Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday joked that she had a new theory about what Fox News was really doing: “elaborate, postmodern performance art.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity had cited a Mediaite report about the freshman lawmaker’s policy adviser Dan Riffle, who has the Twitter handle “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.”
In addition, the congresswoman had said it was immoral for billionaires to exist alongside extreme poverty and people who lack health care.
“I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong,” Ocasio-Cortez said per MarketWatch. She later clarified that she meant to say hookworm.
Ocasio-Cortez, who favors using higher marginal tax rates of up to 70 percent on earnings over $10 million to help fund a “Green New Deal” to tackle the climate crisis, also said that not all billionaires are immoral.
“It is not to say that someone like Bill Gates, for example, or Warren Buffett, are immoral people,” she said, according to CNBC.
But Hannity homed in on Riffle’s Twitter handle, and Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t help but laugh:
Then, she posed three questions for the network:
“The Daily Show” replied:
The congresswoman’s crack may have hit closer to home than even she realized. Earlier in the day, “The Daily Show” tweeted a joke predicting that Hannity would offer to let President Donald Trump do the State of the Union speech at his house:
Hours later, Hannity actually asked Trump to deliver the address from his Fox News show. “The Daily Show’s” response?
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Dan Riffle updated his Twitter handle. It has been his handle for at least a year.