Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hit back at a minor-league baseball team that depicted her as an “enemy of freedom” in a Memorial Day tribute clip by revealing a regular morning ritual she goes through to ensure her safety.
The lawmaker on Tuesday responded to a controversial video that the Fresno Grizzlies aired at Chukchansi Park with a Twitter thread explaining how her life changes due to “the flood of death threats” that those kind of “hateful messages” inspire.
“I‘ve had mornings where I wake up & the 1st thing I do w/ my coffee is review photos of the men (it’s always men) who want to kill me,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
“I don’t even get to see all of them,” she added in a second post. “Just the ones that have been flagged as particularly troubling.”
Ocasio-Cortez said the number of threats against her increases whenever the widely watched conservative cable network Fox News gets “particularly aggressive + hateful” with its rhetoric toward her.
It’s a link she’s made before.
“It’s very clear that when right-wing media starts to heat up, that’s directly correlated to the amount of violent targeted threats we get,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Daily News in March.
She concluded with a warning about the importance of words and a question for people who believe in free speech:
The Grizzlies has apologized for not properly vetting the pre-produced video:
Ocasio-Cortez revealed in February how her office tackles anonymous threats:
Ocasio-Cortez ended the day on a lighter note, however, by teasing a return to bartending in her congressional district “to promote a national living wage.”
“Let’s see if my margarita+mocktail game is still on point,” she wrote.