WASHINGTON – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday compared Republicans to the uptight Dwight Schrute character from “The Office” — and even likened some GOP members to a real SpongeBob Squarepants.

The firebrand freshman with a socialist bent shared a tweet defending her choice of words when she said the super rich — a group she wants to see pay higher taxes — amounted to “like 10 people.” The tweet made the point that the country’s richest have amassed more than half its wealth.

Ocasio-Cortez added that her comment, in which she said some Republicans have the “social intelligence of a sea sponge,” wasn’t meant to be taken at face value anyway.

“This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.

“But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows,” she said, referencing the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company salesman played by Rainn Wilson on the long-running sitcom.

Ocasio-Cortez has often used the 12-year figure to promote her Green New Deal. It comes from an October 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said that’s the amount of years humans have left to change their behavior for only moderate damage from global warming to occur. The New York Democrat has pushed for the U.S. to cut emissions in half by that deadline.

On Saturday, she tweeted about economic justice and the morality of paying people too little. “The myth that bad credit or struggling w bills = irresponsibility is a heinous myth,” she wrote. “Paying people less than what’s needed to live is what’s actually irresponsible.”

She then talked about how she’d like to see a tax hike on the uber-rich.

“When we say ‘tax the rich,’ we mean nesting-doll yacht rich. For-profit prison rich. Betsy DeVos, student-loan-shark rich. Trick-the-country-into-war rich. Subsidizing-workforce-w-food-stamps rich. Because THAT kind of rich is simply not good for society, & it’s like 10 people,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

Philadelphia-based attorney Max Kennerly defended Ocasio-Cortez’s use of “like 10 people.”

“The the richest Americans are worth $730 billion. The fourteen richest American families (excluding the Koch brothers, so no double-counting) are worth $511 billion. Together they’re worth more than 60% of Americans combined,” Kennerly wrote in a tweet that the New York congresswoman shared with her 4.1 million followers.