NBC’s Andrea Mitchell marveled this week that anyone would use the word “socialist” to refer to the freshmen Democratic women, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.

“First of all, none of these members of Congress are socialists,” Mitchell said during a discussion regarding House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s defense of President Trump’s rally this week in North Carolina, “but that is the way the Republican leadership wants to frame this election. They don’t have a Democrat to run against, they’re not running against Bernie Sanders per se yet.”…

As it turns out, both Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are members of a group called the Democratic Socialists of America, which claims to be the “largest socialist organization in the United States.” Ocasio-Cortez herself once said in an interview, “Call me a socialist. I don’t give a damn.” Further, as the Washington Free Beacon notes, an Omar staffer told a DSA representative in 2018 that “[Omar] is proud to call herself a democratic socialist, she’s very excited about this. So I hope you guys endorse us, too.”