Sandy Cortez from the Burbs: a patronizing poseur
Like the Socialist Squad member, my immigrant parents sought new life and opportunity on the fringes of this great city.
And that is where the commonality begins and ends.
3 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leaves the 2021 Met Gala Celebrating In America: A Lexicon Of Fashion at Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 13, 2021 in New York City.
GC Images
When she was five years old, her family moved to a middle-class life in Westchester County, something she has attempted to hide with her suspicious origin story.
The lefty congresswoman claims to have helped her mother clean houses in the meager Bronx. Gone too was her childhood nickname 'Sandy.' Ultimately, she fell back to the more conveniently ethnic-sounding moniker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Alexandria From the Block she's not.
My folks, meanwhile, moved to Queens. Sandy Cortez grew up in a comfortable Yorktown Heights, I in a red-brick cooperative apartment building in unsnooty Bay Terrace.
I have never worn a free designer gown, worth some $20,000, emblazoned with the slogan 'Tax The Rich' to the luxe 2021 Met Gala in pricy Manhattan, as the supposed Bronx badass did. There, she rubbed elbows with the A-list swells she pretends to despise.
3 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went by 'Sandy' as a child.
Courtesy Matt Slater
For Sandy from the 'Burbs, poverty-stricken youth is a performative posture, an attempt to prove that the far-left Democratic darling is down with the little Bronx and Queens people she's elected to serve. But truth is, she fled from their company almost from the beginning.
So when she picked a social media fight with President Trump last week, calling for his impeachment over military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, at one point snarking that females from The Bronx 'can eat Queens boys for breakfast,' she ought to take out her GPS.
3 US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, speaks to the press next to former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil as he is greeted by family and friends upon arrival at Newark airport in Newark, New Jersey, on June 21, 2025.
AFP via Getty Images
Or try a vegan diet.
The jig was up after New York State Assemblyman Matt Slater (R-Yorktown) shared AOC's Yorktown High School yearbook photo, prompting her to issue this tortured revision to her biography. For perhaps the first time, she publicly acknowledged setting foot north of New York City:
'I'm proud of how I grew up and talk about it all the time,' she posted to X on Friday. 'My mom cleaned houses and I helped. We cleaned tutors' homes in exchange for SAT prep.
'Growing up between the Bronx and Yorktown deeply shaped my views of inequality & it's a big reason I believe the things I do today!'
Only people who grew up so privileged can take it all for granted. For Sandy Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, who also comes from a well-off background, it's all a front. Do they really speak for the downtrodden? Do they really know what they want?
The people of the Bronx want a hand-up, not a hand-out, and certainly not the patronizing socialism of these poseurs.
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