Here’s a Really Dumb Conservative Meme About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

It misses the entire point of her congressional campaign.

G. Ronald Lopez/ZUMA Wire

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Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez instantly became a national celebrity after she upset 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in last week’s primary. Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America, scored interviews on Meet the Press and the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and has inspired a whole bunch of op-eds wondering what her lefty campaign portends for the future of the Democratic Party.

Conservative pundits have taken notice too. On Sunday, Newsmax TV host John Cardillo dropped what he considered to be a bombshell. Although Ocasio-Cortez stands to represent a district that includes parts of Queens and the Bronx (where she lives now), Cardillo pointed that she used to live in the suburbs:

That wasn’t quite right, and the candidate eventually set him straight:

But Cardillo’s argument—echoed by places like the Daily Mail—misses something fundamental about Ocasio-Cortez’s message. That house with the leafy yard Cardillo tweeted out? The family nearly lost it after Ocasio-Cortez’s father died of cancer during the Great Recession. In the hopes of keeping it, her mother cleaned houses and drove buses and, and Ocasio-Cortez—flush with a background in public policy and that economics degree from BU—took a job waitressing and bartending at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan. (Eventually, they sold the house.)

Ocasio-Cortez tells a variation of that story all the time, and for good reason. It’s a classic story of the Great Recession, and even more so, it’s a classic story of millennials during the Great Recession, stunted in their prospects by the failings of political and economic institutions, always one crisis away from disaster. Cardillo is staring right at the essence of Ocasio-Cortez’s message, but he still can’t see it.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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