Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's never at a loss for words, seems to have let the cat get her tongue over her amazing insult to Hawaii's patron saint and most beloved figure of honor, Father Damien of Molokai.

That's the 19th century Belgian priest who came the islands, learned the Hawaiian language, lived like a pauper, and spent his life caring for people with leprosy on the remote island of Molokai, before catching the disease and dying of it himself. The native Hawaiians loved him as an emblem of their Aloha spirit and honored him with a statue alongside King Kamehameha I as their state emblems inside the capitol. 

Not an issue for the far-left wokester congresswoman, who singled Father Damien out as a 'colonizer' and an example of 'white supremacy' on an Instagram tour of all the bad things about America:

. @AOC calls the statue in the US capitol building of Father Damien, a canonized saint in the Catholic Church, a part of “white supremacist culture.”

Father Damien died of leprosy after spending his life serving others who had the disease. pic.twitter.com/NVnfCN7EVK

— John Gage (@johnrobertgage) July 31, 2020

See, pure wokesterliness - if someone's white, it's obviously because of white supremacy, never mind the particulars. White, colonizer, that's all there is to it.

And for that, she got a gale wind of blowback from grossly offended Hawaiians (America's least-white state) and all kinds of people who actually know the story of Father Damien and what he means to Hawaiians.

The Week, which is a center-left mainstream publication, had a devastating takedown of this fool, in an excellent piece titled "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez picked the wrong statue to criticize," by Matthew Walther:

In an Instagram story uploaded Thursday, the congresswoman, who once complained about not being able to afford an apartment after being elected to a position that pays her $174,000 a year and will provide her with free health-care and other benefits for the rest of her life, singled out a statue of Damien, who lived in vowed poverty and eventually died of leprosy himself, as a representative example of "what patriarchy and white supremacist culture looks [sic] like." She was not referring to the saint's life or manner of conduct, but to the fact that he is memorialized inside the Capitol while Queen Lili'uokalani, the last monarch of the kingdom of Hawaii, is not.

Ocasio-Cortez is probably not aware of the fact that the statue of the saint is a replica of one that stands outside the Hawaii State Capitol in Honolulu, that he spoke and preached in the Hawaiian language, that his feast day is a holiday in Hawaii, or that he is routinely named in lists of the most admired figures in modern Hawaiian history.

Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner, had even more damning details - his piece is brutal:

While there, according to the U.S. Capitol’s website: "He constructed a home for boys and later a home for girls. He bandaged wounds, made coffins, dug graves, heard confessions, and said Mass every morning. In December 1884, Father Damien noticed severe blisters on his feet without the presence of pain. As he suspected, the disease was leprosy."

Queen Liliuokalani—the very woman whom AOC says they should honor instead of Fr. Damien the “colonizer”—wrote to Fr. Damien in 1881 to thank him and to bestow an honor upon him.

...and...

So the statue AOC objects to as a totem of white supremacy is a statue of a poor, sick immigrant social worker to the poor, whose work was honored by Hawaii's native queen. The statue was created by an immigrant woman feminist artist of color, and chosen by the people of the least white state of the union.

Here he is - look like a white supremacist to you?

Even the normally silent Catholic bishops stepped up, here's a video by Bishop Robert Barron that tells the story of Father Damien for this clown, otherwise hailed as 'the future of the Catholic Church' by the left-wing National Catholic Reporter:

Friends, I made this quick video in response to @AOC. In defense of St. Damien of Molokai: Part 1 pic.twitter.com/Wj92fPBxbs

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) July 31, 2020

It's nice to see one of them saying something. Barron also defended Father Junipero Serra, a man with a similar history to Father Damien, whose statues were toppled in California and whose Mission San Gabriel the subject of a likely arson fire.

Most powerful was the verdict of native Hawaiians - who didn't take the attack on Father Damien well at all:

A Hawaiian Catholic catechist said that St. Damien of Molokai is a “hero” to the Hawaiian people, after a prominent congresswoman claimed the statue honoring him in the U.S. Capitol is part of colonialism and “patriarchy and white supremacist culture.”

St. Damien “gave his life” serving the isolated leper colony at Kalaupapa peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, said Dallas Carter, a native Hawaiian and a catechist for the diocese of Honolulu, in an interview with CNA.

“Any Hawaiian here who is aware of their history–which most Hawaiians are–would absolutely, Catholic or not, defend the legacy of Damien as a man who was embraced by the people, and who is a hero to us because of his love for the Hawaiian people,” Carter said.

“We did not judge him by the color of his skin. We judged him by the love that he had for our people,” Carter told CNA.

And Hawaii's a blue Democrat state, though tha hasn't stopped Ocasio-Cortez elsewhere.

What she was trying to do was pigeonhole the same flawed narrative of Confederate statues being unworthy to stand based on the legacy of slavery, onto Hawaii's beloved chosen saint. And she was also trying to erase Hawaii's history, a truly disgusting thing given the special state's many worthy figures, and given how little people know of it.

Now that it didn't go over well, she's saying nothing, expecting it will blow over. But it shouldn't blow over. She owes the Hawaiians an apology and she's not giving it. Let this be one more reason for Hawaiians to reconsider voting for Democrats. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly what's wrong with them.  

Image credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons