Yes, Right-Wing Demons — AOC Is Actually Hot

The transaction under the loyalty test

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is attractive. She is thin, she has symmetric features, she smiles in photographs, and she scans as conventionally beautiful on every axis the culture the paid right claims to be defending has spent a century affirming. Anyone with eyes can see it.

On Tuesday, September 1, Fox News host Julie Banderas appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime and said, on camera, in prime time, on the record: “Girl, no conservative would want to date you. You are not untapping a mystery here. I mean, first of all, she broke up, she froze her eggs, she’s eventually going to put them in and maybe some brave soul will stand up and be the father of those poor little children.” Watters, whose show it is, closed the segment: “Only available to liberals.” The setup for the segment was a TMZ reporter asking Ocasio-Cortez whether she would date a conservative. She laughed and said probably not. That was the material. That was the entire ask on which the eleven-o’clock hour of a network valued in the tens of billions of dollars was constructed.

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The people who do this work do not believe what they say.

The men and women who go on Fox News in prime time and say the things they say do not believe those things.

The instant the cameras cut, they are different people. The lights come down, the microphone comes off, and the person who just told America that a young congresswoman’s frozen embryos will need a brave soul to father them walks out of the studio and gets in a car and rides home to a house on the Upper East Side or in Bronxville and pours a drink and, if the numbers were good, laughs about it. Not because she believes what she said. Because the work is over and the check will clear. She is a professional. This is what she is paid for.

The control case sits four years back. In 2022, on Sean Hannity’s show, the conservative comedian Adam Carolla broke the discipline: “She’s young, she’s vibrant, she’s beautiful.” Nothing happened. No one was disciplined. No one was fired. No one apologized. Four years later Banderas walked into the same building and said the opposite, in the same prime-time slot, and no one was disciplined for that either. The apparatus does not care what any of them believe. It cares that they show up when scheduled and read the script when handed. The men and women in this trade are professionals in the way session musicians are professionals. They play the notes on the sheet. What is on the sheet on any given Tuesday is a decision made somewhere else.

Ocasio-Cortez has understood this for years. In January 2022, after a Newsmax host went after her boyfriend’s feet, she wrote: “If Republicans are mad they can’t date me they can just say that instead of projecting their sexual frustrations onto my boyfriend’s feet.” She had the mechanism named. She named it in a boyfriend-feet dispute. Four years later Banderas walked past everything Ocasio-Cortez had already said about the pattern, and did the pattern anyway, and got paid for it, because the pattern is the job.

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She has the paid right’s number, and the paid right knows it. She sees through the reactionary word games because she has watched them run on tape for a decade, in her direction, from her seat in Congress. She names the moves as the moves are being made. She plays the game better than the people paid to play it, which is why the people paid to play it call her an airhead — she is more intelligent than any of them, and the airhead line is the discipline that keeps their audience from noticing. They call her an idiot because her working knowledge of tax policy and immigration law and monetary economics runs deeper than the working knowledge of anyone Fox will put in a chair opposite her, and the idiot line is the discipline that keeps their audience from noticing that either. She is what they wanted to be and are resentful they are not, and the resentment is the fuel the paycheck runs on. So they take the job, and they read the script the Murdochs hand them, and they call themselves independent thinkers while doing it, and the word independentbecomes the tell.

Sometimes the paymaster is not the Murdochs. Sometimes the paymaster is the Russians. In September 2024, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment describing a $10 million operation in which two RT employees funneled Russian state money through a Tennessee company called Tenet Media to six named American right-wing commentators — Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, Matt Christiansen — to produce English-language video content “often consistent” with Kremlin messaging on U.S. audiences. The influencers said they did not know. Fine. The point is not what they knew. The point is that the market for their labor was so uncritical of its buyers that the Kremlin could walk into it, hand over ten million dollars through a fictitious European front named Eduard Grigoriann, and have the labor delivered to spec inside a year. The independent-thinker LARP does not survive contact with the invoice. The invoice can come from Rupert Murdoch. The invoice can come from Vladimir Putin. The mouth moves the same either way.

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The job is not just work. It is work the operative enjoys, and the enjoyment is on the tape. You can watch her enjoy it. Watch the tape from Tuesday night, and watch Banderas’s face at the moment she says the words brave soul. She is having a good time. Her body language is the body language of a woman being paid well to be cruel to another woman and being congratulated for the cruelty in real time by a studio full of colleagues. This is what is in front of us. The high is part of the compensation package. Cruelty is not incidental to the paycheck — it is a co-benefit, and it is what keeps the class of men and women in this trade in this trade. They could do many other things for the same money. This is the one where they get to hurt people and be paid for it and have their hurting called work.

The temptation is to imagine these people as ideologues who fell into a kind of collective madness. That is the wrong picture. There is no madness. There is a profession. The profession is cruelty for hire, dressed as commentary, aired in prime time, and paid for by a specific commercial arrangement whose beneficiaries and mechanics can be described.

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The men who fund this apparatus want their taxes cut, and they want the enforcement mechanism that would examine their books dismantled. Both wishes are documented, and both have been granted on schedule.

The tax cuts of 2017 delivered the largest share of their benefits to the top of the income distribution and were made permanent for corporations while sunsetting for individuals. The tax package of 2025 extended and enlarged the individual cuts. The gross transfer to the top decile runs into the trillions across the decade.

The audit force that would look at where those benefits landed has been eliminated in place. In February 2025, the Trump administration terminated more than 7,000 probationary IRS employees, the majority of them auditors. By mid-2025 the agency had lost more than 3,600 revenue agents, roughly thirty-one percent of the auditing staff, the employees whose specific job is complex face-to-face examinations of the wealthy. The Global High Wealth unit, which audits billionaires and centimillionaires, lost thirty-eight percent of its workforce in one year. Total IRS workforce reduction as of January 2026 was approximately twenty-seven percent, with a projected additional five thousand enforcement layoffs coming in fiscal 2027.

The results arrived on schedule. Audit revenue for fiscal 2025 fell thirty-five percent, from ten billion dollars to six and a half. High-income audit starts are projected to drop sixty-six percent in fiscal 2026. The auditors who remain are being redirected downward, toward low-income taxpayers who are cheaper to audit. The class of person who used to worry about a phone call from a revenue agent no longer worries about it, because the phone bank has been unstaffed. The class of person who never had a problem with revenue agents in the first place is now the class of person being audited.

This is the purchase transaction.

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The delivery vehicle for the purchase is the network on which Banderas said what she said. Fox News is owned by Fox Corporation, controlled by the Murdoch family through a family trust. Its function inside the American right is training — preparing a voter base to keep returning to power the political coalition that keeps the auditors unemployed. The AOC segments are the loss-leader content, the free entertainment, that keeps the audience seated through the ad breaks in which the transaction is actually consummated, and angry enough at the correct enemies to vote correctly the next November.

A donor wants his taxes cut and his auditors fired. To cut his taxes and fire his auditors he needs a Congress and a presidency. To get a Congress and a presidency he needs voters. To get voters he needs a delivery system that trains audiences to want what he wants and hate what he hates. The delivery system is Fox. The delivery vehicle is Watters. The driver on Tuesday was Banderas. The freight on Tuesday was a woman’s fertility. The truck pulled back into the depot at eleven. The driver went home. The vehicle was clean. The freight was delivered. The funder woke up on Wednesday with his tax cut still in place and his audit letter still not arriving. The invoice for Tuesday’s work read: approximately one billion dollars in high-net-worth audit revenue not collected in fiscal 2025, attributable to enforcement staffing reductions the audience for Tuesday’s segment will vote next November to preserve.

AOC’s frozen eggs are what people were told to think about on Tuesday. Transaction complete — the rape of our institutions of civilization continues unmolested.

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The ordinary version of this story gives you ideologues. It gives you believers who were wrong. Believers who were wrong are a comprehensible category, and they are dignified by having believed something.

A great many of the loudest voices in this apparatus do not believe what they are saying. They know. They know the way a factory worker knows the assembly line. The line moves on Tuesdays and the driver goes home on Tuesdays and if you asked her privately what she thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez she would tell you the truth, and the truth is that the young congresswoman from the Bronx is a beautiful woman with a formidable political future whose presence in the public discourse costs the men who fund her network their tax cuts and their unaudited books. So the driver says what she says, because that is what pays. And the driver is fine, and the vehicle is fine, and the freight has been delivered, and the invoice has been paid, and somewhere on the Upper East Side a man is having a very good year, and the auditors who would have looked at his year are not employed by the federal government of the United States of America.

She, meanwhile, is hot. A country in which a major political faction cannot say so, out loud, in public, is a country whose loudest voices are professionals who no longer believe anything, working an assembly line whose product is the impunity of the men who own the assembly line. The men and women who work the line know it. They go home each night and pour a drink. The drink is on their patrons.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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