The Patriot Post® · Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Childish Rage Against DeSantis
By Richard McDonough
“It’s appalling that far-right politicians seem to have decided that fall before an election is their regularly scheduled time to commit crimes against humanity on refugees. Don’t normalize this. Lying to & trafficking people for TV and clicks isn’t politics as usual. It’s abuse.” —Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, September 16
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), always in a rage because of all the crimes she imagines being committed by the country everybody wants to join, just accused Governor Ron DeSantis of “crimes against humanity” and “trafficking” for flying 50 illegal aliens to one of the nicest places on earth, the advertised liberal “sanctuary destination” of Martha’s Vineyard — thereby embarrassing all the rich hypocritical “liberals” who immediately called out the National Guard to remove the unwelcome brown immigrants as fast as possible.
AOC added two tweets. In one of these she admonishes the “deplorables” not to call the immigrants “illegal” since they should “fondly recall their last name is spelled the way it is because their great-grandpa came to the US with the equivalent of a misspelled post-it note.” In the other she instructs the peasants to “remember” that “By today’s standards, most US families would have be deemed undocumented or trafficked at some point in their family history” but “didn’t need lawyers and years of processing to come to this US until immigration became a racialized issue.”
AOC is the Boston University (BU) graduate with an economics degree who, during the Trump administration, needing to find a storyline to smear Trump’s excellent economy, said, “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” which tells one all he needs to know both about AOC and about what the “woke” Left has done to what remains of our universities. She apparently thinks that if someone works two jobs, that counts as two employed people!
Based on her recent tweets about the crisis created by flying 50 Venezuelans to the wealthy liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, it seems that AOC did not do any better in critical reasoning lessons at BU than she did in economics. Consider her three claims one at a time.
Her third claim — "By today’s standards, most US families would have be deemed undocumented or trafficked at some point in their family history" but “didn’t need lawyers and years of processing to come to this US until immigration became a racialized issue” — is part of her argument that today’s illegal aliens should be treated the same way immigrants were treated 100 or so years ago.
Unfortunately, AOC’s argument is based on a poor analogy between the illegal immigrants entering the U.S. now and immigrants who entered long ago. In order for AOC’s argument to be cogent, there must be a significant analogy between the two cases. In fact, there are enormous dis-analogies. For starters, the population of the U.S. in 1915 when, to take just one example, waves of Irish immigrants entered the U.S. was about 100 million. Now the population is about 333.4 million, which means that there are entirely different sorts of problems involved in housing, feeding, educating, and medicating these new arrivals. Second, there are these things called “immigration laws” that AOC seems to be unaware are massively different now than they were a century ago. Third, one problem that did not exist in 1915 are more than 1,000 dead illegal immigrants at our southern border since Biden took office. Fourth, another problem that didn’t exist in 1915 are the 100,000 American deaths annually due to drugs being brought in through the southern border. Given AOC’s constant mission to find U.S. “crimes against humanity,” one would think she would have noticed all those dead people at the southern border and around the country. But this does not concern her because this was all caused by her beloved president with a “D” behind his name.
Because of these enormous dis-analogies, among many others, AOC’s analogical argument is very weak. Perhaps AOC should return to BU and audit a class on critical reasoning (if BU still teaches such outdated subjects).
In another tweet, AOC admonishes the peasants to not call illegal immigrants “illegal” since they should “fondly recall their last name is spelled the way it is because their great-grandpa came to the US with the equivalent of a misspelled post-it note.” This is an argument?
The way contemporary people spell their name has literally nothing to do with the justice of current immigration policies. This is an ad hominem fallacy and implicit appeal to emotion fallacy attacking Americans who disagree with her immigration policies: If the peasants don’t agree with her immigration policies, they are bad people who victimize illegal immigrants, so we must let them all in out of pity! Since AOC does not have any legitimate argument for her views, her tweet about the way our grandfathers were treated is just another attempt to play the victim card by using ad hominem and appeal-to-emotion fallacies.
It is not clear why AOC thinks she has the right to instruct the peasants how they should talk. France has official language laws, but the United States, being a free country until recently, does not. If AOC wants to argue that we should replace today’s laws and policies with those in place 100 years ago, she should let us know. She won’t like the result.
Finally, AOC’s argument that one should not call these immigrants “illegal” repeats the familiar leftist argument that one should not call a person “illegal” because a person cannot be illegal. However, when the police call little 11-year-old Johnny, who took dad’s car for a joyride, an “illegal driver,” they are not saying that Little Johnny is an illegal person but only that he committed an illegal act. Similarly, when foreigners break U.S. law to enter the country, they performed an illegal action under U.S. law and are correctly called “illegal immigrants”. Thus, to call the people flooding through the southern border “illegal” is not to say that they are illegal persons. It is to say only that they committed an illegal action.
AOC seems to be in a perpetual state of rage against her country. One can only assume that she learned this at BU on those occasions when she was not dancing. Unfortunately, AOC has no idea whatsoever how to formulate a thesis and argue rationally for it. It would appear that no one ever taught her. Rage is a good way to make oneself sick. It is not a good basis for solving problems. The best-known remedy for narcissistic rage is to grow up.
Of course, Republicans would wait until right before elections to commit crimes against humanity. That makes perfect sense in the sandbox!