CLAP BACK
I don’t see nobody else
’Scuse me while I feel myself.
—Lizzo, “’Scuse Me While I Feel Myself”
In Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first days in office, in addition to being tweeted at and saluted by another queen, music legend Cher, for her abilities as a congresswoman to mix dance moves, a great lipstick shade (Beso by Stila), and cosponsoring a bill, AOC was also going blow for blow with Congress members on the other side of the aisle. And these weren’t cute little jabs. She said straight-up what many people all over the world were thinking when she called the president out as “a racist” in an interview on 60 Minutes. While the haters tried to dub her a “flamethrower,” or however you describe a queen who can light up a movement, AOC remixed it into a compliment and told Anderson Cooper on CNN, “I like to think that I’m persuasive, and so I think a lot of that work is going to be on building relationships and trying to persuade and talk to my colleagues on building a progressive agenda for the party.”
That seems like a pretty positive agenda, right? But the haters keep trying her, and they have been since her big primary win made her a national figure. Back in December 2018, not long before she was sworn in, she had to clap back at the president’s son Donald Jr. after he went online and claimed her tax proposals and “socialist ideology” would lead “Americans to having to eat their dog’s food.” He was fearmongering about her proposal for a 70 percent marginal tax rate that would apply only to a person’s income above $10 million, not for their entire income.
The next day she shot back,
I have noticed that Junior here has a habit of posting nonsense about me whenever the Mueller investigation heats up.
Please, keep it coming Jr—it’s definitely a ‘very, very large brain’ idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.
On January 15, she had to school another figure on the right, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, about marginal tax rates.
@ScottWalker: Imagine if you did chores for your grandma and she gave you $10. When you got home, your parents took $7 from you. The students said: ‘That’s not fair!’ Even 5th graders get it.
Ocasio-Cortez countered:
@AOC: Explaining marginal tax rates to a far-right former Governor: Imagine if you did chores for abuela & she gave you $10. When you got home, you got to keep it because it’s only $10 . . . Then we taxed the billionaire in town because he’s making tons of money underpaying the townspeople
AOC was being attacked, but she could clap back with the best of them, and it only made Americans love her more. True to form, she told Cooper exactly how she felt about the haters. Did she feel guilty or bad about these Twitter spats? No. “If you can’t take the heat, then get out of the kitchen. And people know that if you’re going to come after me, you’re opening yourself up.” Don’t come to rumble with AOC, #SheReady.
That’s not to say some of the haters didn’t get pretty scary. By May 2019 she was getting death threats just for being who she is, sis. “I’ve had mornings where I wake up and the first thing I do with my coffee is review photos of the men (it’s always men) who want to kill me,” she explained. “I don’t even get to see all of them. Just the ones that have been flagged as particularly troubling. . . . It happens whenever Fox News gets particularly aggressive plus hateful too.” Fox News has been soooo angry, soooo vampire thirsty for the young congresswoman’s blood that they continue to try to suck all the life out of her reputation as a Queen of the Resistance.
According to a study done by Media Matters (April 2019), she was mentioned 3,181 times within six weeks on Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, from February 25 to April 7—just under seventy-six times a day. In a five-minute span on a single night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called her “stupid,” “a bigot,” and described her platform as “pure poison and open racism.” He described her developing influence in Congress in the following terms: “over time like any untreated virus, her bigotry grew more inflamed.” And those are the softer blows, Tucker has also called her an “idiot windbag,” “pompous little twit,” and a “fake revolutionary,” according to USA Today. Fox commentator Brit Hume said, “She’s kind of adorable in a way that a five-year-old can be adorable,” taking jabs at her age.
Basically, Fox News will twist and try to destroy everything she says—including both blatant and suggestive remarks about pictures of her with other Congress members, like Pelosi, to paint her as disrespectful and to stir up a frivolous debate. Sean Hannity once said, “She’s the real Speaker of the House” as if he’s trying to drive a wedge between AOC and Speaker Pelosi. Thank goodness Pelosi’s a queen who can see right through that BS. But like some sort of burly Bluto, Fox continues to attempt to bully AOC about her liberal values to recruit drama for her on her own side, stirring up stories that paint her as being anti-Democratic establishment and a communist.
They just loved her tussle with Whoopi Goldberg on The View about how Whoopi felt left out of AOC’s talk about the younger generation versus the old—they slice and dice and dub that scene as if Whoopi left angry. Note: She didn’t. But that’s what Fox News wants people to think.
They’ll showcase wild meme-like photos of AOC during their segments with exaggerated expressions, nothing like her truly pleasant face, to portray her as a crazy-eyed lunatic or madwoman. A lot of the name-calling is blatant, and some of it is couched in strange compliments like when a “concerned” Laura Ingraham wondered whether Ocasio-Cortez would have to go to jail after an alleged campaign-finance violation . . . Oh but she also admires her political career. Ewww, nice-nasty. Shade! And somehow it’s good for their ratings to stalk one of the youngest Congress members? But like AOC herself says, “We don’t flinch,” y’all.
DESPITE ALL THIS, she continued to slay on Capitol Hill too. On January 16, 2019, she made her first floor speech. To set the scene: The government was shut down because Trump was insisting that lawmakers agree to give him $5 billion to build his ridiculous border wall. This man was holding wages hostage for hundreds of thousands of government workers for this pet project of his! Ugh. At the hearing, AOC told the story of one of her constituents, a man from Yemen, an air-traffic controller who was struggling financially due to the government shutdown, all because Trump’s tantrum was keeping the federal budget from being passed. She was driving home the point that the government shutdown was affecting regular citizens. The government was shut down for five weeks, there were major airline delays on the East Coast, and federal workers were missing their paychecks.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said on the floor, “The truth of this shutdown is that it’s actually not about a wall . . . The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms. It is not normal to hold 800,000 workers’ paychecks hostage. It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want . . . It is certainly not normal to starve the people we serve, for a [wall] that is wildly unpopular with the American people.”
True to form, AOC tweeted about the experience. “It was an honor to bring forward one of my constituents’ stories in my first-ever speech on the House floor. In the moment, it often seems lonely and scary to speak out on these issues—especially in DC, which so deeply prizes conformity, ‘etiquette’ in the form of learned silence, and falling in line. I feel a lot of pressure to conform, or not shine as brightly—and I also admit that a lot of that pressure is self-imposed. In DC it ‘feels’ as though I shouldn’t say or do these things more so than other contexts, because those feelings are reinforced by a culture that is very exact in who should be where on a totem pole.”
AOC’s speech would go viral and become one of CSPAN’s most viewed videos. Look at that type of outreach. So many people got to hear her constituents’ stories.
A FEW WEEKS later, at the State of the Union address, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared like a superhero in a white cape jacket. The female lawmakers wore white, as encouraged by the Democratic Women’s Working Group to celebrate the record number of women elected to Congress and to pay homage to the women’s suffrage movement. It was fitting for this president.
She had made a statement of her own that was already flying across media outlets: she arrived with Ana Maria Archila, a codirector of the Center for Popular Democracy. Archila worked with Make the Road New York and was dedicated to helping immigrant and working-class New Yorkers—and she lived in AOC’s congressional district. Just a few months earlier, Archila and a fellow sexual assault survivor named Maria Gallagher had confronted Arizona senator Jeff Flake in a Senate elevator during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who stood accused of sexual assault. They confronted Flake, hoping to convince him to follow his conscience and vote against confirming Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court instead of voting along party lines. At the State of the Union, they wore matching pins that AOC had purchased at a local store in their district. One of them read WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY. *snap, snap*