Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and her Tuesday night guest Joe DiGenova engaged in base and racist mockery of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in a childish attack on her name. And on Wednesday, the Democratic lawmaker fired back.
“You notice when she introduces herself, does she take on that Obama, you know, Obama put on accents…” Ingraham said on the Tuesday episode of the “The Ingraham Angle.”
“She does the Latina thing where she does her, you know, ’Anastasio Ocasio-Cortez,” said DiGenova, exaggerating the accent.
As Rep. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out on Twitter, she’s not putting on airs in pronouncing her name — she’s just saying it properly.
“If by ‘the Latina thing,’ she means I actually do the work instead of just talk about it, then yeah, I’m doing ‘the Latina thing,’” the lawmaker said. “Unless of course she‘s talking about being multilingual, which we know isn’t a ‘Latina thing.’ It’s a ‘21st century’ thing.”
She continued to lay into Ingraham, whose nightly Fox News shows is typically rife with anti-immigrant bigotry and not-so-subtle dog whistles to white supremacy:
Siri, show me the brand of ‘economic anxiety’ that mocks Americans of color as unintelligent + unskilled, while *also* mocking those same Americans for speaking more languages than you: pic.twitter.com/HXBC7Osexu
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 21, 2019
“How dare they refuse to say their name in a wrong accent & not mangle their own family name so that I can feel more comfortable instead of look inside myself & examine why something as small as *a person’s name* makes me uncomfortable in the first place?? This is an outrage!” https://t.co/ArYd28WVcv
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 21, 2019
She also pointed out that Fox News hosts often refer to her, incorrectly, as simply “Cortez,” rather than saying her full last name.
“My last name is not ‘Cortez,’ just as theirs isn’t ‘Ingra’ or ‘Carl’ or ‘Hann,’” she said
