Never trust anyone under 30 to remember the generation that told us all to never trust anyone over 30.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just short of that 30-year-old barrier. She’s also one of the soi-disant leaders of the millennial protest generation.
This generation is, according to the New York Democrat, “more informed” than generations before it. In fact, it’s so informed that it’s apparently the first generation to ever question our government or “go to the streets” to do so.
Proof that you don’t have to be a septuagenarian with the surname Biden to gaffe it up in spectacular fashion, AOC went on Instagram on Tuesday to, among other things, deliver a profoundly flawed paean to her generation.
“I think young people are more informed and dynamic than their predecessors,” Ocasio-Cortez said during the stream when she was asked if young people were “to [sic] ‘delicate.'” (She responded by describing them as ‘bada–.'”)
This was taking place on Instagram, mind you, a medium favored by millennials like Ocasio-Cortez and myself, a place where depth, reflection and nuance go to die. Not that this necessarily invalidates that statement but, well, I’m just sayin’. Anyway, it gets worse:
AOC on Instagram live:
“Young people are more informed and dynamic than their predecessors... they actually take time to read and understand our [world] history.”
Um, what?
3,301 people are talking about this
“I think this new generation is very profound, and very strong, and very brave, because they’re actually willing to go to the streets,” she said. “How about that? Previous generations have just assumed that government’s got it.”
Yeah, I’m going to have to throw a flag on this one, and not just because Ocasio-Cortez is casting the young left as a group that wants to question government as opposed to wanting it to grow exponentially. A moderately informed millennial would probably remember that not too long ago, there was a generation that burned their draft cards because they didn’t believe in their government’s involvement in the war in Vietnam.
As for taking it to the streets, here’s a quick YouTube search I suggest Ocasio-Cortezperform: “1968 Democratic National Convention.” As I’m sure she’s a regular Western Journal reader, I’ll save her the trouble and post some of what I found here:
Boy, those baby boomers sure weren’t “willing to go to the streets.” That tear gas was just a minor inconvenience.
A few years before that, civil rights protesters were also willing to go to the streets as the Bull Connors of the world turned fire hoses and billy clubs on them.
In fact, Ocasio-Cortez should ask her Democratic colleague Rep. John Lewis of Georgia about taking it to the streets. He was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday in 1965 when Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark — having ordered every white male over the age of 21 to the courthouse in order to deputize them — turned his charges against civil rights marchers. Many of the marchers were beaten viciously with nightsticks.
The violent footage of the attack was, for many Americans, their first wake-up call to the sadism in the Jim Crow-era South. It remains one of the most egregious uses of government force in American history. Like the violence at the 1968 convention in Chicago, the footage is also available on YouTube.
And then there’s the fact that we’re a country founded on taking it to the streets. The Boston Tea Party. Crispus Attucks. The North Bridge at Concord. If millennials are so “informed,” surely they know about these, right?
According to Ocasio-Cortez, this is a generation that “actually take[s] the time to understand our history. The history of the labor movement, the history of civil rights, the history of the labor struggle, the history of economics, the history of the United States, the history of colonialism. And they’re not afraid to have this conversation.”
Spare me. If one is to judge by Ocasio-Cortez’s answer to this question, history began the moment Donald Trump came down that escalator in the summer of 2015. No generation before them was willing to deal with the great injustices, injustices like, um, actually having to pay back your student loans. They’re going to take it to the streets. Unlike no other generation, ever.
Yes, I’m going to assume this falls under the category of gaffes. It’s a telling gaffe, however. For a member of a generation that knows “the history of the United States” and “the history of civil rights,” she certainly doesn’t seem to evince it.
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