Tucker Carlson Seems to Think Calling AOC "Sandy" Discredits Her in Some Way

It's a time-honored political technique: If you don't really have any answers on how to solve a persistent social problem, then just attack your political opposition and cast doubt upon their character. Your supporter base who either identifies as red and/or blue will never hold you accountable because they'd rather occupy themselves with being an echo chamber of your claims against "the bad guys." It seems Tucker Carlson calling AOC "Sandy" is another example of this phenomenon.

Whenever there's a politician who comes about asking for some type of radical change for working and middle class individuals, a common technique at discrediting their character is to highlight how their own life wasn't all that hard to begin with. Because we all know that if someone didn't grow up in "the struggle" then there's possibly no way they could ever commiserate with or fight for people who are less fortunate than them, right?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made political waves for attaining a prestigious office despite her relatively young age and for bringing up a lot of "hot button" political issues that impact hundreds of millions of American lives: namely universal healthcare and mass student loan forgiveness, along with greater accountability for financial institutions that play fast and loose with the U.S. economy and are bailed out whenever they make a massive blunder.

A huge platform that AOC ran on was the fact that she was born in the Bronx to working class parents, so her political opposition tried to paint the picture of her as an "impostor" of sorts once it was discovered that she attended a Yorktown, N.Y. school. Then, another video of her dancing while she was a student at Boston University was also brought up around the same time to discredit her political aspirations.

However, it's the fact that she used the nickname "Sandy" while in high school that seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Pretty soon, conversations surrounding her "real identity" began to circulate the internet, with people conflating her "identity crisis" with "identity politics" being abused by the DNC in order to dupe voters into supporting the party under the guise of faux-virtue.

Tucker Carlson is a longtime conservative host, and uses "Sandy" almost as a pejorative against the congressional representative, but when the story behind her Yorktown education was more closely examined by the public, it had people sympathizing even more with her.

AOC was able to attend the affluent school in Westchester County, N.Y. after her parents saved their money and pooled together their resources. This allowed them to afford a mortgage on a small home in the area so their daughter could attend a school district that offered more opportunity than where they previously lived in the Bronx.

Yonkers Times reported that Tucker Carlson brought up AOC's past in Westchester County as a means of painting her as yet just another crooked politician who is protected by law enforcement and pretending to sympathize with the plight of poor individuals.

"Unfortunately, not everyone lives in a suburb as placid and protected as the one Sandy Cortez grew up in, with all the bake sales and pool parties. Cities like St. Louis and Baltimore are more violent than El Salvador, and they’re getting more dangerous by the day. In Milwaukee, homicides have risen nearly 40 percent just this year."

At the time, AOC retorted that she doesn't pay particular attention to what Fox News reports, as it's a news organization that "bankrolls a white supremacist sympathizer."

Yonkers Times wrote that they wished AOC had responded by pointing out that she was fighting for more schools in America to be like the one she attended in Yorktown.

“'I went to a high school in the suburbs that every American child should have the right to attend. That is what I’m fighting for in Congress, educational equality, which we clearly don’t have. My family saved enough money to buy a small home in northern Westchester. This is the story of hard work and living the American Dream. I am so happy that they sacrificed for me but far too many young Americans and people of color have substandard schools and get a substandard education.' This is what AOC should have said," the outlet wrote.