I Accidentally Turned On Fox News This Morning and Now I Need Therapy (and I am a Republican)

Stuart Varney Just Spent Ten Minutes Convincing Your Grandmother That Billionaires Are the Real Victims of America and I Am Begging You to Get Mad About It

I have been up for 20 consecutive hours writing so you get not one but TWO articles that absolutely no one will share or read today! Lucky you…

I was making coffee this morning. I don’t know how my television ended up on Fox News. I don’t remember turning it on. I barely watch television. I think my remote is haunted, possibly by the ghost of Roger Ailes (the man who built Fox News into the most powerful right-wing propaganda machine in American history before being ousted for sexually harassing roughly every woman in the building), which tracks because that man haunted everything he touched while he was alive too.

But there I was, half-awake, pouring water into a French press, when I heard the voice. That plummy, British-boarding-school voice that sounds like it was designed in a lab to make Americans feel like whatever they’re hearing must be sophisticated because the man saying it once lived near a castle. Stuart Varney. The man Fox Business hired specifically because Americans will believe literally anything if you say it with a British accent, which is a psychological phenomenon I call the “Nature Documentary Effect.”

David Attenborough could read you a Pizza Hut menu and you’d nod thoughtfully and say “Fascinating.”

What came out of Varney’s mouth over the next ten minutes was, and I need you to understand I am choosing this word carefully, the single most disgusting piece of propaganda I have ever witnessed on American television. I have watched coverage of wars that was less dishonest. I have seen used car commercials with more journalistic integrity.

The Pitch (Buckle Up, It Gets Worse)

Varney presented data claiming that the top 1% of earners pay roughly 46% of all federal income taxes. He then expanded this to include the top 10%, who he claimed shoulder about 76% of the total income tax burden. And then he spent TEN MINUTES, (I timed it, because I am a journalist and also because I was too angry to do anything else with my hands), arguing that YOU, the Fox News viewer making $55,000 a year and worrying about your electric bill, should feel SORRY for these people. That the REAL injustice in America is that Democrats keep asking billionaires to pay MORE. That the REAL parasites are the people on food stamps.

He actually said this. On television. In the year 2026.

While gas is $4.50 a gallon and a bag of groceries costs more than a concert ticket and half the bridges in this country have rust growing on their rust.

Now. Those numbers he cited? They’re TECHNICALLY from IRS data. And they are also one of the most brilliantly misleading statistical performances since the tobacco industry proved cigarettes were safe by only studying 22-year-old Olympic swimmers. Here’s what Varney (accidentally, I’m sure) forgot to mention.

Those numbers are ONLY federal income tax. Not payroll taxes. Not state taxes. Not sales taxes. Not property taxes. Not the seventeen other taxes that working people pay every single day without a team of accountants finding ways to make them disappear. When you include ALL taxes, the picture changes so dramatically you’d think you were looking at a different country. A bus driver making $40,000 a year pays a combined effective tax rate that, as a percentage of actual income, is not dramatically different from what many billionaires pay. And in some cases it’s HIGHER, because billionaires don’t earn “income” the way you and I understand the word. They earn capital gains. They earn carried interest. They earn things with names specifically invented so you’d stop reading before you figured out the scam.

Warren Buffett said it himself. He pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. He wasn’t bragging. He was trying to warn you.

The Part That Should Make You Want to Put Your Fist Through Drywall

The top marginal income tax rate in 1960 was 91%.

Read that number again. NINETY-ONE PERCENT. That was the rate under Eisenhower. A Republican. A five-star general. The man who won World War II did not consider a 91% top marginal rate to be socialism. He considered it to be the cost of maintaining a civilization where the roads work and the bridges don’t collapse and children can drink the water.

Today it’s 37%. It was 70% when Reagan took office and he cut it to 28%, and the national debt, which had been manageable for the entire postwar period, TRIPLED. The rich got a tax cut that would make a Roman emperor blush and the bill went on the national credit card and guess who’s been paying the interest for forty goddamn years? YOU. The bus driver. The nurse. The plumber. The teacher buying classroom supplies with her own paycheck because the school district can’t afford pencils but Lockheed Martin just got another $50 billion contract.

Speaking of where your taxes actually go (which Varney will never, ever tell you because the man who signs his checks won’t let him), the federal government spent approximately $886 billion on defense in 2024. You know how much went to food stamps? About $113 billion. The ENTIRE food assistance program for every hungry family in America costs less than what the Pentagon loses in accounting errors. The Department of Defense has failed its audit every single year since audits became mandatory. They cannot account for TRILLIONS. But Stuart Varney wants you mad at the lady buying bread with an EBT card because SHE’S the problem.

The V for Vendetta Part

I kept thinking, while Varney was talking, about that movie V for Vendetta. (The graphic novel by Alan Moore is better, but work with me here.)

There’s a scene where the government-controlled TV host, Lewis Prothero, sits in front of a camera and screams propaganda at citizens to keep them afraid and angry at each other so they never look up and notice who’s actually running things. Prothero’s job is to make sure the people who SHOULD be storming the castle are instead fighting each other in the mud outside it.

That is Stuart Varney’s job…

He sits in a studio that costs more per month than most of his viewers make in a year, wearing a suit that costs more than their car payment, reading a script that was functionally (if not literally) written by the same billionaires he’s defending, and he tells working Americans that the reason their lives are hard is because poor people are taking too much. NOT because the rich have spent forty years systematically stripping the tax code until it’s a participation trophy for anyone with a seven-figure accountant. NOT because every tax dollar you send to Washington gets laundered through defense contracts and government programs that mysteriously end up enriching the same people who lobbied for them. NOT because the entire system has been rigged, openly, by people who can afford to rig it, while the enforcement agencies that were supposed to prevent this have been gutted down to a skeleton crew.

The money isn’t going to food stamps. The money is going UP. It has been going UP for forty years. It goes UP through tax breaks and government contracts and subsidies and bailouts and carried interest loopholes and offshore accounts, and it STAYS up there, and then some British guy with expensive hair goes on television and tells you the problem is DOWN. The problem is the people below you. Not the people above you. Never the people above you.

I’M MAD AS HELL.

You should be too.

Not at the single mom on food stamps. Not at the immigrant working two jobs. Not at the Democrat or the Republican across the street.

At the people who turned your country into their personal ATM and hired a British man to tell you it was YOUR privilege. At the people who are RIGHT NOW, TODAY, building a technocratic aristocracy where they will rule like kings and you will serve like serfs and Stuart Varney will get a nice room in the castle because the court jester always does.

Stop watching this shit. Stop absorbing it. Stop letting it reprogram your brain so you punch DOWN instead of looking UP. They are burning this country down from around you and they hired a man with a posh accent to tell you the fire is warm and cozy.

It’s not.

Wake up.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.