Conservatives Prove, Once and For All, That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Fun and Cool

By Jacob Weindling  |  January 3, 2019 | 2:56pm
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Politics Features Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Conservatives Prove, Once and For All, That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Fun and Cool

After countless attempts, conservatives have finally owned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by…

*checks notes*

…releasing a video of her being happy and dancing.

One of the biggest tells in modern politics is how conservatives treat America’s new leftist darling, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She clearly terrifies them, as she combines a genuine political personality with ruthlessly effective messaging, and it’s basically undisputed at this point that she is the Twitter heavyweight champion. As the saying (kinda) goes, you come at the queen, you best not miss.

And conservatives are missing. A lot. Whether it’s a swing and a miss over her clothes or demands that she debate a brain pill salesman with a massive Napoleonic complex, the right is constantly trying to “expose” AOC for the supposed unserious Nazi socialist communist that she truly is. Here is the latest attempt* that has gone viral.

*quick note: the account that originally posted this video that was published by Gateway Pundit got ratioed into oblivion while wrongly saying this was filmed while she was in high school, and they deleted their Twitter account and the video with it, so here is the original video from a parody account dedicated to dubbing an array of songs over AOC dancing.

1. That’s not high school. The Boston University shirt and Boston University campus in every single shot are clues as to where this takes place.

2. They’re reenacting a scene from The Breakfast Club.

3. Say she was in high school. She’s 28 now. What the hell does dancing and laughing and being goofy at 18 have anything to do with who you are a decade later? What’s wrong with dancing and laughing and being goofy in high school? What’s wrong with dancing and laughing and being goofy at all?

Stuff like this is a gift to Ocasio-Cortez. It’s free publicity that paints her in a positive light. This is what conservative Brooke Rogers was getting at in her New York Post column about the right’s incessant attacks on AOC:

The attacks invariably redound to her benefit. The dynamic is especially foolish for conservatives trying to win over the young, many of whom see themselves in her: a woman with a few thousand dollars in savings, who graduated with $20,000 in student loan debt. It helps her solidify her preferred image, as a fighter for the “every millennial,” while her opponents end up looking like elitists who sneer at a young Latina from a working-class background.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t ask for better enemies. Conservatives constantly make campaign commercials for her and then call them attacks. Here is a sampling of the reaction on Twitter from people who otherwise would not be sympathetic to AOC’s leftist agenda, like longtime liberal (not leftist) political columnist for The Washington Post, Karen Tumulty.

Or Ross Freaking Douthat, the New York Times op-ed writer who is so conservative, that he openly states that his political views are not from the 20th or 21st centuries.

Or conservative pollster Jeff Blehar, who hosts a podcast at National Review.

Or conservative FreeBeacon writer, Alex Griswold, who is lampooning the right-wing idiots who thought that this was a hit piece.

Or self-described neoliberal Bloomberg columnist, Noah Smith.

Or senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez.

Or Robby Soave, editor of the libertarian-leaning site Reason.

Here are a few other good tweets from people more sympathetic to the AOC cause.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a uniquely skilled communicator and she has already changed American politics as much as any Democratic politician in my lifetime (don’t believe me? How many of you heard of the Green New Deal before she joined Sunrise Movement’s protest outside Pelosi’s office a couple months ago? Now we have two top-tier 2020 presidential contenders backing the radically ambitious policy to combat climate change). It’s already hard enough for conservatives to combat her effective socialist messaging, and releasing videos like this make it even more difficult.

In fact, if I didn’t know anything about U.S. politics, I’d say that folks like Ben Shapiro, this QAnon account, and all the other conservatives who constantly try to dunk on her with her own coolness are actually double agents working on AOC’s behalf. It may sound crazy, but thinking that video is embarrassing for her is even crazier.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.

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