Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stood up for a Republican rival on Friday after he was heckled by an audience member at MSNBC’s town hall on her signature policy proposal, the Green New Deal.
A heckler called former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) a “moron” after he said it would be impossible to pass the resolution to obtain carbon neutrality in the U.S. in a single Congress “with the number of committee references that you would have in the course of that.”
Inglis also suggested progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez focus solely on climate change now and address other issues like basic income at a later date.
“Make the changes now, you moron,” shouted one man from the audience.
Ocasio-Cortez immediately fired back at the heckler.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey that’s unacceptable,” she said.
“And that’s the difference between me and Trump,” she added to Inglis.
Check out the video here:
Ocasio-Cortez later commented on the incident via Twitter.
“Let’s debate, not debase,” she wrote:
Inglis voiced his concern about the GOP’s skewed stance on climate change ahead of his departure from Congress in 2011.
He tweeted it was “good of” Ocasio-Cortez to defend him:
President Donald Trump has infamously called on his supporters to “knock the crap” out of hecklers at his own rallies, as this supercut released by Mashable in 2018 demonstrates:
Former President Barack Obama, however, tackled a cursing protester in the same year in a completely different way.