Alexander Riley – February 10, 2021
The insufferable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was in the news again, having discoursed at length on social media about her experience during the bizarre events in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The video showcases what she does best: talk lugubriously about herself and all the things that are causing her pain and suffering.
Here’s some of what we learned about the effects of the day on this poor, delicate soul.
In the therapeutic language of the current moment, Ocasio-Cortez is a “survivor of sexual assault.” Under expanded definitions created by partisan academics, sexual assault now includes many acts that, however inappropriate, unfortunate, and potentially legally actionable, are very far from the violence and moral dreadfulness of rape. Such “survivors” include fully-clothed women whom a male acquaintance hugged or attempted to kiss without their permission, and women who had what an objective onlooker might well have understood as consensual sexual contact while under the influence of alcohol, later suffering regrets about it.
Ocasio-Cortez gives no further information on the nature of her assault, but if her claim concerns something more egregious than the examples above, we await word on the details. My guess is they won’t be forthcoming. AOC knows quite well how invoking this term in a deliberately imprecise way adds additional victimization weight to her exaggerated claims about the danger she faced on Jan. 6.
The effort here is to contribute to a broad—and largely successful—media effort to make the events of Jan. 6 into something akin to the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, some on the left have been explicit about the parallel, directly comparing the largely comical collection of fools who broke windows and took selfies in the Capitol with the Al Qaeda operatives who hijacked planes, flew them into buildings, and murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. This comparison breaks down when one remembers that all but one of the people who died in the Jan. 6 events were Trump supporters who were either shot by police while unarmed or suffered medical emergencies.
Ocasio-Cortez also reveals that the Capitol police who defended her on Jan. 6 are among her victimizers. One of them even looked at her with “anger and hostility.” Is it possible this look was simply the officer feeling stress? No, impossible. The look displeased her Moral Highness, and thus it must have been yet another act of trauma-producing violence against her.
Running from her office that fateful day, Ocasio-Cortez found a California Democratic colleague, Katie Porter, walking nonchalantly through the hallway with a cup of coffee. Apparently, Porter has less piled-up trauma than AOC and so failed to realize the tremendous danger she was in. Porter invited her to come to her office and wait. Ocasio-Cortez’s thoughts on the offer? “Are some offices safer than others because they have white sounding names? Or male sounding names?”
We cannot, AOC told her fans, get past what happened on Jan. 6—though of course we have long gotten over the much greater violence that happened throughout the country at the direction of BLM and Antifa rioters, in the spring, summer, and fall of 2020. To endeavor to move on from this, or advocate that we should, would be to trying to move on after being “touched inappropriately at work.”
Yes, that’s what she said. If you are touched on the shoulder or the waist by someone at your place of employment without your express permission, this is something you cannot and should not ever get over. It will traumatize you forever, and anyone who suggests you might be more objective about the actual amount of harm it did you and act accordingly is merely another traumatizer.
Let us be clear about one thing: Ocasio-Cortez is a narcissistic, hyper-sensitive, and stupendously unserious person intellectually. That she is among our elected leaders is a depressing statement not only about her, but about those of us who elected her to that office.
“When we go through trauma,” she dramatically and grammatically incorrectly intoned, “trauma compounds on each other [sic].” These words could well be the mantra of the contemporary left. Everything experienced by non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and non-biological males is potentially traumatic, and all of it accumulates over a lifetime to make brittle, bitter, self-obsessed victims like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who then spend the rest of their lives reminding us how unbelievably brave they were to survive such things, while endeavoring to do everything they can to make those who caused them all the trauma pay, and pay in spades.
So this is how today’s leftist political darling reacts to some people in weird costumes and MAGA hats breaking windows and coming into the Capitol to take pictures of themselves. How about a point of comparison, to see how much things have changed?
When Ronald Reagan was shot by a would-be assassin, he nearly bled to death on the way to the hospital. On his release, he was asked what he was going to do when he got home. “Sit down!” he joked. Later that day, he wrote lightheartedly in his journal: “I’m not jumping any fences…but I’m home.”
From admirable Stoic humor to risible hyper-sensitive victimized egoism in just 40 years. Pity the culture!
Originally published at IntellectualTakeout.org. Alexander Riley is a professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
Image Credit: DonkeyHotey, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
