https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/aoc-shadow
To get a sense of how powerful freshman Congressmember (her preferred title) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, just look at her effect on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Specifically, look at the difference between Pelosi’s inaugural speech in 2019 and her speech in 2007, when the California Democrat was elected the first female speaker in U.S. history.
Back then, Pelosi offered several tributes to American soldiers fighting in Iraq. We must honor our military, veterans and first responders as “the heroes that they are,” she graciously offered. That sentiment was met with a rousing standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. The question of climate change—then gaining attention as a key issue thanks to Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” released the year before—merited only one sentence.
But Pelosi’s message on Thursday was almost directly and proportionately reversed. After an obligatory shout-out to our troops and their families, Pelosi urged her colleagues to face “the existential crisis of our time, the climate crisis, a crisis manifested in natural disasters of epic proportions.” (A claim that is patently false, but unlikely to be scrutinized by the media’s biased fact-checkers.)
A new select committee on climate change would be convened, Pelosi announced, to “put an end to the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.” The cure for the working class would be the creation of green jobs from sea to shining sea, she promised. Pelosi’s Democratic subjects rose to applaud her.
The military earned one other brief mention at the end of her speech, and the existential threat of Islamic terrorism officially was replaced by carbon dioxide emissions.
Even though the wealthy, septuagenarian from San Francisco now wields the speaker’s gavel, it is the bartender-turned-representative Millennial from the Bronx who possesses the power. Cortez essentially is this Congress’s shadow speaker, agitating the Democrats’ policy agenda and creating her own caucus of diverse, radical soulmates. Further, she is the poster girl for a left-lurching Democratic Party. Democrats now view socialism more positively than capitalism, according to an August 2018 poll and also want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service as they impeach the president.
Ocasio-Cortez is earning the media attention and adoration other politicians can only dream of having. Hours before she was sworn-in on January 3, a cute video surfaced of Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends in college—putting an “I’m just like you” face on her dangerous left-wing ideology. Her Twitter posts go viral immediately; other politicians now are trying to emulate her unpretentious approach on social media, such as when she whips up a quick dinner while talking about political issues to her 1.3 million Instagram followers. (In a cringe-worthy Instagram video this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren popped open a beer in her kitchen and chatted about her newly-formed presidential exploratory committee. Let’s just say it didn’t go over as her handlers had hoped.)
But Ocasio-Cortez is more than a pretty face with a devoted social media following. Armed with a hubris born out of inexperience and a leftist worldview born out of economic and historical ignorance, Ocasio-Cortez’s real charm is that she is unafraid to confront the old-guard leadership on Capitol Hill.
Her raison d’etre is human-caused climate change, the refuge of international socialists for the past three decades. Every means to dramatically alter the way people live—the mendacious objective of the Left—can be masqueraded as a noble desire to save the planet. Climate change largely was ignored by both Republican and Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2018; in fact, most climate-mitigation ballot proposals were defeated across the country in November. But thanks to Ocasio-Cortez’s aggressive activism—and hundreds of millions in political contributions flowing from billionaire environmentalists—it’s likely that issue will take center stage in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
