Republicans spent the week demonizing the FBI following its search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, and one of their followers responded, attacking an FBI office with an AR-15 and a nail gun. But it’s not just the FBI in the sights of Republicans. They’re simultaneously attacking the IRS—often in the same terms they’re using to attack the FBI. And once again, it’s working on their followers.
One key Republican talking point following the search of Mar-a-Lago was that the Justice Department and the FBI had been "weaponized" by Democrats. Well, according to Sen. Rick Scott, “Democrats are actually weaponizing the IRS.” According to Rep. Mike Simpson, the Inflation Reduction Act “sends a mob of IRS agents to watch [Americans’] every move.” And Sen. Chuck Grassley went a step further, saying, “Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s … ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa?”
In response, social media is filling up with videos of people who have fully bought into these claims and are getting their guns ready.
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Like this:
And this:
Someone is going to get shot, possibly a lot of someones, because Republicans are taking the IRS as one of their government boogeymen coming to get you.
The wild claims about the IRS are pulling together a couple of different threads. One is, Philip Bump explains, recent stories about IRS ammunition purchases and a job listing for an IRS criminal investigation special agent. The IRS spent $725,000 on ammunition so far in 2022, according to a report touted by Rep. Matt Gaetz in June—but what Gaetz didn’t add is that the IRS spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on ammunition every year. That’s disturbing, because basically everything about the scale of gun use in the United States, absolutely including in government, is disturbing. But it’s not unique to 2022. Similarly, the criminal investigation special agent job listing makes clear that this is a law enforcement position. Because it is. But it's not some new job category invented by President Joe Biden to torment Republicans.
Another accusation Republicans are harping on is that the Inflation Reduction Act creates “87,000 new IRS agents,” implied to all be criminal investigation agents. In reality, the bill provides for the hiring of new staff in a range of areas, including customer service workers (so when you call with a question, there’s someone to actually answer the phone) and auditors who will be specifically tasked with pursuing wealthy tax evaders, not small businesses or families making less than hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—in fact, households with earnings of less than $400,000 a year “will likely see the chance of an audit decline,” according to the Treasury Department. The criminal investigation division of the IRS, which currently has 300 vacancies for criminal investigation agents, has a total of 3,000 employees, 2,100 of whom are agents. To the extent that there’s a kernel of truth in the IRS hiring 87,000 people, that’s part of a multi-year plan, and in many cases, the new hires will replace people who retire or quit, at an agency where the number of enforcement staff has dropped 30% since 2010 despite the population continuing to increase.
Republicans are mostly looking to whip up their base against any federal agency during a Democratic presidency, and the IRS is convenient because of the funding it gets through the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s incredibly dangerous, as we saw on Thursday with the attack on the Cincinnati FBI office following strikingly similar Republican rhetoric about the FBI and the IRS. As a side matter, Republicans whose major donors will face increased risk of an audit as the IRS renews its staffing levels are also cynically convincing people whose chance of an audit will decline that armed agents are coming for them.
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