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Who is Michael Tracey? Journalist calls AOC's account as sexual assault survivor ‘emotional manipulation’

Tracey was criticized far and wide for his comment. So much so that he was trending on Twitter hours after his offending tweet

On Monday night, February 1, Democratic party representative for New York's 14th congressional district Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said during an Instagram Live broadcast that she is a survivor of sexual assault. The politician, known popularly by her initials, AOC, contextualized her trauma in the wake of the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6. She said those in Congress who are telling her "to move on," or even apologize, following the violent insurrection at the Capitol in January were using "the same tactics of abusers."

"The reason I say this and the reason I'm getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it's not a big deal, that we should forget what's happened, or even telling us to apologize. These are the same tactics of abusers. And, um, I'm a survivor of sexual assault," AOC said. "And I haven't told many people that in my life. But when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other. And so, whether you had a negligent or a neglectful parent, and -- or whether you had someone who was verbally abusive to you, whether you are a survivor of abuse, whether you experience any sort of trauma in your life, small to large -- these episodes can compound on one another."

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In the aftermath of AOC’s Instagram Live, the name Michael Tracey began trending on Twitter. Tracey, quoting a tweet about AOC’s revelation, wrote on Twitter, “This is a masterclass in emotional manipulation -- a genuine political/rhetorical skill. Gotta hand it to her.” He followed up his comment with, “People in media are the biggest ever suckers for emotionally manipulative political rhetoric when the rhetoric happens to align with their niche cultural sensibilities.” It was a tweet that was not taken too kindly to. He was criticized far and wide for his comment.

Who is Michael Tracey?

A “roving journalist”, as his Twitter bio claims, Tracey is an independent journalist who has written for a wide variety of news publications as per his Muckrack account. These include The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, The Huffington Post, VICE, New York Daily News, CNBC, Salon, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Intercept, Reason, The Nation, The Spectator, The Week Magazine (US), The Federalist, The American Conservative, Current Affairs, and more. 

As per his Patreon bio, Tracey believes “there are serious problems with how the media operates at present,” and he sees crowd-funding of journalism as a means to counter what he calls “silly journalistic hegemonies.” He’s been openly critical of the U.S. media, an example of which can be seen in his recent piece on former President Donald Trump getting de-platformed from various social media sites, most prominently, Twitter. 

He wrote in his piece that journalists “absolutely love corporate censorship, and their ecstasy at its implementation grows in direct proportion to how ruthless and politically vengeful that censorship is. These people have the foresight of a gnat: they are so consumed by an ideology of petty, vindictive victimhood that they have no capacity to see how such democracy-overruling censorship power poses an unprecedented threat to political speech and civil liberties.”

In response to a Newsweek journalist emailing him about the tweet and the subsequent backlash, Tracey put out a statement on Twitter where he said, “The supposed ‘backlash’ is just an amusingly vicious avalanche of personal attacks on me, virtually none of which are responsive to the point that the Congresswoman is employing highly effective emotional manipulation tactics in order to garner support for her political objectives. actually, give her credit for this; it demonstrates her shrewdness.”

“What she did was invoke her alleged sexual assault in order to bolster the claim that anyone with a differing interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the Capitol riot is inherently committing an abusive act upon her, akin to a sexual assault,” he said. “Therefore her critics must instead back her various political demands or be guilty of inflicting further ‘trauma’. The importation of this language of therapeutic moralism into the domain of national legislative affairs is, again, likely to be highly effective in garnering political support among certain key demographics, particularly left-leaning social media users. So I give her big credit.”

In her more than one-hour broadcast on Instagram Live, AOC spoke about her experience on January 6, which included an incident where a man came into her office unannounced, banged on several doors, and yelled, "Where is she?" The Democratic rep said she thought that man was an insurrectionist, but he was a Capitol Police officer. "I thought I was going to die," AOC said.

"I hear huge violent bangs on my door and then every door going into my office," AOC said. "Like someone was trying to break the door down. And there were no voices. There were no yells. No one saying who they were, nobody identifying themselves." She also said that she had felt unsafe in the days leading up to the insurrection and had her staff draw up a security plan for January 6, anticipating some sort of incident.