“Leave My Mom Out Of It”: Virtual Debate Between Caruso-Cabrera And AOC Turns Ugly

Michelle Caruso Cabrera, former CNBC anchor, has been trying to engage with her political opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for months now. MCC has continually prodded AOC to debate her on a public stage, with little to no response from the reining Democratic socialist representative.

That was, of course, until this week’s BronxTalk virutal debate. The two political opponents finally got into a bit of a kerfuffle via social media after MCC accused AOC of staying in her “luxury” apartment in DC (“with a Whole Foods in the lobby”) while her constituents in the Bronx-Queens district are left to deal with the coronavirus pandemic on their own. 

AOC responded by saying that MCC once lived in a Trump-owned building in NYC and that her family still has roots in her district, according to the NY Post. “This is where my uncle is. There is where my brother is. This is where my family is,” AOC said. 

MCC responded: “AOC says her family lives here. Her mother moved to Florida because the taxes are too high.”

AOC thought the fact about her mom was a low-blow. “You can come after me all you want. Leave my mom out of it. My mom is a widow,” she barked back to MCC on a video posted online. “My mother is a school secretary who makes an hourly wage that’s laid off. You don’t know her. You don’t know what she’s been through. Leave my mom out of it. It’s really wrong.”

MCC then took on AOC driving Amazon out of New York: “We have to have an attitudinal shift toward jobs. We can’t tell job creators, ‘Go away, we don’t want your 25,000 jobs [referring to the aborted Amazon project].’ I’m never going to do that,” Caruso-Cabrera said.

She also noted that AOC voted against the Covid relief legislation last moth. “It’s what you always do. You’re always working on your celebrity status. No bill is ever perfect. But we have to start somewhere and we had to work quickly,” NCC said.

Responding later to MCC, Ocasio-Cortez says “This woman probably couldn’t find Sunnyside [Queens] on a map…”

“Who are you? Where is your family from?” an exasperated and triggered AOC finally yells at MCC later in the debate. “No one has seen you in this community before!”

“Greetings from Sunnyside Queens,” MCC then calmly responds. “My opponent is the one no one ever sees in the district. Let me tell you, the second this crisis started, I started delivering food and delivering masks. I have delivered nearly 3,000 masks and food and hand sanitizer to Jacobi hospital – which I’m not sure you could find on a map, AOC.”

“When I go out in the community, people say AOC is MIA,” Caruso-Cabrera concludes.  

You can watch the full Democratic primary debate for Congressional District 14 here. The fun starts about 47 minutes in: