Speaking at a press conference on Friday of last week, Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who won a surprising upset victory over a long-time Democratic incumbent U.S. representative in the Democratic primary, continues to make news with her grandiose remarks. She then won, as expected, over the Republican opponent in the heavily Democrat district.
“We’ve done what was impossible,” she told a small crowd at the Sunshine Movement, a radical environmentalist group that is supposedly motivated by “global warming.” “We went to the moon. We electrified the nation. We established civil rights. We enfranchised the country. We dig deep, and we did it. We did it when no one else thought that we could. That’s what we did when we won an election this year.” (Emphasis added.)
While her low-budget congressional race leading to a victory over a fellow Democrat was not expected, it was certainly not something to be compared to going to the moon. One would think that Americans who suffered violations of their civil rights simply because of race believe the advances made by African-Americans over the past few decades somewhat more important than the election of one member of Congress. Electrification certainly is of greater importance than the win of one socialist in New York.
Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the radical leftist group Justice Democrats. Conjuring up memories of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era programs, she is calling for a “green” New Deal to fight global warming, or as they sometimes prefer to call it now, “climate change.” Of course, considering that Roosevelt’s New Deal was an utter failure at ending the Great Depression, one wonders if her environmentalist “New Deal” would be similarly ineffective at dealing with global warming.
What FDR’s New Deal was successful at doing, however, was increasing the size, scope, and power of the federal government, and one suspects that is the real goal of the radical environmentalists such as Ocasio-Cortez, only this time on a scale that would usher in a world government invested with great power over our daily lives.
Leftists such as Ocasio-Cortez have long been given to hyperbole as a way of advancing their cause. They take a high view of their own self-importance. One might recall Bill Clinton and Al Gore claiming, “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” and comparably haughty statements made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Taking it back even further, the radicals who plunged France into a horrifically bloody revolution in 1789 believed they had achieved something of such great historical significance that the very calendar should reflect it.
As part of a larger effort to de-Christianize France, which included pillaging and closing of churches (and reopening them as “temples” of reason), the French radicals tried to abolish the “Christian” calendar, which was based upon the Incarnation of Christ as history’s greatest event. On October 5, 1793, the new calendar established the year of the adoption of the revolutionary constitution as the new demarcation of time. American radicals would probably like to do something similar to the Christian calendar in this country, but they just do not have the power to do so — yet.
Radicals such as Ocasio-Cortez are the ideological heirs of the French Revolution, and they share the same inflated idea of self-importance, without the guillotine (so far).
A little perspective on what Ocasio-Cortez actually accomplished is in order. In her surprising primary victory, she only polled 15,897 votes in a congressional district with 214,750 active registered Democrats, of which fewer than 28,000 bothered to vote. While she certainly deserves credit for a running a good campaign, it is obvious that her incumbent opponent was grossly over-confident and the Democrats in her district were incredibly apathetic. And, of course, no Republican could have won in the overwhelmingly Democrat district in New York.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was among those who ridiculed Ocasio-Cortez’s grandiose comments. “Ocasio-Cortez compares her election to moon landing,” he tweeted. “Huh? Big difference. Moon landing was LUNAR, not LOONEY; Moon landing done by ppl [people] who knew what they were doing … those who elected someone who thought there were branches of Congress did NOT.”
Huckabee’s last reference was to a recent tweet by Ocasio-Cortez in which she commented on the “Three chambers of Congress,” before ‘correcting’ herself to say, “three chambers of government,” which she mistakenly identified as the House, the Senate, and the presidency, neglecting to include the judicial branch (not chamber). At the time, Ocasio-Cortez attempted to redirect attention away from her gaffe to remarks about health care. Huckabee was not the first to poke fun at her mistake, and likely will not be the last.
She quickly responded to the former governor of Arkansas with some barbs of her own, telling him to “Leave the false statements to Sarah Huckabee [Huckabee’s daughter, who actually goes by her married name of Sanders, and serves as press secretary to President Donald Trump]. She added, “Also, you haven’t been a Governor of any state for 10+ years now.”
We should add a word of caution to those who consider Ocasio-Cortez an uninformed radical leftist. She is that for sure, but her views are shared — unfortunately — by far too many Americans. Many French in the late 1700s no doubt considered the views of the Jacobins, the Illuminati, and other radical secret societies in France to be as “looney” as those of Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow leftists, until the madness began.
It is really no laughing matter.
Photo: AP Images
