AOC: Before you laugh at another AOC meme

“President Trump is on his way to becoming the most consequential and impactful president since FDR, and his supporters are more loyal to him than any president since Andrew Jackson. I am not making a personal judgment. I am merely noting what the polls are saying.” —Pollster Frank Luntz March 2025

By Robin Itzler

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in 1989, which means she is old enough to run for president. Don’t laugh as there are many ignorant Americans who would vote for her.  Known to most as AOC, she is personally responsible for a cottage industry of funny memes, video parodies, and jokes, all at her expense. We feature one today.

While laughing at AOC memes, remember that in the last century two others were initially mocked when they first came onto the political scene. In their rise to power, both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini seemed more like comic-strip villains than diabolical dictators. From Hitler’s wacky mustache to Mussolini’s smirk; from Hitler’s effeminate speaking mannerisms to Mussolini’s standing with outstretched arms on his large hips, imagine all the funny memes and ROFL (rolling on floor laughing) emojis had the internet been around in the 1930s.

In reviewing “Mussolini” by R. J. B. Bosworth, a book which calls for revisiting how history views the Fascist leader, Alexander Stille, writing in The New York Times, opened with:

“Americans have tended to think of Benito Mussolini as a cross between a gangster and a buffoon, a ‘‘Sawdust Caesar’’ who hijacked Italian democracy and led his country to disaster as Hitler’s junior partner. But in recent decades a number of Italian historians have disputed this view.”

In “Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy – and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show,” Tom Phillips wrote:

“In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became Chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.”

In “Hitlerland,” Andrew Nagorski discussed the media’s early impressions of Hitler and the Third Reich: “Yet you had Americans meeting Hitler and saying, ‘This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.’ And a lot of them went through this whole litany about how even if Hitler got into a position of power, other German politicians would somehow be able to control him. A lot of German politicians believed this themselves.”

In January 1940, the Three Stooges released You Nazty Spy! Moe was the first screen actor to mock Adolph Hitler. Later that year in October, Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Great Dictator was released to great acclaim. Pictured: Charlie Chaplin in the film. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, the Three Stooges did a sequel called I’ll Never Heil Again.

All this was a 1940s version of ROFL.

In “How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler,” Dr. John Broich, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, explained:

“But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a ‘nonsensical’ screecher of ‘wild words’ whose appearance, according to Newsweek, ‘suggests Charlie Chaplin.’ His ‘countenance is a caricature.’ He was as ‘voluble’ as he was ‘insecure,’ stated Cosmopolitan.”

Hitler and Mussolini weren’t taken seriously by many people during their rise to power because the media presented them as caricatures; more to generate laughter than fear. When 1945 ended with 50 million worldwide deaths, including the systematic murder of six million Jews, the world had stopped laughing.

We need to remember this the next time we laugh at an AOC meme.