Conservative author Ben Shapiro slammed Thursday Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) call for her constituents to help Twitter and Facebook censor critics of her version of events that took place during the Capitol Hill riot.
"There is some irony here," the "Ben Shapiro Show" host said. "This is a person who has spent the entirety of the last several weeks, claiming without evidence that fellow congresspeople -- so far as I'm aware, she's provided no evidence in this -- that fellow congresspeople were in on the riots, that Ted Cruz wanted her murdered, attempted to have her murdered, that Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are like her own sexual assaulters."
"And here she is being like, 'oh, I can't believe people are putting out misleading information. That's really upsetting.'"
Below is a transcript of the segment:
Ben Shapiro: So here is where Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez starts to really lose it. OK, so she sends out an email from Team AOC to her entire email list and her email asks her constituents to contact anybody in the fact-checking world or in the social media world and try to get them to censor and remove tweets that suggest that she was not in the Capitol Building. OK? I'm serious, here's what she wrote:
As we speak, right-wing operatives with millions of followers on social media are spending flat-out lies and misleading information about Alexandria. But with your help, we can force Twitter and Facebook to take action and enforce their own rules. What's so frustrating about these attacks is that once the truth comes out, so few people get to hear it. Hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of people have already seen or shared the misleading tweets or fake news articles.
OK, so first of all, the irony of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a person who has said on national television that actual facts matter less than moral truth, there is some irony here. This is a person who has spent the entirety of the last several weeks, claiming without evidence that fellow congresspeople -- so far as I'm aware, she's provided no evidence in this -- that fellow congresspeople were in on the riots, that Ted Cruz wanted her murdered, attempted to have her murdered, that Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are like her own sexual assaulters. And here she is being like, "oh, I can't believe people are putting out misleading information. That's really upsetting."
But here's where it gets dicey. What is the misleading information? OK, apparently, the misleading information is that she was not in the Capitol Building. So she keeps insisting that she was in the Capitol Building because, in fact, she was part of the Capitol Complex. Right? This is what she tweets out. She tweets out, "well, you know, guys, I mean, it's connected by tunnels." She says "this is the latest manipulative take on the right. They are manipulating the fact that most people don't know the layout of the Capitol Complex. We were all on the Capitol Complex -- the attack wasn't just on the dome. The bombs Trump supporters planted surrounded our offices too."
OK, so a couple of things there: One, we have yet to find the evidence of who actually planted the bombs. She can make an assumption it was Trump supporters, but that actually is not publicly available information. So that in and of itself is misleading information. And when she says that we were part of the Capitol Complex and therefore they were trying to attack the Capitol Complex in general...Nancy Mace was on the same floor. She says the rioters did not breach the building. OK, reporters at the time said the rioters did not breach that building. Again, this is not to say that she couldn't have been justified or at least she couldn't have felt legitimately and authentically in danger. Again, people react to crisis in different ways. But what she is now saying, which is that, "oh, yeah, you know, people are saying I wasn't in the Capitol Building. How dare they."
Well, I mean, were you or were you not in the Capitol Building? It's called the Capitol Building. It is not called the Capitol Complex. When people say the rioters stormed the Capitol Building, they mean the Capitol Building, like a building because they don't mean the complex, right? I mean, so she is now, now she's misleading. So she puts out this email and she says, "we need your help. Here's what you can do to help us combat this campaign of disinformation and others in the future. Scan your social media to find posts with this misleading information, especially those using the trending hashtag."
Mmhmm. It's funny how Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's emergency mode kicks in when she's trending for the wrong reasons on Twitter. As somebody who trends on Twitter frequently, like once every three weeks, once every month, I can tell you that the best thing you can do with a Twitter trend is basically ignore it. That's pretty much the best thing you can do with a Twitter trend, but instead, she says she wants all of her followers to basically spam Facebook and Twitter and get a bunch of stuff taken down, which is not a great look for a sitting congressperson.
She says "don't tweet any hashtags yourself because we don't want them to spread further. Identify any posts that are threatening or harassing and use the built-in report features to flag them for the moderators. Facebook and Twitter both have built-in tools for reporting posts and tweets that break the rules. The sad thing is that a lot of damage has already been done. People have already been misled and radicalized. They believe the lies to a point where their hatred could someday boil over into violence.
So now she's going to say that if you point out that she was not in the Capitol Building itself, that you are one of the kinds of people who distributes information that ends with the Jan. 6 riots. I mean, that's that's pretty manipulative stuff right there.