February 16, 2026

ED MORRISSEY: Too Dumb to Check: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be AOCs.

Ocasio-Cortez tried to take a swipe at Marco Rubio, whose speech in Munich received broad acclaim and enthusiastic responses. She attempted to fact-check a gracious reflection on how much Europe has influenced American culture and heritage by … exposing her utter ignorance of history.

Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to Western culture. My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain. I believe the Mexicans and descendants of African slave peoples would like to have a word on that.

What did Rubio actually say in his speech? “The entire romance of the cowboy archetype,” Rubio noted in his speech, “that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain.”

And he is absolutely right.

Not only did the cowboy archetype originate in Spain, so did the horses they rode in on. Literally. Horses had gone extinct in the Americas for thousands of years before the first Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Spanish explorers reintroduced horses in the 15th and 16th centuries in their efforts to settle the Americas, as well as the cattle ranching that had long been part of the vaquero culture in Spain.

The Daily Wire offers a brief history lesson:

The word “cowboy” itself is a direct translation of the Spanish word vaquero (from vaca, meaning cow). The tradition began in the medieval hacienda system of Spain and was brought to the Americas by conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Gregorio de Villalobos in the early 1500s. These Spaniards introduced the first horses and cattle to the Western Hemisphere.

Cortés, huh?

With a bit of luck though, Gaia will save us all from POTUS AOC:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll