Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has sparked outrage on social media with her negative commentary about the ‘He Gets Us’ ads that aired during Sunday night’s Super Bowl. According to The Christian Post, the ads were created to help people learn about Jesus, including His love and His story, through contemporary connections, but Ocasio-Cortez called it “fascism.”
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.”
Christian Headlines reports that one of the ads showed images portraying children being kind to one another that ended with the line, “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults. He gets us. All of us.” Another ad showed adults arguing with one another with the tagline, “Jesus loved the people we hate. He gets us. All of us.”
The ‘He Gets Us’ campaign is a project of the Servant Foundation. According to their website, the group states, “our goal is to help everyone understand and relate to Jesus as he’s depicted in the Bible with a modern lens of his radical forgiveness, compassion, and love. We feel his teachings and lived experiences are as relevant to us today as they were 2,000 years ago. We strive to provide a safe place for people to ask questions, even tough ones, without fear or judgment.”
Although the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign is not affiliated with any particular “church, religious denomination, or political organization,” Ocasio-Cortez still managed to make it divisive, filling people’s hearts and minds with negativity that brings about heated arguments.
Still, many were outraged at the comment made by Ocasio-Cortez. Christian Headlines reports that some replied, “not one commercial conveyed fascist ideology. But feel free to throw a tantrum that Christians mention God.” Another wrote “praying for the hate to leave your heart.”
Author Michael Isenberg warned against members of Congress making such commentary, noting that “there’s always an implicit threat of legislation, which is inconsistent with our great First Amendment tradition.” Isenberg also suggested that Ocasio-Cortez revealed more about herself in her tweet than anything else, saying that it “seems to me that if @AOC thinks the message ‘Love your enemies’ is fascist, that tells us more about her than the He Gets Us group.”