We were treated to a delightful exhibition Wednesday, even if it probably won't exactly move the needle. Unaired video leaked of an encounter in which Tucker Carlson invited a Dutch historian named Rutger Bregman on his show thinking they would be pals, only for Bregman to tear him and his Fox News friends apart as shadow dancers hired by the monied elites dodging taxes and hoarding the world's resources. The network's talking heads, Bregman rightly pointed out, can normally be found scapegoating immigrants or ridiculing kooky liberals while ignoring the actual issues of our time.

"It works by you taking their dirty money," Bregman told Carlson. "It's as simple as that. You are a millionaire funded by billionaires, that's what you are." (Carlson refused to air the interview, and produced a weak response last night.) The implication wasn't that billionaires like the Fox-owning Murdoch family—globalist elites in the mold of those Carlson has lately taken to criticizing on-air—are directly telling him what to say. It's just he has the job because he will generally protect their interests, even if he occasionally dresses himself up as a populist Man of the People who wonders, mouth agape to the size of a Cheerio, why billionaires at Davos get away with dodging taxes. It is a performance.

As luck would have it, Thursday brought an illustration of the form.

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Check out the sign in Times Sq.! ⁦Thanks to @JobCreatorsUSA⁩! pic.twitter.com/iIN0DTo8r2 — Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) February 20, 2019

Here's Ingraham peddling an obviously astroturfed billboard in Times Square. "Job Creators Network" immediately brings to mind the shady, billionaire-funded groups that fueled the "grassroots" Tea Party movement against Barack Obama, which (now laughably) pretended it was concerned about The National Debt. Unfortunately for the Fox News host—who has lately taken to airing outright white nationalism, and spent Wednesday night comparing critics of John Wayne's racist 1971 interview to ISIS—there are people around now who will call her on it.

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Few things effectively communicate the power we’ve built in fighting dark money & anti-worker policies like billionaire-funded groups blowing tons of cash on wack billboards (this one is funded by the Mercers).



(PS fact that it’s in Times Sq tells you this isn’t for/by NYers.) https://t.co/B4QTPi1r2k — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 21, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez also produced the receipts:

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The merits of the Amazon deal are intricate. Yes, it would have spurred a lot of economic activity, but economists are increasingly warning against "the financial mirage of tax incentives for corporations" like the $3 billion New York offered Amazon. The FoxConn deal in Wisconsin is a ready example of that. There's also the question of why Amazon needs a tax break when it paid $0 in federal corporate income taxes last year. Moreover, Amazon was cagey about how many of the 25,000 jobs promised would go to local New Yorkers. It's also in dispute how much it was actually AOC who killed the deal. She maintains it was spearheaded by local leaders.

A mural of AOC in New York ANGELA WEISS Getty Images

But, of course, the billboard called her out. The people who paid for it—millionaires and billionaires from everywhere except, very likely, Queens—don't care about New Yorkers or the jobs. It's just politics, trying to make the fact that a community made some demands of a gigantic corporation moving into their area into a referendum on "socialism." As AOC pointed out, nobody who's from New York or wants to reach actual New Yorkers puts up a sign in Times Square. New Yorkers, if they can possibly avoid it, do not go there.

Ingraham doesn't care about regular New Yorkers or their jobs, either, despite the location of her studio. Did you know that most of the Fox News personalities who rail against coastal liberal elites in their sheltered enclaves live and work in the New York area? Did you know Tomi Lahren lives in Los Angeles? They don't actually care. It's a job. They are circus clowns harping on racial and cultural resentment to distract people who are getting ripped off by the current system from the fact they're getting ripped off. They are, as Bregman so brilliantly put it, "millionaires funded by billionaires," and they know what is required to keep the paychecks coming in.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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