In an apparent attempt to divert attention from her friend Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic comments, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unleashed a fusillade against Jerry Falwell Junior, in which she 1) got the facts wrong, 2) misrepresented Falwell’s words, and 3) portrayed his statements out of context. In the words of President Trump, this was fake news at its best.
Falwell, however didn’t take the attack lying down. The two had a spirited debate on Twitter. Despite it all, Falwell invited Ocasio-Cortez to speak at Liberty University. The Christian Post reports:
Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. has invited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to speak at the evangelical Christian school after quashing claims that he threatened her in comments he made about the Green New Deal and his herd of cattle at a Conservative Political Action Conference event last week.
A Twitter spat ensued after Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat congresswoman from New York, retweeted an incendiary clip posted by Bishop Talbert Swan of Spring of Hope Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts, that shows Falwell speaking about concealed carry permits in 2015 following a terror attack at an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, where 14 people were killed and 21 others were injured.
“’I always thought that if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims [unintelligible] …’” Ocasio-Cortez wrote alongside the retweeted video where she falsely claimed: “This was just this weekend at CPAC, the conference attended by the President and members, to 1000s. Where’s the resolution against Islamophobia?”
The clip, however, was from December 2015 following the San Bernardino terror attack, not last week’s CPAC event.
And Falwell shot back a response.
“She claims this was @CPAC last week when it was actually in 2015 the day after the deadly CA attacks by radical Muslims (‘those’ Muslims I referenced) She also deleted the last part of my quote ‘before they walk in and kill us,’” he tweeted.
The dispute heated up when Ocasio-Cortez shared another video on Twitter by Vic Berger IV, who claimed that it showed Falwell “threatening to shoot @AOC at @CPAC this past weekend.”
The clip, however, was shown without context.
Read more here.