(Daily Mail) Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has been slammed after video re-emerged of her using an accent while addressing Al Sharpton’s civil rights organization.
The Democratic lawmaker slipped into a Southern drawl as she told the audience: ‘I’m proud to be a bartender. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.’
Ocasio-Cortez, who grew up in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, has been accused of pandering to the crowd at the National Action Network conference in 2019.
A new viral video which brands AOC ‘a total fraud’ shows the clip spliced with more recent footage of her criticizing Donald Trump without any noticeable accent.
The 33-year-old progressive is not the first to be accused of altering her accent to suit the audience. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barrack Obama have all toyed with various ways of speaking while out on the campaign trail.
Ocasio-Cortez made a speech at an Al Sharpton-sponsored conference in New York in 2019 and was later accused of putting on a an accent
The old clip was cut with a more recent video in which AOC put on a different accent
Ocasio-Cortez address in 2019 was made during Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention that year. She went on: ‘There’s nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy.
‘There is nothing wrong with preparing the food that your neighbors will eat. There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family to work.’
Days later she had already drawn criticism and addressed the allegations she was putting on an accent, claiming it was entirely authentic.
‘Folks talking about my voice can step right off,’ she wrote on Twitter. ‘Any kid who grew up in a distinct linguistic culture & had to learn to navigate class enviros at school/work knows what’s up. My Spanish is the same way.’
‘As much as the right wants to distort & deflect, I am from the Bronx. I act & talk like it, *especially* when I’m fired up and especially when I’m home. It is so hurtful to see how every aspect of my life is weaponized against me, yet somehow asserted as false at the same time,’ she continued.
Ocasio-Cortez grew up in the Bronx until she was five, when her family purchased a home in Yorktown Heights in upstate Westchester County. She returned to the Bronx after graduating from Boston University in 2011.
AOC is a total fraud. This is her accent before and after: pic.twitter.com/d2BKs3RAmx
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 11, 2023
‘We’ve played a lot of clips of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she doesn’t talk like that in a single one of them. That’s fake, that what that is,’ Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson said at the time.
Other critics from the right took to Twitter to mock Ocasio-Cortez for her newfound accent.
