Are the Trolls OK?

Of all the deeply dumb ways that rightwing trolls have attempted to fuck with
their political opponents, Thursday saw two of the dumbest: the first came from the continually inept rightwing hacks Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, whose hilarious attempt to paint Elizabeth Warren as a sex-crazed cougar in a cool open marriage failed spectacularly but led to a very funny tweet. Next, we had a woman at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s town hall, who tried to get Ocasio-Cortez to respond to a very strange assertion—that we need to eat babies to solve the climate crisis.

Trolls—are you okay?

“I think your next campaign slogan has to be this: we’ve got to start eating babies,” said a woman who we now know is affiliated with the LaRouche PAC, a group started by the conspiracy theorist and fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. She then took off her jacket to reveal a t-shirt that read: “SAVE THE PLANET, EAT THE CHILDREN.” (You can watch it here, beginning around the 1:22 mark). She continued, yelling: “Even if we would bomb Russia, we still have too many people, too much pollution, so we have to get rid of the babies. Just stopping having babies is not enough, we need to eat the babies.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded well:

One of the things that’s very important to us is that we need to treat the climate crisis with the urgency that it does present. Luckily, we have more than a few months. We do need to hit net zero in several years. But I think we all need to understand that there are a lot of solutions we have, that we can pursue. We are never beyond hope.

Unsurprisingly, some of our nation’s most well-known idiots jumped on the clip, which began widely circulating online after the Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra shared it on Twitter. Don Jr. tweeted out: “Seems like a normal AOC supporter to me.” And then Donald Trump waded in, retweeting his son and adding: “AOC is a Wack Job!”

The LaRouche PAC, at this point, had yet to claim ownership for this stunt. Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, was worried that the woman was, as she put it, “in crisis.” “This person may have been suffering from a mental condition and it’s not okay that the right-wing is mocking her and potentially make her condition or crisis worse,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet. “Be a decent human being and knock it off.”

Later in the evening, the LaRouche PAC took credit, which hasn’t stopped rightwing ghouls from continuing to pile on Ocasio-Cortez. I imagine Wohl, meanwhile, is probably crying in a D.C. Pret A Manger bathroom over the fact that his stunt has been somewhat overshadowed by LaRouchians, of all people. Somewhere, Jonathan Swift is turning in his grave.