AOC Lays Into Republicans for Defending Gosar’s Horrible Video: “What Is So Hard About Saying This Is Wrong?”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor Wednesday to condemn Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, as well as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other party leadership for their reaction to an anime video Gosar posted online edited to depict her murder.

The House voted today to censure Gosar for the video. Only two Republicans—Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—joined Democrats in voting to formally rebuke Gosar. Ahead of the vote, McCarthy gave a speech in which he called the move to censure Gosar the “definition of abuse of power.”

“Let me be clear. I do not condone violence, and Rep. Gosar had echoed that sentiment,” McCarthy said, chalking the whole response up to a partisan attack. “The video was deleted, but Democrats won’t listen because they will do anything to distract from the failures of one-party rule in one year destroying a nation.”

Ocasio-Cortez then gave her own speech.

“In response to the Republican leader’s remarks when he says that this action is unprecedented–what I believe is unprecedented is for a member of House leadership of either party to be unable to condemn incitement of violence against a member of this body,” she said.

“It is sad. It is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong, and instead decides to venture off into a tangent about gas prices and inflation,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “What is so hard? What is so hard about saying that this is wrong?”

After facing backlash for the video online, Gosar claimed that those who took issue with it were overreacting, that it was just a harmless cartoon. And it is a cartoon, but that doesn’t make it an acceptable thing to post about a colleague or about a member of Congress.

“Now, this nihilism runs deep,” AOC said about this just a joke attitude. “And it conveys and betrays a certain contempt for the meaning and importance of our work here. That what we do, as long as we claim that it is a joke, doesn’t matter. That what we say here doesn’t matter. That our actions every day as elected leaders in the United States of America doesn’t matter!”

After Gosar posted the video, Rep. Ted Lieu responded online, tweeting, “In any workplace in America, if a coworker made an anime video killing another coworker, that person would be fired.”

AOC echoed that sentiment in her speech. “Would you allow depictions of violence against women, against colleagues?” she asked. “Would you allow that in your home? Do you think this should happen on a school board? In a city council, in a church? And if it’s not acceptable there, why should it be accepted here?”

“Lastly, when the Republican leader rose to talk about how there are all of these double standards and lists a litany of all these different things, not once did he list an example of a member of Congress threatening the life of another,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded. “This is not about a double standard. And what is unprecedented and what is tragic is the descent of transgression in this body.”

(image: screencap)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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