Things got very entertaining during the CNN town hall with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on the night of Wednesday, October 15, as some of the audience members put the duo through their paces and called them out on various moves they’ve made that have been quite bad for America. That led to AOC shouting at one point.
During one such moment, Rep. AOC was asked if she is gunning for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in her home state of New York, a claim that many Republicans have made and pointed to as the reason why Sen. Schumer has proven so intransigent during these shutdown negotiations, saying that he doesn’t want to be outflanked to the left by AOC.
So, during the town hall, AOC was asked about the matter, pressing her on whether she really is planning on trying to displace Sen. Schumer from his long-held Senate seat during the primary season. AOC started yelling instead of giving a coherent answer, with both her and Bernie raising their voices while freaking out.
AOC, for her part, immediately responded to the question by angrily shouting, raising her voice as part of a confused and vague denial of the widely shared and much-believed rumors that she wants to unseat Schumer. She snapped, “I mean, no, because I don’t think this is about anything… This is what we’re talking about!”
Bernie, who had been humiliated during the town hall with a question about Schumer directed toward him, then entered the conversation and started shouting as well, declaring that Americans shouldn’t care about if an internal, Democratic Party feud is causing the shutdown chaos because what matters is “healthcare.” He started off by saying, raising his voice as he did so, “Let me jump in on this one. That’s exactly what we’re talking… we have a country that is falling apart!”
Continuing by unconvincingly claiming that the matter doesn’t really matter, he snapped, “We had a housing crisis, a health care crisis, an education crisis, massive income and wealth inequality, corrupt campaign finances, and the media says, ‘Are you going to run? What are you going to run for?’ Nobody cares!”
Still not done with his yelling, the socialist senator went on to insist that Vance and Trump are raising this question of AOC running for the senate seat in order to “deflect attention away from the real issues.” Describing what those are, he said, seemingly defending the idea of taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens, “We’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, right? All right, you tell me why we’re the only nation not to guarantee health care to all people.”
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Continuing, the angry and woke senator added, bundling together an incoherent mix of vague and misframed issues, “The only nation not to guarantee paid family and medical leave, why we have a $7.25 an hour minimum wage, why we have 800,000 people sleeping out on the street.” He added, “Let’s talk about that issue — not her political future. She’ll decide that.”
Watch them here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video