Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Does ‘Breakfast Club’ Dance In College-Era Video
The day before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as a congresswoman from New York, an old video made the rounds on social media of the new congresswoman dancing on a rooftop when she was a college student.
As with many episodes of discourse surrounding the new congresswoman, the video is being shared by conservatives opposed to Ocasio-Cortez who believe it makes her look bad, while the replies push back, arguing that it actually makes her look sort of cool.
The video, titled “Phoenix – Lisztomania – Boston University Brat Pack Mashup,” was produced and posted to YouTube in 2010, while Ocasio-Cortez was an undergraduate at Boston University. She and some other students are seen on a rooftop in Boston, doing dance moves meant to evoke those of the scene in the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club in which the characters get stoned and dance.
The video is set to the song “Lisztomania” by the indie rock group Phoenix and is actually a homage to an earlier, semi-viral video that had set the Breakfast Club scene to that song.
On Thursday, a Twitter account presumably associated with the QAnon conspiracy movement, AnonymousQ1776, posted a portion of the dancing video along with the notation, “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is……High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”
The video was actually taken when Ocasio-Cortez was in college and not in high school – hence the “Boston University” shirt that she’s wearing – but what’s notable in the replies is that the posting of the video is greeted almost entirely with mockery. The video had nearly 300,000 plays in its first 24 hours.
“Wow, way to expose how foreign and scary she is by showing her having fun in high school, recreating a scene from a wildly popular 1980s movie. You got her!” wrote Kevin Kruse.
“I was on the fence before but because of this awesome video I am now a huge fan of AOC. Thanks for pushing me over the threshold,” writes user Than Roberts.
This followed a report earlier this week on the conspiratorial website the Gateway Pundit, which broke the supposedly scandalous story that Ocasio-Cortez went by the name “Sandy” in high school and also shared the previously well-known information that the future congresswoman went to high school in suburban Yorktown and not in The Bronx.
Ocasio-Cortez, who at 28 will become one of the youngest members of Congress, defeated longtime incumbent Joe Crowley to win a Democratic primary last year.
