Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s opponents think they’re exposing her by revealing she, uh… [checks notes] grew up in a house?

Ever since proud democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez buried 10-term incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in NY-14’s Democratic primary last week, observers have wondered whether her progressive platform — including Medicare for all, abolishing ICE and extensive criminal justice reform — could play on the national stage. Unsurprisingly, her insurgent campaign is also cause for concern among the old Democratic establishment, where she may signal an “earthquake.” The result is that both feckless centrist liberals and triggered conservatives are looking for ways to disparage Ocasio-Cortez’s accomplishments and downplay the threat she poses to them.

But in their frantic digging for dirt, these clowns have come up pathetically short. The attempts to stoke fear and outrage over a young leftist’s rise to political prominence are almost as embarrassing as the widespread failure in punditworld to take Ocasio-Cortez seriously at all.

First, Sean Hannity’s hysterical “takedown” of her agenda turned into an effective ad for it:

Sean Hannity just presented this agenda as a negative pic.twitter.com/mYoByIRyr5 — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 28, 2018

Then, in one of the weakest columns to ever run on the New York Post’s Page Six (a gossip section incidentally used by Donald Trump to pump up his own reputation for decades), an anonymous waitress offered a single complaint about working alongside Ocasio-Cortez in a Mexican restaurant: that she’d hadn’t been generous enough sharing her tips from bartending for a “very busy Cinco de Mayo celebration.” This potshot was somewhat undercut by the article’s admission that pretty much every other co-worker liked Ocasio-Cortez just fine, as well as the aggrieved party’s rather unusual idea of how tips tend to be split in the service industry. (In general, there is no accepted standard for making our extremely dumb tipping culture fair.)

Ex co-worker no fan of Democrat darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://t.co/iwGdI4DC3e pic.twitter.com/x2MFk5uIG3 — Page Six (@PageSix) July 1, 2018

A waitress she worked with felt Ocasio-Cortez didn't give her enough when splitting her tips at the end of the night one time. All the other co-workers say she was great. That's it. That's literally it. That's what someone wrote and published an article about. https://t.co/JSS90D38aB — A.B. Allen (@A_B_Allen) July 2, 2018

Think it couldn’t get any dumber than that? Please.

The latest line of attack targets Ocasio-Cortez’s backstory. Inasmuch as she likes to describe herself as “a girl from the Bronx,” ex–NYPD cop and committed online racist John Cardillo thought he’d score points against her by posting a photo of the house she grew up in and criticizing her for… going to college?

A few problems here: Ocasio-Cortez is still from the Bronx; she never said she lived in the “hood”; and, well, her family held onto this modest home only through tenacious hard work.

Dumb conservative meme about @Ocasio2018 is even dumber than you first realize https://t.co/0dvbdfqyw2 pic.twitter.com/NgufZ2v1F0 — Inae Oh (@eenayo) July 2, 2018

https://twitter.com/MattBors/status/1013489321293148160

This is the Yorktown Heights (very nice area) home @Ocasio2018 grew up in before going off to Ivy League Brown University. A far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she’s selling. pic.twitter.com/e8HMDGMg4Z — lvl 45 chaos chatterton potus (@thetomzone) July 2, 2018

Good god you’re a know nothing shmuck. Yorktown Heights is an ethnic suburb and the most modest in the county. Now go be a pig somewhere else. I disagree with Ocasio-Cortez on everything but you are a repellent slimebucket of a person. https://t.co/KGErgvEoYo — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 1, 2018

Oh, she also went to Boston University, not Brown. But something tells me that pants-pissing conservatives would have a problem with any higher education or simple GED equivalency on her résumé. By the way, do they ever take issue with a white man who talks a big game about bootstrap ideology even though he was born into privilege (ahem, Rand Paul), or one who attacks a rival’s local authenticity when the other guy has a stronger claim to the region? (Ted Cruz, hello.) I think they’re picking on her for a reason!

Hey John, 1. I didn’t go to Brown or the Ivy League. I went to BU. Try Google. 2. It is nice. Growing up, it was a good town for working people. My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here & I grew up seeing how the zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity. — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2018

3. Your attempt to strip me of my family, my story, my home, and my identity is exemplary of how scared you are of the power of all four of those things. — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2018

Other free-floating reactionary turds ran with Cardillo’s weird conceit. Arthur Schwartz — a rando perhaps best known for self-owning last summer by accusing Reince Priebus of adultery — made the ludicrous accusation of “cultural appropriation.” Cardillo, meanwhile, posted photos of other Yorktown Heights houses. Neither jab landed as intended.

https://twitter.com/ArthurSchwartz/status/1013515218234892288

“I grew up on the upper east side and went to Magnet School. Here’s why it’s okay that I’m racist:” https://t.co/0HGdacgwVo — Corkus Bucksuth (@samknight_one) July 2, 2018

I grew up in NYC. Had friends from Yorktown Heights where @Ocasio2018 grew up. Been there many times. Sure, her house was small, but to claim it's not an affluent area is dishonest. To claim it's similar to the Bronx is ridiculous. Here are a few other Yorktown Heights homes. pic.twitter.com/ZKMTnd5xlV — John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 2, 2018

i cant believe the woman who is a socialist grew up in a house. thats fucked. dont lobby for universal healthcare and immigrant rights unless you grew up in a hollow tree inside a fucking swamp you dumbass funcking bitch — this user has set her status to "busy" (@wowprettylady) July 1, 2018

Of course, when all else fails and your opponent is a woman, you have to resort to unflattering photos. Throughout the presidential election and afterward, Trump voters delighted in making Hillary Clinton memes where the Democratic nominee had a goofy or weird expression on her face — almost as if to detract from their candidate’s puckered ham of a mug.

Could the same tactic erode support for Ocasio-Cortez, an attractive 28-year-old woman of color in a sea of decrepit, elderly white dudes who resemble the nude Satanists from Rosemary’s Baby? Probably not, though that won’t stop alt-right chuds from using what they think is an unflattering photo of Ocasio-Cortez on the internet—she looks eager and wide-eyed, like the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme—to paint her as crazy.

Socialism Is Growing In America Because Everybody's Rich Thanks To Capitalism https://t.co/KFIkhl5s1z pic.twitter.com/sTLtmYWy25 — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) July 2, 2018

The fearful opposition is already so enamored of this picture that a reverse-image search kicks back results for “socialism” itself. They really want to drive that association into our heads.

Yet many of Ocasio-Cortez’s critics concede (and I’m sorry to be so heterosexual about this) that she is, in fact, hot — a quality they can still use to disparage her. Surely we can expect more sexist comparisons like this one:

How socialism looks vs how socialism acts. pic.twitter.com/qnRNBkGEsx — Matt’s Idea Shop (@MattsIdeaShop) July 1, 2018

Get it? She’s only fake-beautiful! The rosy case for democratic socialism is just like women who “lie” and “cheat” by wearing makeup! That analogy no doubt strikes a chord for a handful of incels, 4chan trolls and the neckless divorced dads who jerk off to Tomi Lahren, but the good news is that Ocasio-Cortez has a much stronger sense of social media messaging than any of the bros coming after her. In fact, she wisely elevates the proof of her grit over her appearance.

Some folks are saying I won for “demographic” reasons. 1st of all, that’s false. We won w/voters of all kinds. 2nd, here’s my 1st pair of campaign shoes. I knocked doors until rainwater came through my soles. Respect the hustle. We won bc we out-worked the competition. Period. pic.twitter.com/RbpQMYTiWY — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 29, 2018

All of which is to say: The haters are sounding pretty desperate, and their charges don’t seem to be sticking.

Not only is this Richard Cohen hit piece on @Ocasio2018 predictably incoherent, Cohen appears wholly unaware that the Dodgers didn't suddenly vanish into obscurity, but rather merely moved to LA. https://t.co/nVPyAzvFbE pic.twitter.com/7p2SMrhSXa — Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) July 3, 2018

Not only is Ocasio-Cortez a fierce newcomer able to energize a progressive base, but everyone seeking to take her down with memes has gone soft after years of aiming their firepower at already unpopular women in the Democratic leadership like Hillary or Nancy Pelosi. This isn’t someone heading into the midterms with baggage weighing her down, and thus far, nobody has managed to saddle her with any. If the Republican party can’t produce a more substantive line than “the middle class isn’t allowed to be socialist” and “here’s an awkward screengrab from an interview she gave,” Ocasio-Cortez may haunt them for years to come.