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NEW YORK —
A day after Fox News’ Tucker Carlson aired a segment describing her congressional district as “filled with garbage,” U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the network on Wednesday for airing “unmitigated racism” with no accountability.
She tweeted Wednesday that describing immigrants as dirty is a “lazy, tired, racist trope.”
The liberal New York Democrat’s popularity has made her a frequent target of Fox News Channel’s opinion hosts. Carlson, in particular, has targeted Ocasio-Cortez for supporting a “Green New Deal” of environmental legislation.
On Tuesday’s show, Carlson said Ocasio-Cortez’s district in the New York City borough of Queens is “filled with garbage, litter and trash piled in public places” and is plagued by homelessness. As he spoke, the screen filled with pictures of overflowing trash bags on sidewalks and a half-filled water bottle leaning against a curb.
“It’s not that hard to pick up garbage off the street of your own congressional district,” Carlson said. “How can we take seriously anything she says about the environment when this is her congressional district? She should be ashamed of this.”
In New York, like in most cities, sanitation issues are handled by the local, not the federal government.
Carlson interviewed a guest, Seth Barron, an editor of the City Journal, who described Ocasio-Cortez’s district as the “least American” in the country, “occupied by relatively few American citizens” and high percentage of people who came to the country illegally. He offered no statistics to support the claim.
Barron said people are crammed into illegal living spaces producing a lot of garbage that landlords don’t want to dispose of normally, so a lot ends up in the street.
“It can be a little gross,” Barron said.
Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional office did not respond directly to Carlson’s commentary on Wednesday. But she retweeted a clip of the segment saying that she goes back and forth on whether she should make appearances on Fox News.
“The main reason I haven’t is squaring the fact that the ad revenue from it bankrolls a white supremacist sympathizer to broadcast an hour-long production of unmitigated racism, without any accountability whatsoever,” she wrote.
Fox News had no immediate response to the congresswoman’s tweets.