Progressive lawmaker Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Wednesday blasted Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a “white supremacist sympathizer,” pointing to his “unmitigated racism” as the main reason she does not appear on the conservative network.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez took aim at the far-right primetime star over his Tuesday night segment in which Carlson’s guest claimed AOC’s New York district was dirty because of the number of non-U.S. citizens who live there.
While “investigating” the Democratic congresswoman’s home district, Carlson brought on City Journal associate editor Seth Barron, asserting that it was ironic that AOC claims to care about the environment while the area she represents is supposedly filthy.
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“Well, part of the reason is because her district is actually one of the least American districts in the country,” Barron added. “Now by that, I don’t mean that it's not part of America, but it's occupied by relatively few American citizens. A very high percentage of her district is, in fact, illegal aliens.”
Barron would go on to say that undocumented residents produced a “lot of garbage” and there were “illegal food vendors pouring their pig grease into the gutters,” something Carlson said Ocasio-Cortez “should be ashamed of.”
“I go back and forth on whether to go on Fox News,” AOC tweeted in response. “The main reason I haven’t is squaring the fact that the ad revenue from it bankrolls a white supremacist sympathizer to broadcast an hour-long production of unmitigated racism, without any accountability whatsoever.”
Addressing Carlson’s segment directly, she further noted that it’s a “lazy, tired, racist trope” to paint immigrants as dirty, adding that “environmental injustice is a major motivation as to why we introduced and wrote the Green New Deal the way we did in the first place.”
For more than a year now, Carlson has been at the center of widespread backlash over his remarks on immigration and race. Last December, advertisers began fleeing his program after he said immigration makes America “poorer and dirtier.” Calls for him to be fired renewed this past summer when he said white supremacy is a hoax days after the deadly El Paso mass shooting.
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, has found herself the focal point of obsessive coverage by Fox News since becoming the youngest woman to serve in Congress last year. This past April, for instance, left-wing media monitoring group Media Matters found that Fox had mentioned her name more than 3,000 times over a six-week span.
Barron would take to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to apologize for his comments.
“On Tucker Carlson’s show last night, I discussed the issue of trash on the streets in Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s district,” Barron wrote. “I chose the wrong words and that is my fault. I am sorry.”
Insisting that the issue he was intending to raise was how immigrants are “often unable to access legal, affordable housing," the New York journalist added: “I didn’t do justice to a complex issue and I apologize.”
