Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested during a talk on Saturday that America is “garbage” and that former President Ronald Reagan presented a “racist” vision of the country that “pitted” white working class people against minorities in order “to screw over all working-class Americans.”
Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks while speaking at the left-leaning South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas.
“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,” Ocaiso-Cortez said. “So you think about 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 our country.”
“And it’s this whole tragedy of the commons type of thinking where it’s like because these one, this one specific group of people, that you are already kind of subconsciously primed to resent, you give them a different reason that’s not explicit racism but still rooted in a racist caricature,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “It gives people a logical reason, a ‘logical’ reason to say, ‘oh yeah, no, toss out the whole social safety net.'”
