The Capitol’s most prominent progressive congresswoman is snubbing Donald Trump’s inauguration because, she says, “I don’t celebrate rapists.”
In a series of posts on Instagram, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said she’d been repeatedly asked whether she’d be attending Monday’s ceremony—which has been moved inside from its traditional site on the Capitol steps on account of Trump, apparently, not much fancying standing out in the cold.
“All these journalists are like, ‘Congresswoman, Congresswoman, are you going to the inauguration?’” she told her followers Sunday. “Let me make myself clear: I don’t celebrate rapists.”
Her caption for the video read, “Guess I’m old school that way.”
Facing a litany of sexual assault claims over the years, Trump has never been convicted of rape. He has, however, been found civilly liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll, in a case beset by wrangling over legal definitions that eventually saw a New York judge forced to clarify the victim hadn’t actually failed to prove Trump had “raped” her in the most common sense of the word.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in a filing after the trial.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Earlier in her raft of posts on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez also took aim at TikTok, accusing the social media giant of joining other Big Tech platforms in “bending the knee” to Trump.
After a brief blackout across the country ahead of an imminent ban—sanctioned by the Biden administration due to national security concerns over TikTok’s ownership by ByteDance, a company with close ties to the Chinese government—the social media app on Sunday began restoring service to U.S. users with a push notification crediting Trump for its return.
“Welcome back! Thanks for your patience and support,” the notification read. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is now back in the U.S.!”
Ocasio-Cortez responded by first pointing out that at the time service was restored, Trump remained a private citizen and was therefore unable to have carried out any sort of official presidential action on the matter.
She said, “Please understand that TikTok’s decision to name Trump in the notification is a choice. They are signaling that they’re privately collaborating, they have agreed to privately collaborate with Donald Trump and the Trump administration. And for all of those concerns, that people were saying that TikTok is gonna be used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese, understand that they’re using it as a propaganda tool for the right.”
The congresswoman then drew parallels with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of a rollback to content moderation and fact-checking programs for Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads, as well as Elon Musk’s alleged manipulation of X’s algorithms to weaponize far-right content in Trump’s favor ahead of the recent election.
“I want you all to put all the pieces together, because what this effectively means is that every mass social media platform in the United States has been taken over by the right wing,” she said. “What does this mean for us? Well, we’re on the eve of an authoritarian administration.”
She added, “This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.”
