There's a strong chance that Fox News knows that it's fighting on the side of wildly unpopular ideas. The network's own polling finds that a majority of people support raising taxes on the richest Americans, which would be only a minor policy change compared to the implementation of (also popular) proposals like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Since the network's propaganda has failed to make those ideas unappealing, it makes sense for it to target the most popular face of those policies: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Most of the shots Fox News personalities take at Ocasio-Cortez do little more than reveal their own tone-deafness. One of the newest tactics for the network's hosts is to straightforwardly describe Ocasio-Cortez's ideas and actions, but in an outraged voice, so that the audience understands the aforementioned ideas and actions are, somehow, unreasonable.

Take, for instance, Sunday's edition of Fox & Friends, when host Griff Jenkins introduced Ocasio-Cortez's announcement that all of her staff would be paid a living wage: "Get a load of this. A tweet went out yesterday—she said "Leadership begins at home" or whatever, however she put it—she basically announced that she is going to redistribute the money appropriated to her congressional office to make sure that entry-level staffers get a fair share of money."

Jenkins is referring to Ocasio-Cortez's new policy of paying all entry-level staff a minimum of $52,000 per year, which Roll Call describes as "an almost unheard-of amount for many of the 20-somethings whose long hours make House and Senate offices run." Ocasio-Cortez, like all members of Congress, is allotted a set amount of money to manage her office; in order to raise the salaries of her lowest-paid staffers, she has to reallocate funds from other places in her budget, including the typically highly paid chief of staff. For the Fox & Friends weekend couch-warmers, this exercise of discretion is revolting; co-host Pete Hegseth goes on to call it "socialism and communism on display."

To explain why this is bad, exactly, the hosts fall back to the usual justifications for extreme income inequality in the U.S.: One person makes more money because they do more and/or better work than the person who makes less. What this means in practice, though, is that CEOs get paid 300 times more, despite the fact that the workers are the ones actually producing whatever a company needs to survive. It's the belief that there should be no ceiling to how much money the already wealthy can make that dictates there should be no limit to how little someone else can make, either. To Fox News and the people running it, any reform that deliberately helps people at the bottom is socialism. And anything short of the brand of wholly unrestrained, predatory capitalism that gave us Hoovervilles and the Gilded Age and the Great Recession is an evil that must be resisted at all costs.