OPINION:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making social media waves for uploading videos of her egg-freezing “journey” — with italics on the word “journey” because it’s become a favorite catchphrase of the youth set who feel the need to share their growth patterns with anyone who will listen. And all the older generations go — who gives a flip. Do your job and keep your mouth shut, and you might learn something.
Ouch.
Anyhow, Ocasio-Cortez’s up-close-and-personal shows of jamming needles in her belly are her latest “look at me” moment in her already-too-long political journey. On the one hand, she could be seen as actually performing a valuable service to other hopeful moms out there who want to similarly freeze their eggs but are somewhere between clueless and petrified — about the journey. But on the other hand — come on. This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the bartender-turned-pol who never met a camera she didn’t like or a photo app she couldn’t exploit.
“AOC did NOT stage a photo shoot to protest children in cages,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress posted sometime after a photographer captured her in 2018 crying at a fence near a children’s detention facility. Well, then. There you have it.
From Snopes: “[P]hotojournalist Ivan Pierre Aguirre posted photographs he took during the June 24, 2018 [protest] event in Tornillo. Texas. One picture captured then-U.S. House of Representatives candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having an emotional reaction while looking through a fence toward a detention facility housing children.”
The photographer himself posted the photos on X, beneath this text: “Before @AOC hit the national stage & was just a fairly unknown House candidate from NTC, she took time away from her campaign & came down to #Tornillo to protest the #tentcity housing migrant children.”
The photos were of a weepy-eyed Ocasio-Cortez, dramatically covering her face and bending at the knee, as if weak from grief.
From that, grew the mocking.
From those, came the likes of this, from Fox News: “The pictures were ridiculed particularly as there was no sight of actual migrant children during the protest.”
Yes.
But perhaps the parking lot she peered at was making her sad?
Grief, like beauty, can be in the eye of the beholder.
Fast-forward to today.
Fast-forward to today’s needle-jabbing Ocasio-Cortez.
“Increasingly,” The Hill wrote, “prospective candidates are trying to let voters in on parts of their lives that politicians once kept behind lock and key. It’s all about the desire from voters for authenticity in political candidates.”
That may be.
But genuine authenticity doesn’t have to be manufactured. In fact, manufactured authenticity, by definition, is the opposite of genuine.
Nobody wants politicians who pretend to care about the little people so much that they set up a camera and lighting and script to showcase their next “down wid da little people” performance.
Voters want politicians who uphold the Constitution, secure the rights of the individual and protect the nation from enemies, both foreign and domestic.
If Ocasio-Cortez wants to freeze her eggs, so be it. Freeze away. But putting the process on film and video for the whole world to see doesn’t make her any more authentic than when she cried over the empty parking lot. It just shows her as desperate for attention. And that right there is probably the most authentic feature about her.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
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