When I interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in September, the 29-year-old democratic socialist had not yet won her congressional race, but she was already morphing into a source of acute psychological anguish for the Fox News crowd: a young, ambitious, and outspoken Hispanic woman, who suffered occasional bouts of hyperbole and verbal imprecision. Ocasio-Cortez, a political neophyte of strong self-possession, embraced the imagery, sometimes mirthfully. “They don’t know how to deal with me,” she told me at the time. “They’re just like, throwing all this vitriol, but they’re not even pretending to hide their condescension. They’re just embracing it.” It was interesting, she observed, in an abstract way, to experience going from “being a three-dimensional person” to becoming a caricature overnight. “To be honest,” she added, “I think a lot of them can’t hide their misogyny.”

Weeks later, Ocasio-Cortez’s celebrity profile has merely expanded. On November 18, roughly 4,000 people tuned into her Instagram to watch her answer fan questions while cooking mac and cheese in an Instant Pot—a mind-blowing, over-the-top millennial-liberal fantasy that many on the right could do little to stop. The right’s own obsession with the congresswoman-elect has since degenerated into a full-blown mental breakdown. They celebrated when she supported a climate protest in Nancy Pelosi’s office (“the first item on her agenda has fellow Democrats seeing red”!), then grew hysterical after she mistakenly described the three branches of government as “three chambers” (“The presidency, the Senate, and the House”). On Friday, Fox News convened a panel to discuss the shoes she wore out campaigning, which are set to be featured in an art exhibit. “She’s proposing that we bring socialism to our country right now,” exclaimed Fox contributor and former Real World cast member Rachel Campos-Duffy. “In Venezuela, there are people who can’t afford shoes, don’t have shoes on their feet, because of what socialism has done to their country.” Ocasio-Cortez responded on Twitter: “No, no es amor / Lo que tú sientes, se llama obsesión”—No, it’s not love, what you feel is called obsession.

Ocasio-Cortez’s conservative-media foes reject the notion. “Just hold up for a second,” said Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro, who hosts the massively popular Ben Shapiro Show podcast. “You guys made her a celebrity, and then we commented on the fact that she doesn’t know a lot of things about politics, and that she says a lot of silly things about politics. And then it’s like, ‘Oh well, why are you targeting her?’ Sorry, you don’t get to play that game.”

Shapiro isn’t the only one fuming over the ostensible double standard. Multiple conservative sources I talked to invoked Sarah Palin as an example of a similarly telegenic, charming political novice who was nonetheless savaged by the mainstream media for her expensive clothes, frequent high-profile gaffes, and apparent ignorance on important issues. “The social-media right was very cognizant of how Sarah Palin was treated by [the] media for the duration of her time that she was in the limelight,” said Stephen L. Miller, a media critic who has contributed to National Review Online, Fox News, and the New York Post. “What you have now is somebody on the left who’s making these similar kind of consistent policy gaffes just about every single time she’s called on to talk about them. But instead of criticism from the media about it, we’re seeing more glamour shoots, and she’s held up for late-night appearances, and she’s kind of turned into a media darling.”