Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has dismissed comments in which the Georgia Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene called her a “little communist” and said she should be locked up, tweeting: “First of all, I’m taller than her.”
Greene is a far-right congresswoman and controversialist who was stripped of committee assignments for comments including advocating violence against political opponents. This month, she apologised for comparing public health rules to combat the coronavirus to the Holocaust.
Greene has harassed Ocasio-Cortez on Capitol Hill, prompting the prominent progressive to raise concerns for her security and that of others.
Greene was speaking on Saturday evening to supporters of Donald Trump at a rally outside Cleveland, staged to bring the former president back to the campaign trail and to target an Ohio Republican who voted for Trump’s second impeachment.
Referring to Ocasio-Cortez as “the little communist from New York City”, Greene responded to boos and remarks from the crowd when she said: “Right. Yeah, lock her up too, that’s a good idea.”
Chants of “lock her up”, aimed at Hillary Clinton, were a salient and to many observers troubling feature of Trump rallies in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“She’s not an American,” Greene said of Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in the Bronx, to parents born in New York and Puerto Rico. “She really doesn’t embrace our American ways. You want to know why? She has something called the Green New Deal.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded with the dismissive tweet.
According to another tweet, from 2019, Ocasio-Cortez is 5ft 4in. A CrossFit profile for Greene says she is 5ft 3in.
In May, Ocasio-Cortez offered rather more words in response to harassment by Greene in the halls of Congress.
According to the Washington Post, two reporters saw Greene shout: “You don’t care about the American people. Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”
Speaking to reporters, Ocasio-Cortez referred to the deadly assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January.
She said: “I refuse to allow young women, people of colour, people who are standing up for what they believe to see this kind of intimidation attempt by a person who supports white supremacists in our nation’s Capitol.
“I’m not going to let kids see that we’re going to be intimidated out of our fight for justice.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
