Spat Between Gaines and AOC Shows What’s Wrong With the Democrat Party | The American Spectator

There are very few things social media is good for.

It’s generally a bad thing for the impressionable youth who find themselves spending hours enslaved to algorithms feeding them content that merely serves to destroy their mental health; for those of us who are too old to consider ourselves “impressionable,” it has a tendency to undermine our productivity, our creative individuality, and (in truly destructive cases) our relationships, and, thereby, our lives.

But there’s one thing our instantaneous public square is really good at: Exposing the dark underside of the individuals our fellow countrymen have elected to public office.

It all started with a relatively mundane post from women’s sports activist and brand-new mom Riley Gaines in response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent viral appearance at a rally promoting wannabe socialist dictator Zohran Mamdani. “We’re being destroyed from within,” Gaines asserted on X on Sunday. (READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: This Is Why Sliwa Can’t Save NY By Not Showing Up to the Fight)

Hyperbolic? That’s debatable. Mamdani’s policies, if implemented, seem capable of putting the final nail in New York City’s coffin. A run-of-the-mill political comment? Absolutely. But AOC picked up the gauntlet.

“Maybe if you channeled all this anger into swimming faster you wouldn’t have come in fifth,” the politician responded the following morning.

Yikes. Where exactly, one wonders, was her social media team? Charity can be replaced by a modicum of political sense in concluding that the comment was ill-advised for someone eyeing a potential presidential campaign. At this point, of course, social media hordes noticed that they were in for a rare treat. They didn’t have long to wait.

Gaines, by now a veteran of these kinds of spats, delivered exactly the kind of response we all wanted: “It’s always hilarious when they think they’ve landed a “gotcha” by pointing out I was the 5th-fastest woman *in the nation* yet they conveniently forget the mediocre man who ranked 462nd in the men’s division,” she remarked. “Misogynistic dunce.”

At this point, it was time to take the sparring off social media. The rules of warfare and TV ratings demanded that the two women take their debate to the airwaves. So, Gaines got on Fox to challenge AOC to an in-person debate. “She can defend socialism; I will defend capitalism. She can defend removing God; I will defend embracing a biblical worldview,” Gaines told Laura Ingram. “She can defend child sacrifice; I will defend the sanctity of life.” (READ MORE: Xi Cracks Down on Christians Ahead of Meetup With Trump)

Much to the disappointment of salivating television CEOs watching from the C-suites they can’t afford, Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t interested. “I would like to challenge this person to get a real job,” she said on X, despite (as Gaines pointed out in the comments) being technically jobless herself given the ongoing government shutdown for which her party bears the responsibility.

Gaines, of course, didn’t leave it there. “I have a real job. I’m a mom. It’s the most important & rewarding job in the world,” she fired back in a repost. “I think if you had a baby girl like I do, you’d understand my positions a little better.”

As a general rule, social media squabbles are not the place to look for political and cultural insight: Their participants are usually heated, and their audiences are usually a radical subset of the population. That said, this week’s altercation may very well have been the exception to the rule.

Over the course of the last year, Democrats have published a whole host of articles trying to discern the reasons for their abysmal performance in the 2024 presidential election. Perhaps, they muse, Americans are just too misogynistic and racist to vote for the party that gave a black woman a shot at the Oval Office. Maybe, the fix is to turn to young socialists concerned about “queer liberation” — never mind that polling suggests, as Semafor recently pointed out, that “Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric.” In fact, it turns out that an astronomically high 70 percent of voters consider the Democrat Party “out of touch.”

Americans are a whole lot more normal than Democrats give them credit for. Most of them still find being the fifth-fastest female swimmer in the country more impressive than being a politician from New York. Eighty percent of Americans aren’t all that interested in watching men beat women in women’s sports. The vast majority still believe that mothering children is a very real and very beautiful job.

All of this is why Ocasio-Cortez’s fiery social media posts this week were, to put it mildly, ill-advised. They were profoundly out of touch with public opinion. Maybe they’ll play well to a crowd of childless New York millennials who’ve spent their 20s severing familial connections, but those young adults still number in the minority.

The problem Ocasio-Cortez is unwittingly unveiling is that the Democrat Party has, by and large, turned into a massive self-referential bubble drifting further and further away from reality as experienced by the mostly normal humans who occupy this country. The good news for the rest of us is that the inevitable finally happened: Americans noticed the bubble.

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