Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admits to occasionally watching Fox coverage of her: 'It’s really fascinating'

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash for the first episode of the new series Being…, where she admitted to occasionally checking out what Fox News is saying about her. Ocasio-Cortez has been a target of the right-wing network since very early in her political career, enduring attacks that paint her as something different than she actually is. But she believes that says more about the people creating that narrative than it says about her.

“Do you ever watch Fox News?” Bash asked. “Do you watch what they say about you?” “Not a ton. Every once in a while I do, and I think that it's really fascinating,” Ocasio-Cortez answered. “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. You know, these caricatures that are developed are not really personal, they are societal.”

Ocasio-Cortez is unfazed by Fox News because she can look at their attacks academically, but that’s not the case when her Democratic colleagues fall victim to misinformation about her.

“The harder one is the critiques from within the party,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That is the one — that’s the stuff that hurts. But the right-wing stuff doesn’t hurt.”

While Ocasio-Cortez may not be hurt by right-wing attacks, they come with a real-world danger in the form of countless death threats. She has even spoken about waking up sometimes in the morning and reviewing photos of men who want to kill her, just in case she sees them approaching. One man, who allegedly entered the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, was arrested for threatening to “assassinate” Ocasio-Cortez.

“There were moments where I thought that I was going to die before the 6th,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The thing that I think some folks may not understand, is how direct the through-line is between right-wing targeting on TV and how much that is actually a driver of very real physical threats.”

For more on Being... check out CNN.com.

Watch John Oliver rip Andrew Cuomo for thinking 'irrelevant montage' would exonerate him of harassment allegations:

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. And check out our host, Kylie Mar, on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.