YORKTOWN, N.Y.—Yorktown was in the national spotlight after a social media exchange between Assemblyman Matt Slater and fellow Yorktown High School graduate Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) drew the attention of the New York Post, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Fox News and other right-leaning outlets.
The exchange started with some social media sparring between AOC and President Trump, in which the congresswoman called out the president, who ordered Iranian nuclear sites to be hit with so-called "bunker buster" bombs.
AOC called for Trump's impeachment for bypassing Congress when ordering the airstrikes. After Trump shot back on X, AOC invoked her Bronx roots.
“Mr. President, don’t take your anger out on me—I’m just a silly girl. Take it out on whoever convinced you to betray the American people and our Constitution by illegally bombing Iran and dragging us into war. It only took you 5 months to break almost every promise you made.”
She followed up with, “Also, I’m a Bronx girl. You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast. Respectfully.”
The congresswoman’s district includes part of north-central Queens and the eastern Bronx, where she spent the first five years of her life before her family moved to Yorktown. After college, she returned to the borough.
It was the "Bronx girl" part of the tweet that drew Slater into the fray, with the assemblyman arguing that because AOC spent the bulk of her youth in northern Westchester, her Bronx bona fides are bogus.
Slater posted a picture of a teenage AOC from the Yorktown High School yearbook. That caught the Post’s attention and eventually led to Slater making his first-ever on Fox News.
He told Yorktown News he wasn’t looking for a viral moment.
“I honestly see it as a disrespectful gesture towards our community—I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s acceptable. I’m proud to be a member of this community, to be raised here, to raise my kids here,” he said. “Someone who wants to just continue to deny the fact that they existed here—it is borderline offensive and it needs to stop.”
AOC responded that she doesn't deny growing up in Yorktown and says her time here helped shape her political views.
“I’m proud of how I grew up and talk about it all the time,” she wrote on X and added, “My mom cleaned houses and I helped. We cleaned tutors’ homes in exchange for SAT prep. Growing up between the Bronx and Yorktown deeply shaped my views of inequality & it’s a big reason I believe the things I do today!”
Slater was a Yorktown High School senior when AOC was a freshman, and he said they were on the same track team. While Slater acknowledged that their paths crossed in a general sense during school, he said they weren’t friends and have no affiliation with one another now as elected officials.
He said he made the post because she is “lying, and everyone knows it and I just had enough of it.”
When asked if AOC or someone from her office had reached out to Slater about his post, he said, “No, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that she’s lying.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s constituents don’t seem to mind her Yorktown youth, however. She won reelection with nearly 70 percent of the vote last fall and has been touted by some as a potential presidential candidate.
AOC’s office has not responded to requests for comment from Yorktown News.
After chatter about AOC’s roots circulated online, Fox News was one of many that took notice. Slater was invited to appear on Fox & Friends First to discuss the topic with anchor Carley Shimkus—his debut appearance on the network.
In addition to AOC’s hometown, Slater and Shimkus discussed her support of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. Mamdani serves alongside him in the Assembly and was endorsed by AOC on X. On air, Slater said he thinks the 33-year-old, who identifies as a Democratic Socialist, is “dangerously unqualified, no question about it.”
He added that Mamdani “likes to joke around that we are both red, but different shades of red” and said, “He likes to peddle his socialist views in the chamber.”
Meanwhile, the AOC hometown story drew MAGA influencer Johnson—who was in New York for the NYC Democratic mayoral primary—to northern Westchester. In a video that includes footage outside Yorktown Town Hall, Johnson accused AOC of lying about her Bronx roots and said her working-class credentials are fake. He has also publicly condemned Mamdani, calling him a “Muslim communist” who “wants to defund the NYPD."
Mamdani’s victory came up in a recent episode of The Benny Show with Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville.
“Sen. Tommy Tuberville sounds the alarm,” Johnson tweeted. “NYC is collapsing as Democrats nominate foreign-born radical Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani for mayor.” In the interview, Tuberville called Mamdani’s nomination “a disaster” and warned of the U.S. becoming like Europe due to “mass migration overrun by Muslims.”
It was after covering the primary in NYC that Johnson headed up to Yorktown for what he called an “investigation” of AOC’s origin story. In a YouTube video shared with his 5.13 million subscribers, Johnson said Yorktown has “mansions everywhere."
“It’s beautiful, it’s green, it’s pristine. It’s clean,” he said.
He compared Yorktown Heights to the section of the Bronx where AOC spent her earliest years.
“This little town is the opposite of AOC’s gritty, downtrodden working-class persona,” Johnson said, adding that Yorktown Heights is “well-off, leafy and manicured.”
Some users on X argued that while nice, Yorktown is far from a wealthy enclave. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Yorktown’s median value of owner-occupied housing units from 2019–2023 was $581,000.
Yorktown News reached out to Johnson for comment but has not received a response.
Meanwhile, Slater—who said he'd never heard of Johnson before the AOC business kicked off—continues to call out his fellow Husker.
“You get positive, negative on everything unfortunately, in my line of work,” Slater said. “I would say that here locally, overwhelmingly positive—because so many people know that it’s just all fake. And so, they’re just grateful that finally someone is saying, ‘Cut it out, you’re lying.’”
