Lights on; No one home…
Many conservatives are quite concerned about the appeal and rapid rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-NY,) the freshman Representative from the 14th District in New York. Others believe that the non-stop coverage she’s receiving is driving that rise. The reason there’s so much concern about arresting her growth in popularity is that for some reason, she seems to have become a sort of Messiah for the youngest activists, and it’s causing distress to those who worry about the general direction of the country. She’s a communist, all else being equal, and she’s dangerous in the same sense as Hugo Chavez was dangerous: If she gets too much momentum, she’ll become a dictator in this country. On the other hand, there is a school of thought that she is a creation of the media, such that if the media decides to wreck her, she’ll be finished just as quickly as she started. There’s definitely truth in both sentiments, but should we be concerned? My answer may not please either group, but it’s my answer nonetheless: I will treat her exactly in the same fashion as every other leftist numbskull mentioned on this site: I will lavish her with my undying, unflinching contempt. Besides, she’s likely to be put down by the DC establishment, an event that will only enhance that “Lights on; No one home…” look in her eyes. If they fail, and they might, we may be in more trouble than we would have dared to imagine.
She doesn’t know it yet, but the leadership in both parties in Congress is preparing to clamp down on her like a vise. After spending a whole day last week running all over the Congressional office buildings, and throughout the Capitol and grounds hunting for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY,) and you can be certain the McConnell was apprised of her antics. If you think McConnell is taking this lightly after the last two incidents in which he and his wife, Elaine Chao, (also secretary of Transportation,) then you don’t understand Mitch. He may be a RINO, and he may hate the conservative base of his own party, but he truly hates the sorts of tactics that protestors have been using when going after him, and he’s apt to use all the power of his position to squash her like a bug.
Nancy Pelosi(D-NY) isn’t going to put up with much more, either. The time is coming when Pelosi is going to hammer this twit, if only because Pelosi does not permit dissent within her caucus. Any who voted against her speaker-ship will learn in short order, when committee assignments aren’t so kind to the dissenters. It will also become evident when Ocasio-Cortez offers up a bill. The former bartender is going to need a stiff drink. Cortez has made the mistake of seeming to bad-mouth leadership, and Nancy, Steny, and the rest of the old bull Democrats aren’t going to sit idly by and be supplanted by this know-nothing child. Even Chuck Schumer, over in the Senate, isn’t long going to tolerate her antics. Together with Pelosi, Schumer may together make Ocasio-Cortez regret her early brashness. My point is that media may be making a big deal of this poor, dumb, ignoramus, but in Congress, she’s a small fish in a huge pond, and the bigger fish are already eyeing her as supper.
There’s one reason to be concerned about Ocasio-Cortez, and it’s this: She is being taken seriously by equally ignorant young people, (and here I use the word “ignorant” in its most precise meaning – lacking specific knowledge,) whose college educations have taught them as precious little about the real world as their heroine has apparently learned. This is where the adults in the room can make the biggest impact, and it won’t be on a mass scale. We need to take the time to explain to young people why Ocasio-Cortez is utterly wrong about almost everything. She’s wrong about economics. She’s wrong about history. She’s wrong about climate change. She’s just utterly, abysmally wrong. She actually compared “climate change” to World War II, for Pete’s sake. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that some of us have been less than diligent about educating the young people around us. We’ve left it to the schools, so that there’s very little useful education remaining there. We’ve left it to the institutes of higher learning, where questioning the orthodoxy is prohibited. Worse, we have paid for the whole thing!
Part of maintaining our society that many otherwise perfectly sane adults tend to neglect is that they must exhibit and practice the same virtues in sustaining a civilized society and advanced economy that their forebears had practiced to build it. If we fail now to steer our young well clear, and if we’ve been too late in realizing the necessity of that guidance, we will bear the cost when they join together and become the foot soldiers of this bug-eyed moron. We will have earned the disaster she will inflict on America if she and he ilk ever rise to power. For now, she’s an aberration, but as time passes, it’s becoming clear that she will have company, and what might have been an aberration will have become a trend. That’s the real fear expressed in this argument as to whether Ocasio-Cortez should be ignored, or instead watched carefully: Is this what’s coming? Is this the end?
One would like to be able to say “no” emphatically, but given the course of our nation, and the manner in which leftism has been institutionalized over the last three decades, it’s hard to say that with the certainty one might have preferred. This may be the trend now building, but if so, there’s still time to stamp it out. We may need another more serious talk about how that’s to be managed. All those who ever intoned “Never again!” ought to see in all of this the signs that the old evil is rising again, in part because we failed to completely smother it, but also in part because the one most devastating frailty in human nature is the temptation of the path of least resistance, and we’re condemned to endlessly make war with this ugliest side of our primitive nature.
To ignore, or not to ignore; that is the question, but I wonder if we ask it too late. I wonder if the time to have paid attention to Ocasio-Cortez was when we permitted the radical left to seize ownership of education, government, media, and the wider popular culture. We should have anticipated that she and those like her would necessarily arise to fill the moral vacuum we’ve left by abandoning our institutions to the left. This may be why I’m somewhat annoyed at the debate over how to contend with her: The fact of her existence may be all the evidence we need to know that it’s already too late to save our republic, and that to rebuild anything like the nation we had known, we’ll now need to fight a second civil war. Yes, it is as serious as that. We have permitted our own children to be turned against us, just as the Stalinists had done in the Soviet Union.
Another problem we face is that we’ve permitted the earning of credentials to become a viable substitute for actual knowledge. This is part and parcel of our education system, in which credentials mean everything, but actual accomplishments are seldom achieved. Getting a graduate degree in Women’s Studies is now more important than the question: For what is such a degree used, apart from teaching it? Does it represent actual knowledge? This is how we have arrived at this moment in history in which we have the glowing spectacle of a 29-year-old Representative, with a degree in economics(!) who clearly doesn’t understand the first thing about the subject. This is how she can rail about “Climate Change,” and yet only a bare few in our culture even bother to question the legitimacy of the bodged-together “scientific consensus” that isn’t.
If you wonder how such a monument to ignorance could manage to rise so high in our society, remember that this is what the Democrats have been proposing as a virtue lo these last one-hundred years. She is the pinnacle of their philosophy. Now she agitates for higher taxes, socialized medicine for all, but guns for none but the moon-bats like her who will impose it all upon us. She isn’t the sad result of the inevitable failures of socialism. She is the pinnacle of everything they believe; every pestilent nugget of their incongruous, inconsistent philosophy is spat into the public arena in the form of its perfect human representation: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Fact-less, thoughtless, regurgitating statist bromides, and howling at the moon while she promises to gang-rape the progressive movement, amid promises that she could “give zero f*cks” about push-back from senior Democrats, she is the perfect representative of the mindlessness the left has always favored, and she is here to “run train” on you, too. Don’t beg that she now be ignored. Mourn the fact that when the rise of her ilk might still have been prevented, our “conservative” politicians did nothing, but worse, we didn’t demand it of them. Don’t worry, however, because long before she is able to do serious harm to you, she will need to demolish Chuck and Nancy and their ilk, who are not yet apt to go quietly. She’s banking on doing to them what Barack Obama did to Hillary Clinton in 2008.
While it is true that the media created her, and that they yet retain the power to destroy her also, you should know that the media is largely comprised of her ilk, who care nothing for facts, but only lay their concern on the side of their own propaganda, as the teenagers from Covington Catholic School learned this weekend. I don’t think we should give her more attention than she’s due, because as an individual, she’s not clever or thoughtful or even original. She’s another clone of a type, but the fact of her rise is the more serious thing to consider. How do we have so many young people who are so thoroughly detached from reality, logic, and the wisdom of the generations who came before them? I say it is dereliction. Whose? Ours.
Those who support her seem to do so with a sort of religious fervor; they’ve found their new Messiah. This really is a substantial part of the reason why Ocasio-Cortez could so easily rise to fame despite knowing so little and having accomplished even less: The generation in question was left in a moral vacuum, by the culture, the schools, and most importantly, their parents. That moral vacuum is the space into which demagogues like Ocasio-Cortez are always pulled, and it’s a space they enjoy. Watch her antics to understand that she enjoys pushing the limits. She wants conflict. She has been able to get away with it her whole life long, posturing as a learned person while demonstrating an ignorance immediately recognized by all but her followers.
She is the future toward which we are now galloping, unless at this very late date, we vanquish the failed ideas of which she is now the clearest public representative.
