(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) On a recent episode of The View, host Joy Behar went on a rant about accused mass-shooter Payton Gendron, claiming contrary to 18-year-old’s own manifesto that he had drawn inspiration from Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Despite the conservative pundit’s status as the top ratings-getter at the leading cable-news network, Behar seemed to demonstrate little self-awareness, accusing Carlson of being an “irrelevant” non-entity in the national discourse, Red State reported.
Although Gendron’s own writings specifically denounced Fox News and declared conservatism to be “dead,” leftist media and political operatives, including President Joe Biden, pounced at the opportunity to link political rivals to the massacre that left 10 people dead at a Buffalo, NY, grocery story on Saturday.
The fact that Gendron’s manifesto professed his racist motivations was enough for Behar to pin it all on Carlson.
“Back in [the] World War II period, there was a guy named Father Coughlin, and he was an anti-Semite and a racist, he was a priest from the Catholic Church,” she stated. “He had, in a country of 127 million people, he was on the radio, he had 30 to 40 million listeners. That’s a lot.”
Behar went on compare Carlson’s viewership to these numbers:
“Tucker Carlson has, in a country of 326 million people—we have grown—he has 3 million listeners. So it’s 30 to 40 million versus 3 million. He’s almost irrelevant if you think about it,” Behar alleged.
“And I think maybe that’s the way to go with him,” she continued. “Just ignore him. Every time we talk about him, every time the media gives him air time, he gets bigger and bigger.”
In April, ABC’s female-driven coffee klatch boasted of a season-high 2.726 million viewers, making it the sixth-highest of 13 daytime television shows, tied with the second half-hour of Let’s Make a Deal.
A June 2021 analysis by Forbes estimated Carlson’s average audience share to be slightly higher, around 2.8 million, outpacing all its competitors on both Fox and rival networks.
Despite Behar’s insistence that Carlson was too insignificant even to be mentioned, she nonetheless fretted that his supposedly incendiary rhetoric was having a profound impact on millions of Americans, causing them to become racist, hateful bigots.
Tucker is so irrelevant there’s a systematic daily smear campaign to get him de-platformed and thrown off the air.
— Julia G. (@JuliaGulia80920) May 17, 2022
Twitter users were quick to comment, pointing out that her argument makes no sense.
Also to point out the obvious but in WWII, there was not nearly the entertainment choices then that there is now.
— Daniel Thorpe (@Dan_Thorpe) May 17, 2022
If Tucker is irrelevant @TheView must be a dumpster fire.
— Jesus = Answer (@hollis4congress) May 17, 2022
Their obsession with him says otherwise.
— Brigitte (@im_mykidsmom) May 17, 2022
