Conservatives Slam Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez For Suggesting Ronald Reagan Was Racist
At the South by Southwest conference held on Saturday, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a lot of noise. The freshmen representative discussed a variety of pressing issues, focusing primarily on her progressive policies and climate change.
As detailed by a previous Inquisitr report, her Question and Answer session was “crashed” by television host and science communicator Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who asked the New York representative about her plans to combat climate change, and ended up endorsing the Green New Deal.
“AOC gets it,” Nye praised the progressive Democrat. “We can address income inequality. We can address climate change, if we get together and get to work,” he said.
But one of the topics Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed at the South by Southwest conference is turning out to be a lot more controversial. During a discussion with journalist Briahna Gray, Ocasio-Cortez talked about Republican President Ronald Reagan’s tenure, all but explicitly stating that Reagan was a racist.
According to Mediaite, while Ocasio-Cortez did not explicitly describe Reagan as a racist, she certainly suggested that his policies and rhetoric were in fact racist. According to the young representative, the former Republican president “pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans in order to just screw over all working class Americans.”
Ocasio-Cortez also discussed the fact that Reagan used the term “Welfare Queens” to refer to black women collecting welfare. This, according to the Democrat, presented a “resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, that were sucks on our country.”
Ronald Reagan therefore, according to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pandered to Republicans “already subconsciously trained to resent” black women.
Apparently, these comments prompted many prominent conservative journalists, pundits, and social media personalities to slam and criticize the progressive Democrat. The Daily Wire journalist Ryan Saavedra, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, conservative pundit Larry Elder, author James Hirsen, and journalist Jim Hoft all lashed out at Ocasio-Cortez.
Conservatives Flip Out Over Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez Essentially Calling Ronald Reagan Racist https://t.co/rkau6D5poN pic.twitter.com/2TAKv3BRzo
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) March 10, 2019
“She wasn’t alive when Reagan was elected in a landslide and re-elected in a bigger landslide,” Laura Ingraham wrote, sarcastically describing Ocasio-Cortez as “brilliant.”
Larry Elder tweeted that “black businesses grew faster than white owned ones” during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, sarcastically commenting on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks.
“AOC says Reagan was a racist. WTH is her definition of racist?” James Hirsen asked.
“Ocasio-Cortez blames Reagan for racism,” conservative journalist Jim Hoft tweeted, linking to his outlet The Gateway Pundit‘s article in which Ocasio-Cortez is described as “not bright enough” to realize that Barack Obama “inflamed race wars” across the United States.
Conservatives and prominent right-wing journalists and media personalities are “obsessed” with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, who wrote in a column that their obsession is deeply rooted in sexism and racism.
