Politics

Washington Post Conducts Massive Fact Check On Ocasio-Cortez

(Photo: Screenshot/YouTube/Pod Save America)

Amber Athey Podcast Columnist
Font Size:

Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the victim of a particularly tough fact check by the Washington Post on Friday.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reviewed various dubious claims made by Ocasio-Cortez over the past several weeks and found all of them to be false. (RELATED: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wiggles Out Of Question About Potentially Backing Pelosi For Speaker)

The following Ocasio-Cortez claims were checked by WaPo:

1. “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.” — July interview on PBS’ “Firing Line.”

2. “ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.” — May interview with The Intercept

3. “They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle-class does not exist anymore in America.” — August interview on “Pod Save America”

4. “In a Koch brothers-funded study — if any study’s going to try to be a little bit slanted, it would be one funded by the Koch brothers — it shows that Medicare for all is actually much more, is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now.” — August interview on CNN with Chris Cuomo

5. “The reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that everyday American make is a tax. And so, while it may not seem like we pay that tax on April 15th, we pay it every single month or we do pay at tax season if we don’t buy, you know, these plans off of the exchange.” — August interview on CNN with Chris Cuomo

Kessler rated all of these “false” and called Ocasio-Cortez’s claims “eyebrow-raising.”

Follow Amber on Twitter