AOC Wants Answers About Photo That Sure Looks Like 'Team Mitch' Groping a Cutout of Her
A deeply creepy photo surfaced on social media over the weekend showing a group of young men in “Team Mitch” shirts apparently groping a cardboard cutout of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, captioned, “break me off a piece of that.” AOC found this unsettling, for some reason, and she would like some answers.
Here’s the photo, which looks like it first popped up on Instagram (it’s since been deleted) before making the rounds on Twitter:
Charming.
AOC tweeted a response on Monday. “Hey @senatemajldr – these young men look like they work for you,” she wrote. “Just wanted to clarify: are you paying for young men to practice groping & choking members of Congress w/ your payroll, or is this just the standard culture of #TeamMitch?”
According to the Huffington Post, the photo was taken at an annual political picnic in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky—the same picnic, in fact, where the official Team Mitch Twitter account tweeted out an equally charming photo of opponent Amy McGrath’s name on a gravestone.
It’s unclear whether the apparent cardboard cutout gropers actually work for McConnell or they’re just fanboys (Splinter reached out to McConnell’s office for comment, but has yet to hear back), but it looks like a few of them did pop up on Team Mitch’s Instagram, this time holding photos of Neil Gorsuch and, yup, Brett Kavanaugh, har, lol, cool:
This is the second time this summer that AOC’s had to call out creepy sexualized images of her—in July, ProPublica found a secret Facebook group for former Border Patrol agents that was full of racist, misogynist, and harrowing memes, including an illustration of AOC “engaged in oral sex at an immigrant detention center,” and one with Trump forcing AOC’s head toward his crotch. The Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into the group, though it doesn’t look like much has happened with it.
Anyway, I guess we’ll wait to see if McConnell has anything to say about Team Mitch—he’s certainly found the time to praise Donald Trump’s non-statement re: this weekend’s mass shootings.