Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Reminds Us the Halls of Congress Are Crawling With Fox News Grandpas

We spend a fair amount of time digesting the alternately hilarious and horrifying proposition that we have elected a Fox News Grandpa as President of the United States. Donald Trump, American president, is a bit of a science experiment: what if you elected a low-information voter who's allergic to books to be the world's most powerful man? In fact, Trump is more than that. He's the monster that escaped from the lab, the grotesque amalgam of decades of racial resentment and weaponized anti-intellectualism that have steadily erupted out of the Fox News-Talk Radio Vortex. The results of making such a creature the president have been...instructive.

The worrying thing that we broach less frequently is that there is no way in hell Donald Trump is the only elected official who's getting high on his own supply. We just notice it more because we're used to Republican would-be-presidential types like Mitt Romney, who play footsie with the fringe loons to secure the support of The Base so they can get into office and start shoving even more of the wealth towards the people who pay the campaign bills. But for many, many years, the halls of Congress—and especially the House—have been crawling with elected officials who don't just cater to people whose only sources of information are Fox News and talk radio. They are those people.

We got a stunning reminder Thursday night via Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman who has been a relentless target for the Fox News mis-and-dis-information machine.

"One of the side-effects of this kind of Fox News lunacy is that other actual members of Congress believe it, and see it uncritically," says Ocasio-Cortez. "So I was on the floor [of the House] once and this guy came up to me, and he was like, 'Is it true that you got $10 million from Netflix?' And I was like, 'No?' And it was like, in the well—we're voting on, like, gun reform. And I'm like, what else do you not know? This is concerning."

I think the least we could all ask of the people in our national legislature is that they read a newspaper. If you're a Republican, and the Times or the Post are just a bridge too far, crack open that Wall Street Journal. We could ask you to stop before you get to the editorial page, but we'll take what we can get. What AOC reminds us here, however, is that there are a whole bunch of Louie Gohmerts—and even Half-Louie Gohmerts—running around the Capitol, their minds brimming with Vortex Wisdom which they're all-to-happy to dispense to anyone.

Louie Gohmert is pictured on the House floor ahead of the 2019 State of the Union address. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

Ocasio-Cortez also recounted how there's one congressman who asks every witness before his committee whether they're a socialist or a capitalist. It's not a particularly useful question, though it is one you'd ask if you've been inhaling large quantities of Fox News. The United States, like every other developed country, is a mixed economy: it primarily distributes goods and services via markets, but some programs—like the extremely popular Medicare and Social Security—more closely resemble socialism.

In a nation with some grip on reality, the question would be how much of the economy should be left to markets, and which industries or sectors are better off being administered to by the government. But if you've got The Fox News Brain, it's a binary: either you're a freedom-loving all-American capitalist, or you want to live in Venezuela. Needless to say, this is not a framework that will serve us particularly well when attempting to deal with the increasingly complex problems presented by the 21st century. The solution to I just lost my job to automation is not "Freedom!"