Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in an interview defended commentator Marc Lamont Hill, an anti-Israel media figure, and called Congress “a shit show.”
Asked by the New Yorker about the concept of “cancel culture” and online backlash, the progressive New York Democrat said, “You look at the capture of power in the right wing, the ascent of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth. You cannot really animate or concentrate a movement like that — you can’t coalesce it into functional political power — without a sense of persecution or victimhood.”
“And that’s the role of this concept of cancel culture,” she continued. “It’s the speck of dust around which the raindrop must form in order to precipitate takeovers of school boards, pushing actual discourse out of the acceptable norms. Like in terms of the 1619 Project or getting books banned from schools, they need the concept of cancel culture, of persecution, in order to justify, animate, and pursue a political program of takeover — or at least a constant further concentration of their own power.”
Ocasio-Cortez said discussions about cancel culture “only go one way.”
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“We don’t talk about all the people who were fired,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “You just kind of talk about, like, right-leaning podcast bros and more conservative figures. But, for example, Marc Lamont Hill was fired [from CNN] for discussing an issue with respect to Palestinians, pretty summarily. There was no discussion about it, no engagement, no thoughtful discourse over it, just pure accusation.”
Hill was fired in 2018 following comments he made about Israel and the Palestinian territories during a speech at the United Nations, calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” That phrase is used by terrorist groups, including Hamas, that have called for the elimination of Israel. The comments were called antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League, a charge denied by Hill, who is a professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University.
In another portion of the interview, asked about the day-to-day aspect of serving in Congress and being “in the room” for big decisions, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Honestly, it is a shit show.”
“It’s scandalizing, every single day,” she said. “What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing. Some folks perhaps get used to it or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken, but there is so much reliance on this idea that there are adults in the room, and in some respect, there are. But sometimes, to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions — sometimes they’re just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion.”
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Asked about her own political celebrity, Ocasio-Cortez said she is something of a “novelty” and “the red meat for their base.”
