Joe Hildebrand: How AOC deleting her pronouns has offered a beacon of hope in woke US

If the Democrats do their walk of shame, learn their lesson and start to listen to ordinary people instead of lecturing them, then people like AOC might just be AOK, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Alexandria the city was founded in Egypt in 331BC by Alexander the Great.

Its famous lighthouse was a beacon for sailors in search of safe harbour and its famous library was a beacon for scholars in search of reason.

Alexandria the congresswoman was born in New York in 1989AD to Puerto Rican parents.

She is no great fan of dead white males – despite being named after one – but has also provided a beacon for safety and reason.

Indeed, she may have just saved the Democratic Party and re-established rationality in the greatest democracy on Earth.

And how did she accomplish this herculean feat of restoring peace and sanity to Western civilisation?

I’m glad you asked.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Picture: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images/AFP

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deleted her pronouns.

Yes, hold on to your hats and strap yourselves in: The youngest woman to ever serve in the US Congress is no longer a “she/her”.

Or rather she still is, she just no longer feels the need to tell everybody.

When AOC removed her pronouns from her X profile, she fortunately did not appear to have caused any confusion over her status as a female. Others are not always as lucky. Picture: iStock

Thus the firebrand AOC has removed this once vital recognition tool from her X profile.

In a heartening sign, this does not appear to have caused any confusion over her status as a female.

Chances are if your name is Alexandria – as opposed to Alexander – you are probably a she/her unless otherwise advised.

Other names are not so lucky. Consider the poor fates of Ashleys and Ashleighs across the ages, or the endless explainings of Vivians and Viviens and Viviennes, let alone the Caseys and Kaseys.

And that’s before you even get to the Taylors.

But fortunately for most people, it is unnecessary to launch a pre-emptive strike on what others must call them.

While some on the hard edge of the Donald Trump rump are no doubt fiercely anti-gay or anti-trans, the vast majority of the tens of millions who voted him in simply do not care. Picture: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

If you are a boy named Sue, as the pioneering progressive Johnny Cash once envisaged, by all means give your prospective dinner party guests a heads-up.

If not, it probably doesn’t matter.

This is the hard lesson that the Democrats learned in their obliteration at the hands of Donald Trump.

Some on the hard edge of the Trump rump are no doubt fiercely anti-gay or anti-trans, but the vast majority of the tens of millions in the middle who voted him in – along with both houses of Congress – simply do not care.

For them, the progressive Left’s recent obsession with enunciating their pronouns is just another example of how out of touch overeducated elites are with their everyday economic concerns.

If you are struggling to put food on the table and losing money hand over foot to ever-skyrocketing prices, you don’t have the time, energy or inclination to even think about the navel-gazing of identity politics that more privileged people obsess over.

AOC has assumed a problem she simply does not have – but this is a beacon of hope. Picture: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP

AOC is the AOCanary in the AOCoalmine.

She is not a trans woman whose social life depends on eliminating confusion or awkward conversations.

She is assuming a problem she simply does not have.

Talk about cultural appropriation!

And predictably, as with all virtue-signalling that is in fact wholly self-serving, it was Orwellianly disguised as a form of public service: “All these trans people are telling everybody they are she/him, therefore I must tell everybody I am she/her.”

Come again?

You could not conceive of a more boring, self-obsessed, whitebread bandwagon if you tried.

And that is the story of the modern elite cultural left in a nutshell: Self-centred, censorious, agonisingly earnest and always looking for other people’s causes to cannibalise.

AOC and the omnicause could have just let trans people use whatever pronouns they wanted.

But no, it was vital that they too proclaimed their own gender identity.

Except now it’s suddenly not vital at all.

Apparently pronouns don’t matter any more, so AOC has deleted hers from X – something that would have been a hate crime in 2023.

The exact timing of and reason for this has been pored over in an article in the august periodical Newsweek, which in itself speaks volumes about modern American politics.

In fact, there is only one reason that politicians do things: political reasons.

Just as it is dawning on the Democrats that their out-of-touch wokism is killing them, so too was AOC presumably advised by campaign HQ that her pronouns weren’t turning the tide in working-class middle America.

Believe it or not, this is a good sign – a beacon of hope.

It means the Democrats are finally realising how toxic their cheerleaders of smug east and west-coast elites are to everyday people struggling to make ends meet.

If they do their walk of shame, learn their lesson and start to listen to ordinary people instead of lecturing them, then people like AOC might just be AOK.

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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: How AOC deleting her pronouns has offered a beacon of hope in woke US