Ocasio Cortez Rant
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clashed with Republicans as the US Senate voted on a $2.2tn coronavirus relief bill on Friday. She said it was a ‘shameful’ corporat. — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 10, 2019 Ingraham in response railed against what she described as the “continuing effort to beat everything into the ground as a racist offense” in Thursday’s episode of “The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast.”.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to Instagram live on Sunday evening from her kitchen in her Bronx apartment to rant about the Green New Deal, socialism, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and the end of the world.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went off during a House Financial Services Committee meeting after Rep. Sean Duffy mocked the effort of the 'Green New Deal' as nothing more than an elitist fantasy. AOC’s latest rant about billionaires is totally off-base Say what you will about left-wing darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she knows how to get a message across on social media. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to Instagram live on Sunday evening from her kitchen in her Bronx apartment to rant about the Green New Deal, socialism.
In a series of clips preserved on Twitter, the first-year representative blasted her critics and said the world only had “one shot” left to prevent total destruction.
“AOC” ranted about plastic bags — “I wish they didn’t exist” — before pouring herself some wine:
Socialist @AOC mulls banning plastic bags, since she wishes they don’t exist, and pours herself a glass of wine. pic.twitter.com/vKaO0uFHY4
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
As she peeled sweet potatoes, she offered a “special hello to my haters,” noting that she had received death threats, and complaining that people feel “entitled to very private and personal information about me that they don’t ask for from other people”:
Count how many times Socialist @AOC says “like” in this two minute commentary where she shares that she has moved apartments due to death threats (and wanting a second bedroom). Recall, this is an elected official. pic.twitter.com/ffEyX2Kalf
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
“The whole premise of the Green New Deal is that we’re screwed on climate,” she said. “At this point, we don’t even have to prove it — just walk outside in winter in a lot of places, and it’s either way worse than you’re used to, or way warmer than you’re used to.”
Socialist @AOC describes the #GreenNewDeal and tells us if we don’t pass it we’re all screwed and all going to die. pic.twitter.com/MkUl2aG3x6
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
Ocasio Cortez Rent Strike
She predicted that the planet would face “disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,” claimed there was a “scientific consensus” that “the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” and said that young people were wondering, as a result, “Is it OK to still have children?”
AOC also bashed Sen. Feinstein, who was confronted by a group of children (and their adult activist chaperones) about the Green New Deal last week. It was “not good enough,” she said, to tell people “I’ve been working on this for X amount of years.” She rejected “watered-down proposals that are, frankly, going to kill us,” an apparent reference to Feinstein’s own climate change policies.
Socialist @AOC discusses how people should reconsider having children due to global warming, and reminds us that we are all going to *literally* die if the Green New Deal doesn’t pass. She also takes some shots at Dianne Feinstein. *Sidenote: She failed to compost her potatoes* pic.twitter.com/6eWhbTbqqB
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
She scoffed at the idea that “working on an issue for 30 years, alone … makes someone qualified to solve an issue.” She said that people who had proposed more “ambitious solutions” had “not been listened to.” A carbon tax, she said, would not be enough to solve the problem: “If you think that a carbon tax alone, and no other intervention, is going to fix climate change, you’re part of the problem.” We have “one shot,” she said, because “people didn’t try” to solve the problem for decades before. “And now people are dying — in the thousands,” she claimed.
Socialist @AOC eviscerates @SenFeinstein and calls her a political coward. This is wild. pic.twitter.com/ZQQw7Ibixh
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
She bashed “climate delayers”:
.@AOC on Instagram live: 'We had time when I was born, but – tick tock – nothing got done. As the youngest member of Congress, I wish we didn’t have 12 years. It’s our lungs that are going to get choked with wildfire smoke…Climate delayers are the new climate deniers. '
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) February 25, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez also defended her “Green New Deal” by noting that it “isn’t even a binding bill.” She called opposition to the bill “reprehensible,” and claimed critics were funded by the fossil fuel industry.
.@AOC tries to sell her #GreenNewDeal by saying “if it passes, nothing will even happen.”
That’s how you know it’s a steaming pile of manure. pic.twitter.com/6aNaEbmEEX
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
In addition, AOC rejected the idea of evaluating the crisis in Venezuela as a problem with socialism. Instead, she said, it was “kind of an issue of authoritarianism versus democracy.” It would be just as illogical, she said, for people to point to “Zimbabwe or … other failed states that use capitalist frameworks” as proof of the failure of capitalism. (Zimbabwe’s ruling party and its recently-ousted dictator, Robert Mugabe, defined themselves as socialist.)
Socialist @AOC discusses Venezuela. She says that it has nothing do with socialism but rather is a failure of authoritarianism. She then bizarrely goes on an inane rant citing Zimbabwe as an example of failed capitalism. The poor potato she is cutting could be more coherent. pic.twitter.com/IHW8r6pCZS
— Gob Abierto (@GobAbiertoBOL) February 25, 2019
The original full Instagram video is not yet available online.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Last Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) published a parody of herself in a video “story” on Instagram. She suggested that telling Hispanic communities in New York to grow cauliflower instead of yucca constitutes “colonial environmentalism” and that approaches to climate change must involve working with local leaders, rather than imposing one-size-fits-all solutions (*ahem* like the Green New Deal). Yes, this was a real video from Ocasio-Cortez, and not some conservative parody. She is parodying herself.
“What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community, so important,” Ocasio-Cortez says in her stream of short videos. “That is such a core component of the Green New Deal is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context and it’s an area that we get the most pushback on … because people say why do you need to do that? That’s too hard.”
She then attacked one very rational scientific complaint about horticulture as inherently bigoted.
“But when you really think about it, when someone says that it’s too hard to do a green space that grows yucca instead of I don’t know, cauliflower or something, what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with a colonial lens on them and it should be no surprise that sometimes a lot of these projects don’t work out occasionally because our communities are naturally in tune to live in an environmentally conscious way,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“A lot of us are one or two generations removed from living off the land. My family in Puerto Rico in many ways lives off the land,” she added, as if this should make her an authority on agriculture.
“But if I went to a predominantly white community and said, ‘Ok you guys are going to be growing plantains and yucca and all these things that you don’t know how to cook and that your palate isn’t accustomed to,’ it’s gonna being like cute for a little bit but it’s not easy and you need to make it as easy as possible to kind of just flow into these communities and to make it work,” Ocasio-Cortez argued.
“So the way that you do this right is that you don’t come into a community and impose what you think is right. That is what so many community development projects get wrong,” she said. “What you need to do is plug in and find leaders in these communities and support them and also just pay attention to when they’re speaking about these things.”
On this last point, I agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and I think she made a great argument against the Green New Deal. Working with local communities follows a Roman Catholic principle called subsidiarity. The basic idea is that government works best at the smallest, most local level, so reforms need to be tailored to local communities.
This is the exact opposite of the Green New Deal, which sets impossible standards for decarbonization and calls for the mandatory rebuilding of every single building in America. It imposes a “right” for “safe, affordable, adequate housing,” but Americans should be tragically familiar with the kinds of housing the government provides and considers “safe, affordable, and adequate.” Let’s just say people won’t be satisfied, and Ocasio-Cortez’s idea that government should decide what housing counts as “adequate” will strike most community leaders the wrong way.
As for the claims about colonialism, those are both absurd and backward.
First, scientifically speaking, New York is far better suited to the growing of cauliflower than of edible yucca. Cauliflower originated in the Mediterranean and grows in moist soil conditions. Yucca originated in Mexico and grows in arid conditions — even as far north as Canada, but still in dry climates. There is a key reason why yucca does not grow on the coasts, and particularly in New York.
When someone says it is hard to grow yucca in New York, they are not spouting colonialism, but science. Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez should brush up on the subject, if she wants to force America into a new Dark Age by weaponizing the pseudoscience of climate alarmism and scaremongering. Perhaps an interest in actual science will convince her that the alarmists’ models should not be trusted.
Secondly, Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion that traditional ways of farming coming from indigenous communities should be the model for America’s multicultural economy is laughable. Not only do people of Mexican heritage live in New York, but they are able to purchase plantains and yucca shipped in from Central America. Even if yucca could grow in New York, it would be wiser for New Yorkers to grow foods like cauliflower and sell them to purchase yucca grown elsewhere.
Furthermore, Americans learn to cook various foods all the time, and as the economy makes more types of food more widely available, millennials have branched out in taste and cooking.
As a white man who adores yucca and plantains, I found Ocasio-Cortez’s condescending attack on white people’s provincial tastes quite disgusting. Does this Democrat who would remake America’s economy seriously think that only Latinos should enjoy yucca and plantains? Is it cultural appropriation to enjoy food from other cultures? When some foods are Americanized — Chinese food, for instance — cultural flavors are lost, but millennials are increasingly searching for the authentic flavors of other parts of the world.
Tragically, Ocasio-Cortez’s anti-science rant fits well in the narrative of intersectionality. Based on the idea that indigenous people are oppressed, some have argued that science itself is an oppressive Western construct that must be annihilated. It is ironic, however, to see a Democrat — in the name of science — push something so unscientific as this “indigenous agriculture” of growing yucca in New York. Even with a changing climate, that’s quite a stretch.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Parents Wealth
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.