Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s meteoric rise to Congress and the national spotlight was largely predicated on her ‘origin story.’ As she tells it, she grew up in a working class family in the Bronx and worked as a bartender before successfully primarying former Democratic heavyweight Joe Crowley in 2018.
The only problem? The Squad member’s backstory is not as cut and dry as she would have you believe and it has been under renewed scrutiny in the wake of a tweet she recently sent out about President Donald Trump.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Walter Kirn, editor of Unbound on Substack, to discuss AOC’s actual backstory and what it reveals about opportunity in the United States.
The Controversy
While there are headlines dating back to 2018 debating where Ocasio-Cortez actually spent her formative years, curious minds are taking a fresh look in the wake of her recent anti-Trump blustering.
Earlier this month, AOC called for Trump to be impeached for his decision to strike key nuclear sites in Iran. After the president responded in a Truth Social post, she invoked her ‘heritage’ in an apparent effort to look tough. “Also, I’m a Bronx girl. You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast. Respectfully,” she tweeted in reference to Trump being born and raised in Queens.
Her claim of being a “Bronx girl” caught the attention of many, including a New York State assemblyman who represents the part of Westchester County (not the Bronx) that AOC spent most of her childhood in. On X, Republican State Assemblyman Matt Slater shared a yearbook photo of Ocasio-Cortez showing her as a high school freshman (he was a senior at the time) in the suburb of Yorktown — a 40-minute drive from the Bronx.
In a statement to The New York Post, Slater said the “AOC-Bronx mythology is laughable” to anyone who lives in the community. “The truth is AOC is Sandy Cortez who went to Yorktown High School and lived at the corner of Friends Road and Longvue Street,” he said. “She may think it makes her look tough or like some kind of champion for the radical left who voted for [mayoral candidate] Zohran Mamdani, but she really needs to come clean and drop the act.”
The New York Times has reported that AOC, who was born in the Parkchester neighborhood Bronx, moved to Yorktown with her mother and late father when she was around 5 years old. She graduated from Yorktown High School in 2007 before attending Boston University.
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson recently took his show on the road to visit the town that AOC has, at best, tried to paint as a working class community and, at worst, tried to pretend she isn’t actually from. His video, which has racked up some 6 million views, paints a very different picture. Watch:
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Yorktown Heights actually. My college boyfriend was from there,” Megyn noted. “There are lower end parts of it, but the town, net-net, is absolutely beautiful and a lovely place to grow up. She is a liar. She is another cosplayer.”
AOC Responds
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, maintains that she has not been misrepresenting her past. “I’m proud of how I grew up and talk about it all the time,” she said on X Friday. “My mom cleaned houses and I helped. We cleaned tutors’ homes in exchange for SAT prep.”
She then slightly reframed her usual telling of how she spent her younger years. “Growing up between the Bronx and Yorktown deeply shaped my views of inequality & It’s a big reason I believe the things I do today,” she added.
Those “things” apparently include her “motto” that “your zip code shouldn’t determine your destiny.”
The Whole Truth
In Megyn’s view, AOC is not being sincere. “Anyone can do what she is doing,” she noted. “You look at your circumstances and talk about them in the most dire terms possible to make yourself sound tougher than you are, to make it sound like you overcame more than you did, and, in her case, to make it sound like you have street cred when you try to ‘fight the oligarchy.'”
Megyn shared how her life story would sound if she took the same approach. “I could sit here and say I was raised by a single mom who was a nurse, who put me through college with their own blood, sweat, and tears. It’s true… except there is some context,” she explained. “For the first 15 years of my life, I had an intact family. My dad was alive and well and was a college professor, first at Syracuse and then at the State University of New York at Albany. We were a double income family, and my mom was within nine credits of getting her PhD and was eventually a nursing manager. And then my dad died suddenly, and my mom did have to put me through college with my dad’s insurance money.”
“I had to wait tables to put myself through school. I worked day and night, which is true, to make sure I could pay the bills so that I could go to law school and make something of myself. There has never been a doctor or a lawyer in any of my family. My nana answered phones for the phone company. My pop-pop worked at a paper mill. These were not rich people,” she continued. “All of that would be true. But the truth is, I was waiting tables in between my summers at Syracuse University, which cost $15,000 a year back then.”
It is all a matter, Megyn said, of perspective. “So yeah, we had some knocks, but… leaving out the other parts would lead you to think I had a much tougher childhood than I really did,” she said. “And what [Ocasio-Cortez] wants to do is… inflate the five years of Bronx living when she was a toddler into her actual origin story.”
Kirn said AOC is but the latest in a long line of “cosplaying” politicians. “The fact is, she is a U.S. congressman now who apparently spent the first few years in the Bronx. It wasn’t her money that got them out of the Bronx. I don’t think it was her lemonade stand that did it. It was her parents working hard,” he noted. “They left New York City… They went to a nicer neighborhood. Their child went to a private [university] in the capital of American east coast academia, Boston, and she is now a congressman.”
In some ways, Kirn said the 35 year old is underselling her own story and what it illustrates about opportunity in America. “Can’t she be honest about her arc and her narrative, which is that of being lifted on the backs of hard working parents who obviously… wanted the best for their child and then – using education and… maybe her natural talents… and even doing a little waitressing – she ended up a U.S. Congress person,” he asked. “That is not any kind of indictment of the American system. That should lead to a celebration of it, and we should be looking to make sure that the system that allowed that for her will allow that for others.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Kirn by tuning in to episode 1,098 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.