Each March since 1987, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Austin, Texas, for the SXSW (South by Southwest, or South By), a festival in three parts featuring film, technology, and music. In recent years, the gigantic event has also become a place for left-wing politicians to build their bona-fides among millennial voters. At SXSW, leftist politicians feel safe to be themselves and say what they really think to a like-minded audience. And this year was no different.
Among declared 2020 Democrat candidates, Amy “Eats-With-a-Comb” Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg — the first openly gay Democrat to ever run for president — and Elizabeth Warren spoke on Saturday. Republican John Kasich, who is considering running against President Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries, also spoke at the event.
Klobuchar had strong words for President Trump. “When I see the corrosive divide, instead of trying to find ways to bring us together in times of crisis, he finds ways to bring us apart. This is Donald Trump, every single day.”
Warren took the opportunity to talk about her plan to break up tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google. “I’m deeply concerned right now, that the space around companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google is now referred to by venture capitalists as the kill zone. Because if you try to stuff a small business into that, one of two things happens: It either gets bought up [when] it shows its worth, and before it can grow into something that’s really strong and valuable, or it just gets wiped out.”
Warren continued, “My view on this is, it’s a little like baseball. You can be an umpire — a platform or you can own teams. That’s fine. But you can’t be an umpire and own one of the teams that’s in the game.”
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Buttigieg, the current mayor of South Bend, Indiana, took the opportunity to get his relatively unknown name out there. If elected, Buttigieg, currently 37 years old, would be the youngest chief executive ever elected. “I get that I’m the young guy in the conversation, but I would say experience is what qualifies me to have a seat at this table.”
Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN Worldwide and the new chairman of WarnerMedia News and Sports, was on hand to represent the media elite and complain about Fox News and the White House. Zucker claimed that the Department of Justice’s attempt to overturn the merger between AT&T and Time Warner “came from the president.”
“There was absolutely no basis to be doing what they were doing and clearly there was a political agenda at work,” Zucker said.
And Zucker had little use for Fox News. After dismissing Fox’s concerns about being shut out of the Democrat Primary debates in this election cycle, Zucker went on to accuse Fox News of being “state-run television.” “I’ve said before that Fox is state-run TV. The question should be, ‘Is the White House state-run government by Fox TV?’”
And, of course, no leftwing event in 2019 would be complete without the leader of the fresh-faced socialist coalition Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). AOC drew a bigger audience than all of the announced presidential candidates. Among other gems of wisdom, the young congresswoman called the state of America in 2019 “garbage.”
AOC took the opportunity to spew her Marxist and intersectional philosophy to a friendly crowd. “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 said. “So, you think of 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 this country.”
A short time later, while answering a question about her “Green New Deal” and a proposed $15-per-hour minimum wage, AOC waxed philosophical on the current state of America. “This isn’t radical. It’s just that now we’ve strayed so far away from what has made us really 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,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “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.”
Ladies and gentlemen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the current thought-leader of the Democrat Party.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video of AOC speaking at SXSW
