Ocasio-Cortez Sinks to a New Low by Launching Vicious Attack Against Ronald Reagan
It’s time for the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas — a week-and-a-half-long mixture of music and lectures by left-leaning figures.
You can probably guess which is more popular with the crowds, but it’s generally the lectures and panels that make the news — especially when one the freshest face of the Democrat “fresh faces” in the 116th Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, is the one doing the lecturing.
Ocasio-Cortez didn’t disappoint, either. In one widely circulated clip from her appearance at the festival on Saturday, she called the current state of America “garbage” and lamented that Ronald Reagan “pitted” the white working-class against non-whites “to screw over all working-class Americans.”
So in other words, par for the course.
“One perfect example, I think a perfect example, of how special interests and the powerful have pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans in order to just screw over all working-class Americans, is Reaganism in the ’80s when he started talking about welfare queens,” Ocasio-Cortez told the audience.
“So you think about this image of welfare queens and what he was really trying to talk about was … this, like, really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing that were ‘sucks’ on our country.”
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggests former President Ronald Reagan was a racist and claims he “pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans to screw over all working-class Americans” pic.twitter.com/oxM2QPRgrB
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 9, 2019
“And it’s this whole tragedy-of-the-commons type of thinking where it’s, like, because these one, this one specific group of people, that you are already kind of subconsciously primed to resent, you give them a different reason that’s not explicit racism but still rooted in a racist caricature,” she continued. “It gives people a logical reason, a ‘logical’ reason to say, ‘oh yeah, no, toss out the whole social safety net.'”
By the way, the whole “welfare queen” debate goes back to Reagan’s 1976 campaign, not during the 1980s. Not that it materially affects her rant, but it’s yet another example of how fact-checking isn’t exactly Ocasio-Cortez’s forte.
Also, while the media has always maintained that the “welfare queen” debate was nothing more than a racist dog-whistle by Reagan, it was more a matter of him bringing up the worst abuses of entitlement fraud. The idea that it was racist and that Reagan was pitting the white working-class against the non-white working-class is mostly the left’s spin on it, yet it’s treated by the media as gospel fact.
As for “toss(ing) out the whole social safety net,” this is apparently what calling for an end to abuses qualifies as.
Ocasio-Cortez is also attacking Ronald Reagan over comments made during the 1976 presidential campaign that she says are racist, but at the same time, she’s standing by a bevy of recent comments by fellow Democrat freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota that are prima facie anti-Semitic. Just throwing that out there.
Oh, and furthermore, a country with low unemployment and a stable economy is “garbage.”
“I think the thing that is really hard for people to sometimes see is that when we are on this path of a slow erosion and a slow, slow, slow, just, like, move away from what we’ve always been, we’ll be a hundred miles, you’ll, you know you won’t even realize that you’ve drifted a hundred miles,” she said.
“So, when someone’s talking about our core, it’s, like, ‘oh this is radical.’ But this isn’t radical, this is what we’ve always been.
“It’s just that now we’ve strayed so far away from what has really made us powerful, and just, and good, and equitable, and productive, and so I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are but where we are is not a good thing,” she added.
“And this idea of, like, 10 percent better from garbage, is, shouldn’t be what we settle for. It’s like this, like, it feels like ‘moderate’ is not a stance, it’s just an attitude toward life of, like, hmmm.”
Again, much like every other Ocasio-Cortez oratorial effusion on inequality in America and how she plans to change it, there aren’t really any details. But if you can’t come up with a better plan, well then shush, because she’s the boss.
Overall, this is a pretty good Ocasio-Cortez summation of the vision of the new Democrats for America:
Ronald Reagan is a racist for bringing up welfare fraud, you’re either being duped or racist (or both) if you bring it up, too; our country is “garbage” even with a great employment market and “we’ve strayed so far away from what has really made us powerful, and just, and good, and equitable, and productive,” whatever that may be.
And this is the individual that wants to sign us up for a Green New Deal plan that could end up costing us $93 trillion.
Do you feel comfortable with that, particularly given her view of our country and the paucity of detail she provides for everything?
As for myself, I prefer “an attitude toward life of, like, hmmm,” whatever that is. It can’t be worse than whatever Ocasio-Cortez and her crowd want to bring on.
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