A certain portion of the American people are too stupid that they cannot be trusted to live their own lives and require a domineering government to order them around, a frequent MSNBC contributor said on Friday morning’s episode of “Morning Joe.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Donny Deutsch, a controversial business mogul and pundit, told those opposed to another wave of mask mandates, vaccine passports, or legislation requiring American citizens to receive the COVID-19 vaccination.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski favorably quoted an op-ed from Bloomberg News, titled “The Case for Vaccine Mandates,” which reads, “States should instead be issuing their own vaccine passports, and requiring health-care workers to be vaccinated.”
Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press asked Deutsch about the political wisdom of forcing people, especially schoolchildren, to wear masks again. “There was such a sense this summer of being relieved, of not having to wear masks anymore. How will this play? Isn’t this a political firestorm waiting, if masks are asked to come back?” he asked.
Deutsch replied that it will be easier to shape mass behavior now that the American public has gotten used to taking orders.
“I think it was a lot harder the first time around … creating new behavior versus returning to, kind of, behavior we’ve already been through,” he said. “So look, whether it’s a mandated mask, a mandated vaccine is, at this point, there is a percentage of the population that — who cares whether they’re angry or upset about it? There’s 330 million people in this country. We need to protect ourselves.”
“I’m done worrying about what people think. I’m done worrying about, ‘Is there going to be a firestorm?’” he continued. “Whether it’s a mandated mask or a mandated vaccine, there’s an idiot percentage of this population that just needs to be told what to do. And guess what? You don’t have a choice. Too bad.”
Deutsch has long expressed his disinterest in persuading others and his preference for direct, and potentially volatile, action. He called for “a revolution” in 2018 after Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) released a memo detailing that the Obama administration used paid opposition research to obtain a FISA warrant and spy on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. “Our democracy is under siege. People need to start taking to the streets,” he told “Deadline: White House” host Nicolle Wallace. But the problem was Nunes and Trump, not the Obama administration’s abuse of secretive courts to conduct surveillance against a rival political candidate.
“This is a dictator. This is not something to analyze anymore,” he said. “People, we need a revolution.”
Mika Brzezinski, for her part, blamed the Delta variant on conservatives, saying Friday:
People who are unvaccinated, and are followers of Donald Trump, and followers of these Republicans, and followers of Fox News, and followers of Newsmax, and followers of right-wing garbage on Facebook are the ones who have chosen to believe the conspiracy theories and the bad information out there, and they are the ones going to the hospital and dying of COVID, and spreading it around the country, and keeping our country from being able to move forward, out of mask-wearing, out of all these things that restrain your rights and that you think the Democrats are so stupid to be supporting, which is supporting facts. Yes, Democrats like facts. And some Republicans do, too.
Deutsch told Brzezinski that the public message to the unvaccinated should be that they have blood on their hands. “There’s no grace here. There’s no two sides to this argument,” he said.
Deutsch has regularly insulted the intellect or integrity of his political opponents. During a rant on “Morning Joe” last year, Deutsch said that President Donald Trump’s popularity could only be explained by the fact that “one in three Americans are racists.” In 2018, he compared all Trump voters to Nazis. Deutsch’s disdain for conservatives echoes that of the broader media. As far back as February 1993, The Washington Post wrote that evangelical Christians “are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”
That shared condescension toward traditional Americans may partially explain why Deutsch continues to be given major media opportunities. Aside from his role as a regular guest on MSNBC, Deutsch has anchored several cable news talk shows, including CNBC’s “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch,” MSNBC’s “Saturday Night Politics with Donny Deutsch,” and Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect.”
His CNN show, “(Get to) The Point,” was canceled after just one week for low ratings.
Related: WATCH: Radical MSNBC Guest Says ‘People Need To Start Taking To The Streets’ For A ‘Revolution’
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.