Just hours after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as congresswoman on Thursday, a random Twitter user came forward with a little thing from the politician’s past that they believed to be incriminating, or something: a video of her dancing in college.
“Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is…” reads the original tweet, which was framed as a smug gotcha. “High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.” The gotcha here was presumably … that she has had fun? It, of course, backfired, inspiring thousands of people to remark on how endearing the video was, and resulting in a flood of wholesome AOC dancing memes.
On Friday morning, Ocasio-Cortez released a video of her own, in which she dances beside the plaque next to her office door. “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous,” she wrote. “Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!”
The initial short clip shared by Ocasio-Cortez’s anonymous detractor was actually pulled from a longer video of her and other students re-creating the dance scene from The Breakfast Club on a Boston rooftop to the universally loved song “Lisztomania” by Phoenix. The video dates back to when Ocasio-Cortez was in undergrad at Boston University in 2010 — a time when many people were reimagining this scene as part of a sort of twee, proto-viral dance trend.
The whole concept is admittedly a little nerdy, but 2010 was a different time! And it’s one of the more wholesome activities one can do as a college student. If anything, again, this just proves that Ocasio-Cortez has always been pretty damn endearing.
Don’t conservatives remember how this tactic played out with Beto O’Rourke? Plus, the video is Ally Sheedy–approved.
This post has been updated throughout.