Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spoken out after video emerged appearing to show House Republican Lauren Boebert engaging in what the New York congresswoman described as “sexually lewd acts” in a Colorado theater on September 10.

Boebert and a male companion were thrown out of the Buell Theatre in Denver after repeatedly vaping, using a cell phone and “causing a disturbance” during a performance of musical Beetlejuice.

Surveillance footage from inside the theater appeared to show Boebert’s male accomplice groping her breasts, and then being groped in turn by the Republican firebrand. In a statement, Boebert apologized for her behavior, which she claimed “fell short of my values,” but made no reference to the alleged sexual acts.

Ocasio-Cortez responded to the controversy in a one-minute video posted to her 323,000 TikTok followers on Thursday, in response to a viewer’s question.

She commented: "All I gotta say is I can’t go out to lunch in Florida in my free time, not doing anything, just eating outside and it’s wall-to-wall Fox News coverage and then you have a member of Congress engaging is sexually lewd acts in a public theater and they got nothing to say.”

“I danced to Phoenix once in college and it was like all over the place. But putting on a whole show of their own at Beetlejuice and there’s nothing? I’m just saying be consistent. That’s all I’m asking for. Equal treatment. I don’t expect it, but come on.”

  • TheFonz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You mean she’s learning how to build coalitions to get real policy enacted? Or is she not enough purist leftie for you?

    • Munrock ☭@lemmygrad.ml
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      Oh is that what she’s doing? Yeah you can’t rush stuff like that. But those people who criticize her will be eating their words with a giant spoon when those coalitions eventually bear fruit.

    • ThePac
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      4 months ago

      deleted by creator

    • stewie3128
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      1 year ago

      Nancy gave her a taste of the whoopin stick, and suddenly she let go her two most progressive and influential staffers. Since then, she’s toed the party line, including voting to break the railway strike.

    • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s no such thing as liberals or leftists in u.s politics. Just conservatives and ultra conservatives. The grossest thing is that even the Democrats are infected now, you can’t even criticize Biden (A man deserving of a career of criticism) or someone calls you a right winger. Anyone who isn’t on the same spectrum of politics as you is a right winger, even people more far left than you.

        • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Of course, I was critical of a democrat, so you went tribal and immediately hated and shit on what I said. You guys really need to fix this “my side’s politicians are beyond reproach” bullshit.

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            1 year ago

            No, your take was just stupid and suggested you don’t care about abortion nor gay rights.

            Both parties may look similar from an economic perspective, but there’s an absolutely massive fucking gulf socially. Calling Democrats conservative just suggests you only care about economics.

            • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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              … and even then, even if it’s just about economics, woefully fucking wrong. You can look at just about every economic measure under Dems vs Repubs and the outcomes are starkly different. The way they spend money is also starkly different, though at least on this front I would grant that compared to many countries, we don’t have a full-left party, but still wouldn’t call them conservative by any stretch.

              tbh equivocating the two parties in 2023 after watching from birtherism to a full fucking attempt at a coup by republicans is very iq-like-lukewarm-pea-soup take.

              • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Agreed. I think there’s significant economic differences, but I can understand how they might look similar to someone who is far left. Republicans favor broken, crony capitalism, while Democrats favor capitalism as a restrained engine. I generally agree with the Democrat perspective.

              • stewie3128
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                1 year ago

                If the Dems are so economically liberal, where’s nationalized healthcare? They wouldn’t allow it.

                Where’s the wealth tax?

                Why aren’t they calling for blanket federal student loan forgiveness?

                Why didn’t we get a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall after any of the recent economic crises?

                Why haven’t they broken up the banks?

                Why were the GOP the ones who upped the amount of the first covid check? It ended up being $1,200, the Dems only asked for $800 or $850 or something.

                Why was the final covid check cut from $2,000 to $1,400, after promising that if we gave them the two Georgia Senate seats, we’d get $2,000 checks?

                The Dems - at best - only serve to lightly depress the brake pedal on the disasterous changes that the GOP make when the GOP have the reins.

                And, never forget: Biden rammed Clarence Thomas through his Supreme Court appointment, and treated Anita Hill terribly at the hearings in order to do so.

                • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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                  Because nearly all of that they’ve lacked the political power to do. Obama had 2 years with democrat control of congress and the White House, and that got us the ACA. Was it enough? No. Was it the best we’re going to get given the makeup of the senate especially at that time? Yeah probably.

                  Similar with Biden’s term so far. 2 years of very bare congressional control*, one of the most legislatively successful terms in modern history. Stimulus, for example, you woefully mischaracterize, and it’s worth reading what actually happened.. Also of note from the same article:

                  On May 15, 2020, the Democratic-controlled House passed a $3 trillion relief bill called the HEROES Act, but the Republican-controlled Senate never brought it to a vote.

                  Another juicy one:

                  Why aren’t they calling for blanket federal student loan forgiveness?

                  They fucking did. Biden signed via executive order student loan forgiveness and it got struck down by a Trump appointed judge.

                  I wonder who repealed glass-steagall? Oh right, a bunch of fucking republicans. I wonder what dems had to say about that:

                  During debate in the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (Democrat of Michigan) argued that the bill would result in banks becoming “too big to fail.” Dingell further argued that this would necessarily result in a bailout by the Federal Government.

                  Good thing that never happened.

                  I’m not going to go any deeper on this, and while I agree that the dem party is nowhere near left enough for my tastes, they’re not even comparable to republicans/conservatives and part of the reason that we’re in the circumstance we are is that people who are obviously ignorant of the actual and political realities in this country and pretend that the parties are even close to equivalent. You’re doing it right now - Republicans fuck everything up, but somehow it’s Democrat’s fault that they aren’t fixing it fast enough, even though they’re expected to do it with one hand tied behind their back.

                  But even that, that doesn’t matter. The practical reality in this country which seems especially difficult for hard-left/progressives to swallow is that you will further nothing on your agenda by not voting, or not voting for dems. Third party will change nothing because of the decisions white slave owners made 200 years ago, and republicans are literally out to destroy any of the things that the left care about.

                  * Democrats controlled the house for 2 years pretty decisively. They only had the senate with a tie-breaker, and that’s including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who have repeatedly fucked up a lot of the positives dems have attempted during this time. Manchin, I can almost understand because a dem getting elected in WV at all is remarkable, but Sinema is just a cunt.

                  • stewie3128
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                    1 year ago

                    Obama had a 60 vote supermajority in the Senate before Ted Kennedy died, and after his death, Harry Reid said they’d wait for the Republican guy to get seated before voting on the ACA. SUPER. MAJORITY. When is a Democratic supermajority going to happen in the Senate again?

                    Yeah, they passed the HEROES Act in 2020 when there was no chance of it defeating a guaranteed Trump veto. Why didn’t they pass it again when they had a trifecta 2021-2022? They’ll pass doomed-to-fail symbolic legislation all day long, but when there’s a chance at doing some real good, they always delay too long, deliver a gutted husk of what they promised, or apparently just forget to get around to it.

                    On student loans, Biden didn’t promise full student loan forgiveness. In fact, he campaigned promising not to do any substantial student loan forgiveness. When his staff and influential people on the Hill finally convinced him to do something on federal student loans, it was not blanket forgiveness. It wasn’t even the $50k that they thought they could realistically justify in court. It was $10-20k, and means-tested at that (because Dems can’t do anything without their precious means testing to prove that they’re financially conservative).

                    Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, with a 55/45 GOP majority in the Senate, and something like a 20-vote GOP majority in the House. He could have vetoed it if he wanted to, if he thought it wouldn’t get overridden. This means either:

                    1. Clinton supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and/or
                    2. Thought that at least 11 Dems in the Seate AND 60-ish Dems in the House would join the GOP majorities to muster a dual 2/3rds supermajority to override his veto.

                    I’m not sure which option is more damning, but frankly I think both are true. The Clinton Administration explicitly pushed to the right (which they called “triangulation”) after they got whooped in the '94 midterms, and the party has continued pushing right ever since.

                    On your argument that not voting for the Dems won’t do any good: The only way to make a party listen to you is to withhold your votes; until you do so, they’ll take you for granted. In the 80s, the radical right demonstrated that they’d sit out elections if they didn’t have sufficiently fascist and/or stupid candidates to vote for - now they’re running the show.

                    The problem is that the Democratic party establishment does not care if they are the majority. In fact, they’d prefer it if they weren’t. They are first and foremost a fundraising operation. If they win, then they actually have to do something good for us, which generally runs contrary to the interests of the party’s largest donors. They could have made PR and DC states in the first half of Biden’s term - that would have been a lay-up, guaranteeing them some hope of competitiveness in the Senate in the coming decades. So why didn’t they?

                    The result of what you’re arguing for is a continuing leisurely descent into fascism, at which point we’d hopefully get a major correction. I’m saying let’s cut out the slow leisurely descent part and get a new left-wing party that is actually left-wing. Because with two right-wing parties in power, there’s no hope of turning left until they’re gone.

      • HoustonHenry@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m talked to tons of democrats who’re unhappy with how Biden has failed to live up to his promises, and how he has lost an edge, and a myriad of other reasons. People criticize him ALL THE TIME! Left and right.

        Edit- I’ve found that democrats are far more willing to criticize Biden than Republicans who are willing to criticize Trump. Despite the mountains of evidence to directly contradict most of what comes out of Trumps mouth, Republicans “stand by their man”

        • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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          IMO criticizing Biden doesn’t solve anything for me. Write your congressperson. Attacking Biden with vague statements risks spreading apathy and handing over control to the other side which has already shown they will not on stretch the rules but break them, and I have zero hope they will even play inside the rules next time. I’ll take slow steady progress over regression every single time.

        • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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          If you criticize him here though, you get called names and told you’re a Trump supporter. It’s pathetic that the best Democrats can do is Biden, a guy who is responsible for so much death and destroyed lives though his hard stance on drugs and jails throughout his career. I see m think Biden is a conservative disguised as a leftist, he’s not anywhere near left wing enough and neither is anyone I can think of in u.s politics that is of any worth.

          And it’s really sad that you can’t even criticize a democrat here without people losing their minds and acting like you just insulted god.

          • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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            1 year ago

            This is Lemmy. The main criticism of Biden is that he passed the act to end the railroad strike instead of putting all railroad CEO’s in a room and then burning the room down.

            The supporters of Biden here are either going to point to Trump and say “he ain’t that” or are going to say he did something good, even if it wasn’t everything they wanted.

          • HoustonHenry@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Has anyone lost their shit when I criticized Biden? I don’t see ANYONE GIVING A SHIT! ANYONE??

            It’s pretty fun to watch you push a point no one agrees with though, keep going bud

          • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            You’re not picking friends. Learn how Politics work, both in the literal sense and the interpersonal sense. No one likes someone who just complains all the time. You need to learn to pick your battles. If you spread aparthy among your peers about Biden, you might get someone much much worse. And despite the wet dream of letting things get so bad that some magical revolution comes in and saves us, reality hits us like a truck. Overturns Roe, Overturns the voting rights act, guts the EPA, among other things. It’ll take an entire generation to fix these things.

            • Armen12@lemm.ee
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              Talking about a political candidate is literally the most basic form of democracy in this country, it literally doesn’t get any more basic then people debating things, least of all someone running for office

              You can’t just threaten people with friendship, that’s insane lol

              • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                If you just want to hear yourself talk. If you want to affect the world and change it for the better on the other hand, learn how to accomplish it.

      • DrPop@lemmy.one
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        Are they though, at least in the circles I frequent I don’t see that. But I do avoid mainstream social media.