On February 2, 2021, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did a livestream on Instagram Live (archive) to recount her experience during the January 6th Capitol riots. She claimed that the rioters were actively looking for her, shouting her name as she feared for her life. However, upon close inspection, her summary turned out to be false.
One of the first people to point out at the discrepancies of AOC's story was OAN correspondent Jack Posobiec with this simple, but self-explanatory diagram:
As you may know, the rioters breached the Capitol building, but AOC was in the Cannon House. But this is not the end of the discrepancies. In her livestream, AOC dropped specific timestamps of when the alleged events happened. According to her account, she heard loud banging on her door at 1:01 pm. The problem? Even if her office is in the Capitol, her story could not have possibly occurred as according to the New York Time's timeline, the first rioters entered the Capitol at 2:11 pm. That is a whopping time difference of 70 minutes.
In light of that discovery, hashtags like #AOClied, #AOCSmollet, and #AlexandraOcasioSmollet (yes, her first name is misspelled) trended on Twitter.
As you would imagine, AOC was not enthused about the trending hashtags, especially when 2 of the 3 compare her to the infamous race hoaxer, Jussie Smollett. As a matter of fact, she messaged her followers to mass-report any tweets with these hashtags:
And if that was not enough, she proceeded to compare herself to war veterans:
The question that needs to be asked is why did she lie about her experiences to such a great extent? Even when shown evidence of her story and the actual timeline not matching up, she doubled down. My guess is that she is only doing it for political clout. She is likely aware that no matter if she speaks truthfully or not, her supporters will back her. Whatever additional attention she gets outside of her supporters is a bonus regardless if it is negative or positive attention, i.e. "any publicity is good publicity".
What AOC does not realize is that what she is doing is counterproductive. Similar to how #MeToo ended up raising more cynicism towards towards sexual assault allegations, AOC's lies might cause people to approach allegations of victimization from riots with suspicion.
