Clutching at straws
The current right-wing gotcha is claiming that Ocasio-Cortez lied about being in the Capitol during the attack. “She wasn’t even there!! She was in her office next door!!! Doesn’t count!!!!”
But some have questioned her story, with conservative critics mentioning that her office is in the nearby Cannon House, not the main Capitol building. GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, whose office is close to Ocasio-Cortez’s, tweeted: “Insurrectionists never stormed our hallway.”
That’s fascinating, but how would AOC or anyone else have known that at the time?
Ocasio-Cortez has vigorously defended her account of the day. She shared a tweet by the alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, who claimed that the congresswoman was “not in the Capitol building at the time of her ‘near death’ experience.”
She wrote that these comments were part of a move by the right who were “manipulating the fact that most people don’t know the layout [of] the Capitol complex. We were all on the Capitol complex—the attack wasn’t just on the dome. The bombs Trump supporters planted surrounded our offices too.”
Her account was supported by Ari Rabin-Havt, former deputy campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ tilt at the Democratic presidential nomination last year. He tweeted that he was at the Rayburn Tunnel in the Capitol complex during the attack.
“Trying to find a hiding place, I moved to [Cannon]. A swat team came running through the tunnel intersection yelling it was not safe & I should find a place to hide. Anyone suggesting @AOC is exaggerating is ignorant or a liar.”
Or ignorant and a liar and a misogynist and a reactionary.
In another tweet he compared the attack with the evacuation of the Capitol complex on 9/11. “I’ve witnessed dozens of protests and security situations at the Capitol. I have traveled with two presidential campaigns. The only moment in my career I have been scared was in [Cannon] that day.”
I was jumping out of my skin that day and I was three thousand miles away.
I believe Tucker Carlson joined in on this shit, too, despite the fact that he FREAKED THE FUCK OUT (or pretended to) when some protestors showed up at his home.
To be clear, those protestors were assholes. You can protest that guy at the Fox News offices and get your point across without the threats. (Note that Twitter and Facebook took action against the offenders, and yet there was no outcry about censorship and cancel culture and let’s repeal section 230.)
My point is just that conservatives only seem to take this “it was no big deal, stop making such a fuss” attitude when it’s other people in danger.
I don’t know a lot about AOC or her positions on the topics of the day; what few things I have heard I often disagree with. That being said, her role as GOP gadfly pleases me to no end.
And THAT being said, there’s really no reason for her to lie about this. She’s not stupid; she knows that if she makes things up out of whole cloth that she’ll be found out, a lesson that Trump and his goons never quite learned, and given the mindset of the frenetic, drooling idiots who are the Proud Boys it’s not hard to believe that some subset of them might be trying to find her during the insurrection and looting of the Capitol. I mean, they were after Pence ffs, the very archetype of a conservative male sycophant to Trump, so how hard is it to believe that they’d go after an uppity brown woman who isn’t afraid to speak her mind?
They really are clutching at straws given the fact that AOC began her own account of the events by saying that she was in her office when the trouble started. Are they really calling her a liar because she didn’t draw a fucking map to show where her office is in relation to where the insurrectionists were?
“She said she was in her office but she’s a liar because she was..erm..in her office. But…but…her office isn’t in the Capitol building proper but in the building next door. Well, yes, it’s in a building that’s linked to the Capitol by an easily-breached short corridor, but ignore those details because she’s a liar for saying that she was exactly where she actually was. And also because her name’s Ocasio-Cortez and that’s an un-American foreign name and un-American foreigners always lie.