Most Corrupt Series- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Politicians are among the least trusted figures in American public life. Voters often view them with suspicion, yet they continue to win elections and build long careers in office. In recent years, one member of Congress has become a lightning rod for controversy, drawing intense criticism from opponents and constant scrutiny from the press. Her rise to power was sudden and unexpected. In 2018, a relatively unknown activist defeated one of the most powerful members of Congress in a primary that shocked the political establishment. Within months, she became one of the most recognizable political figures in the United States. That figure is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC? How did she slide into Congress and remain there? What are her controversies? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army and Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born on October 13, 1989, in Bronx, New York. Her father, Sergio Ocasio-Román, was of Puerto Rican descent and owned a small architectural firm, and her mother, Blanca Ocasio-Cortez, was born in Puerto Rico and cleaned houses. She and her younger brother, Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez, were relocated to Yorktown Heights, an affluent suburb considered safer with better schools. This is interesting since she would later oppose private and charter schools supporting Democrat teachers' unions and public education. She graduated from Yorktown High School in 2007 and enrolled at Boston University. In 2008, she interned at the Foreign Affairs and Immigration Office of Senator Ted Kennedy, where she worked until his death in 2009. She returned to the Bronx after her father died in 2008, where she took a job bartending and waiting tables. She lived paycheck to paycheck with high monthly expenses that included $200 for an Affordable Care Act health insurance policy with a large deductible and $300 toward repaying her student debt. In 2016, Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, served as an organizer for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. In her first election bid, she faced opponent incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democrat primary. Crowley was a powerful Democrat who held the seat since 1999 and had a war chest of $4.3 million. Cortez relied on grassroots volunteers and donations, raising $300,000, and she received only the endorsements of a few particularly far-left-wing organizations, including the Democratic Socialist of America. She promised the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, creating local jobs, and an open immigration policy and the abolition of ICE. These socialist ideas were well-received and she defeated Crowley. That guaranteed her win in the general election as no Republican had a chance and was elected to represent New York's 14th congressional district in 2019 at age 29, becoming the youngest woman and Latina to serve in the U.S. Congress. She soon became known simply as AOC. She has served on several House committees dealing with financial services, oversight, and energy policy. AOC has always been against corporate America, with exception to those industries that supported Democrat campaigns, the greatest being the pharmaceutical industry. AOC's position on oil, gas, and green energy has been consistent. Today is also the day that we choose to assert ourselves as a global leader in transitioning to 100% renewable energy and charting that path. She wants to terminate the petroleum industry, including pipelines and fracking with heavy spending on renewables such as wind and solar, but she never grasped the fact that without oil, you cannot even make those components or keep windmills working, and the national and global economies would collapse. AOC has always been consistent in her positions against mass deportation, defunding federal and local law enforcement agencies, especially Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE. She advocates for illegal immigration and a path to citizenship, taxpayer-funded legal defenses, and due process against removal even for violent illegal criminals. She is especially opposed to mandating that voters prove citizenship to vote with a photo ID, as all are Democrats. Mailing in an absentee ballot is one of the safest ways that we can vote this year, and what's great is that you can do it from the comfort of your own home. She is also opposed to eliminating ballot harvesting, mail-in voting, and cleaning up voter rolls, which are common-sense approaches that even the majority of Democrat voters support. But elected Democrats like AOC oppose these constitutional enforcements, which is how Democrats win elections, and this has been proven. AOC, like other Democrats, claims requiring ID suppresses voters, but she and other Democrats also demanded that ID be shown for anyone attending her rallies and town halls, just like Democrats require photo ID to attend official functions. She doubled down during the first Trump administration in her support of illegal aliens. In one photo opportunity, she visited the chain-link holding enclosures that became famous as Kids in Cages, where she cried, where children were separated from adults until they could be proven to be related. Earlier this week, we were here and we were hearing inside that Capitol, the State of the Union, and the president said something. He said and spoke of the idea that he likes quote-unquote legal immigration, but that is a lie. The president does not like any form of immigration. This started under the Obama administration, but AOC told The Nation that Trump created this concentration camp atmosphere. Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it. These cages were first built under Obama, especially during the 2014 border surge at the McAllen Texas Processing Center. The Washington Post and AP also confirmed that viral detention photos used by AOC and Democrats to attack Trump for inhumane treatment against children were actually taken in 2015 during Obama's presidency, so she and the Democrats lied. Trump's 2018 zero tolerance policy led to the systematic separation of thousands of children from parents to stop child trafficking. If they feel there will be separation, they don't come. DNA tests were conducted to prove familial connections, which ended during the Biden administration when he opened the border, losing over 325,000 children, and see our video on that debacle. AOC condemned the separations of adults and children, but she never mentioned the arrests of illegals who were caught smuggling unrelated children. She supported the Biden open border policy and they shut down deportations en masse and ended DNA testing. She also opposed Trump's border wall. In November 2018, Amazon announced plans to put part of HQ2, or the second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, with promises of about 25,000 jobs and a package of $3 billion in incentives from state and local programs. The deal immediately drew backlash over subsidies, secrecy, gentrification fears, labor issues, and whether a company as rich as Amazon should get public favors. Liberal-owned companies always received great deals, but AOC was against it and became one of the loudest critics. She argued that New York should invest that money in public needs instead of showering Amazon with incentives, and after Amazon pulled out, she openly celebrated the collapse of the deal. What this is a celebration of is that everyday people in the community stood up and they wanted a say in what was happening in their own backyard. Time and other coverage at the time treated her as a major public face of the opposition. Freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, State Senator Michael Gianaris, and Deputy Leader of the City Council James G. Van Brommer were vocal opponents of Amazon moving into the area. She and other Democrats fought to not give her constituents well-paying jobs to fight corporate America. If Amazon or any large corporation created jobs, the citizens would not be dependent upon the state and federal government for welfare and taxpayer-funded benefits. The Democrats needed their own people dependent upon government and capitalism got in the way. I spoke out on this issue to begin with is because organizers and residents of my community were busting down our doors saying you need to say something about this because we are threatened with homelessness, we're threatened with rising rents, we have seen this happen in San Francisco and Seattle. On defunding the police, her hypocrisy rose to the occasion. Her argument was to shift resources away from policing and incarceration and towards social services and community support. The same official report says activists defined defund the police as moving public funds away from policing and incarceration and investing instead in community resources, and it identifies AOC as a supporter of that call. The militarization of our police is enabled by the federal government and I want everyone to draw a direct line between our police budget and our defense budget here in the United States of America because we would not be giving local police departments who are under-trained a tank if we didn't give the military too much money to have extra damn tanks lying around to begin with. But while calling for police and ICE to be abolished, she spent millions from her campaign coffers for private security. In 2025, a fundraising email attributed to her said, I believe that ICE, an agency that was just formed in 2003 during the Patriot Act era, is a rogue agency that should not exist. She wants to protect illegals. In November of 2020, AOC was sworn in for her second term in Congress on January 3rd, 2021. She later voted in favor of Donald Trump's second impeachment for having incited the January 6th event, which was proven untrue, and she called for any members of Congress who had likewise encouraged the insurrection to be expelled. She never addressed the proven fact that Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor Muriel Bowers assisted in the insurrection along with the FBI who instigated the event. In 2021, during her second term, Ocasio-Cortez voted for the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic relief package aimed to help the country recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which added amendments to the Paycheck Protection Program, but she broke with her party by voting against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. She has been silent on the now well-documented Democrat-supported Somali fraud in Minnesota as well as other blue states, with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars stolen. The clearest example was Taiwan. She was asked, would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move? Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, uh, you know, I think that this is a, um, this is, of course, a, uh, a very long-standing, um... Her answer was that this was, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States, before pivoting into a general statement about wanting to avoid confrontation. There was also a second, more embarrassing hit. During the same trip, she said the U.S. could not justify acts of war against Venezuela, just because the nation is below the equator. You know, we look at what happened in Venezuela, for example. It is not a, uh, it, it is, it is not a, a remark on who Maduro was as a leader. He canceled elections. He was anti-democratic leader. That doesn't mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator. Venezuela is not below the equator. It is in the northern hemisphere. She also failed to admit that Joe Biden placed the bounty on Maduro and see our two videos on Venezuela and capturing Maduro. On February 5th, 2019, she said 70 percent of Americans believe in improved and expanded Medicare for all. Not true. One Democrat poll taken in blue areas reached 70 percent, but more established and reliable polling found far lower support when Medicare for all, as well as Obamacare, was defined as replacing private insurance. See our video on Obamacare. On February 20th, 2020, she said Bernie Sanders had never taken corporate lobbyist money in his entire political career. Not true. Sanders had accepted contributions from registered lobbyists representing corporate clients, including in Senate and presidential runs. See our video on Bernie Sanders. In September 2021, AOC made headlines at the New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art event wearing a white dress with the words, tax the rich, scrawled across the back. There was an ethics investigation as to her attire, which was donated, violated House for Ethics rules. The Office of Congressional Ethics, a nonpartisan watchdog, issued a report that she was provided with the dress, a handbag, shoes, and jewelry for the event. She also received hair, makeup, and transportation services, as well as the use of a hotel room for the event. The investigation spurred action when the OCE report stated, while Representative Ocasio-Cortez appears to have now paid for the rental value of the attire she wore to the Met Gala and for the goods and services she and her partner received in connection with the September 2021 event, payment for these goods and services did not occur until after the OCE contacted her in connection with this review. If Representative Ocasio-Cortez accepted impermissible gifts, then she may have violated House rules, standards of conduct, and federal law. This is saying that after she got caught and reported, she then paid $3,000 for the dress and services. On October 24, 2021, she claimed that January 6 resulted in almost 10 dead, by individuals seeking to restrain and murder members of Congress, duly elected to carry out the duties of their office. Not true, as four people died on January 6 itself. Others included officers who died later, and other cases not officially classified as direct on-scene riot deaths, but natural causes. December 20, 2021, she claimed that I represent more or just as many or more people than Joe Manchin does, meaning Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, which was false. Her district had about 696,664 people, while Manchin, as a senator for all of West Virginia, represented about 1,793,716 people. On April 29, 2022, she made the outrageous claim, in Texas, Republicans passed a law allowing rapists to sue their victims for getting an abortion. That was an outright lie, as Texas SB-8 targets providers and helpers, not the abortion patient, and the law specifically bars a rapist from bringing such a suit. On January 27, 2023, she added to her laurels, saying, the largest contributor to the debt ceiling or to our deficit has been the Trump tax cuts. That was false, as the CARES Act, USAID, and American Rescue Plan each added far more to the debt. In 2022, AOC ran for a third term unopposed in the Democratic Party and easily dispatched her opponents in the general election. She also announced her engagement to her long-time partner, Riley Roberts. The irony is that AOC, like most Democrats elected and re-elected, are losing most of their constituents moving to conservative, lower-tax, and less expensive states due to liberal financial mismanagement. Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the most critical voices in Congress of the Biden administration's policy on Israel-Palestine and has called for greater restrictions on military aid to Israel. But she and other progressives have also been in dialogue with the administration on its policy, which has caused her to face pushbacks from some on the hard left. However, like most Democrats, she never acknowledged the terrorist attacks by Hamas and its funding from Iran. She was also a supporter of shutting the government down, but she was not on board with members of Congress not getting paid during the shutdown. As of November 2025, AOC earns an annual salary of $174,000 and her net worth was publicly posted as between $49,000 and $200,000. AOC might not have a ton of cash at her personal disposal, but she generates millions through campaigning. An FEC filing from April said she generated $9.6 million in fundraising, $5.1 million in spending, and disclosed $8.3 million in cash, which she used for private security, which is not illegal, perhaps immoral. AOC also spent $19,000 of campaign money on a mental health professional who specializes in ketamine therapy. The expenses were marked as leadership training and consulting, but FEC rules are strict on campaign expenditures. It's unclear what the sessions consisted of or who participated. AOC's campaign did not respond to requests for comments. So, she uses campaign money for her lifestyle while keeping a modest bank account for Federal Review under FEC guidelines. She has also earned approximately $26,000 from book royalties generated from her publishing ventures detailing her personal story and views. Other revenue sources for AOC include guest speaking fees and honorariums, estimated at $11,000 annually. She is also the lowest Democrat contributor to charities despite her outward progressive socialist anti-capitalist platform. AOC's ignorance of capitalism versus the reality of socialism places her economics degree and intellect into question. She, like all politicians, works over the corporate world and lobbying groups for campaign financing, which is odd since in her socialist utopia, such money would never exist. But then again, she wants to use capitalism to afford the Democrats the opportunity to eventually impose socialism. Once in power, they would not need election funding as they would abolish all political opposition. Now, that sounds more like fascism and communism, so let's just be honest about those illegal immigrants. Ballot harvesting, multiple voting, even the dead voting, and no ID to cast a ballot. In addition, AOC has invested in minor brand partnerships and advocacy campaigns, which align with her core values. These efforts bring in around $5,000 per year. While these funds may seem small in comparison to other figures in politics, they add to the diverse portfolio of activities that fund her career beyond Capitol Hill. However, to be honest, she is not as corrupt as many of her Democrat colleagues who became millionaires in office through illegal insider trading and taking soft money from lobbyist corporations and siphoning off campaign money. She may not be intellectually savvy, logical or even worldly. And although being a hypocrite, she does not have a track record of greed and financial corruption so prevalent in Congress. So, is she corrupt, morally or intellectually bankrupt? We let you decide. Thank you for watching this episode of Forgotten History. If you liked what you saw, please click like, share and subscribe. And, if you would like to assist with the ever-increasing cost of production, please consider becoming a channel member and joining our Patreon page. And thanks for watching.