In August 2022, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade ominously warned his audience that “Joe Biden’s new army” of armed IRS agents was going to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” But after masked, plainclothes federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security abducted Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, Kilmeade sang a different tune.
“I love the message it's sending to other students causing unrest,” Kilmeade said Thursday morning.
As of publication, Ozturk’s only offense appears to be having co-authored an op-ed that was critical of her university’s response to pro-Palestinian activity on campus. A DHS spokesperson told media outlets Ozturk was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas” but provided no supporting evidence and didn’t seem to specifically reference the op-ed. As of Thursday afternoon no charges had been filed against Ozturk, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed he’d revoked her student visa and estimated there could be 300 similar cases. Ozturk also appeared on the website of Canary Mission, which identifies and doxes pro-Palestinian organizers and activists on campus.
The disconnect between how Fox News personalities manufactured the spectre of authoritarianism during Biden’s time in office and how they are celebrating actual authoritarianism under President Donald Trump doesn’t merely show hypocrisy. This seeming contradiction is in fact a consistent part of the network’s approach to covering basic civil rights and liberties — namely, promoting the idea that some categories of people deserve them and others don’t.
Fox News attacks IRS funding to target wealthy tax cheats
Kilmeade was just one of many figures at Fox News who spread the myth that Biden was going to persecute conservatives by hiring 87,000 IRS agents, many of whom, in this false telling, would be armed. (The number of new IRS employees Biden was planning to hire was also incorrect.) The Fox narrative was designed to undermine the Biden administration’s attempts to go after wealthy tax cheats by increasing the IRS’ investigative capacity.
In August 2022 alone, Fox repeated the falsehood that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which became law that month, would add 87,000 IRS agents more than 200 times — in at least 40 instances claiming they would be armed.
The rhetoric Fox News’ on-air talent deployed to discredit the IRS’ new focus on the ultra-wealthy was truly unhinged.
Host Laura Ingraham said the IRS was the “new Gestapo” and claimed the IRS will act as an “economic, financial militia against regular people.” Then-marquee star Tucker Carlson said the IRS was being used “as a military agency" and that Biden was hiring “87,000 armed IRS agents to make sure you obey.” Contributor Mollie Hemingway called it “part of an orchestrated campaign to target Americans and have the federal government be at war with those Americans.”
The predictable result of this right-wing media offensive is that the Trump administration now is gutting the IRS to benefit the super-rich. According to a Washington Post report from March 12, the IRS’ “burgeoning efforts to more closely inspect the taxes of some of the country’s richest people and most powerful companies are stalling because of layoffs imposed by the Trump administration."
Fox News cheers on Trump’s authoritarian campaign against pro-Palestinian speech
Now, Fox is providing cover for Trump as his administration escalates its authoritarian crackdown on foreign-born students and scholars who have engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy or organizing.
The Trump administration has targeted at least six students or scholars in its ongoing attempts to quash pro-Palestinian activity on campuses. In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently detained an Iranian-born student and deported a Brown professor — in defiance of a judge’s order — to Lebanon; it’s not clear if either of them had ties to Palestinian groups or activities.
Kilmeade’s celebration of Ozturk’s arrest is the latest incident in Fox’s demonization campaign against pro-Palestinian campus organizers. The network cheered when ICE took Palestinian campus organizer and green card-holder Mahmoud Khalil into custody, with Kilmeade himself warning, “Students, you are going to lose,” due to the Trump administration’s “relentless” actions.
Khalil’s arrest was “the beginning of a series of big victories” according to former Fox contributor Leo Terrell, who sits on the White House task force combating “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses” and serves as Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Senior national correspondent Aishah Hasnie said the Trump administration has to “send a message” and “make an example of somebody.”
Fox has been at the forefront of other anti-immigrant smear campaigns as well. In addition to spreading xenophobic tropes about Palestinians being considered for refugee relocation and providing MAGA influencer Mike Davis a platform to call for denaturalizing U.S. citizens, Fox host Lawrence Jones endorsed a promise from Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, to defy judicial orders limiting deportations. Fox personalities repeatedly attacked Judge James Boasberg after he ruled that the administration must halt some deportation flights. A Fox guest pushed for mass deportations by arguing that “while not all of them may be gang members, the point is that we don't know that they're not gang members." Harris Faulkner underlined the network’s stance that Trump is justified in crushing all dissent by claiming “free speech, I thought — under our laws and Constitution — was for our citizens.”
The throughline at Fox is clear. A Democratic administration attempting to crack down on oligarchs who cheat on their taxes is a sign of looming totalitarianism. But masked agents of the state abducting a student from the streets of Massachusetts under orders from the Trump administration is something to celebrate.
