In an interview with New York’s Hot 97 in the summer of 2019 (a year before the George Floyd riots, I must point out) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that “marginalized” communities have “no choice but to riot” in the face of injustice.
“I believe injustice is a threat to the safety of all people. Because once you have a group that is marginalized and marginalized and marginalized…once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot,” she said, before explaining that she meant marginalized people worldwide, including the United States.
“And it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m not even talking about Palestinians. I’m talking about communities in poverty in the United States; I’m talking about Latin America; I’m talking about all over the world,” she said.
Not long after, she refused to condemn antifa’s armed attack on an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington.
.@AOC refuses to condemn the Antifa attack on the Tacoma ICE center; refuses to tell @TheRealKeean if her inflammatory comments about “concentration camps” radicalized the attacker. pic.twitter.com/YOjn0yL032
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) July 15, 2019
Just over a month ago, AOC said that the “whole point of protesting” is to make people uncomfortable. “To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point,”
What if activists aren’t PR firms for politicians & their demands are bc police budgets are exploding, community resources are shrinking to bankroll it, & ppl brought this up for ages but it wasn’t until they said “defund” that comfortable people started paying attn to brutality
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2020
The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable.
Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows.
To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2020
Democrats, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, romanticized and legitimized the BLM riots last summer, calling them “peaceful protests,” and only condemned the violence when it was politically necessary to do so. But there was universal condemnation by Republicans of the violence that occurred at the Capitol on Wednesday. The BLM riots caused as much as $2 billion in property damage and resulted in dozens of deaths, but Democrats didn’t want to offend their radical base, even though BLM rioters literally called for “burning the system down.”
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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