After Fox News attracted yet another round of controversy in recent days via repugnant comments from hosts, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suggested that the issue at the network runs much deeper than a few flippant remarks.
As she put it:
‘Between Tucker Carlson’s defense of sexual assault + calling women “extremely primitive,” or Jeanine Pirro’s bigoted diatribe that hijabi women are “antithetical” to the Constitution, who do you think Fox News will give a promotion to first?’
Media Matters for America revealed Carlson to have made the remarks Ocasio-Cortez referenced during talks with a “shock jock” radio host on-air in the late 2000’s, while Pirro offered her rant about Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on her show in recent days. Omar is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, serving in the district that Keith Ellison used to represent. Pirro apologized for questioning the Congresswoman’s loyalty because she wears a hijab, but Carlson took a much different approach, refusing to apologize for anything he said.
His comments went so far as to include a defense of child marriage — in other words, the sex-based enslavement of minors. Even if he wasn’t personally on board with the concept, he suggested that because the perpetrators make a “lifelong commitment to take care of” their victims, the cases weren’t as severe as “pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child.”
As Ocasio-Cortez indicated, the commentary didn’t hardly end there. For instance, he defended polygamist leader Warren Jeffs (who helped arrange child marriages), calling the charges he’d been slapped with “bullshit.” He also insisted that women are “primitive” and “just need to be quiet and kind of do what you’re told,” besides singling out numerous individual women for harsh criticism.
His summary of the whole incident is that Media Matters caught him saying something “naughty… over a decade ago,” and he won’t “express the usual ritual contrition.” He ended his response to the unearthed tapes with an ad for his show and a defense of his “views,” without specifying whether or not those still include the idea that maybe child sex trafficking under the guise of religiosity isn’t so bad after all.
Fox News has a longstanding problem with harboring sexually perverted individuals. Their now dead chairman Roger Ailes went down under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, having sought to pressure and abuse numerous women over a series of decades. Bill Shine, who served as one of his top staffers and helped try and keep the victims quiet eventually got a job in the Trump administration as a communications official, because of course. (He’s now working on the campaign.)
Besides Ailes, longtime host Bill O’Reilly also went down under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations.
The network’s longstanding ties to racism like what Pirro spewed about Omar are well-documented. They routinely parade the president’s talking points and associate very closely with the administration, despite presidential claims like the existence of a vast secret criminal network among undocumented immigrants having no basis in reality.
Check out Twitter’s response to Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning below…
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
