As has become commonplace over the past several months, Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing the victim card.
The freshman congresswoman had a total meltdown on Twitter earlier this week over a joke from a guest on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s Tuesday program. (Yes, really.)
Ingraham stokes ‘anxiety’…?
Media watchdog group Media Matters for America posted a clip to Twitter on Tuesday of Ingraham and guest Joe DiGenova joking about the heavy “Latina” accent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses to pronounce her own name.
DiGenova misstated the congresswoman’s name as he over-pronounced it, then did the same with his own name in a thick Italian accent as part of the harmless joke.
Take a look:
Ingraham guest Joe Digenova says @AOC “does the Latino thing” when she talks. pic.twitter.com/sa1LLExkBA
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 20, 2019
After that “story” began to spread among the liberal media on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez launched an outraged tweetstorm that accused Ingraham and the rest of the Fox network of purposely mispronouncing her name in order to deliberately stoke racial “anxiety.”
“If by ‘the Latina thing,’ she means I actually do the work instead of just talk about it, then yeah, I’m doing ‘the Latina thing.’ Unless of course she’s talking about being multilingual, which we know isn’t a ‘Latina thing.’ It’s a ‘21st century’ thing,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
In a follow-up tweet, which included a picture of Ingraham, Ocasio-Cortez added, “Siri, show me the brand of ‘economic anxiety’ that mocks Americans of color.”
Siri, show me the brand of ‘economic anxiety’ that mocks Americans of color as unintelligent + unskilled, while *also* mocking those same Americans for speaking more languages than you: pic.twitter.com/HXBC7Osexu
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 21, 2019
Sanctimonious faux outrage from AOC
The congresswoman wasn’t quite done yet, though. She went on to launch a separate thread of tweets that accused Fox News more generally of deliberately mispronouncing her name, which transitioned into a sort of primer on the construction of Hispanic surnames.
She tweeted:
How dare they refuse to say their name in a wrong accent & not mangle their own family name so that I can feel more comfortable instead of look inside myself & examine why something as small as *a person’s name* makes me uncomfortable in the first place?? This is an outrage!
“By the way: Fox News likes to say my name (incorrectly) as ‘Cortez,’ which I can only imagine is bc that sounds more ‘stereotypically’ Hispanic + probably incites more ‘anxiety’ for them. Pro Tip: My last name is not ‘Cortez,’ just as theirs isn’t ‘Ingra’ or ‘Carl’ or ‘Hann,'” the freshman representative added, in obvious reference to Fox primetime hosts Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.
The congresswoman continued:
My last name is Ocasio-Cortez. Full stop. That’s my name. No, you can’t say ‘Cortez.’ I’ve never used that in my life. ‘Cortez’ is referring to someone else. Even if they‘re trying to be rude + wrong, my dad’s last name was Ocasio anyway. (His name was hyphenated too, though)
Ocasio-Cortez concluded her thread with a break down of “Latinx culture:”
For the curious, in Latinx culture children take *both* their parents‘ names. It’s not a ‘progressive, new thing.’ It’s just how some names work. PR hyphenates, others mark differently. Your last name = the families that came together to make you. AOC is also fine though 🙂
As absurd as this tweetstorm from “AOC” is, sanctimonious and faux racial outrage has routinely become her shtick. Why should we expect any less?