Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and so it was with the brouhaha that took place during a Queens town hall hosted by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday. In case you’ve been living under a rock and somehow missed it, a woman wearing a “Save the Planet, Eat the Children” t-shirt interrupted the proceedings and demanded that people “start eating babies” in response to climate change.

Stating that we only have “a few months left” to save the planet, the woman immediately fast forwarded to the most extreme of ‘solutions.’

“We have to start eating babies,” she said. “We do not have enough time. There’s too much CO2. All of you, you are polluting. Too much CO2. We have to start now ... Even if we bomb Russia, we have too many people, too much pollution. So we have to get rid of the babies. That is the big problem. Just stopping having babies is not enough. We need to eat the babies.”

Even before we knew the woman wasn’t a constituent or likely even an AOC supporter, babies on the menu to save the earth did seem a bit extreme, even by today’s absurd, climate change cult standards. So it was no huge surprise when the whole thing turned out to be a stunt put on by a right wing political cult once led by Lyndon LaRouche. Even so, the real news wasn’t just simply what the woman said, but also how Ocasio-Cortez responded:

“One of the things that’s very important to us is that we need to treat the climate crisis with the urgency that it does present,” she said calmly, almost meekly. “Luckily, we have more than a few months. We do need to hit net zero in several years, but I think we all need to understand that there are a lot of solutions that we have, that we can pursue. And that if we act in a positive way, there is space for hope. We are never beyond hope.”

The New York congresswoman wrote later she thought the woman was suffering from some sort of “mental condition,” so she wanted to “de-escalate” the situation. Fine, but for gosh sakes, mental condition or not, a person just stood up in public and asked you to endorse literally murdering babies and, uh, eating them. Wouldn’t a nice, calm, de-escalating go a little like ‘Uh, no, we definitely aren’t condoning eating children, but thanks for your comments and please see the nice men with the straight jackets to the left’ have been way better?

Put it this way. What if a white male had stood up at Ocasio-Cortez’s town hall and openly called for, say, discriminating against a minority group to save the planet? (No, that doesn’t make sense, but neither does killing babies. Work with me here!) How do you think she would have reacted, even if the man had seemed mentally disturbed. Obviously, any politician, from the most conservative Republican to the most liberal Democrat, would have immediately and rightly refuted that person with a strong, ‘No, we’re not going to discriminate against anyone!’

So no, AOC doesn’t get a pass because she thought the eating baby woman was mentally disturbed. Quite the contrary, the ‘logic’ behind her actual response is disturbing. If you read between the lines, Ocasio-Cortez basically lauded the woman for her sense of urgency, then merely walks it back a few notches by contending that we have “more than a few months.” (Twelve years, to be specific, but we won’t quibble.) And we have “lots of solutions,” so let’s not resort to eating our young just yet.

From her reference to Swedish professor Magnus Söderlund, whose actual plan to fight climate change involves developing a taste for human flesh, to simply condensing AOC’s 12 year timeline to “a few months,” the woman’s crazed rant actually turned out not to be mental illness, but rather a troll job of epic proportions.

“AOC doesn’t rule out eating babies,” LaRouche PAC tweeted after the stunt, taking credit for what they fully expected to happen.

If the LaRouch political cult (of which, for the record, I’m not a fan) wanted to show that eating babies is really only a few steps away from current insane leftist environmental policy proposals, they certainly succeeded. In the name of ‘saving the earth,’ these climate-change lunatics want to take us beyond the stone age, to a place where human life is secondary not just to their warped view of what a sustainable planet looks like, but to leftist power and control.