#AOCLied hashtag flooded with spam & puppies after PR team urges followers to help memory-hole her ‘Smollett moment’

After New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admitted she wasn’t even inside the Capitol building during last month’s raid she’d framed as a near-death experience, the Democrat convinced her fans to help bury the embarrassment.

Essentially summoning an army of human ‘bots’ to save face, AOC’s team on Wednesday emailed her followers with a request to help “set the record straight” concerning ‘negative’ – i.e. realistic – posts about the congresswoman and her whereabouts on January 6. 

While one man was charged with threatening to assassinate AOC over social media, there is no evidence of any contact between the two on the day of the raid, and the congresswoman’s increasingly lurid description of what she insisted was a brush with death at the hands of Trump-loving rioters had been exposed as at least partially fictional. Her pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears, merely triggering further mockery.

By Thursday, however, the hashtags #AOCLied and #AOCSmollett were overwhelmed with photos of people’s pets – cats, dogs, reptiles, and so on – really anything but conversation about the Democratic Socialist’s exaggerations regarding her activities during her supposed brush with death in the Capitol – or another building near the Capitol – on the day of the riot.

It’s not clear if Twitter helped AOC with her ‘Smollett problem’ – the hashtag itself being a reference to disgraced actor Jussie Smollett, who staged a phony hate crime last year, allegedly paying two Nigerian brothers to faux-lynch him with a piece of string – but the “AOCLied” hashtag was almost completely overrun with pet photos and K-pop gifs by Thursday.

#AOCSmollett was still going strong, however.

The congresswoman’s campaign sent out an email on Wednesday begging for help memory-holing the offending hashtags, but advised against their further use, instead suggesting anyone who stumbled across them report such posts to Facebook and Twitter. The email insisted that anyone “calling out the Photoshopped tweets, fake news articles, and misleading posts” was doing their civic duty.

AOC’s neighbor in the building adjacent to the Capitol, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), blew her neighbor’s narrative wide open earlier this week, noting that, despite having her own office two doors down from the New York congresswoman, she neither saw any “insurrectionists” nor heard the “mob” that supposedly put the fear of death into AOC when ‘they’ banged on her door. 

However, this was a reversal of her own earlier attempts to milk the shocking moment. Mace appears to have backtracked on initial claims that she was “brought to tears” that day, having sanded the rough edges off her version of the story by the time she commented on AOC’s ‘trauma’ earlier this month. 

While it later emerged that the “mob” in their hallway was a single Capitol police officer, AOC still clung to her story, initially trying to paint the “white man in a black beanie” as a menacing figure. “He was looking at me with a tremendous amount of anger and hostility,” she insisted, also suggesting the man’s tone was impolite. 

“Right-wing operatives with millions of followers on social media” were “spreading flat-out lies and misleading information about Alexandria,” the memo read, defending the congresswoman and insisting such “hatred” was “exactly what led to thousands of enraged rioters storming the Capitol building on January 6th.”

Despite seemingly never being in immediate danger during the riot, AOC and several of her peers managed to inflict a taxpayer-funded group therapy session on the House of Representatives on Thursday, during which they were invited to “share their stories” and accused any skeptics of lies and disinformation. 

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