As a part of Joe Biden’s attempt to offer an olive branch to the more tempestuous underlings of Bernie Sanders, the Democratic National Convention gave socialist superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a prime speaking gig to engage in the procedural necessity of nominating the Vermont senator for the nomination and the generational necessity of lambasting “colonization.”
Ocasio-Cortez, of course, has already begrudgingly committed to backing Biden, and though her campus activist-quality diatribe didn’t do much to bolster Biden’s sell as a bipartisan unifier, the Bronx congresswoman only endorsed Sanders as a necessary formality of convention rules, which mandate that all candidates who pass the delegate threshold be nominated.
In a transparent chase of clicks, NBC News decided to leave out that stipulation in a much engaged tweet of their story of the night. Though the network has since deleted and corrected the tweet, that didn’t stop AOC’s outrage.
This is completely unacceptable, disappointing, and appalling.
The DNC shared the procedural purpose of my remarks to media WELL in advance. @NBC knew what was going to happen & that it was routine.
How does a headline that malicious & misleading happen w/ that prior knowledge?
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 19, 2020
So @NBCNews how are you going to fix the incredible amount of damage and misinformation that you are now responsible for?
Because a 1:15am tweet to slip under the radar after blowing up a totally false and divisive narrative across networks isn’t it. https://t.co/zf6Wqiotvv
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 19, 2020
If her ire sounds a bit tonally similar to another brash, populist New Yorker with little patience for journalists who don’t act as sycophants, that’s because it is a tad Trumpy. And like the president, Ocasio-Cortez would be wise to take her own flirtation with war on the press to reevaluate her penchant for spreading fake news.
Recall that Ocasio-Cortez’s debut proposal in Congress resulted in the humiliating rollout of the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution that promised to pay people “unwilling” to work and sought to phase out cows because of greenhouse gas-emitting flatulence. And when the rollout backfired spectacularly, she went on a Trumpy tirade, claiming that critics were pointing at “multiple doctored” and “draft” versions of her GND. But they weren’t — it was the single official copy.
Shortly thereafter, Ocasio-Cortez declared of Gen Z and millennials, “We’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is, “How are we gonna pay for it?”‘” When critics took her words literally, she lambasted conservatives for having the audacity to “fact-check” this easily falsifiable declaration.
Her lies have ranged from the absurd, such as claiming that TikTok teens tanked a Trump rally, to the evil, such as alleging that border control is instructing migrants to drink out of toilets, to the simply weird, such as saying that croissants at the airport cost $7 a piece.
Fake news is bad. Props to Ocasio-Cortez for finally realizing that. Maybe she’ll learn some lessons for herself from this revelation.
