Culture

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Dance Video Is Brilliantly Remixed a Teen

"Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!"

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance moves seem to go with everything, as shown by an inventive Twitter account that’s gained more than 10,000 followers since going live late Thursday night.

A new Twitter account called “AOC Dances To Every Song” shows the New York City-based legislator breaking it down to the musical stylings of Beyonce, Soulja Boy, ABBA, and more in a series of a videos. The meme was created in response to a video released on Tuesday by an anonymous opponent of Ocasio-Cortez that criticized her as such: “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is… High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”

A screenshot with an incredible ratio: 7.7k comments and a mere 812 retweets.  The account has since been deleted.

As one might expect, the move backfired; a common adjective used to describe the video — shot when she was at Boston University, not in high school — was “adorable,” endearing the liberal politician more so to her supporters and fans.

Meme-ing the video seemed like the obvious next step to one woman.

Valentina (she asked that her last name be withheld), an 18 year-old who lives in Chandler, Arizona, uploaded more than 40 remixed videos of Ocasio-Cortez’s recreation of The Breakfast Club’s dance scene since her first tweet, which was a little after 10 p.m. local time on Thursday. But her account had already garnered more than 16,000 followers by 3 p.m. Eastern Friday.

Valentina tells Inverse that she had a hunch the idea could go viral and decided to follow through with it on a whim.

“I made a tweet about ‘oh someone’s gonna make an account where AOC dances to different songs and get 10k followers’ and then I realized I wanted 10k followers so I made it,” she said in a Twitter message.

The account’s first tweet featured Initial D’s “Deja Vu”:

It really started taking off when Valentina made one with the theme song from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion:

And what meme account would be complete without some kind of nod to “Sandstorm” by Darude?

All of the account’s clips are taken from the video Ocasio-Cortez was a part of in 2010 — watch it below — when the politician was attending Boston University.

It shows Ocasio-Cortez and classmates dancing to “Lisztomania,” the 2009 song by the French disco-rock Phoenix, and the dance moves pay homage to the dance scene in the 1985 John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club:

So far, Valentina’s mash-up of Ocasio-Cortez dancing to “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” by Wham is the most popular; it had more than 4,000 likes since being posted a little after midnight local time from Arizona.

Ocasio-Cortez has since danced off the attempted smear with her own Twitter video that accumulated more than 1 million views in minutes.

“I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous,” she tweeted. “Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!”

Valentina was astonished by the fact that the video’s newfound popularity all started as a way to besmirch the politician.

"It’s amazing that dancing is considered a weapon"

“It’s amazing that dancing is considered a weapon to use against a left-leaning candidate when American conservatives are flooded with allegations of sexual harassment, racism, promotion of policies that kill people, etc.,” she tells Inverse.

And she plans to keep the AOC Dances To Every Song meme alive for as long as she can. The creator said each video takes her a couple of minutes and that she’s taking requests.

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