In an interview with the New Yorker published on Monday, far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) blamed surging thefts in New York City on the expiration of the child tax credit and vague “environments of violence.”

AOC said she has been told by “hospitals, doctors and social workers” that the increase in violence is mainly being caused by young men. Why this should come as news to her is a mystery, since young men have always been the source of most criminal violence.

“And we allow the discourse to make it sound as though it’s, like, these shady figures in the bush jumping out from a corner. These are young men. These are boys. We’re also not discussing the mental health crisis that we are experiencing as a country as a result of the pandemic,” she said.

A pandemic manufactured and exploited by AOC’s party.

Then she pointed out that the child tax credit expired on Dec. 31 “and now people are stealing baby formula.”

“We don’t want to have that discussion. We want to say these people are criminals or we want to talk about “people who are violent,” instead of ‘environments of violence,’ and what we’re doing to either contribute to that or dismantle that,” the reality-challenged congresswoman said.

Violent crime isn’t surging across America because desperate young mothers can’t afford baby formula. It’s not the result of “environments of violence”; indeed, it is the violent criminals she doesn’t want to talk about who create “environments of violence,” not the other way around.

Surging violence is the direct result of the Democrat Party’s war on law enforcement and its “criminal reform” policies that greatly reduce or eliminate any consequences for committing violent crime. That’s the discussion AOC doesn’t want to have.