New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) told her supporters during a social media livestream Sunday that the best way to resist Trump administration officials like Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, is to laugh at them.
“The point is that they are scraping and grasping at straws because they have nothing else. Laugh at them, Stephen Miller is a clown! I’ve never seen that guy in real life, but he looks like he’s, like, [4 feet, 10 inches tall]. He looks like he is angry about the fact that he’s [4 feet, 10 inches] and he has taken that anger out on any other population possible. Like, laugh at them,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Instagram live Sunday.
The New York lawmaker added that one way of combating the rise of what she described as authoritarianism is by poking fun at “insecure masculinity” and those who perpetuate it.
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“One of the most powerful cultural things you can do to a political movement that’s predicated on the puffery of insecure masculinity, that’s what this is about,” she said. “One of the best ways you can dismantle a movement of insecure men is by making fun of them, by having secure men who aren’t afraid of successful people around them who are also participating in that as well.”
Ocasio-Cortez regularly spends time on social media bantering and talking policy with her followers. She has been a prominent figure in the government shutdown fight, as Republicans say her possible primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has inspired his hard-line position on health care.
Ocasio-Cortez called those GOP claims “ridiculous” and “desperate” last week. “It is so important to understand that these people are all talk,” she said of Republicans.
Miller, one of the most influential figures in the Trump administration, regularly tangles with Democrats over policy debates and news of the day.
Earlier on Sunday, he slammed Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) over a social media post accusing Miller and “MAGA-world” of doxing a judge in South Carolina before her house was burned down, and asking if President Trump would “speak out against the extreme right that did this??”
“You are vile. Deeply warped and vile,” Miller said of Goldman during a Fox News interview. “While the Trump Administration has launched the first-ever government-wide effort to combat and prosecute illegal doxing, sinister threats and political violence, you continue to push despicable lies, demented smears, malicious defamation and foment unrest.”
Officials in South Carolina are investigating the cause of the blaze.