Leer en Español
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was going to be the winner of El American‘s Idiot of the Week for remaining silent in the face of the spike in the immigration crisis, not being as vocal about it as she was when Donald Trump was president, and showing a deafening silence even when images of the terrible overcrowded conditions of immigrants in the “Biden cages” were leaked.
Last Wednesday, however, AOC finally broke his silence in one of his Instagram livestreams. What she said, far from preventing her from taking the Idiot of the Week award, has earned it with honors and plated in gold, platinum and diamonds. She would have been better off keeping quiet.
Ocasio-Cortez, during Trump’s presidency, compared immigrant holding centers to “concentration camps,” and took pictures of herself crying while imagining children locked up in the distance. Now that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are governing, however, she argues that “it’s not a border crisis, it’s an imperialism crisis, it’s a climate crisis. It’s a trade crisis. And also, it’s a carceral crisis.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s semantic gymnastics didn’t end there. Instead of explaining why they used to be called “child cages” and “concentration camps,” while now they are called “overflow facilities for unaccompanied minors,” AOC rambled on about the word “surge.”
According to her, those who use the word “surge” to refer to the increase in immigrants held at the border – which so far in Biden’s term is reaching unprecedented numbers – are “consciously trying to invoke a militaristic frame and that’s a problem.” According to her, “they are children. They are not insurgents.”
In her juggling to avoid acknowledging her hypocrisy, she attacked those who use the word “surge” because “we are not being invaded. Which, by the way, is an idea of white supremacism, a philosophy.”
In other words, in order not to accept the responsibility of the Democratic government in the worsening situation, AOC has started talking about philology and philosophy in order to blame everything on, of course, white supremacists and imperialists.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez succeeds in deflecting the debate.
For AOC to divert the debate on the immigration crisis to the linguistic field is a pitiful and demagogic maneuver, but to do so by confusing the relationship between the terms surge and insurgent is just pathetic.
Although she takes our Idiot of the Week award, we think Ocasio-Cortez is actually very smart, since in a matter of months she has gone from being a sobbing victim to a rabid attacker.
She knows her audience and knows that talking to them about imperialism and white supremacism mesmerizes them. She probably doesn’t mind looking like an idiot, as long as her loyal Instagram and Twitter followers keep voting for her, without having to think about “Biden’s cages.”
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm