Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina apparently thinks you have to be a “well-briefed U.S. senator” to understand the nuances of the Ukraine war, and that ordinary voters are simply too ignorant to have an opinion on the matter.
“Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Tillis said on Monday, according to Punchbowl News. He then blasted fellow Republicans who “are being driven just by the perceptions of their base” and “need to grow a spine” and get behind sending another $60 billion to Ukraine.
It’s hard to imagine a sentiment more contemptuous of the average voter than these sneering comments from Tillis. Only senators with special knowledge, in his telling, are competent to judge the war in Ukraine and understand the stakes.
What nonsense. It’s an appeal to authority masquerading as an argument — the kind of thing we usually hear from the left, not from Republicans. Think you know what a woman is? What are you, a biologist? Think you know that President Biden has dementia? What are you, a neuroscientist?
It sounds like a joke, but this is actually what we heard over the weekend from a chorus of Biden lackeys in the press tsk-tsking that it doesn’t matter what the special counsel’s report said about Biden’s obvious cognitive decline and failing memory because Special Counsel Robert Hur “is not a neurologist.” Some of these people were shameless enough to go on
