Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a knack for forcing her way into the headlines — but this weekend she crossed a line that made even her socialist allies uncomfortable.
During her appearance at the “South by South West” (SXSW) festival in Texas, Ocasio-Cortez told the cheering crowd that America is “garbage.”
That’s not all. She described former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and former President Ronald Regan as racists.
Ocasio-Cortez attacked capitalism and free enterprise, and told her supporters that America has “unlimited resources” that could give everyone what they wanted… but secret billionaires were hoarding it all for themselves. She said that Americans shouldn’t have to work as hard as they do. Instead, they should be given more money and free things for less work.
She also implied that Democratic socialism was a core principal of America’s founding fathers — and that socialism only seems radical because we’ve strayed so far from their vision.
“So when someone’s talking about [socialism] they’re like, ‘oh, this is radical,’ but it isn’t radical,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd. “This is what we’ve always been.”
“I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are,” she continued. “But where [Americans] are is not a good thing. And this idea of like, ten percent better than garbage, it shouldn’t be what we settle for.”
Ocasio-Cortez has quickly become the darling of the extreme left — and Republicans are also eager to make her the new face of the Democratic Party.
“This idea of making her the face of the Democratic party hits a lot of boxes for them,” said Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), about the conservative media’s impact on politics. “She is young, a symbol of the party moving to the left, and she isn’t afraid of the word ‘socialism.’”
“It’s not a mystery,” said Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center told The Associated Press. “AOC is a machine of silly things she says, gaffes and extreme statements, and the impression she gives is amateurism. The same thing that is her appeal is also her downside. She was a bartender.”
That’s not the only controversy Ocasio-Cortez was involved in over the weekend, of course.
Even the way she arrived at the SXSW festival was tone deaf.
The New York socialist was criticized for taking a private flight to Texas to give the speech where she called America nothing but “garbage”… just a few weeks after putting forward a bill in Congress that would ban air travel.
You can see some clips from her speech here —