Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is giving as good as she gets in an ongoing Twitter spat with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
The back-and-forth started when Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday pointed out the parallels between migrants fleeing violence in Central America and other instances in the past century of people “asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status” ― including “Jewish families fleeing Germany.”
Graham tweeted the next day that Ocasio-Cortez should “take a tour of the Holocaust Museum in DC. Might help her better understand the differences between the Holocaust and the caravan in Tijuana.”
The latest salvo came Monday evening, when Ocasio-Cortez replied: “The point of such a treasured museum is to bring its lessons to [the] present day.”
“This administration has jailed children and violated human rights. Perhaps we should stop pretending that authoritarianism + violence is a historical event instead of a growing force,” she wrote.
On Sunday, U.S. border agents fired tear gas on hundreds of migrants protesting near Tijuana, Mexico, many of whom were trying to get through the wire and fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border there in an effort to seek asylum. The border was temporarily closed following the incident.
In her tweets to Graham on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez offered a museum suggestion of her own. “I heard your ‘joke’ about ethnic DNA preferences last month,” she wrote. “Perhaps you would enjoy a visit (or revisit) to the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture... It’s a great educational experience.”
Ocasio-Cortez was referring to an October appearance by Graham on “Fox & Friends,” where he awkwardly quipped about what a DNA test could potentially reveal about his ancestry.
“I’ll probably be Iranian,” he said at the time. “That would be, like, terrible.”