On Thursday night, Time magazine cover star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, stopped by Seth Meyers’ Late Night.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents New York’s 14th district, was asked by the comedian about Fox News’ apparent obsession with her—that she has, in essence, become their new Hillary Clinton (or their bogeywoman).
“I mean, it’s weird. Like, why are so many grown men just obsessed with this 29-year-old?” she replied, to laughs from the crowd. “No, but I think it’s really funny, and the conspiracy theories are great.”
ADVERTISEMENT
That led Meyers to jokingly ask about Fox News regular Mike Huckabee’s outrageous—and entirely baseless—claim that the 29-year-old New Yorker is a “Manchurian Candidate.”
“I’m not a Manchurian Candidate, but I do have amazing staff—and in no part thanks to the fact that we pay a living wage in our office,” offered Ocasio-Cortez. “We don’t pay less than $52,000 a year, which means so far two of my staffers have been able to quit their second jobs in restaurants and be fully present at work. And so I hope it’s a lesson to the folks on the other side of the aisle that if you pay your staff, you’ll be prepared.”
Meyers then queried the congresswoman on whether her fellow members of Congress “get bad information” about her from Fox News and end up actually believing it.
“Well, it is funny because one of the side effects of this Fox News lunacy is that other actual members of Congress believe it, and see it uncritically,” she explained. “And so I was on the [House] floor once and this guy came up to me and said, ‘Is it true that you got ten million dollars from Netflix?’ and I’m like, ‘No… what else do you not know! This is concerning!’”
For the record, the $10 million number is what Netflix paid for the documentary Knock Down the House, which features Ocasio-Cortez as one of its four main subjects. The film won both the U.S. Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
