AOC’s Hypocrisy-Dripping Costume Change

Democrats love wearing costumes.

Think of Hillary Clinton walking around talking about hot sauce, or Kamala Harris changing her accent depending on where she is. It’s rare that a Democrat wins — particularly in a red or a purple state — by preaching openly for weakness on foreign policy or transing the kids or raising your taxes.

That’s because honesty doesn’t tend to work out well for people who push this kind of stuff.

Thus, Democrats frequently put on costumes, pretend, and lie.

What’s really fascinating is how they decide to pretend. What are they deciding to dress up as?

On Wednesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wants to run for president in 2028, acted like a chameleon again. She’s already gone to a historically black church and started dropping her G’s; she’s shown up outside an immigration facility and cried at an empty parking lot.

But on Wednesday, she did something I have never seen before in American federal politics. She put on a hijab at an event.

That says something. It says something about her, about where the Left is going, and about where America is going.

It used to be that if you were a terrorist-supporting radical Muslim, you had to cosplay as a mainstream American, or at least get the media to do your dirty work for you. But now, Democrats are cosplaying as Muslims or as fellow travelers to radicals.

Here’s the salient point: Radical Islamists in America aren’t cosplaying anymore. Ilhan Omar doesn’t cosplay. Neither does Zohran Mamdani. Neither does Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. They may sometimes pretend to hide some of their more radical Islamist edges, but they’re not really trying to hide the ball.

Now AOC is cosplaying as one of those types.

Other Democrats are playing dress-up, too; Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner is wearing a Trump voter costume. (At least what the Left thinks Trump voters are like.) Or James Talarico, the Senate Democratic candidate in Texas, who’s pretending to be a Bible-thumping Christian who loves ribs when actually he just loves transing the kids.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up to an Eid dinner with Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani showed up in a thobe, the long robe worn by Muslims for the holiday. Mamdani is precisely who you think Mamdani is: a radical Islamist who is masquerading as a Gen Z TikToker. He’s a socialist who wants to bring down the country.

But the story is AOC wearing a hijab. She was clearly wearing a scarf to look like a hijab.

In Muslim countries all over the world, hijabs for women are mandatory. If you do not wear it in places like Iran, they will kill you. In radical Islamist countries, you will be punished.

There has been a long-standing tacit bipartisan policy in the United States that when women go to the Middle East, they don’t wear the hijab. In 2007, Laura Bush went to Saudi Arabia. No hijab. Condoleeza Rice went to Saudi Arabia; no hijab. Nancy Pelosi in Saudi Arabia? No hijab. Hillary Clinton in Saudi Arabia in 2012? No hijab. Michelle Obama in 2015?  No hijab.

Why does this matter? Because when Western women go to the Islamic world, they are making a point, which is that they are not going to be forced into a traditional Islamic hair covering that has been used for hundreds of years as a way to treat women as second-class citizens.

In 2016, former German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen —  not a Right-winger — went to the Middle East. She did not cover her hair this way and said, “No woman in my delegation has to wear the abaya” ( a different kind of head covering). “The right to choose your own clothing is a right shared by men and women alike. It annoys me when women are pushed into wearing the abaya.”

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in her memoir about the time she visited Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince handed her an abaya. She wrote, “The Crown Prince pulled out a gift-wrapped package. ‘I have a gift for you,’ he said. It was a full-length, beautifully embroidered abaya, the black robe and veil Saudi women traditionally wear. ‘I had it made especially for you,’ he said tenderly. ‘Our women wear them.’ Yes, as a sign of oppression, I thought.”

Correct. Hundreds of millions of women around the world are forced to wear these sorts of head coverings.

You’ll notice I’m not talking about Ilhan Omar wearing a hijab. She’s a Muslim woman. If she wants to wear a hijab, that’s her business.

No Jew has ever asked a politician to put on a kippah. If you’re a non-Jewish man, there’s literally no reason to do it. Don’t do it. It’s stupid; it’s dumb. As an Orthodox Jew, I have never, ever seen an Orthodox Jew ask a woman to wear what’s called a shaytl, a wig used as a religious hair-covering.

There is a category for generic hair coverings, such as women putting on a veil to cover their hair when visiting the Vatican. They want to cover their hair out of respect.

But that’s not what AOC was doing.

She made an overt choice. She put on a hijab for a reason.

We should ask what the reason is, because all over the world, hijab is a sign of the submission of women. There’s a reason France has banned certain types of head coverings in public spaces: it sees them as a form of submission to radicalism.

That’s why AOC did it. This was not a bug or a mistake; this was a feature. She was cosplaying in solidarity with foreign radicalism. She was cosplaying as a member of the supposedly “oppressed foreign contingent” in the United States.

She believes the rising tide in the Democratic Party is foreigners who come to the United States and say that America sucks. She believes that Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Zohran Mamdani are the rising tide; all immigrants to the United States or children of immigrants who decide that America is horrible and that the problems of the world must be laid at America’s feet.

She was signaling solidarity with all of that. This was not a sign of generic religion or respect for Muslims. Everything she does is scripted, a deliberate choice.

If you truly believe AOC got up in the morning, grabbed a scarf from the shelf, decided she was going to wear it, and it just coincidentally looked like a hijab, you’re being deliberately ignorant.

It was a virtue signal to the people who believe that America is responsible for all the problems of the world, that third-world cultures all over the world have been put upon by the United States. She was signaling her solidarity with that.

This was not a generic symbol. Politics is all about the symbolic. It’s all about how we use speech. It’s about how people act, and it’s about the symbols that they choose to identify with.

AOC would not wear garb that was redolent with Trumpism. AOC is not going to walk out of her house wearing an American flag t-shirt.

There’s nothing new about the cosplay; Democrats do it all the time.

AOC is clearly preparing for a presidential run. She believes that there is a rising majority of people who despise this country, who think the country is responsible for all the ills of the world, and that she can activate the most passionate base in primaries in order to get her over the top.

That’s why she’s doing what she’s doing.