The gun lobby continues to find itself in a hard place, stuck between their ideology and reality where figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) live. She responded forcefully this week after the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) hosted whopping rounds of fearmongering against her, including via a clip of her dancing included at the end of a video featuring National Rifle Association (NRA) President Oliver North that had been edited to look more “ominous.”
She shared:
‘GOP defensively say, “we’re not scared of dancing women!” yet proceed to use footage of me dancing “with the color drained to make it look more ominous.” Spoiler: The GOP *is* scared of dancing women, because they fear the liberation of all identities taught to feel shame’
The conversation surrounding Ocasio-Cortez dancing in the first place began after footage of her participating in an internet challenge as a college student emerged. Some trolls sought to weaponize the video footage — which is from almost a decade ago at this point — but Ocasio-Cortez shot down that effort by posting a video clip of her dancing outside the Congressional office she’s been lucky enough to earn.
Many Republicans shot down the suggestion that they were perturbed by the Congresswoman dancing in the first place, but this week, as CPAC went on, journalist Dave Weigel shared:
‘The Democrat appearing in CPAC videos and speeches the most, by far: [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. More than any 2020 Dem. An Oliver North-narrated NRA video just ended with the footage of her dancing outside her office, with the color drained to make it look more ominous.’
There’s even more irony in the situation of North using footage of Ocasio-Cortez as a scare tactic. North was convicted of federal crimes as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan administration, in which after the sale of weapons to Iranian rebels, he helped orchestrate the subsequent redirection of the earnings to the Contra rebel group in Nicaragua, which was a brutal organization responsible for rampant human rights abuses that Congress had specifically prohibited support for.
This is the guy who conservatives are accepting and touting as one of their leaders in the literal same week that they complain about Democrats seeking the Congressional testimony of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who’s soon going to prison after pleading guilty to charges including federal campaign finance law violations he carried out at President Donald Trump’s direction.
In their efforts to pick and choose where they direct their outrage, Republicans including the president have lambasted Ocasio-Cortez for her “Green New Deal” efforts, which culminated in a recent Congressional resolution she attracted an impressive list of co-sponsors for in both chambers and lays out lofty goals like net-zero carbon emissions in the United States within ten years.
She’s gotten around the GOP’s ever-so-selective outrage via means like getting Michael Cohen to admit during his public Congressional testimony this week that House Democrats intent on investigating allegations against the president of tax and insurance fraud should look at his tax returns, which he has successfully kept hidden — for now.
Check out Twitter’s response…
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
