00:00:49.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:04.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:01:14.080Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:19.460I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive
00:01:26.780what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:32.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,
00:01:38.200and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:43.380Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:55.480There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:02:03.600I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:02:06.400Last week, Representative Paul Gosar tweeted an anime video depiction of him killing his
00:02:14.580colleague, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, this is pretty clearly unacceptable.
00:02:20.280It's against Twitter's terms of service, and if I tweeted a video of myself murdering a co-worker,
00:02:24.920not only would I be fired, I'd probably be getting a visit from law enforcement.
00:02:28.500Twitter removed the tweet, but did not kick Gosar off the platform.
00:02:31.620And after he was censured and stripped of his two committee assignments by a vote of 223 to 207 for tweeting the video, he retweeted it because he doesn't care.0.97
00:02:41.560Women of color like AOC face disproportionate levels of harassment, disinformation, and threats online.
00:02:47.000And this kind of abuse impacts us all because we're not able to have a healthy, functioning democracy unless everyone is able to fully participate.
00:02:56.160Let's revisit this episode that originally aired in February,
00:02:59.600after AOC faced attacks online because she shared her experience of the insurrection,
00:03:04.480to really hear the toll that harassment takes on women of color in the public eye.
00:03:09.220If you were online at all last week, you probably saw Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez0.70
00:03:14.460use Instagram Live to give a harrowing account of what she experienced
00:03:17.800from inside the Capitol complex during the insurrection on the Capitol.
00:03:21.540In this account, she also shared that, like so many of us,
00:04:46.680Now, in AOC's Instagram Live, she recounted hearing somebody bang on her office door, come into her office and say, where is she?
00:04:53.760At the time, she was afraid that rioters had found her, but she later realized this person was a Capitol Police officer who was there to help her.
00:05:00.880Now, after this, we saw really ugly trends on Twitter, like hashtag AOC lied and hashtag Alexandria Ocasio Smollett,
00:05:08.080comparing her to Jussie Smollett to suggest that she was making up her account,
00:05:12.000despite it being corroborated by multiple people
00:05:14.620like Representative Katie Porter and Bernie Sanders aide Ari Rabin.
00:05:18.540So this is actually a really good example of how disinformation works in real time.
00:05:23.240This complete distortion of what AOC said has become part of the public dialogue,
00:06:46.160And I had started doing some legislative organizing that way.
00:06:49.320We were working in New Jersey to ban the box
00:06:52.100and also some bail reform initiatives.
00:06:55.080And so a lot of that, my initial digital organizing work
00:07:00.080was around legislative work, which was really interesting.
00:07:02.840And at the time, a little cutting edge. Not a lot of folks were doing it, but we kind of dipped our toes in and started organizing folks online.
00:07:13.180And then after Mike Brown was murdered, Feminista Jones had kind of put this call out on from Twitter to say, hey, would you be interested in hosting a vigil in your city this week?
00:07:27.720And I was like, sure, I could do one in Philly. And I call that the, you know, the moment that
00:07:33.980the full digital organizer that is Leslie Mack was born. So that's where I started out was
00:07:40.360organizing that first vigil in Philadelphia, the National Moment of Silence. And I guess I liked
00:07:47.940it because I just kept on going. Yeah, you're kind of a prolific digital organizer. You're
00:07:52.660someone who I feel is one, it was one of the sort of, when I think about some of the foundational1.00
00:07:57.740Black feminists who are showing up online, I definitely think about you. And, you know,1.00
00:08:02.160full disclosure, you and I worked together at Ultraviolet. And so yesterday was kind of a
00:08:08.520long, wild day for folks who are online and in feminist spaces online, because we saw AOC really0.64
00:08:16.420being at the center of this coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign against her after she
00:08:24.280really bravely shared her story about what happened in the insurrection on January 6th
00:08:29.340and her own personal story as a survivor of sexual violence. And so my first question for you is,
00:08:34.640how do you see disinformation and abuse being linked? Well, they're linked on two levels. And
00:08:41.860I was talking about this with you yesterday, which is one is at the personal level, which
00:08:47.800is that abusers in our real lives, our personal lives, use disinformation against us, right?
00:08:53.900So they'll tell us lies about ourselves, about the world, that nobody will love us.
00:08:59.000And that's a tool that they utilize at the personal level.
00:09:02.020And what we're watching is public abusers, right?
00:09:06.180People that are abusing the system, people that are abusing people within it, using disinformation for that same purpose, which is to degrade, denigrate and deny the experiences, real life experiences of marginalized people.
00:09:20.520So we're watching that play out with AOC. You know, she bravely not only shared her story, but she went personally one to one to the people, which I think this is such a digital story in and of itself that she took to IG Live to have this hour long conversation.
00:09:36.180And the way I saw it play out, I didn't know she was live until I saw on Twitter, people were tweeting about it. And they were like, wow, AOC is doing XYZ. And I said, oh, let me go over to IG and watch her.
00:09:50.080So I was watching her. And while that was happening, somebody was starting a clubhouse room to talk about it, to debrief it. Shout out to Tracy Quarter. And then as I was watching it, it said, oh, Katie Porter is going to be talking about this IG Live on MSNBC shortly.
00:10:06.300So it was this moment of like, whoa, all of this digital stuff was happening. It was pinging and creating waves all over the place. And then subsequently, that's what we watched, was the abusers that AOC was naming in her IG Live, namely folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and really all the insurrectionists and seditionists elected that supported the coup on
00:10:36.300January 6th. And they've subsequently now tried to discount her personal experience in this
00:10:43.340harrowing moment. And it's been wild to watch people just blatantly lie. One of her fellow
00:10:49.600Congress people said, oh, I'm two doors down from her. And there was nobody in the hallway.
00:10:57.880And then we find out that the person evacuated before anything happened.
00:11:01.700So the level of disinformation is really disturbing to watch in real time.
00:11:05.700Yeah, it is completely like a coordinated attack. So you're talking about Nancy Mace from South Carolina. So she tweeted yesterday, I'm two doors down from AOC and no insurrectionist stormed our hallway. But that day, she herself tweeted on January 6th that she was being evacuated because of this threat. You know, she described it as, quote, a nearby threat.
00:11:24.980She later did an interview, I think on Good Morning America, where she said that she was
00:11:28.620so frightened by what happened that she stayed overnight in her office, her motherly instincts
00:11:35.800kicked in, and that she was so afraid for her life that she was thinking about bringing a gun
00:11:40.780with her to Capitol Hill from now on because she was so afraid. And so that's how she talked about
00:11:45.380it right after it happened. And so it's very telling that now, weeks later, after AOC essentially
00:11:51.720says the same thing, that I was afraid for my life. Somebody knocked on the door and I was
00:11:55.980afraid for my life. She's saying that didn't happen. And I think it's really interesting how
00:12:00.640you see the way that this is coordinated. You know, we saw another big account on the right
00:12:06.300tweeting a map with arrows trying to indicate that AOC was not, you know, not in the Capitol
00:12:12.700when folks stormed. And AOC herself replied and said, your arrows are wrong. And AOC had a really
00:12:18.380good tweet where she talked about the fact that disinformation, one of the ways that it plays out
00:12:23.260is that once it's out there in the public narrative, it doesn't matter if it's not based
00:12:29.340in reality or if it's an outright fabrication. That becomes part of the narrative for so many
00:12:34.500people in a way that you can almost never kind of correct. Yeah, you never can pull it back once
00:12:39.320the cat's out of the bag with disinformation. And it also gets spread in such innocuous ways.
00:12:45.940It just becomes fact. And it happens so quickly. It's really an impossible thing to corral back in.
00:12:52.760One other thing I'd mention is that even, you know, AOC herself never said insurrectionists
00:12:57.880stormed that hallway. What she said was somebody was walking down there and she was afraid of who
00:13:03.060it was. So even in the disinformation, they were already twisting the things that AOC said and
00:13:10.280saying things that she never said at all. And so the levels of lies, right, start to compound
00:13:16.520themselves. They've misinterpreted what AOC said at the start. Then they're calling her a liar
00:13:22.060erroneously. And now we have, you know, these ridiculous hashtags that are, you know, attempting0.97
00:13:29.580to discredit Alexandria and, you know, the real obvious pain that she was in. And it's interesting
00:14:05.840it's fascinating to watch that two people can talk about an incident, their stories match up
00:14:12.680exactly the same, but only one is targeted for disinformation. That's what tells me it's
00:14:18.240coordinated. It's deliberate and it's supposed to be specific to individuals. It's not happenstance.
00:14:25.840Absolutely. I mean, that jives with everything that we know from the research. We know
00:14:29.420disinformation is worse for women of color in politics. A report from the Institute for
00:14:33.660a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reveals that women of color candidates and
00:14:39.100political officials are targeted on the right on social media at alarming rates. So this report
00:14:45.300found that women of color were particularly likely to be targeted. Ilhan Omar received the highest
00:14:50.720proportion, 39%, of abusive messages of all the candidates in their studies, and AOC received the
00:14:56.360highest ratio of abusive comments on Facebook. So, you know, we know, you know, it completely
00:15:01.440jives with this research that Katie Porter, her testimony, her sharing her story would not be
00:15:07.620kicked apart and sort of targeted for this kind of coordinated disinformation campaign in the
00:15:13.040same way that someone like AOC would be. So one question I have for you is, why do you think that
00:15:18.160women of color are such bigger targets for this kind of disinformation online? Yeah, I mean,
00:15:23.440I think we're bigger targets in general, and especially for our elected women of color,1.00
00:15:27.740because we get shit done. And we really are there to stand in the gap for those that are1.00
00:15:33.660marginalized, right, in ways that our white counterparts are not. So off the bat, we're
00:15:40.280already facing some pushback to the work that we want to do in the world, and whether that's
00:15:46.480in political spaces or wherever. The other side of that is that we're easy targets, which means
00:15:52.460that somebody attacking Katie Porter is going to be seen as mean. They're going to be seen as not
00:16:01.000nice. But somebody attacking a woman of color, it becomes something so, it's so okay. And then the1.00
00:16:07.860pylon occurs and people are just waiting for opportunities to attack women of color. And this
00:16:13.400is something that, you know, you and I have been dealing with in digital spaces for, you know, a
00:16:17.720decade plus now. So it's not news. But I think those two things are why we become such lightning
00:16:23.680rods. I mean, the goal is to silence us. The goal is to get us out of positions of power. The goal
00:16:28.920is to make the kinds of changes that we are collectively individually pushed for, not reality.1.00
00:16:35.980And so starting with attacking women of color, that's like the that's the front line of that0.53
00:16:40.920pushback. What you just said completely jives with what you know about disinformation, right?
00:16:45.940Like, one of the points of disinformation is to silence people, right? So I think that disinformers, they don't want women of color to be putting their ideas out into the world, to be creating the kind of changes that they want to be responsible for in the world.0.93
00:17:01.360And so these kinds of really scary coordinated disinformation attacks are meant to have a chilling effect on their targets.
00:17:09.880And so they're meant to make AOC and women who aspire to be like her, other women of color who might want to be activists, might want to be involved in politics,
00:17:17.540or might just want to put their ideas about these things into the world via Twitter or social media.
00:17:22.620It's meant to make these people feel so afraid and be so fearful that this kind of thing is going to happen to them that they just stop.
00:17:30.400They don't put their opinions out into the world. They don't try to shape the world. They stop with their activism online. And I think, you know, when we have conversations about disinformation, they often turn into conversations about free speech. And we need to be talking about the ways that this is an attempt to shut down free speech and to make it so that people don't feel comfortable engaging in public discourse.
00:17:53.380absolutely and it's so you know the thing that has been hitting me so much is is how normalized
00:18:00.260you know these types of attacks against women of color elected officials have become
00:18:05.920um you know i was listening to rashida to leave from the floor last night um in the hearing around0.99
00:18:12.180stripping marjorie taylor green's um committee assignments and she said i wanted to go last
00:18:17.920because i knew it was going to be hard for me to talk about it and she talked about the fact that
00:18:21.520her first day on Capitol Hill, she hadn't even been sworn in yet. And there was already a death
00:18:27.300threat against her, serious enough that the FBI had to come and pull her aside. It was her first
00:18:30.980one. Not even sworn in yet, first day in DC. And she said she was paralyzed and everyone after that
00:18:38.140paralyzed. One mentioned her son. She really talked about the trauma of it and how her team
00:18:42.440had to decide to kind of shield her from it moving forward because they recognized how it paralyzed
00:18:47.740her. And she said when she saw what was happening on January 6th, the first thing she thought was,
00:18:52.660thank God, thank Allah, I'm not there. Because she knew that she would be a direct target as well.
00:18:59.540And so when we think about so much work that's been going into getting more women of color to0.88
00:19:06.520run for office, getting more women of color elected, the flip side of that is we do not
00:19:12.240have systems set up to actually hold the space that women of color that serve in that way0.61
00:19:19.420to hold them in the trauma that is sure to follow. And the other thing I want to bring
00:19:26.220to attention is that our decades of ignoring this kind of violence in digital spaces is why
00:19:32.640we're seeing it accepted in real world spaces. There's a direct correlation between all of the
00:19:39.680work that we have been doing, um, in digital spaces to, to throwing up these red flags for
00:19:44.560so, so long. I know you had Shireen on the, on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and, um, you know,
00:19:50.080just, she's, she's amazing. And her groundbreaking work to just point out that, nope, this is not
00:19:56.600just a general harassment. It's very specific. It's very targeted and it's meant to silence0.81
00:20:01.780women of color. All of that is now in the, in, in, in the real world. And it became,0.99
00:20:08.420it became normalized in digital spaces. And that's the danger. When things become normalized
00:20:14.160in digital spaces, it means they're going to be acceptable outside of digital spaces. There's no
00:20:18.880barrier between the two. We are living beyond the digital age. There's a complete melding
00:20:24.140of digital life and quote unquote real life that means that anything we find acceptable or
00:20:31.000treat as acceptable online become the same in real world in very short time.
00:23:52.760One thing that I wish that people understood is that what happens digitally and what happens in the real world, those two things are not distinct.
00:23:59.840And I think for so long, and I think we're starting to see that, you know, the insurrection was one way that I think that folks who were unwilling to see this maybe are like, oh, I think that perhaps what happens online does have real world impact.
00:24:11.080But for so long, when it was a lot of women and women of color and Black women online who were saying, hey, we're being harassed, hey, this is happening to us, and no one was listening, I think one of the reasons why that was minimized is because it was happening, quote unquote, just online.
00:24:25.740And the perception that you could just step away from your computer or turn off your computer or get off social media and it wouldn't be happening anymore, completely divorced from the reality that if it's out there in the ether happening online, it's out there in the real world, right?
00:24:39.900These worlds are not so distinct and so separate.
00:24:43.300Yeah, and if you think of disinfo at some point as an unsharpened pencil, right?
00:24:49.900Can't do very much, but it is a tool.0.97
00:24:52.240I would say that what happened was it was sharpened against women of color. It was sharpened0.64
00:24:59.400against, I just think back to some of the early moments of disinfo that I remember,
00:25:05.440like Gamergate, that entire thing started with disinfo. And so the tool of disinformation was
00:25:12.360sharpened on all of our pain and all of the attacks that came against us. It was sharpened,
00:25:17.360it was sharpened and it was perfected. And so now that it's being used to great effect
00:25:22.060across the board, not just directed at us, but directed at government, generally speaking,
00:25:28.580directed at misinformation in elections, disinformation in so many sectors, even around
00:25:34.720COVID-19. It's wild because we are, I wrote an article a couple of, for BYP 100, like two years
00:25:43.240ago. And I think I called it something like Black women always playing, always cast in the role of
00:25:49.920Cassandra. And the piece was really just like, we're really tired of not, of being able to see0.77
00:25:56.860the future, telling you what's going to happen and nobody listening to us. It gets exhausting,
00:26:03.220right? I do feel like we have this narrative of like, trust Black women, listen to Black women.
00:26:08.400And I have a shirt that says that. Obviously, I agree with that. But we also have to have a very real conversation about what happens when you're expected to be the person who can see in the crystal ball and warn everybody time and time and time again.
00:26:21.860And I think, you know, you and I had a good conversation about this moment regarding AOC, but also disinformation kind of writ large. And I do think, like, this is a moment where we can have a reckoning or a hard reset and say, no, we're not going to do this again, where we, after the fact, say, oh, we should have listened to Black women.
00:26:39.900this is an opportunity to really get it right. And that's what I would love to see. I would love to
00:26:44.140not just see this be another time where, you know, in six months, we all say, oh, well,
00:26:48.840we should have listened to these, these, you know, Black women activists or Black women social media
00:26:53.420users or Black women researchers who saw this coming. But we actually say, oh, people warned
00:26:58.820us and we did something. We took meaningful action. Yeah, absolutely. And even in the, like,
00:27:04.680after acknowledgments, it never goes as far as what you just said. It's always an acknowledgement
00:27:10.120like, oh, we should have known this, right? We should have known this, or we should have known
00:27:14.700from this more recent thing. And what I'd like folks, the acknowledgement needs to go way further
00:27:20.440back. It needs to acknowledge the fact that the entire ecosystem collectively decided not to
00:27:25.920listen to women of color and especially black women in digital spaces, as we were shouting
00:27:29.920from the rooftops about how abuse was being weaponized, how it was being coordinated.
00:27:34.680you know, in small ways and large ways and how every single platform has ways in which
00:27:41.420we can be targeted for harassment that they refuse to close the loop on.
00:27:46.260I'll use an example, Twitter lists, great lists.
00:37:12.200Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.0.98
00:37:16.600I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:37:21.080I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:37:28.160They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:37:32.600But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:37:36.040They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:37:39.680Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:37:48.120If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:37:54.080This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:38:06.540I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:38:13.640I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:38:16.780From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:38:23.560It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:38:30.680Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:38:40.260Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:42:22.960And I know I have a little bit of time in digital space every Sunday that's joyful and
00:42:27.460peaceful and fun. And I had lost that. I really had lost that feeling of enjoying interacting
00:42:34.780with strangers online, which is such a big part of digital organizing. And I needed to figure out
00:42:42.160a way to bring that back into my platform and into the ways that I interact naturally. And
00:42:48.640this ended up working. I had tried some other things before that weren't as successful. And
00:42:53.880this seems to be working quite well for that purpose. And it kind of, this sounds strange,
00:42:59.860but it's sort of like if the temperature has been rising on the stove around negative reactions to
00:43:06.920me all week, that Sunday thread, it's like throwing water on a fire. It just puts it out
00:43:12.680completely. So I sort of have a reset every week now because now it looks silly that you're like
00:43:18.340arguing in someone's mentions when people are like talking about dogs or like you seem weird.
00:43:24.580So yeah, I mean, those are just like little tricks that I've started to pick up just to kind of be
00:43:29.540like, okay, how can I continue to exist in this space and not have it be so toxic to me that I
00:43:36.900have to like build all of these different systems. And this trick has seemed to work so far. I'm
00:43:42.840hoping it will continue because it's been really nice to be able to bring that part of digital
00:43:47.820interaction back in a safe way. That's a great tip. I hope people out there, I'm going to use
00:43:54.620it. That's a great tip. And again, it sucks that you have to do these things, but I'm happy that
00:43:59.660you have systems in place that just protect your health, protect your wellness, and continue to
00:44:04.320give you that outlet to do that community building and engaging that I know that you're so good at
00:44:09.280and that you love so much. So I'm thankful for that. Leslie, where can folks keep up with you
00:44:14.260online. You're doing amazing stuff all over the internet. Where can folks keep up with you?
00:44:18.560You can just find me Leslie Mack, M-A-C. You can search that up. That's my handle on
00:44:23.460Twitter. If you just search it in Google, you'll see my, all the things, Facebook and
00:44:28.200my website, lesliemack.com. You can find me there as well. Yeah. I want to, I just want to thank
00:44:33.960you too, Bridget, for, for calling this extra episode and thank you for all of your podcasts,
00:44:39.980but especially for this series you've been doing around disinformation, because I think it's
00:44:43.920really allowed a lot of folks to put into context the long, you know, trail of this work against
00:44:51.240disinformation. You know, we've watched it in this election cycle in a way that I think has woken
00:44:56.260people up to the realities and dangers of it. But it's really important to put it into the context
00:45:01.400that we've been screaming about this for almost a decade, more than a decade. And so, yeah, I mean,
00:45:10.160Y'all could have just listened to Black Women from the first place. And you can start doing that now. And we can avoid things like 45 and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all the other, you know, horrible things that have stemmed from digital spaces. Because frankly, somebody like MTG, the only way that they've built a platform is through digital space.
00:45:32.560Oh, absolutely. I was just talking about this, how the problem really is, is that we have, for people like her, we have made it politically advantageous to do things like this online. It's not, you know, it's not like, oh, she sounds wild, like, get her out of here. It's, oh, she sounds wild, amplify her.
00:45:49.580Amplify her. Yes. And, you know, as Bridget disclosed, we both work at Ultraviolet. But, you know, one of the great things about the media guide is that it really has specific ways for people to not share disinformation.
00:46:04.060And one of the biggest culprits is the media. They share disinformation inadvertently and deliberately in covering it. And it's it's wild that they have not seen the light and understood their role in spreading it.
00:46:19.800Because if you're considered fake news, quote unquote, by by a portion of the population and then you write you report on disinformation in a specific way, you legitimize it really specifically with a specific audience.
00:46:35.280And I. I don't know what the answer is, but I'll say this when I was in journalism school, clearly I did not become a journalist because I actually saw one when I was in J school, I saw this as the future of journalism and it really scared me.
00:46:49.800I went to Northwestern University and this is in the, you know, the mid to late nineties. And I,
00:46:54.280I really, I remember saying to my mom, I can't be in this industry. This, this, the track that
00:46:59.960this is on is, is leading in a really dangerous and scary place. And I don't think it's something
00:47:06.000that I could do for my, my career. I don't think it's something I could do. She was not thrilled.
00:47:10.300It was a lot of money anyway. But yeah, I just remember, and it's, it's silly now. I talk about
00:47:17.180this all the time and certainly age myself, but, you know, you go to the computer lab to write
00:47:20.500your, you know, your stories and stuff or the paper. And, you know, people would bring magnets
00:47:24.800into the computer lab to like swipe people's floppy disks so that their stories couldn't get
00:47:31.080it on time so that they could get the byline the next day. And like, I remember just being like,
00:47:35.520these will be my colleagues. Yeah, this is not going to be for me. And it's been a while sitting
00:47:43.420back outside of journalism and watching everything that I felt as a 19-year-old come to pass.
00:47:50.520Every single thing, I was like, this is going really itself. The idea of ethics were so
00:47:59.160loosey-goosey and not at all ethical. And I just was like, this is one of the best
00:48:05.980journalism schools in the country. And these are the people they've matriculated. And this
00:48:10.740is the attitude that they have towards women, towards black people, towards marginalized folks,
00:48:15.660towards poor people. I just, yeah, the reckoning has been long coming. And I think that the digital
00:48:22.520space has only added to that. Absolutely. And I think we see it in the way that folks are
00:48:28.840reporting about the AOC situation. I was really disgusted to see it sort of framed as almost like
00:48:33.380a catfight or a spat between two female members of Congress, as opposed to a wider coordinated
00:48:40.380disinformation campaign that AOC is at the heart of. This is not two women beefing over a man or
00:48:47.540something. This is people making up lies about someone in a coordinated way to smear them for
00:48:54.620sharing their story. I was really dismayed to see it framed as a she said, she said kind of thing,
00:49:00.980as opposed to disinformation. But that becomes a question, right? Why did
00:49:06.320anybody feel the need to discount AOC's account of what happened to her personally.
00:49:13.160That's the ultimate question is why was that something you felt you needed to do?0.91
00:49:18.600And at the heart of that is that we go back to silencing of women of color and especially
00:49:24.520progressive radical women of color. And that's the ultimate goal. And people will pay any price0.88
00:49:30.080to do that. So true. And I think, like, what do you think it tells people who are survivors of
00:49:37.740abuse, sexual violence, when they see the way that the wagon circled to smear AOC for sharing her
00:49:43.700story? What do you think that the response is, you know, like someone who would speak up but
00:49:48.560sees what happened to AOC? What do you think that's going to do to them? You know, it's going
00:49:54.600to further tell them that they shouldn't speak out. It's going to let them know that there will
00:50:00.140be negative consequences to them speaking out. And I think it's why it's so important for us to
00:50:05.720show support for AOC and for all survivors, because there is a survivor listening right now
00:50:11.880that's contemplating, and she's at a crossroads of speaking her truth or burying it and having
00:50:17.860to deal with it in 10, 15, 20 years. And the more that we can show support for survivors
00:50:24.980and for moments like this, where AOC is so transparent, not only in speaking about her
00:50:31.580experience as a sexual assault survivor, but also linking the trauma of that moment to January 6th,
00:50:39.060where she was also feeling under attack. And, you know, I'm just put in mind, you know, Katie
00:50:45.220Porter. It was interesting listening to AOC's account and then Katie talking about it on
00:50:50.420Lawrence O'Donnell's show, because Katie mentioned some details that Alexandria didn't share. And she
00:50:55.540said, you know, she said to AOC, you know, I'm a mom. I've got everything, you know, covered here.
00:51:02.040Don't worry. I'm calm. And AOC looked at her and said, I hope I get to be a mom. And I just,
00:51:08.240I want people to hear that this is a young woman who has a huge platform. She takes it very
00:51:20.400seriously. She does diligent and amazing work, but she's still a young woman who shouldn't be1.00
00:51:27.060made to feel like this just for doing her job. And I don't know what it's going to take. And I
00:51:35.080think that's what's really been scaring me the most in this last, you know, few years
00:51:39.320is that I have a sinking suspicion that it's going to take something so violent that, yeah,
00:51:50.960I just, I'm just really actually afraid for the physical safety of so many of these elected
00:52:29.020I just worry as we're watching, continuing to watch these conspiracy theorists and white supremacists continue to take up space, continue to not be challenged.
00:52:43.160It was really disturbing to watch the hearing yesterday.
00:52:45.800I was so triggered to hear the GOP representatives one after the other get up and make equivocation for MTG's behavior and these false equivalencies that they kept throwing up.
00:53:01.840But I was really buoyed by the Democrats that got up and really were specific about the harms that were done, about who these were targeted against and why we can't stand for it any longer.
00:53:14.540I have not heard the Democrats speak in such large collective voice about this yet.
00:53:20.460And it's sad that it took someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene to get them to do it, because
00:53:27.620had they been doing this all along, perhaps there wouldn't be a Marjorie Taylor Greene