Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Her Mysterious Rise from Bartender to Congresswoman: An Unauthorized Biography

By Peter D’Abrosca

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or “AOC” as she has dubbed herself, has taken the political scene by storm. More celebrity than advocate for serious policies, Ocasio-Cortez nonetheless wields outsized influence over the news cycle due to her adept use of media, her brash attitude, and of course, her attractive appearance.

But what lies underneath the shiny exterior? “AOC” is mostly a mystery, as Peter D’Abrosca found while chronicling her life and rise—from growing up in the suburbs of New York City, to her peculiar postgrad life as an entrepreneur, through her election to Congress and thereafter. This book offers never-before-published content and exclusive interviews, revealing new information on the life and times of America’s newest political phenomenon: a millennial socialist bent on imposing a radical and dangerous agenda.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642933321

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Also by Peter D’Abrosca

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Her Mysterious Rise from Bartender to Congresswoman:

An Unauthorized Biography

© 2019 by Peter D’Abrosca

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Cody Corcoran

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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Post Hill Press

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Published in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Corbin

Chapter 3: Alex From the Bronx

Chapter 4: Sandy Does School

Chapter 5: The Real World

Chapter 6: The Campaign

Chapter 7: Fame and Follies

Chapter 8: The Election

Chapter 9: Dark Money Scandal

Chapter 10: Conclusion

About the Author

Endnotes

Chapter 1

Introduction

Since her upset victory over veteran Democrat Joe Crowley, a staple in the halls of U.S. Congress for twenty years, a freshman congresswoman from New York’s Fourteenth District has captivated America. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the radical political Left’s American dream, and the political Right’s American nightmare.

Her cult-like millennial followers are enamored with her. The Yaaas queen crowd, whose worldview has been shaped through Instagram filters and Snapchat stories, and who have spent more time keeping up with the Kardashians than keeping up with American politics, reads her loudly and clearly: you too can be a know-nothing millennial idiot pouring seven-and-sevens at your local dive bar, and, with the mastery of precisely nothing other than Twitter clap backs, can achieve fame and influence overnight. The political Left’s American dream is the life of AOC: do nothing and become successful.

Her political opponents are still bewildered. Given AOC’s tenuous relationship with reality, Republicans simply cannot understand the appeal. How can this woman, just old enough to rent a car, who likely has not read a book since undergrad—and even then, probably only skimmed the text—instantly become the most attention-worthy member of Congress? After all, she hasn’t accomplished anything professionally. Any speech or interview that she has given proves that she’s not exactly a scholar. She never founded a business that produced a viable product, created a single job, balanced a checkbook, or managed anything other than a social media account. To Republicans, the American dream means the opposite. It means working hard, accomplishing goals, and earning success.

But when you think about AOC through the lens of a twenty-two-year-old Starbucks barista with a degree in pansexual art theory who is chipping away at $234,591 in student loan debt one minimum-wage shift at a time, Cortez begins to make sense. The millennials to whom AOC appeals just know that they are owed by some societal structure that has held them down. The leftist system of academia of which AOC is product has raised an entire generation of nitwit social justice warriors who perceive themselves as victims of a rigged system, believe that certain skin tones, genitalia, and sexual orientations are résumé boosters, and view America as a fundamentally evil place where a white male patriarchy is still large and in charge, scheming at some non-existent monthly meeting about how it can oppress women and minorities whilst drinking scotch and chortling.

In short, AOC checks many of the requisite social justice boxes. Not only is she brown, but at the risk of assuming her gender, she is a she. That makes her the equivalent of a unicorn in the eyes of the political left—she’s near the top of the victimhood totem pole as established by the critical theory wonks. Further, she is one of those pesky victimized millennial Socialists. Despite her upper-middle-class roots and degree in international relations and economics from the formerly-prestigious Boston University, AOC ended up underemployed and hoping for a slammed Friday night at the bar to fill the tip jar. She’s a trustafarian, as one of my close friends calls them, having grown up comfortably as a suburbanite but enlisted for a tour of duty in the race and class war pushed by academia, the mainstream press, and the Democratic Party. The purpose? To repent for her privilege and rid herself of some sort of inherent liberal guilt.

In his book Militant Normals, Kurt Schlichter described Washington, D.C. as a meritocracy without merit. Mostly, members of Congress are do-nothings. There really are no criteria by which a candidate for office can be measured to determine whether he or she is actually qualified to serve the American public. Most of candidates, though, at least have some background on which to hang their empty platitudes.

AOC takes the term do-nothing to a new extreme—one previously unknown in American politics. What did she do that was deserving of a seat in the hallowed halls of Congress? She knocked on a few doors during primary season, presumably while Crowley was behind his desk in Washington, D.C. twiddling his thumbs with the rest of his esteemed Congressional colleagues. Apparently, Crowley did not understand just how pernicious this gaggle of millennial Socialist victims has become. He mailed it in during election season—only to be sent packing on primary day despite outspending AOC by millions. AOC flipped the script on business as usual in D.C. in a fashion not dissimilar to President Donald Trump.

But you know all of this already. You’ve seen AOC’s cringe-worthy tweets that have inspired crazed leftists from the Alyssa Milano school of politics to pollute the world’s largest microblogging platform with nonsensical social justice babble, most of which boils down to blaming those evil white men and greedy capitalists for the ills of the world. You already know that socialism is both evil and immoral. If you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve also read an article or two about AOC’s upset primary election. You probably even know about the rift that AOC has caused between the elderly Democratic Party leadership and Far-Left young up-and-comers, who somehow don’t find the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer extreme enough.

Re-litigating AOC’s leftist policy platitudes is not the main theme of this book, though in some sense she is inextricable from her political ideology. Rather, the pages that follow will chronicle AOC’s journey—from her youth to her election campaign, to her promise to uphold the Constitution of the United States in January of 2019, to some of her follies thereafter.

I set out with a goal of finding out who AOC is on human level. I wanted to get to know her, and consequently allow you to get to know her.

But in large part, my research raised more questions than answers.

I spent hundreds of hours doing investigative research for this book. I reached out to AOC’s friends, acquaintances, and family members, desperately searching for never-before-reported information on the congresswoman. To a certain extent, I was successful. The pages that follow contain exclusive information, which I managed to unearth through my extensive research, about AOC that will be made public for the first time upon the publication of this book. I managed to interview her spokesman, Corbin Trent, known mostly for his media dodginess, after exhausting every possible avenue to land an interview with the congresswoman herself. She wasn’t interested in talking. In fact, no one in her orbit was interested in talking. When they did talk, they were extremely guarded. In fact, this was the first thing I learned about the congresswoman. She and her team are desperate to control how she is portrayed in the media. Her staff members double as image consultants.

When it quickly became clear that AOC’s office would not indulge any of my questions, I got to thinking.

What exactly do we know about AOC? Well, besides the generic, campaign-approved story that she was a struggling bartender who miraculously turned herself into a congresswoman. The answer is not much. There is little information about her family life. Almost none about her long-term boyfriend. Where exactly she grew up remains a topic of debate. Other than the schools she attended, information about AOC’s time in high school and college is sparse. What she did—besides the bartending gig—for nearly six years after her college graduation is anyone’s guess. She had little pre-campaign social media presence—odd for a millennial—besides a bare-bones LinkedIn profile that doesn’t even have a profile picture and an Instagram account that only became political circa 2016. Was she always a Far Leftist? If not, when did she become radicalized? Who are her friends? What do they do? What was AOC like before Congress came calling?

I investigated all these things, visiting the congresswoman’s office in D.C., the bar she worked at in Manhattan, and the upper-middle-class suburb in which she grew up.

When a charismatic twenty-nine-year-old millennial rises out of nowhere and becomes one of the most famous politicians on earth, one might expect a plethora of biographical information to exist. In AOC’s case, it simply doesn’t. It was an odd revelation, to say the least, and piqued my curiosity.

During the course of the investigation, I often remarked that her biography was turning into a mystery.

Who exactly is AOC, and how did America’s most famous millennial Socialist come to be? What propelled her to fame, and how did she gain a cult-like following of millennials nearly overnight? Why did they flock to her as their savior?

The answers to these questions—at least in greater depth than previously reported—are contained in the pages that follow.

But despite all my research, I received the most succinct and accurate answer to the questions of how and why during a casual conversation with a friend—a twenty-four-year-old female and the only sane Democrat with whom I am acquainted.

I’d guess it’s because she’s relatable, she’s young and blunt and zealous, and she wears hoops, my friend said.

That explanation resonated with me. In fact, it resonated more than any other reason for AOC’s stardom that I managed to dig up during this adventure, and more than anything I learned about the freshman congresswoman while writing this book.

She represents the epitome of millennialism. She’s the product of the immature, participation-trophy generation that learned next to nothing from its public schooling—besides the absolute fact that everyone is special and that society owes them something. She’s wildly overconfident and wholly underprepared, and her idealism far outpaces critical thinking or reasoning skills. She’s educated, at least on paper, but if she didn’t have that Bachelor’s degree, she certainly wouldn’t be able to prove it. She may be wrong about everything, but damn it, she’s pressing forward anyway. And since Democrats have always been overgrown, idealistic children who think the government is here to help and can solve all of their problems, she captivated them instantly and took their party by storm.

This is the unauthorized biography of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nobody in her camp willfully participated in its creation. Rather, they avoided me—and my pesky questions—like the plague, desperate to stymy my efforts.

We’ll begin with Corbin.

Chapter 2

Corbin

From the beginning, the plan was to interview AOC for this book. But I quickly found that her office was not receptive to press, as one might expect an elected official and public figure to be. Maybe she prefers friendly interviews with vetted outlets like MSNBC and CNN. Or maybe her office is simply too swamped with media requests to keep up with them. Maybe it’s a combination of both. In any case, my requests fell on