On June 7, 2026, a Fox News reporter asked Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado whether she had conducted an affair with Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The congresswoman's first four words were “F*** you, first of all.” The rest was argument.
That sequence matters. The profanity arrived before the argument because the argument hadn't been assembled yet. She needed a second to find the framework. The framework she chose was sexism. The question, she said, was clickbait aimed at women. The reporter asking it was a man. The whole episode was, by her accounting, a media attack on a female member of Congress.
Sexism in political coverage is a real thing. It has a long, documented history and it deserves naming when it appears. But the word does not become a universal solvent. You cannot pour it on any question you dislike and watch the question dissolve. An allegation that a sitting member of Congress carried on an affair with a colleague is news about a sitting member of Congress, the same as it would be for a male member of Congress asked the same question about a female colleague. The sex of the subject does not decide whether the allegation is fit to print. The existence of the allegation, from named or documentable sources, decides that.
Boebert did not say the allegation was false. She said the question was inappropriate. Those are different positions, and she moved from the second without ever occupying the first.
Massie has not been shy about cameras. He has photographed himself with firearms at Christmas, sued the Architect of the Capitol over a parking space, and spent two terms making a theatrical project of his own independence. Neither of these two legislators is a stranger to the press when the press is useful.
The transformation of an accountability question into a grievance about the question's asker is a maneuver with a reliable signature. It works most cleanly when the audience already distrusts the institution doing the asking. “Sexist clickbait” is a phrase calibrated for an audience that will recognize it as a category and stop reading there. The allegation itself, whatever its merit, goes unaddressed — which is the point.
The Fox News reporter's recorder was still running when Boebert walked away.