Earlier this month, after New York congressional hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off her shocking upset primary victory against Rep. Joe Crowley in NY-14, Fox News’ Sean Hannity put her platform up on his screen. The list of policy proposals, meant to scare Fox viewers, included Medicare for all, women’s rights, and, most innocuous of all, “support seniors.”
“Pretty much!” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, along with the Hannity screenshot.
Now the network seems to have done it again. In a segment Tuesday morning with Daily Caller associate editor Virginia Kruta—first reported by ThinkProgress’ Aaron Rupar—Fox & Friends set out to portray Ocasio-Cortez’s message as dangerous, but may have accomplished just the opposite.
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Over the weekend, the self-described “conservative” writer Kruta attended a rally in St. Louis at which Ocasio-Cortez stumped for Cori Bush, the woman who aims this week to unseat seven-term incumbent William “Lacy” Clay Jr. in a Democratic primary for Missouri’s 1st congressional district.
Kruta told the Fox & Friends hosts that she went to the rally to “see what the fuss was about” and “why the message was resonating.” Asked why voters might be drawn to a Democratic Socialist message, she added, “They talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent. They talk about education for your kids, health care for your kids, the things that you want.”
“If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it, or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and say, ‘My kids deserve this’ and ‘Well, maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that,'” Kruta said. In her article for The Daily Caller, she wrote that she could see “how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a ‘living wage’ was a human right.”
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt wanted to know how this made Kruta feel, “as a conservative,” asking, “Were you angry? Were you more drawn to that?”
“I was mostly uncomfortable, because I was surrounded by a group of people who were talking about how they had gotten involved because they were tired of being angry all the time. It seems like so much effort to be angry about everything, instead of to focus on what you could do to change it.”
Pretty much!
After the segment aired, Ocasio-Cortez happily shared the “breaking news” on Twitter: “Conservative goes to our @CoriBush rally in St. Louis and... gets inspired? And then... gets uncomfortable... about being inspired by a Democrat?”
She ended her tweet with the crying laughing emoji.
