President Joe Biden’s announcement Wednesday that he was making good on a campaign pledge to cancel some student loan debt was met with disdain from Fox News’ most-watched primetime hosts, with Tucker Carlson, for instance, deriding the move as “suicidal.”
“If you wanted to improve the country by disbursing billions of tax dollars, you would help people…who worked hard to pay [their] debts,” Carlson said of the measure which in total eliminates upwards of $300 billion in loans.
The Fox host then posited that “if you really wanted to go forward with debt forgiveness,” it should be allocated toward those “who did something useful in college,” and not to “lawyers or gender studies majors or diversity administrators.”
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“You don’t want more of those people. We have way too many of them already,” Carlson continued. “You would never send money to anyone who supported BLM riots or anyone who claimed on Twitter that America is a systemically racist country. Why would you send them money? Why would you send the fruits of America to people who hate America? What is that? That’s suicidal. No sane person would do that.”
“So what you’re watching, as always, is class warfare,” Carlson claimed. “They reward the top and the bottom—people who don’t need it and people who aren’t trying—and crush the struggling middle, the law-abiding people who want to do the right thing.”
In the next hour on Hannity, the namesake host struck a similar chord, framing Biden’s action as a “reverse Robin Hood” where the “elites” will benefit from the poor and middle class. (Debt cancellation, however, doesn’t apply to individuals earning more than $125,000 per year or to couples making at least $250,000.)
“It should be called the ‘Biden Bribery and Vote Buying Act of 2022,’” Hannity whined, even though it’s Congress and not the president that creates acts.
The measure, he insisted, is paid for by “the hard-working American people” like “truck drivers and farmers and welders and small business owners and members of the military” who will be on the hook for loans taken out by “a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.”
On his radio show earlier in the day, the amply compensated Hannity even lamented how younger Fox News employees who work on his show are beneficiaries of “New Green Deal radical socialism.”
