"Eat The Babies" AOC Hoax

Overview

"Eat the Babies" AOC Hoax refers to an incident that occurred during a speech delivered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a town hall meeting in early October 2019, in which a woman loudly interrupted to advocate "eating babies" to combat climate change. Following the incident, the Twitter account for the fringe political extremist organization Lyndon LaRouchePAC took credit for the stunt, referring to it as a "troll".

Background

On October 3rd, 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a town hall meeting in Queens, New York. During a Q&A session at the end of the meeting, a woman spoke to Ocasio-Cortez and loudly advocated that climate activists "eat the babies." Footage of the moment was captured by CSPAN (shown below).^[1]

"I’m so happy that you are really supporting a Green New Deal, but it’s not enough… Even if we were to bomb Russia, we still have too many people, too much pollution. So we have to get rid of the babies. That’s a big problem. Just stopping having babies is not enough. We need to eat the babies… I think your next campaign slogan has to be this: We have got to start eating babies."

Ocasio-Cortez pivoted away from the "eat babies" portion of the woman's question and said there was still hope to reverse climate change and that looking for solutions was important.

Developments

Footage of the question began to spread shortly after the event. Some conservative Twitter users mocked Ocasio-Cortez for not condemning the woman's proposal. Twitter user @DunniDiesel wrote, "How hard is it to say, 'no, we are not going to eat the babies?'" (shown below, left). Donald Trump Jr. wrote that the woman "seemed like a normal AOC supporter (shown below, right).

Ocasio-Cortez^[2] later tweeted about the moment, saying she felt the woman was "in crisis" and that "it’s not okay that the right-wing is mocking her and potentially make her condition or crisis worse" (shown below, left). President Trump^[3] tweeted "AOC is a wack job!" Some Twitter users praised the congresswoman for the way she handled the situation. Congressman Mike Schlossberg wrote, "And this is how you decently treat someone who is in the middle of a breakdown and does so publicly. Thank you."^[6]

Later, members of the LaRouche movement claimed responsibility for the stunt, referring to it as a "troll." They claimed it was "satire" akin to Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (shown below, left). The group has been attempting to troll environmental activists by spreading an "Eat the Children" message.^[4] Historian Matthew Sweet, who has written a book about conspiracy movements of the late 60s that included research on LaRouche, told The Washington Post^[5] “They’ve been doing this since the ’70s. The tactic is you go to a political meeting and you create a disturbance that disrupts the meeting, and more importantly, that creates a kind of chaos.” After the LaRouche group claimed responsibility, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, "Doesn’t rule out potential mental issue (Drs do that) but good to know they were not in crisis. Earlier this year I was stalked & very nearly hurt by a disturbed person. I don’t take chances & immediately try to de-escalate."

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