I have something in common with the woman presently known as AOC. I started life in The Bronx.
Like the Socialist Squad member, my immigrant parents sought new life and opportunity on the fringes of this great city.
And that is where the commonality begins and ends.
At the age of five, her family transitioned to a middle-class lifestyle in Westchester County, a detail she has tried to downplay with her mysterious backstory.
The progressive congresswoman asserts that she assisted her mother in cleaning houses in the modest Bronx. Her childhood nickname “Sandy” was also discarded, replaced by the more culturally resonant name, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Alexandria From the Block she’s not.
In contrast, my family relocated to Queens. While Sandy Cortez experienced a pleasant upbringing in Yorktown Heights, I grew up in a red-brick cooperative apartment in the unpretentious neighborhood of Bay Terrace.
I have never worn a free designer gown, worth some $20,000, emblazoned with the slogan “Tax The Rich” to the luxe 2021 Met Gala in pricy Manhattan, as the supposed Bronx badass did. There, she rubbed elbows with the A-list swells she pretends to despise.
For Sandy from the ‘Burbs, poverty-stricken youth is a performative posture, an attempt to prove that the far-left Democratic darling is down with the little Bronx and Queens people she’s elected to serve. But truth is, she fled from their company almost from the beginning.
So when she picked a social media fight with President Trump last week, calling for his impeachment over military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, at one point snarking that females from The Bronx “can eat Queens boys for breakfast,” she ought to take out her GPS.
Or try a vegan diet.
The jig was up after New York State Assemblyman Matt Slater (R-Yorktown) shared AOC’s Yorktown High School yearbook photo, prompting her to issue this tortured revision to her biography. For perhaps the first time, she publicly acknowledged setting foot north of New York City:
“I’m proud of how I grew up and talk about it all the time,” she posted to X on Friday. “My mom cleaned houses and I helped. We cleaned tutors’ homes in exchange for SAT prep.
“Growing up between the Bronx and Yorktown deeply shaped my views of inequality & it’s a big reason I believe the things I do today!”
Only people who grew up so privileged can take it all for granted. For Sandy Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, who also comes from a well-off background, it’s all a front. Do they really speak for the downtrodden? Do they really know what they want?
The people of the Bronx want a hand-up, not a hand-out, and certainly not the patronizing socialism of these poseurs.
