From the moment Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman from New York, set foot on the national stage, right-wing keyboard warriors have been in a dither. Whether on account of the fact that she's a woman, or that she's a Latina, or that she dares to dance, or dresses in a stylish manner, AOC faces howls of protest from the right—not least of all for the high degree of media coverage she draws, and her prowess at deploying social media.
Leave it to the iconoclastic Mike Cernovich to turn that model on its head—but in a predictably mansplainy, patriarchal way. Far from attacking AOC for her social media mastery, Cernovich—in a Twitter thread, naturally—dubs her unstoppable because "AOC is the next generation of me."
"No one was better at social than I was in 2015-2106, we drove the narrative in ways no one did or could," Cernovich tweeted yesterday. Indeed, among the stories Cernovich helped drive during that time period was the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which in one episode literally ended with a bang when a believer in the theory shot through the door of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria with the intention of freeing children the conspiracy theory said were being trafficked by prominent Democrats.
So, because the newly-seated House member has serious game in the social-media arena, it naturally follows that she learned her craft from Cernovich. (Well, at least in his mind, it does.) But of course, Cernovich whines that AOC has advantages not afforded him, in addition to allegedly having become a Twitter star by studying his brilliance. "AOC has my playbook + a friendly media + all the intersectional friendly checks," he tweeted.
The question then remains, however, what happened to Cernovich's social media game, that he's gone from being the best, to something less?
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1085663846272921600
