“Sandy is the seashore — and Sandy is the sea.”
“She can turn to anything that she would like to be,” sang the late Harry Chapin in 1975.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), or AOC, known as Sandy Cortez growing up in her posh suburb, wasn’t around when Chapin rendered that line. But, boy, she sure does try to be whatever she would like to be. But who is the real Sandy Cortez, purported “Bronx girl”?
Cortez reignited the debate over her “stolen hood-dom” background after getting into a dust-up with President Donald Trump. After he responded to her appeal for his impeachment by calling her “one of the dumbest people in Congress,” Sandy went all Joe Biden on him. (Biden, who loves the tough-guy routine, is the Izzy Mandelbaum of politics).
“I’m a Bronx girl,” she said in a June 24 tweet (below). “You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast. Respectfully.”
If that sounds scary, it’s not the half of it. In an exclusive scoop achieved via anonymous sources, I can now provide insight (below) into Sandy’s Eating-Queens-boys training regimen.
Satire aside (the above image is from Mr. Grok AI’s imagination), Sandy can’t be feeling dandy about the recent criticism. Fox News reported on the story Tuesday, writing:
Ocasio-Cortez’s tough Bronx persona is under fresh scrutiny with a resurfaced childhood nickname from her suburban upstate New York upbringing casting doubt on that publicly portrayed image.
The progressive champion’s latest spat with President Donald Trump over the Iran strikes again called into question her true upbringing when she declared on X that she was a “Bronx girl” to make a point against the president.
The spat started over Sandy’s assertion that Trump should be impeached because of the aforementioned military strikes. Never mind that presidents have been exercising such power for ages and that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did so repeatedly and with vigor. Sandy is a gal who has essentially said that being “factually” incorrect is irrelevant as long as you’re “morally right.”
Now, whether or not she believes it’s morally right to lie about your background was not reported. But as for her Bronx girl status, Fox also writes that Sandy
was born in the Bronx but moved to Yorktown [Yorktown Heights, to be precise, in Westchester County] — which is nearly an hour outside New York City — when she was 5 years old and went on to attend Yorktown High School, from where she graduated in 2007.
Do know that we’re talking about many of my old haunts here. I spent the first 28 years of my life in the Bronx after, ironically, being born in Westchester. I then moved to Westchester, where I reside to this day, and I’ve been to Yorktown Heights. And, well, Compton it ain’t. Just take a gander at the video below, which shows off the idyllic town.
Okay, I know, realtors paint a rosy picture. In Yorktown Heights, though, the roses are real and the thorns few. Here are the facts:
Westchester is one of the 20 or 30 richest counties in the U.S. This means it’s in the top one percent of all counties nationwide. Yorktown Heights’ median household income in 2023 was approximately $138,750, nearly double that of the U.S. overall ($74,580). This places it in the top five percent, and probably the top two or three percent, among American municipalities.
To hear Sandy tell it, though, she was just a quintile above Oliver Twist. As the New York Post related Sunday:
“I’m proud of how I grew up and talk about it all the time,” AOC said on X Friday. “My mom cleaned houses and I helped. We cleaned tutors’ homes in exchange for SAT prep.
“Growing up between the Bronx and Yorktown deeply shaped my views of inequality & it’s a big reason I believe the things I do today!”
(Relevant video below.)
Of course, a politician lying about his background is not unprecedented. Some may say, too, that Sandy isn’t worth this much ink. But there is a deeper issue here, in that Sandy well reflects many today — especially many younger Americans.
That is, we live in the most prosperous age in man’s history. To paraphrase comedian/commentator Bill Maher, “We’re the only country that has fat poor people.” Despite this, many Americans feel they deserve more; they act as if they’ve been denied their birthright.
Just consider income expectations. “Gen Z [age range: approximately 13-28] thinks they need a $587,797 yearly pay to be successful while Boomers would settle for $99,874 a year,” wrote the New York Post last year, reporting on a study.
Of course, we’d all love to command such an income. But since per capita earnings in the U.S. are just $63,214, most Gen Z’ers won’t achieve what they fancy “success.” This inevitably will lead to disappointment, and often anger, at a system that “denies you success.” And such people can be easy prey for socialist demagogues’ false promises.
This is what happens when you see the glass as half empty, too, counting your “curses” and not blessings.
In truth, though, the blessings are many. Man’s historical default was grinding poverty — until the Industrial Revolution and healthy market systems created a wealth explosion. The short video below, portraying 19th-century tenement life, illustrates that default somewhat.
Ironically, too, the rugged souls portrayed above had it better than some. Just consider the hapless people who, enduring the Irish Potato Famine (1845-’49), fled to the U.S. for a better life.
Sadly, though, the wealth-creation engine can easily be destroyed, as socialist entities have proven for a century now. Thus did British author W. Somerset Maugham warn:
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The wise will heed those words — and tell Sandy to go pound sand.