There is, apparently, nothing too dumb for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to say.
The media darling, a democratic socialist who won a House seat from New York and hasn’t stopped posting on social media long enough to get any actual work done for her constituents, keeps lowering the bar — and then somehow limboing under it again.
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez jumped onto Instagram and declared that she’d never seen a garbage disposal before — or, quite possibly, even heard of one.
“OK everyone, I need your help because I just moved into this apartment a few months ago and I just flipped a switch and it made that noise and it scared the daylights out of me,” she said in the video. “This D.C. apartment is bougie and has things I’ve never seen before.” (For the record, the Urban Dictionary says “bougie” means: “Aspiring to be a higher class than one is. Derived from bourgeois — meaning middle/upper class, traditionally despised by communists.”)
Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t done. “Like what is a garbage disposal really for? Is it better or worse than throwing something in the garbage? More importantly why is it so loud and yelling at me?” In her post, some text is overlaid with an image of a hole in the sink that says, “I am told this is a garbage disposal.”
It’s true that hyper-politically correct New York City banned garbage disposals from the 1970s until 1997 to ease overuse of the city’s water treatment systems. But Ocasio-Cortez was only 8 years old when the ban was lifted. It seems impossible that she had never seen a garbage disposal — or even heard of one — until she moved into her luxury “bougie” apartment in a posh part of Washington.
That wasn’t the only dumbness posted on social media by AOC this week (and it’s only Tuesday). In another Instagram video, the graduate of Boston University is seen looking at her small plot in a community garden in Washington.
“I just checked on my community garden slot and I was so nervous because I was in New York for two weeks in recess. Look!” she says as the camera pans to leafy plants. “Oh. My. God! Look at this!” she gasps. “It’s like — look at the collard greens! Look at the dahlias! Oh my God! I have to trim all of these back for smoothies. I. Am. Shook! Look, like, honestly, gardening — food, that comes out of dirt! Like, it’s magic!”
The internet shredded the congresswoman. One example: “Look, I don’t want to make fun of the brainless, but AOC is without question the most idiotic person ever to (dis)grace the halls of Congress,” Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, posted on Twitter.
Those are, of course, two mostly innocuous examples of dumbness. But Ocasio-Cortez has shown a deep lack of education on far more important matters.
Last year, “Firing Line” host Margaret Hoover asked her, “What is your position on Israel?”
She said she thinks “that what people are starting to see at least in the occupation … of Palestine [is] just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition and that to me is just where I tend to come from on this issue.”
Asked to elaborate, AOC started her answer by saying, “I think what I meant…” She wasn’t exactly sure what she meant. Then she added: “I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue. … Middle Eastern politics is not exactly at my kitchen table every night.”
In another video post, she said Democrats are looking “to take back all three chambers of Congress.” Then she stopped to correct herself — and made it much worse. “Rather, all three chambers of government — the presidency, the Senate and the House.” Close, but the three branches are executive, legislative and judicial. And that’s something most eighth-graders know.
The month before she took office, she posted on Twitter that $21 trillion “of Pentagon financial transactions could not be traced, documented or explained. $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”
The liberal Washington Post gave that claim four Pinocchios, the most it awards for flat-out falsehoods.
But AOC has an explanation for her string of errors and gaffes and just plain dumb statements. In a CNN appearance the day after she was sworn into office, she said, “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
She’s sure right there. Facts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Dumb is where it’s at.
*Joseph Curl ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2014 and covered the White House for a dozen years. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @JosephCurl. A version of this article ran previously in The Washington Times.
