MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Friday accused GOP leadership and Fox News of “deliberately trying to get Americans to a position of where they’ll do harm to IRS agents” with their rhetoric about the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.
Republicans have warned the new bill would add 87,000 new IRS agents and emphasized how much overreach would come with the influx of personnel.
According to Scarborough, the ones speaking out about the additional IRS agents are “deliberately trying to gin up a civil war.”
“I know this all sounds melodramatic until you have the head of the FBI saying we’re facing unprecedented threats,” Scarborough outlined. “And people that I know, people that I’ve known my entire life, are texting me and talking about replacing the U.S. government, talking about civil war. And you go, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And they say, ‘The IRS agents are coming with AR-15s, and they’re coming to our doors. And they’re going to kill us. Or they’re saying, ‘The FBI is coming to raid our house and take our guns away from us.’ These are the lies that have been spread not by — this is what is so disturbing — not by backbenchers. These lies have been spread by Chuck Grassley, by Kevin McCarthy, by top news hosts at Fox News. This is not ‘Infowars.’ This is mainstream, pro-Trump rhetoric.”
“And they are deliberately trying to get Americans to a position of where they’ll do harm to IRS agents. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” he continued. “[D]o I have the quote here? I think I saved the quote in my iPad. Can you imagine Chuck Grassley talking about the IRS having a strike force, quote, ‘that goes in with AR-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small business people?’ A top Fox News host saying that the IRS is coming to, quote, ‘hunt down and kill middle-class taxpayers.’ The IRS coming to hunt down and kill middle-class taxpayers. I want to get to the affidavit. I want to get to the affidavit that we are talking about people who are deliberately trying to gin up a civil war, and their followers are actually going along with it.”
Scarborough added, “I know this because they’re my family members, and they’re lifelong Republicans, and they’re people who used to be Reagan conservatives talking about civil war. And a guy that you and I both have known for a long time — I’m not saying his name — telling me very, very smugly a couple of days ago, ‘Well, you know, the U.S. government is not sacrosanct. The U.S. government can be replaced.'”
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