Last week Fox News hosts attempted to marry the glory of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the lurking danger of an impending domestic communist revolution.
Never mind that Americans are super shoppers in many ways as approx. 70% of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending. The folks on Fox News think the largest free market economy in the world is about to collapse into a Soviet style managed economy.
The fear of communism is an evergreen topic on the Murdoch owned media empire but the recent primary wins of a handful of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) candidates have sent the network into a spiraling hysteria.
Shows I covered on Fox News last week:
Fox & Friends - extra hour on Saturday
The Five
Jesse Watters Primetime
Special Report with Bret Baier - Thursday
The Ingraham Angle - Thursday
Hannity - Thursday
America 250 Special coverage - six hours on Saturday
He Waved at Us! Maybe He’ll Wave Again!
The 250th anniversary of the United States was supposed to be a star-studded event filled with dynamic performances, epic fireworks displays, military flyovers and tributes to U.S. military veterans.
For the first half of the evening Fox News focused on the high-powered military jets that crisscrossed in tight formations over the nation’s capital. Much like Trump’s poorly planned 250 Army parade the flyovers looked underwhelming on television.
While people at the event would have seen and heard the power and precision of the pilots a television audience would miss a lot of the spectacle. Occasionally a military jet might come into view of a camera only to zip right past in within seconds.
When violent rainstorms rolled in and lightning strikes touched down in the area spectators and performers alike rushed into federal buildings and makeshift shelters to wait out the storm.
Most of the footage from the rest of the event was from a double-wide trailer close to the stage dubbed the ‘Freedom Bunker.” The improvised shelter was quickly filled with performers and Fox News personalities.
When the rain finally stopped the entire stage show was reduced to three songs sung by Christopher Macchio, a performer known as America’s Presidential Tenor, and Lee Greenwood belting out “God Bless the U.S.A.” as Trump was ushered onstage.
The president then gave a 30-minute speech that included various U.S. flags encased in glass that adorned the stage.
As Trump spoke, he gave a bit of backstory about each flag as a few World War II veterans were paraded out in wheelchairs. Each elderly man was assigned to a specific flag where they would stop on cue and salute. Oddly Trump’s speech included more information about the flags than the veterans.
In between the tributes to flags and retired servicemen the president talked about the evils of communism at one point simply saying “communism is a loser.”
In the highly scripted speech President Trump still managed to make several false statements about the economy, boast about his perceived accomplishments and claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 election.
What followed was a recorded breaking fireworks display that looked more like actual battle explosions than a colorful pyrotechnic experience.
According to reporting by The New York Times the massive fireworks production caused problems for the residents of Washington D.C.
Pollution in the form of fine particulate matter — tiny particles that can contribute to asthma, heart disease and other ailments — peaked in the early morning at more than six times normal levels in the city, and the poor air quality remained for roughly five hours after the display concluded, according to an analysis by Clarity Movement, an air monitoring firm that analyzed data from 26 sensors operated by the city government.
Near the start of the brief performances before Trump’s speech the folks at Fox News got excited when a camera captured the president watching the Fox News America 250 special on large television set in what looked like a holding location.
Brian Kilmeade could not hold in his excitement, “We’re really. We’re just about an hour behind. That’s about it.”
“All right, all right. He was waving,” said Bret Bair as he waved back on screen.
“Oh. He just. The president waved,” said Harris Faulker.
“I think we just got a wave. Okay, I’m going to say it happened, and then we got it,” said Baier.
“Aw,” said Faulkner.
“We got a wave,” said Kilmeade.
“Let’s go back. Yeah, back to that shoot. Can we go back to that shot? I mean, why not? Right. ” asked Faulkner.
“We got a wave,” said Kilmeade.
“We see you! Hi Mr. President,” said Faulkner.
“Well let’s see, 200 years for this country,” said Laura Ingraham seemingly trying to move to a new topic.
“I think he’s on delay. Let’s see if he turns around for us,” said Kilmeade
“Sorry, Brian is playing shadow puppets over there,” said Ingraham.
“Why are you playing shadow puppets with the president?” asked Faulkner.
At another moment Peter Doocy appeared reporting from outside the stage area.
“Elvis is in the building. President Trump just posted on Truth Social. I’m here DJT.”
Later Brian Kilmeade praised the president for being right about the weather that evening.
The president is right. Everything is breaking his way. The skies have cleared up. It’s actually cooled off. And now we’re going to get the flyover. It’s just everything. Just a little delay.”
Later Sean Hannity praised Trump for his choice and volume of the recorded music that was playing on an empty stage during the delay.
“What a lot of people may not know about President Trump. He has a passion for music. He might not take the stage for another 40 minutes, but he wants to hear the music. And what’s interesting is he has such an eclectic blend of music that he loves a passion for, and he loves loud music. He does not. He likes to really play it loud.”
Mount Rushmore Ego Stroking
On Friday during a segment from outside the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota Griff Jenkins asked random visitors a leading question.
“If you could add one more head to that monument. Whose head would you add?” asked Jenkins.
“So to add any more heads up there? There’s probably plenty of room up there for Trump. Maybe President Trump,” said a white man with a thick southern accent.
Jenkins asked several other folks including a few small children if they would add another president to the monument and nearly all of them answered “Trump.”
On The Five the same day producers included an image that showed where Trump might want his image added to the mountain.
“Tonight, President Trump heads to Mount Rushmore for a big, beautiful speech. But don’t worry, Harold, he’s not carving in his face into the mountain,” said Jesse Watters.
On July 4th during the expansive America 250 coverage on Fox News Griff Jenkins suggested adding Trump’s image again to Mount Rushmore.
“Yet, particularly having just reported yesterday from Mount Rushmore about the fact that we might actually have an addition to that iconic monument. Indeed,” said Jenkins.
According to experts at the National Parks Department there is not enough rock left to add another face to the monument. According to reporting by NBC News the original lead sculptor Gutzon Borglum, wrote in May 1936 that the “stone limitations are so serious, that I doubt if it would be possible to change the composition, which is fixed, in any way to include a fifth head.”
College Educated Commies
Last week several folks on Fox News blamed higher education for the menacing wave of communist thought taking over the country.
Fox & Friends - Tuesday
“I will say this that the college educated are the problem as well. The college educated are the ones that are buying into this. They’re coming off the college campuses. They’re being taught this new world view. It’s not like when we went to college when they had open debate,” said Lawerence Jones.
Brian Kilmeade jumped in, “I’ll back you up on that because if you look at Piker (Hasan Piker) there’s got a lot of degrees, of course, in his whole life in academia as did Mamdani. Right. These are highly educated people who come out with an agenda and they they’re trying to make a difference in their 30s.
Fox & Friends - Wednesday
“Who is voting for these socialists? Highly educated. Brian likes to say overeducated. We had a nice gentleman in the audience who said he blames the colleges. They’re learning a lot of this in college. They’re not being taught what a what a country looks like under communist rule or under socialism. And also, the wealthy are voting for them,” said Ainsley Earhardt.
Jesse Watters Primetime - Thursday
“The dream is dead if you don’t want to work. Colleges have been conditioning kids not to. They’ve been taught the country, stole the land, ripped the world off. So these lifelong students who got everything for free at college feel like America owes them something that they shouldn’t have to earn it,” said Watters.
Hannity - Thursday
“They’re getting a majority of their votes right now from the most educated folks, some the same, maybe over credentialed, educated folks,” said Charles Payne of Fox Business.
Marxist Kindergartens
On July 4th during the America 250 coverage Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed Marxism was being taught to extremely young children.
“Without a question of the lack of history being taught, American history, being taught in America, or worse yet, American history being taught through the prism of Marxism as it is in Howard Johnson’s A People’s History, which is now one of the most used textbooks not just in college but also in high school, junior high, and then sort of worksheets made of it for elementary age.”
The Complicated Relationship Between Education and Communism
Although the folks at Fox News would love to argue that scheming college professors and even Marxist kindergarten teachers are secretly indoctrinating developing minds, they completely flipped the connection between education and communism.
Some scholars have argued that communism is more likely to take hold in underdeveloped countries with a high level of poverty and illiteracy. The theory being that a Communist system is more attractive to a populace that has next to no personal wealth and a desire to receive basic services such an education system.
Although other governments were once communist only five countries currently exist with some form of communist economic model. Four of the five communists countries China, Laos, Vietnam and Cuba have some levels of free market reforms.
The Soviet Union (USSR) was the first self-declared communist/socialist state.
Here’s a breakdown of the literacy rates of the first communist country and the five remaining communist nations before they adopted a managed economy.
USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922-1991)
Although serfdom was abolished in the mid-19th century, the literacy rate in 1914 was only 40%. Only about half of Russian children attended school. A movement to improve the educational system was underway before the Bolshevik Revolution but it was ultimately the communist system that transformed the educational system.
China - China Communist Party
The literacy rate in China at the start of the 20th century was only about 10-15%. By the time the People’s Republic of China was established in October 1949, about 20% of the population was literate.
Vietnam - Socialist Republic of Vietnam
In Vietnam the literacy rate was a between 15- 20% before the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Laos - Lao People's Democratic Republic
Laos also struggled with low literacy rates until the LPDR government started an aggressive program to increase primary school education along with adult literacy.
North Korea - Democratic People's Republic of Korea
This one is a bit complicated to find since North Korea was partitioned from South Korea along the 38th parallel after Korea was liberated from Japanese rule at the end of World War II. At the time of Korean liberation from Japan the adult literacy rate was estimated to be about 20%. It also rose rapidly after World War II in South Korea which has a free market economy.
Cuba - Republic of Cuba
Among the five remaining communist countries Cuba is the outlier as about 76% of the Cuban population over the age of 10 were literate before the Cuban Revolution. Increasing literacy became an early goal of the communist government.
Fox vs. PBS - Trump Made Over $2 billion in 2025
According to a 927-page financial disclosure, President Donald J. Trump earned about $2.2 billion in 2025. The year before he was sworn in for this second term Trump earned approximately $622 million.
Most of Trump’s newfound wealth comes from a crypto company, World Liberty Financial, managed by his sons Eric and Don Jr. According to reporting by The New York Times an investment firm tied to U.A.E. bought nearly half of the Trump’s family crypto company.
Trump also earned hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.
Jesse Watters downplayed any or conflicts of interest the deals might have set up for the president.
On Wednesday Watters said on The Five,
“This guy made $2 billion last year. If he’s demented, then hit me in the head. That’s pretty good, Jessica.”
Later that night he praised the president for being a successful capitalist.
“Then who made billions of dollars? Possibly one of our most capitalist presidents ever.”
How PBS Covered the Same Story
Amna Nawaz, a co-anchor of the PBS News Hour, spoke with Eric Lipton of The New York Times about Trump’s financial disclosure.
Nawaz: President made more than $1 billion just from crypto businesses in his first year as president. Break that down for us. How did he do that?
Lipton: The two biggest chunks come from his meme coin, which he launched three days before his inauguration. It was the kind of a collectible that that surged in value initially. And, the people who quickly invested made a boatload of money. But then it crashed, and hundreds of thousands of people then lost money. Trump made, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars from that gamble that he asked people to follow him on. And many of his followers ended up as losers. The second big chunk of revenue comes from World Liberty Financial, a company that he and his sons started in October of 2024. That company is now one of the biggest issuers of what’s called stablecoins in the world. And it was bought secretly at half of it by the United Arab Emirates in January of 2025. Just as he was being sworn in to be president. And the UAE separately has invested $2 billion into its stablecoin, making it one of the biggest stablecoin issuers in the world. So, I mean, it is it is really intensely tied up with a foreign government. And the president is profiting from that foreign governments investment in his own business at the same time as he is acting as commander in chief and working with that foreign government to negotiate a war in the Middle East.
Nawaz: And we should say it’s not just crypto that’s fueling the president’s wealth. What other businesses and ventures and deals and settlements contributed to his income last year?
Lipton: I mean, there are new real estate deals in the Middle East and in Vietnam and in Romania, in the Maldives. He’s, you know, struck a bunch of deals that include some deals that are actually with foreign governments, like the government of Saudi Arabian and then in Qatar as well. And then there are, as you mentioned, settlements from lawsuits and that are being paid to, to him, from media companies.
Later on, in the interview Lipton made a statement that was extremely illuminating.
Lipton: He’s never made this much money in his entire life as he’s made in this one year.
If you want to learn more about what Lipton and other journalists at The New York Times unearthed in Trump’s 927-page financial disclosure you can read more about it at this link.
Karoline Leavitt Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
During a brief interview on Jesse Watters Primetime, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accidentally promoted an authoritarian police state.
“These are crazy people who are advocating against what I call the three P’s. Prison police and, prison police and private property. They don’t want any of those things. And those are the ideals that founded this great country 250 years ago,” said Leavitt.
I don’t think she thought that phrase through before she said it live on the most watched cable news network.
Candidate Endorsements
Candidate endorsements took up 1.4% of the airtime on the shows I watched last week. The percentage was skewed a bit as I analyzed six hours of additional coverage that was nearly solely dedicated to the America 250 celebrations.
Mike Rogers - U.S. Senate, Michigan - Republican
Ken Paxton - U.S. Senate, Texas - Republican
Stories Fox News Ignored
Every week I compare the hours I’ve watched on Fox News to five hours of the PBS News Hour. The following list are stories that PBS covered that Fox News did not. This list has been truncated due to space. Source - PBS News Hour transcripts.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that constitutional privacy protections apply to cell phone location data. At issue was the police use of what’s known as geofence warrants to locate all devices near the scene of a crime back in 2019. The court ruled that, even when location information is shared with companies like Google and Apple, people don’t forfeit their expectations of privacy. The case was widely viewed as a test for how privacy would be protected in this digital age. (PBS News Hour)
The San Francisco Archdiocese has agreed to pay $395 million to sexual abuse survivors, according to the victim’s lawyers. It settles the claims of more than 500 survivors, the vast majority from decades ago, who said they were sexually abused by members of the clergy. The San Francisco Archdiocese and several other dozen other dioceses nationwide have declared bankruptcy as a direct result of child sexual abuse lawsuits. (PBS News Hour)
In Afghanistan, U.N. officials there say Pakistani forces conducted overnight strikes that killed at least 28 people, including women and children. An Afghan official promised that the country would retaliate. A top Pakistani official said dozens of militants were targeted and killed in the strikes. This latest escalation follows months of cross-border fighting that’s killed hundreds. Multiple rounds of talks have so far failed to produce a cease-fire. (PBS News Hour)
In Ukraine, a wave of Russian strikes killed at least 11 people and injured dozens last Monday. One of the strikes happened in Dnipro, killing five. Another hit in Zaporizhzhia, killing three, including a child. The attacks follow Ukraine’s own heavy drone assault against a major Russian oil refinery this past weekend, the latest in a number of long-range strikes against Russian energy facilities in recent months. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin acknowledged for the first time that his country was facing a fuel shortage as a result. (PBS News Hour)
The Supreme Court is set to take up a major gun rights case in the fall. The justices will hear arguments on whether bans on AR-15s and other assault weapons in Connecticut and the Chicago area violate the Second Amendment.
Similar laws are in place in about a dozen states, including New York and California, a national assault weapons ban expired in 2004. This conservative-leaning High Court has significantly expanded Second Amendment rights, including a ruling just last week that struck down a gun restriction in Hawaii. (PBS News Hour)
Last Wednesday marked one year since the Trump administration dissolved the United States Agency for International Development as an independent agency. USAID was a central tool of American foreign policy, delivering humanitarian aid, fighting disease, responding to disasters and advancing U.S. interests. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Samantha Power, the last confirmed administrator of USAID. (PBS News Hour)
The Trump administration said last week that it will not renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, also known as the USMCA. Instead, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer says the U.S. will engage with the other two nations to address what he called the agreement’s shortcomings. For now, the terms of the deal stay in place for 10 years with annual reviews, rather than a 16-year extension. (PBS News Hour)
As President Trump attempts to wield greater power over election administration ahead of the midterms, dozens of legal battles are currently underway across the country. Their outcomes could shape how elections are run this fall. Liz Landers discussed more with Ben Ginsberg. He has spent decades working as a Republican election lawyer, including on the landmark 2000 Bush v. Gore dispute. (PBS News Hour)
By the Numbers
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I want somebody, anybody, to immediately ask one of these fucking grossly overpaid propagandist chuds to define "Marxism", or "Communism", or "Socialism". Don't let them worm their way out of answering. Keep hammering them until they're forced to expose to the world that they have absolutely ZERO idea what any of those terms actually mean.
Hell, for that matter, force them to define "Liberalism", "Conservatism", "Republic", or "Imperialism". I would bet that if we gave this entire adult population a mandated test and forced them to answer all those questions on the spot, without access to any technology, only 5-10% would be able to correctly answer more than 2...
It is sick that these Fox News personalities make millions for spreading propaganda 24/7. Your description of the hosts flipping out because they think the Idiot “ waved “ to them is priceless. The enablers make Trump worse and worse. I just want this nightmare to end.
I want somebody, anybody, to immediately ask one of these fucking grossly overpaid propagandist chuds to define "Marxism", or "Communism", or "Socialism". Don't let them worm their way out of answering. Keep hammering them until they're forced to expose to the world that they have absolutely ZERO idea what any of those terms actually mean.
Hell, for that matter, force them to define "Liberalism", "Conservatism", "Republic", or "Imperialism". I would bet that if we gave this entire adult population a mandated test and forced them to answer all those questions on the spot, without access to any technology, only 5-10% would be able to correctly answer more than 2...
It is sick that these Fox News personalities make millions for spreading propaganda 24/7. Your description of the hosts flipping out because they think the Idiot “ waved “ to them is priceless. The enablers make Trump worse and worse. I just want this nightmare to end.