On Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that she was joking around when she claimed the world was going to end in 12 years if we do not take serious action against Climate Change, a declaration she’s been widely criticized over.
The 29-year-old socialist mocked the Republican Party for taking her claim about the end of the world seriously, which she suggested was a combination of “dry humor + sarcasm.”
“This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows,” wrote AOC in a tweet published on Mother’s Day.
For context, Ocasio-Cortez first spouted the hyperbolic claim in January at a Martin Luther King forum in New York City, as The Daily Wire previously reported. She said it without laughing, earned a round of applause from the progressive audience, and then emphasized the point by calling the fight against Climate Change “our World War II.”
“I think the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people, in Gen Z, and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” charged AOC. “And your biggest issue, your biggest issue is how are going to pay for it? — and like this is the war, this is our World War II.”
Complicating Ocasio-Cortez’s recent suggestion that the world-ending claim was a mere joke, the elected Democrat has repeated the claim time and again and even collaborated with The Intercept to create a video centered around the charge.
“Climate change is here + we’ve got a deadline: 12 years left to cut emissions in half,” she captioned a tweet promoting the video, last month.
The video, titled “A Message From the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” showcases a future where AOC’s widely-panned and uber-expensive Green New Deal has inspired action to save the planet. In the video, the Democrat — you guessed it — again says that we have a “12 year deadline,” The Daily Wire reported:
The congresswoman then warns that we have “twelve years to change everything” before “hundreds of millions of people would be more likely to face food and water shortages, poverty, and death.”
“Twelve years to change everything,” she narrates. “How we got around, how we fed ourselves, how we made our stuff, how we lived and worked — everything. The only way to do it was to transform our economy, which we already knew was broken.”
Moreover, as reported by The Washington Free Beacon, Ocasio-Cortez doubled-down on her 12-year declaration during an Instagram live-stream when a viewer mocked her over the claim.
“We have twelve years left to cut emissions by at least 50 percent if not more,” Ocasio-Cortez, visibly annoyed, told her viewers. “For everyone who wants to make a joke about that, you may laugh, but you’re grandkids will not, so understand that the internet documents everything.”
“She then went on a tangent about looking back in history books of the civil rights movement and seeing the white people holding signs against allowing black people to vote,” the Beacon noted.
“They would hold up these bigoted signs and they would hold up signs that said things like ‘What about white rights?’ and all of this stuff in the 1950s and 1960s, so just know that in the present day there are a lot of people who hide the fact that their families and that their grandparents fought against principles of equal rights in the United States, not 100 years ago, not 80 years ago, but in this generation’s lifetime,” said the elected rep.
“While a lot of people can hide that their grandparents did that in the civil rights movement, you should also know that the internet documents everything and your grandchildren will not be able to hide the fact that you fought against acknowledging and taking bold actions on climate change,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “People who are trying to mock and delay this moment, I mean—I just feel bad for you. I just pity you for your role in history right now.”