You wouldn’t know it from looking at the news coverage but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually has a Republican opponent in the race taking place in the 14th congressional district of New York. Anthony Pappas is a professor of economics who got his Ph.D. in economics from Yale and who teaches at St. John’s University.

Pappas recently announced on his campaign website that he has accepted an invitation to debate Ocasio-Cortez (h/t DailyWire). “On Thursday, September 21, 2018, our campaign manager was contacted by QueensLatino news publisher, Javier Castano, to confirm a debate between the two major party candidates in New York’s 14th congressional district,” the site states. “We were assured that Ocasio-Cortez had already accepted his invitation, and we quickly agreed,” it continues. The date hasn’t been set yet but a high school auditorium has been chosen as the site.

Dr. Pappas describes Ocasio-Cortez’ brand of Democratic Socialism as “bizarre” and calls it a “make the wealthy pay” scam:

The race in our District has gotten national attention as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been traveling the country promoting her bizarre economic ideas. For example, she was recently called to task on CNN for her spending plan which would cost our people about $40 trillion. That estimate came from an independent (but liberal-leaning) research organization. Ocasio-Cortez is relying on a “make the wealthy pay for it” scam which was shown to raise only $2 trillion for her spending spree. She could come up with no sane answer for making up the $38 trillion difference. In honest, plain terms, that means she would have to raise taxes, fees and even rents on the poor and middle class to get all her “free things” paid.

He also isn’t impressed with Ocasio-Cortez’ foreign policy chops:

Ocasio-Cortez announced that she would seek an end to the occupation of Palestine by Israel (and Puerto Rico by the United States). When called to task again during another news program on the realities of this, she back-pedaled before admitting that she was not a “geo-political expert.” She also had no answer for the vast loss of disaster funding and economic assistance which Puerto Rico would suffer if it became an independent state. A recent 28-year-old college graduate with a Bachelor degree in economics, Ocasio-Cortez has shown a gross level of incompetence on the national stage. Now she proposes to do more of the same as your congresswoman.

Despite his academic qualifications, as recently as June Dr. Pappas didn’t even have a campaign website and hadn’t received a single campaign donation. Given the fact that the registration advantage for Democrats in the district is about 6 to 1, maybe that’s not too surprising.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to seeing Ocasio-Cortez debate an actual economist. Given how poorly she’s done answering questions from talk-show hosts and journalists, I don’t think she stands a chance. Of course, there’s no reason to think it will matter come November. If people in the district cared about economic reality, they wouldn’t be voting for a 28-year-old Democratic Socialist in the first place.