Laura Ingraham and a guest on her prime-time Fox News show mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) last night for the way in which she pronounces her own name.
Ingraham asked conservative lawyer Joe diGenova if he had noticed how, when Ocasio-Cortez “introduces herself, does she take on that Obama, Obama put on accents?”
The host of “The Ingraham Angle” also described the freshman lawmaker as “the It Girl, and I mean girl in a very mature way” and “the juice” of the Democratic Party.
“She does the Latina thing where she does her, you know, ’Anastasio Ocasio-Cortez,” diGenova said, using an exaggerated accent and misstating the lawmaker’s name.
“And I assume she’s going to love that when I do that,” he added.
Ocasio-Cortez fired back on Wednesday night in a series of tweets slamming Ingraham.
‘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.’ Unless of course she’s talking about being multilingual, which we know isn’t a ‘Latina thing.’ It’s a ’21st century’ thing,’ Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
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.’
Unless of course she‘s talking about being multilingual, which we know isn’t a ‘Latina thing.’
It’s a ‘21st century’ thing.https://t.co/v41dAyjshP
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 21, 2019
The New York Congresswoman also criticized Fox News in general for saying her surname incorrectly on the network.
‘By the way: Fox News likes to say my name (incorrectly) as ‘Cortez,’ which I can only imagine is bc that sounds more ‘stereotypically’ Hispanic + probably incites more ‘anxiety’ for them. Pro Tip: My last name is not ‘Cortez,’ just as theirs isn’t ‘Ingra’ or ‘Carl’ or ‘Hann’.
‘My last name is Ocasio-Cortez. Full stop. That’s my name. No, you can’t say ‘Cortez.’ I’ve never used that in my life. ‘Cortez’ is referring to someone else. Even if they’re trying to be rude + wrong, my dad’s last name was Ocasio anyway. (His name was hyphenated too, though.)
‘For the curious, in Latinx culture children take *both* their parents’ names. It’s not a ‘progressive, new thing.’ It’s just how some names work. PR hyphenates, others mark differently. Your last name = the families that came together to make you. AOC is also fine though.’
AOC also added: ‘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.’
No place in the conservative media universe is as obsessed with tracking Ocasio-Cortez as Fox News.
Her name appears so frequently on the network, in fact, that she even has her own keyword tag to allow online readers to follow their coverage.
In the 134 days since Election Day, Ocasio-Cortez’s name appeared in 1,173 separate stories on Fox News.
Even if many of those stories referenced her only tangentially, that still adds up hundreds upon hundreds of stories or segments focused squarely on her.