Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided to attack one of her critics on Twitter yesterday and suggested that even if she won the Nobel Prize in Physics some misogynists would still call her dumb. It started when she posted this meme about being hope.

Conservative Kurt Schlichter offered a terse response.

I hope you’ll spew better cliches https://t.co/q0gZw7lLF2 — Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 30, 2019

And a few minutes later AOC decided to “be hope” by attacking President Trump and brushing off criticism as motivated by misogyny:

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1133892883264823302

This is quite an interesting combination of statements. First, let’s notice that Schlichter didn’t call her dumb or use that word, though I guess you could say he implied she’s not a deep thinker. AOC’s response was to attack President Trump and to claim no amount of intellectual achievement would be enough for her critics.

Let’s just state up front that AOC is really in no danger of winning a Nobel Prize in Physics or any other scientific discipline. But her tweet suggests someone’s intelligence can be judged by their “top hits,” i.e. some of the worst/dumbest things they’ve said. If that’s the case then AOC is in trouble and not just from misogynists. Consider a few examples:

$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.” $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon. And that’s before our premiums. https://t.co/soT6GSmDSG — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2018

Except she misread the source material:

One tip-off is the amount of Ocasio-Cortez’s “accounting errors” is far bigger than the actual Pentagon spending from 1998 to 2015, which was $8.5 trillion. In fact, it’s also far bigger than the amount the government has spent on national security since 1940 and, in all likelihood, in the nation’s history.

Oops! Here’s another: “Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for.” Again, she was a bit off:

Congress gave the military a $61 billion increase from fiscal year 2017 to 2018. The total military budget for 2018 was $700 billion. That includes the Department of Defense and elements of other agencies, chiefly Energy Department programs pertaining to nuclear weapons.

Here’s a misstatement involving another hobbyhorse of hers: “ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.” Nope: “…while Congress requires ICE to make 34,000 beds available each day, it doesn’t require those beds to be filled.”

Here’s another: “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.” Only that’s not remotely true:

Over the past 12 months, the number of multiple job holders has ranged between 6 million and 7 million. That compares to more than 148 million Americans who are employed in a single job.

We’re really just scratching the surface. Remember this brilliant statement: “What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don’t even keep the pews safe?”

How about the time she revealed she had no idea how the Amazon deal she opposed would actually work: “If we’re willing to give away $3 billion dollars for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion dollars in our district ourselves if we wanted to.” Fellow socialist Bill de Blasio had to correct her on that one.

There’s a lot more nonsense to be mined out of her brief career. The point is, there’s plenty to criticize here on the merits without the need for misogyny to explain it. What AOC is doing is using her identity politics as a shield from legitimate criticism. She’s not even really hiding what she’s doing. Remember this gem: “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” The problem isn’t that her critics are unfair, it’s that she frequently shoots her mouth off without knowing what she’s talking about and then claims any negative reaction to her unfounded statements are primarily because she has breasts.