With the trauma still fresh and the emotional wounds taking their toll, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bravely shared her experience, in order to help right-leaning Americans understand the extreme danger of Donald Trump and his radicalized henchmen.
In an emotional 90-minute video (available here), Ocasio-Cortez described in detail how her sense of danger grew in the days leading up to the assault on the Capitol. Around the time the clashes at the Capitol started, on January 6th, Ocasio-Cortez said she was at her desk scrolling through lunch options when she heard a loud, “violent” banging on her office doors. She ran over to her legislative director Geraldo Bonilla-Chavez (whom she calls “G”), who told her, “Hide, hide, run and hide.” She hid in the bathroom of her office and realized that the 17 people who were violently banging on the door had gotten inside and were yelling, “Where is she?”. "In my mind, all I could think of were 17 heavily armed proud boys were yelling, 'Ted Cruz told us to kill you' and at that moment, I thought I was going to die", said Ocasio-Cortez. "I didn't know it while I was hiding, but instead of the 17 heavily armed white supremist Proud Boy members, it was actually a Capitol police officer trying to help me." In the moment, while she was hiding in her bathroom and the door started to open on her, Ocasio-Cortez said, she thought she was going to die. "This was the moment where I thought everything was over." As it turned out, the only thing that was over was the drama as Ocasio-Cortez was quickly escorted to a safer place without incident. The breach of the Capitol didn't even extend to the adjacent building where AOC's office is and she was soon able to eat her lunch--in peace with her fellow squad members. We asked Ocasio-Cortez why she was so sure it was 17 members of the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys, "Well, you know 17 is the number for Q and these crazies are so stuck on symbolism and numerology that they do everything in accordance with the nonsense", said Ocasio-Cortez. "So, naturally as I heard the loud yelling and pounding on the door I assumed it to be exactly that. I'm just really lucky to be alive and I'm not sure I'll ever fully recover from the emotional damage this has caused me. This whole thing is just more evidence that Donald Trump is dangerous to America." Sadly, Ocasio-Cortez has been savagely attacked on social media with manipulative and deceptive attempts to discredit her story by people who falsely claimed she exaggerated the danger she was in because she wasn’t actually inside the main Capitol building where the House and Senate chambers are located. But Ocasio-Cortez never claimed to be in the main Capitol building. She said she was inside her office, which is in one of the network of buildings containing congressional offices that comprise the fuller Capitol complex. These buildings are interconnected by a series of tunnels, which allows members of Congress to traverse underground from their offices to their respective chambers. These tunnels could have been compromised and there was no way for AOC to be able to determine if her building had been breached or not. These defamatory attacks on AOC, by republicans and alt-right news outlets undermine her personal experience and downplay the emotional trauma she felt while the Capitol was under siege as well as the imminent physical danger that she and others really were in during the attack. These reprehensible attacks on AOC's character and experience are both deplorable and predictable, as republicans have already shown the lengths which they are willing to go for cheap political points. "It's shameful, but certainly something we've come to expect from Donald Trump's Republican Party", said Ocasio-Cortez. "As I said just a few months ago, Donald Trump is a racist visionary, but he doesn't stand alone. 'm just glad America is finally able to see these deplorable republicans for who we've always known them to be. They smile to your face and then they plot to kill you behind your back. Fortunately, for me and many others, their efforts to silence us through intimidation and attempted murder were thwarted by the brave men and women in blue."
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