Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed on Friday that her Twitter DMs “finally got fixed,” which prompted an inevitable wave of jokes about hitting on the New York City congresswoman. Among the most common were jabs at conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and his purported affection for the 31-year-old New Yorker.
Ben Shapiro right now: pic.twitter.com/R66j0k6ezF
— Ryan Holman (@realRyanHolman) November 21, 2020
Hey @benshapiro it's your time to shine pic.twitter.com/IwXnfljN4w
— Coping MAGA (@CopingMAGA) November 21, 2020
— ＬＵＣΛＶＩ???? (@lucaviftw) November 21, 2020
Ben Shapiro: pic.twitter.com/eoBtLeRYFj
— Dank Left (@dank_left) November 21, 2020
Ocasio-Cortez and Shapiro have a history of clashing with each other. As reported by The New York Times, Shapiro challenged the congresswoman to a debate and offered to give her campaign $10,000 for agreeing to the event. The offer came just months after the then-freshman politician defeated incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in June.
In response to the offer, Ocasio-Cortez likened the proposal to catcalling.
“Just like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions. And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one,” she wrote.
Shapiro promptly responded the next morning by brushing off her suggestion that his offer was motivated by “bad intentions.”
“Slandering someone as a sexist catcaller without reason or evidence does demonstrate cowardice and bad intent, however.”
The conservative commentator has taken aim at Ocasio-Cortez on many other occasions over the years, which has fueled speculation that he has taken a liking to her.
“@benshapiro totally has a crush on @AOC. It’s cute,” tweeted producer Andrew Kimmel.
“Starting to think Ben Shapiro may have a crush on AOC,” activist Nathan Bernard tweeted in response to Shapiro’s retweet of Karen Tumulty’s comment on the “adorable” politician’s old dancing video.
Now she's totally done for. Newly unearthed video reveals that when @AOC was in college, she was … adorable. https://t.co/EkqXTrQSAo
— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) January 3, 2019
As The Inquisitr reported, Shapiro has brushed off claims that he has an obsession with Ocasio-Cortez and argued that his comments are driven by policy debate. But as noted by one Twitter user at the time, Shapiro’s publication, The Daily Wire, ran five different articles on the politician in the last 48 hours, and the conservative had tweeted about her over 20 times since the prior afternoon. The tweets, the commentator noted, appeared to be unprompted by any specific issue.
Nevertheless, Shapiro continues to make it clear that he does not support Ocasio-Cortez’s political beliefs. In an op-ed for the Pittsburg Post-Gazette earlier this year, he took aim at the congresswoman’s views on the ethics of billionaires, who she argued must give up their power and control to decrease worker exploitation. Conversely, Shapiro claimed that the progressive is advocating for “government control.”
“Worker collectives won’t do the trick. Only top-down government redefinition of the value of labor will,” he said her argument suggested.