I’m 98 percent convinced that the video below is a parody by a conservative soundalike, especially since Ocasio-Cortez never appears on camera. Would even AOC be so AOC as to describe her new apartment as “bougie,” as the video’s caption has it, because … it has a garbage disposal?

But a reporter at the Atlantic insists it’s the real deal.

This clip will merit its own exhibit at the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Presidential Library.

AOC saying she’s never seen a garbage disposal and then proceeding to ask if it’s environmentally sound made me lose brain cells

pic.twitter.com/gV5rKfmxp3

— Ashley StClair 🇺🇸 (@stclairashley) May 7, 2019

She posted that on the same night, coincidentally, that Twitter suspended a popular Ocasio-Cortez parody account.

How can they tell the difference?

God help me, I’m going to half-defend this halfwit: Having been born and raised middle-class in NYC myself, I can confirm that garbage disposals are as rare as unicorns there. They’re so rare, noted the NYT in a story a few years ago, that they’re often touted as luxury amenities in high-end apartments on the market.

This little appliance of convenience has been widely available in much of the country since the middle of the last century, but residential garbage disposals were, in fact, illegal in New York City until 1997. And although the laws have changed, many apartment buildings, especially older ones, continue to ban them, fearing for the health of aging pipes…

Garbage disposals were banned in much of the city in the 1970s over concerns for the aged sewer system. (More creative and gruesome reasons worked their way into city lore. Stuart M. Saft, the chairman of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, said he had heard the police feared that the bodies of murder victims might be disposed of down the drain. And in an essay in The New York Review of Books in 1991, Joan Didion wrote that a city employee had expressed concern to her that people might be tempted to “put their babies down them.”)

Lotta old buildings, lotta old pipes, lotta disgruntled landlords more than willing to cheap out on basic upgrades for tenants who’ve been there for 35 years and are still paying $300/month thanks to rent control. I finally landed in a place with a disposal much later in life but I fear my youthful ignorance about the device so much that I scarcely ever use it. If a stray piece of chopped vegetable lands in the sink and tumbles down the drain, fine, I’ll flip the switch. Everything else goes in the trash.

So her ignorance is understandable. Making a spectacle of her ignorance on Instagram is harder to explain:

I like how we’re supposed to follow her lead in reshaping the entire global economy while simultaneously ignoring that she’s never really been outside of NYC and only recently learned of the garbage disposal and the fact that plants grow in dirt. https://t.co/npen5BpIXH

— RBe (@RBPundit) May 7, 2019

She probably thought that expressing her wonder about garbage disposals was a way to keep it real for her fans, telegraphing her working-class New York provincialism. I feel like that could have been done, though, without coming off like one of the apes laying hands on the monolith in “2001.”

Imagine how rocked her world is going to be when she experiences residential central air for the first time, another amenity verrrrrrry unfamiliar to New Yorkers. No more wall units, Sandy. You’ve hit the big time.