Pinna: Ocasio-Cortez on the Road

“In the face of all of this evidence, let’s give Cortez another shot and ask one more question: why does it even matter if she was hypocritical? Aside from her being an elected official that people are supposed to trust, it’s because she made it matter.”

Last weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to an excellent New York Post exposé, which had featured yet another case of her rampant hypocrisy. This time it was from back during campaign season.

Instead of using a subway station that was but “a one-minute walk” from her campaign headquarters, the environmentalist had opted to leave a significantly larger carbon footprint: she spent nearly $30,000 on car services, including over 1,000 separate transactions with car services like Uber and Lyft.

So what did the Twitter warrior “clap back” with? That “living in the world as it is isn’t an argument against working towards a better future.”

While a conservative’s “razor-sharp BS detectors” activated at the first character of that sentence, it’s important to note that for the 195,000 people who liked her tweet, such logic actually makes sense. With that in mind, we need to be doing more than just calling Ocasio-Cortez out on her hypocrisy; it is also necessary to explain exactly where and how she contradicts herself, without alienating those who support the Green New Deal.

The point of the Post’s piece wasn’t to further the debate on the Deal but rather to point out the severe character flaws and personal mistakes of the freshman congresswoman. Fresh off a major PR defeat over losing Amazon—which drew the ire of powerful state Democrats like Governor Andrew Cuomo—Ocasio-Cortez’s image, and even electoral future, could be in jeopardy.