Tucker Carlson has once again plumbed the depths of depravity and managed to find an entirely new low in his reaction to a recent CNN interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which the Congresswoman said she feared not just being murdered, but also sexually assaulted during the January 6 Capitol riot.
During that interview, Ocasio-Cortez said that on that day, as she and her colleagues hid from violent rioters, “I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.”
Speaking with Dana Bash, AOC spoke of the links between white supremacy and misogyny, between racism and patriarchy. “There’s a lot of sexualizing of that violence,” she explained. Ocasio-Cortez has spoken in the past about her history as a survivor of sexual assault and how “when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other.”
Tucker’s cruelly immature response to that notion? “Sexualizing? Get a therapist, honey!” he sneered. “This is crazy!”
Fear of sexual assault is something pretty much every woman lives with and Carlson’s dismissiveness shows his ignorance as much as his cruelty.
“Admitting to the particular fear of sexual violence that women have—recognizing that particularly vulnerability—is entirely outside the norm for female politicians, who often have to go to absurd lengths to prove that they’re tough enough for the job,” Jill Filipovic wrote in a recent op-ed for CNN.
She continues:
Her fears of sexual assault were not pulled out of thin air. Female politicians don’t just face the typical attacks leveled at prominent people — saying that they’re jerks or idiots, that they’re in someone’s pocket or only in it for the glory. They also face sexualized threats, and, too often, acts of sexual violence. Prominent men certainly hear, “I’ll kill you,” from random angry people (and thanks to the internet, they can hear from many more anonymous angry people than ever before). But prominent women are likely to hear, “I’ll rape you and then I’ll kill you.” It’s not just about wanting you to cease existing; it’s about a desire to dominate, sexually degrade and hurt you.
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez has seen this sexualized violence firsthand. She’s seen teenage Republican boys grope and choke a cardboard cutout of her at a public political event. She’s seen the Department of Homeland Security secret Facebook group where “officers [were] circulating photoshopped images of [her] violent rape.” She told Vanity Fair that “There was a time where the volume of threats had gotten so high that I didn’t even know if I was going to live to my next term.”
So when hundreds of angry Trump supporters breached police barriers at the Capitol and stormed the building, many of them armed with a wide range of weapons, why wouldn’t Ocasio-Cortez be afraid of them wanting to bring their violent sexual revenge power fantasies to life? After seeing the rape memes and hearing countless threats, in what world would that not be something she feared?
Tucker Carlson had the option to say nothing about her completely reasonable fear of sexual assault. Instead, he said, “These people were mad because they thought the election wasn’t fair. Now you may disagree with that but it wasn’t about you. Surprise, surprise. ‘Sexualising the violence. I was going to be raped by Ashli Babbit,'” Carlson said in a mocking voice, referencing the Trump-supporting woman killed by police as if there weren’t hundreds of angry, violent men present alongside her.
During her recent CNN interview, AOC actually spoke directly about the obsession Fox News has with tearing her down and how much it says about the people working so hard to shape a narrative around her.
“I actually find it to be really, really fascinating because it reveals a lot about the subconscious of folks that are crafting these narratives, and they very often are speaking to these very subconscious narratives about women, or about people of color, or about Latinos or Latinas, or about working-class people,” she said. “These caricatures that are developed are not really personal, they are societal.”
(image: screencap)
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