Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Coming for Your Hamburgers! | The New Yorker
Right-winger Sebastian Gorka stated about her Green New Deal that "They want to take your pickup truck! They want to rebuild your home! They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved!" He also stated that the GND is like a "watermelon": "green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside."
Donald Trump himself at the CPAC: "New Green Deal or whatever they hell they call it . . . I encourage it" and "I think it’s really something Democrats should promote. . . . No planes! No energy! When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’"
“Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “What’s humorous to me is that we’re finally proposing a clear, ambitious, but necessary and grounded policy on the scale of the problem. And so it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level. Ted Cruz says we want to ‘kill all the cows.’ How far have we slid in our discourse? But that’s what half our political representation is up to.”
Jerry Falwell, Jr. at CPAC: "Every time she opens her mouth, I think she’s kidding." Ed Rollins: she is a "little girl". Some Fox News people find it funny to mispronounce her name.
“It feels like an extra job,” she said of the attacks. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me.”
Like that would-be terrorist Coast-Guard lieutenant.
Ocasio-Cortez says that she has tried to keep her focus partly by avoiding watching Trump on television: “He relies and thrives on attention, and so the less attention he’s given, even if it’s just one set of eyeballs, the weaker he is.” She said that watching Trump in the House chamber at the State of the Union address made her feel “sick” and “underwhelmed.”
“He is such a small, mediocre person,” she told me. “I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”
Then her Green New Deal and its sense of urgency.
... In an interview after her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez told me that one of the books she read in college that influenced her most was Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “Why We Can’t Wait,” which includes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” There King wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
“I think King had a point,” she told me
Moderate efforts have not been very successful in fighting the effects of increased atmospheric CO2, and right-wing global-warming denial certainly hasn't. Some of those deniers say the more the better about CO2. Though the Earth was often warmer than today in its past, it warmed only gradually, and fast bouts of global warming are implicated in some mass extinctions, like the end-Permian one. Going further, Venus's atmosphere is mostly CO2, and that planet has a horrible greenhouse effect.
Agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s solutions or not, it’s to her credit that, in such a short time, she has helped change the terms of the debate. “Radicalism pushes the bonds of what liberals will jump on board with,” Saikat Chakrabarti, the representative’s chief of staff, said. “Every major social movement has worked that way.”
The Republicans have a familiar playbook: brand the Democrats left-wing extremists, no matter how moderate they might be. Thus, Republicans and right-wingers have made Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and others seem like horrible Stalinist left-wing ogres.
The article's author suggests that pResident tRump might join other Republicans and right-wingers in demonizing his fellow New Yorker. But she grew up without great privilege, she is not a honky, and she is a woman.
And, “In politics,” as Ashley Reese wrote for Jezebel, “women are often either characterized as hideous harpies like Hillary Clinton or pretty idiots whose ‘craziness’ is bound up with their sex appeal. . . . To her critics, Ocasio-Cortez is firmly in the pretty idiot category.”
When I read that to Ocasio-Cortez, she could only agree. “I feel like I predicted it from day one,” she told me. “The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with. But I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy.”
Was that the case with Trump? I asked.
“I can see Trump being enormously upset that a twenty-nine-year-old Latina, who is the daughter of a domestic worker, is helping to build the case to get his financial records. I think that adds insult to injury to him.”
Her staff members sometimes argue about whether she is getting overexposed, whether she is trying to do too much or get too far ahead of the debate.
“When there is a fire, there are the people who run toward the fire and people who run away,” she told me last year. “I want to be with the people who run toward it.”
When I recalled that line, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It still feels terrifying every time. I am trying to pick my battles, but, until there are more people running toward the fire, it’s hard to take a break. The good news is that there seems like more people are running toward the fire. It’s scary running into a burning building. But what is the choice? It can’t be understated how imperilled our democracy is right now.”
If they saw how many goldfish snacks were in this thing they’d say I was killing the ocean too… https://t.co/Iol5hbFLa5"
Apparently using present technology means I can’t fight for new jobs, investing in infrastructure, & renewable energy. 
… https://t.co/3GYhAfrFsr"
… https://t.co/RkwmhqfjuL"
Let me guess: no apology is necessary here, because they’ve simply been “misunderstood.”… https://t.co/fiDqNQu9gb"