"This part hasn’t been reported: The next day Ocasio-Cortez approached Yoho and told him, “You do that to me again, I won’t be so nice next time.” She felt his actions had violated a boundary, stepping “into the zone of harassment, discrimination.” His mocking response, straight out of Veep: “Oh, boo-hoo.” Publicly, Yoho doubled down, issuing a non-apology on the House floor, citing his wife and daughters as character witnesses.
Forty-eight hours later, Ocasio-Cortez delivered one of the most eloquent dunks in political history, a “thank u, next” for the C-SPAN set, taking on not just Yoho but the patriarchy itself. She took care to enter “******* *****” into the Congressional Record. “I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women,” she told the House. “It happens every day in this country.” And the line that spawned headlines, T-shirts, hashtags, and memes: “I am someone’s daughter too.”
Ocasio-Cortez does not name Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, in a separate conversation, rejects reports of a clash, calling it media-manufactured misogyny. “Two powerful women coming from different perspectives,” she shrugs, “and there has to be a catfight.” Still, “House leadership is, sometimes, a little wary of me speaking on the floor. Not that I’m not allowed to, but it’s a little more dicey,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “I think a lot of people, including my Democratic colleagues, believe the Fox News version of me.”
Conservative attack ads depict her as socialist villainess. One especially disturbing spot shows a photo of her face on fire before cutting to a pile of skulls.
“I’ve never seen folks who were in the gallery get all excited about seeing a member of the Oversight Committee,” says Representative Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and friend. “Other members are jealous.”
She has demonstrated a special talent for triggering white-male fragility on both ends of the political spectrum. Three months after her 2018 primary, Andrew Cuomo dismissed her victory as a “fluke.” Ron DeSantis, a congressman at the time, called her “this girl…or whatever she is.” That demographic of politico are allowed to be wunderkinds—Joe Biden was 29 when he first won his Senate seat; Mayor Pete Buttigieg launched a presidential bid at 37, the same age as Tom Cotton when he ascended to the Senate. But “we are not used to seeing young women of color in positions of power,” says journalist Andrea González-Ramírez, an early chronicler of AOC’s rise."
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