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AOC Lies About New Trump Welfare Rule & Children, Gets 40,000 Retweets

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It was P.G. Wodehouse who said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth even has an opportunity to get its pants on.”

It’s a pretty apt statement — except that it wasn’t Wodehouse who said it. Nor was it Mark Twain or Winston Churchill, both of whom have commonly gotten credit for the quote. (To save you the googling, it’s actually a variation on Jonathan Swift.)

And that’s the thing about lies in the social media era: They spread easily, either because people don’t know any better or because it fits in with their cognitive biases. And for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who once told us all that the world was going to end in 12 years, that’s just fine.

On Thursday, the New York Democrat retweeted an NBC News story about a new rule from the Trump administration regarding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps.

The tweet said the administration “has formalized work requirements for recipients of food stamps, a move that will cause nearly 700,000 people to lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).”

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Ocasio-Cortez was apoplectic. Or, at least, she exhibited as much apoplexy as one can in 280 characters of text without caps lock and exclamation points.

“My family relied on food stamps (EBT) when my dad died at 48,” she tweeted Thursday. “I was a student. If this happened then, we might’ve just starved.”

“Now, many people will,” she continued.

“It’s shameful how the GOP works overtime to create freebies for the rich while dissolving lifelines of those who need it most.”

This sounds terrible. As of Friday morning, it’d been retweeted more than 40,000 times. And none of it is true.

Well, all right, some of it is. Yes, AOC’s father died when he was 48, which is a tragedy. Yes, I’m sure she was a student then. And, for all I know, the party I tend to support is busy 24/7 behind closed doors assembling freebies for the rich, kind of like Santa’s elves in reverse. Who knows?

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But as for the whole thing about her family starving? Well, let’s first look at the FDA’s web page about the rule change:

This whole change in SNAP requirements has to do with able-bodied adults without dependents. Let me reiterate the part that’s important here, just in case the graphic didn’t do it for you: without dependents.

Do you think AOC did this intentionally?

Lest we think that this was just hiding on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website, here’s what the fourth paragraph of the NBC News story says:

”The USDA rule change affects people between the ages of 18 and 49 who are childless and not disabled. Under current rules, this group is required to work at least 20 hours a week for more than three months over a 36-month period to qualify for food stamps, but states have been able to create waivers for areas that face high unemployment,” the report, also from Thursday, read.

“The new rule would limit states from waiving those standards, instead restricting their use to those areas that have a 6 percent unemployment rate or higher. The national unemployment rate in October was 3.6 percent.“

Except here’s the thing: Ocasio-Cortez is in Congress.

She’s not getting this news through NBC or even the USDA website. She should be getting it long before then.

So what are we to gather here?

Either AOC is profoundly disingenuous and is willing to use anything to segue into a story about her life and how she somehow “might’ve just starved” if able-bodied adults without children weren’t granted SNAP waivers back in the day or she really doesn’t understand this is about people who can work but won’t and don’t have any dependents being taken off of food stamps.

The latter case is far more disturbing; this is one of the highest-profile Democrats in Congress and she honestly doesn’t understand what the new SNAP rule is about but is willing to tweet about it, anyway.

I doubt it would stop there, either. Would she legislate regarding something about which she has no direct knowledge?

Of course she would. If the facts wouldn’t stop her from tweeting, it certainly wouldn’t stop her from voting.

As for the tens of thousands of people who have retweeted this, well, they probably figured she was telling the truth.

The truth remains pantsless — and that’s perfectly fine, as far as Ocasio-Cortez is concerned.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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