Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has many flaws. The congresswoman can’t do math, pushes awful policy, and sends out cringe-worthy social media posts almost daily. But, no, she doesn’t support eating babies, and it’s insane that some conservatives seem to be suggesting otherwise.
The internet had a field day Thursday night after a video circulated from a constituent town hall Ocasio-Cortez held. During the Q&A portion, one clearly disturbed woman started ranting about how we only have months to live due to climate change, and that in order to address carbon emissions due to overpopulation, we should … eat babies. Seriously.
A woman at @AOC‘s town hall in NY said it was time for humans to #EatTheBabies as a way to stop climate change, saying there were too many people and too much CO2. pic.twitter.com/TzVesJvkfK
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 4, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez was clearly caught off guard by the sight of this distressed woman and the suggestion of such an outlandish idea. The congresswoman’s response was pretty muted: She didn’t say much but looked at the woman with concern and eventually reassured the audience that no, we don’t have just months to live.
Yet some conservatives are going well beyond the usual, fully substantiated criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez to imply that because she did not explicitly condemn baby eating in this one moment, the congresswoman supports such barbarity.
To be clear, the girl tells @AOC that we need to start eating the babies to stop climate change and @AOC couldn’t bring herself to say a single word objecting this horror.
— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) October 4, 2019
I mean, who knows if this is real. Maybe this woman is a troll. But a Swedish professor *has* suggested that eating people is the future, so it’s possible that she’s not. It’s also notable that @AOC never directly tells her that her idea to eat babies is nuts.
— Kat Timpf (@KatTimpf) October 4, 2019
AOC responds “I think we all need to understand there’s a lot of solutions we all have.” @AOC doesn’t even tell the lady eating babies isn’t an option or uhh… don’t eat babies or eating babies isn’t okay… just “we have more than a few months” & “there’s a lot of solutions”.? https://t.co/f4NWGfrJGf
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 4, 2019
As this woman saying over and over again that “we need to eat the babies!” to save the planet from climate change, AOC didn’t even correct her or stop her.
So bizarre. https://t.co/lGMggSYEw9
— Caleb SkHull ??? (@CalebJHull) October 4, 2019
Let’s be clear: Ocasio-Cortez handled this just fine. The woman pictured is clearly deeply, deeply mentally ill — jumping down her throat wouldn’t have helped anything. And the congresswoman has zero obligation to verbally condemn baby eating. We all know she does not support it.
Any conservative who isn’t operating in pure bad faith must give their intellectual opponents, at bare minimum, the benefit of the doubt to assume they do not support cannibalism. When some conservatives fail to do so, it undermines all of our efforts to make the case against Ocasio-Cortez’s radical policy agency.
