Fox News’ Neil Cavuto is a part of their team of seemingly sober pontificators. Unlike the brashness of yesteryear’s Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, Cavuto comports himself in a relatively affable fashion. He doesn’t range intoxicatingly around the emotional vaudeville stage like Glenn Beck; but he’s saying the same thing and when he is stopped in his tracks he just pretends he hasn’t been. This brings us to last week when he had Darletta Scruggs, one of the organizers of the Million Student March, which had just had another protest on April 13 across the country. They seek to make quality college education free to Americans.
Cavuto introduces Scruggs in an old-school, friendly but condescending way, calling her “very articulate” which in this context is probably a touch racist but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. There’s an egomania to being a Fox News television personality that is so pathological that I sometimes wonder if they just don’t all have reflective glass on the front of their cameras so the pundits can just stare at themselves while talking away into the void. The interview begins with Scruggs pushing her support for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton as she feels Clinton is part of the problem and Sanders is more aligned with her views. She proceeds tie this into her activism for free tuition.
Cavuto: And you think that government should pay for that?
Scruggs: I think the government needs to reassess its priorities, right? We prioritize a lot of things but education doesn’t seem to be one of them.
She goes on to talk about the proposed nuclear arsenal upgrade program that will reportedly cost the U.S. around 1 trillion dollars over the next 30 years. Her point the entire interview is simple—we need to get taxes from the richest .01 percent, not particularly new taxes, just the taxes the rich keep getting out of paying, and we need to prioritize education and find the money we seem able to find for things like war. Cavuto, for his part, is every bit as dumb and unimaginative as you’ve come to expect from the right. Usually, guys like Cavuto are able to continuously bring up cherry-picked facts, place them in as rhetorical stumbling blocks, an then force the interviewee to talk about minutiae that is besides the point (and frequently not even true). Darletta Scruggs just obliterates Cavuto by steamrolling his attempts to distract.
- She calls him out of trying to scare people about taxes being raised.
- She calls him out when he uses Germany’s strong economics as proof that government can’t pay for everything.
Seriously! In his attempt to argue against the viability of free college tuition, Cavuto uses an economically successful country with FREE COLLEGE TUITION as his bulwark!
Towards the end of the interview, Cavuto and Scruggs have this exchange where Cavuto, defeated, tries to save face.
And.
I.
Love.
It.
Cavuto tries to get some kind of agreement about not raising taxes until we know what’s happening with spending first—an old bullshit trope of conservatives everywhere akin to telling your kid you’ll go to Disneyland “next time.”
Cavuto: All right. All I'm asking is let’s pry prioritize first. Before we decide to give the government more money, let’s see what it’s doing with the money it has, right?
Scruggs: We know what it’s doing with the money! It’s giving tax breaks to the rich and it’s paying for war.
Game and match.
It’s worth watching from beginning to end, the actual interview begins around the 1:30 mark.