The Squad Does Its Thing
And by thing, I mean charade.
There was no “blue wave” in 2020. Despite poll after poll once again indicating that a Democratic blowout victory was imminent and pretty much everything possible going wrong for Trump in the lead-up to the election, we saw nothing of the sort. If anything, it was a ripple, not a wave. The Democratic down-ballot was less than inspiring as well: They failed to capture the Senate, contrary to pundit predictions; it was expected they’d increase their House majority, but it actually narrowed considerably; and they badly failed to regain majorities in state legislatures.
Moreover, the 2020 election was not the “referendum on Trump’s leadership” that the left forespoke, as Trump received 10,000,000 more votes than he did the first time around. He also saw significant improvements in key demographics, a surprise that you’d think would be a wakeup call for Democrats after spending the better part of five years compulsively shouting about Trump being a racist threat to minorities only to see him improve upon his 2016 performance with nonwhite voters. He even doubled his support among the LGBTQ+ community. Somewhat ironically, the only category that Trump didn’t improve in was white men.
Just as in 2016, the lackluster Democratic results in 2020 should have been viewed as a major sign that maybe some reflection was in order, perhaps in the form of an after-action review of the party's entire approach to politics. Negative on that front, Ghost Rider.
What actually happened is the insufferable quartet of pols known as “the Squad” — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — took the helm of the party and essentially went on a joyride, indulging in intersectional guff to the detriment of their 220 Congressional peers.
“An existential crisis for the Democratic Party.”
Just after the 2020 election, AOC, who’s known not so much for her leadership as she is for demanding we erect turnstiles at the border and giving the impression that she’s seemingly incapable of speaking below a coffee-inflected pitch and slower than the speed of a Sotheby’s auctioneer, told the New York Times that the party had to “do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country.”
Only a few days later, she sat for an interview with Politico in which she claimed that confronting racism was “an existential crisis for the Democratic Party” and “Democrats don’t want to talk about race.” She also tweeted about how “white communities are getting more comfortable with overt racism” and that “real organizing and strategy is needed that disarms bigotry.”
As Shant Mesrobian noted, the quartet’s diagnosis was “nothing short of bewildering.” According to them, the lesson of 2020 was that the Democratic Party failed to address the ignored and neglected issue of. . . racism.
If you’ll recall, this perceived issue1 of racism2 was anything but neglected. The liberal clickbait #resistance movement against Trump, which was led by spleen-venting, spittle-spattering “culture warriors” like AOC, was obsessed with neo-racist bullshit.
Likewise, the preoccupation with “white supremacy,” a term once reserved for actual white supremacists but which is now pretty much lingua franca in progressive lala land where it’s perfectly acceptable to call your next door neighbors white supremacists if they don’t put up a “Black Lives Matter” sign on their front lawn (“Silence is violence, Bill, get with the fucking program!”), is now slapped onto all manner of things entirely unrelated to race—this, too, started during the Trump era.
For the most part, up until the months immediately preceding the 2020 election, the Democratic Party’s establishment wing managed to keep a safe distance from the more radical sect of the Left. And then spring 2020 happened and everyone lost their minds.
The death of George Floyd “ignited a racial reckoning the likes of which America hasn’t seen since the 1960s,” as the Times put it, and our beloved mainstream media vassals joined their Democratic politician overlords in fully endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement, essentially swearing undying fealty to left-wing agitators and downplaying violence and outright rioting in seemingly every conceivable way possible.
Representative Ayanna Pressley, a fellow Squad member, told an MSNBC interviewer during the period of active rioting in August 2020 that “there needs to be unrest in the streets as long as there’s unrest in our lives.”
The party’s obsession with race reached its apogee when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer infamously led fellow Congressional Democrats in taking a knee while wearing scarves made of traditional African Kente cloth. (It was later revealed in a USA “fact check” that the Kente scarves worn by Democrats were historically worn by rich African slave owners and traders.3)
And the party's obsession with race culminated in a Democratic convention that was almost fully BLM-themed, with PSAs sprinkled in about wearing masks and such, along with brief sentimental appeals from Biden on the need to defeat the Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets and why Republicans are Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™.
Defund The Police
Democratic Party leaders were ultimately cowed into subsuming the Left’s activist faction and championing racial prejudice and even re-segregation under the guise of equity, in addition to a laundry list of intersectional demands meant to further fracture the country.
Much to the party’s detriment, the Squad’s quasi-radicalism now acts as a kind of petri dish for the culture war politics that have come to define our national discourse, an evolution spurred on by the “anti-Trumpism” mentality that still reigns supreme.
AOC in particular was arguably the biggest proponent of defunding the police, despite the fact that 81% of Black Americans oppose a reduction of police presence in their communities—a perfect example of an idea championed by ignorant politicians and the digital mob of virtue-signaling elites on Twitter but with little actual support among the people upon whom it would be foisted.
We all know this initiative backfired very badly, and rightly so. In total, attack ads against Democrats that mentioned defunding the police aired over 180,000 times in the 2020 election cycle. According to a post-election analysis by the Wall Street Journal, Republican ads were especially effective in Minnesota, where Floyd was killed and some of the worst rioting took place: Democrats lost a U.S. House seat and six state senate races.
Worth mentioning is that Squad member Ilhan Omar represents the state of Minnesota, where she managed to underperform her party’s top of the ticket by more than any other Congressional candidate, of either party, in the 2020 election, which doesn’t exactly bode well for her political prospects in the near future.
Republicans had a field day using AOC's rhetoric in attack ads, tying vulnerable Democratic candidates in swing districts to the party’s association with defunding the police, regardless of whether that candidate officially supported the idea (no Democrat in a competitive district actually did). Keep in mind that this association was the product not of official policy, but months of both explicit and tacit support for the intiative and the activist faction behind it by the party’s most vocal, high-profile leaders, chief among them the Squad itself. In fact, according to Shant Mesrobian, AOC now has the ignominious distinction of appearing in more Republican election ads against losing Democratic candidates than perhaps any freshman member of Congress in history.
And what did the Squad think of the albatross they effectively slung across the necks of moderate Democrats who never once voiced support for defunding the police or any of the other culture war toxicities in circulation?
Meh. They were too preoccupied tweeting out their glamorous cover shoots and profiles in Vanity Fair and Teen Vogue, among others, expounding on the “lived experience” they shared with Kamala Harris, and posting hortatory-like photos of themselves next to messages about “oppression” and what have you.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib are proud charlatans. They spend more time promoting themselves on social media and preaching to the Church of Woke with inane, chic claims than they do serving their constituencies.
Alas, given the masses of posturing, moralistic young people who’ve adopted woke principles because it’s fashionable, the Squad enjoys a degree of power as junior members of Congress that was previously unheard of, in large part because they’ve managed to amass millions of loyal followers on social media—popularity that offers them influence, attention, and career prospects that their Congressional peers likely envy.
After all, it’s no secret that Twitter in particular, where AOC has managed to accrue a whopping 13.2 million followers, is the medium beloved by the activist and media class, intersectional zealots, call-out culture dogmatists, and mimetic morons, all of whom should be held to a firm and neurologically imperative limit of 15 minutes of Twitter per day.
Like their followers, Squad members also embrace all woke principles that are in vogue, as illustrated by Ocasio-Cortez’s seemingly overnight conversion to Ibram Kendi’s dogmatic “anti-racism” claptrap and her verbatim repetition during a radio interview of his controversial fiat that if you’re not specifically “anti-racist” à la Kendi, then you are, a priori, racist.4
Tuesday's Performance
The Squad’s most recent charade was a real doozy, let me tell you. On Tuesday, members of Congress staged a protest in front of the Supreme Court (by sitting in the middle of the road; standard operating procedure), where AOC and her colleagues essentially feigned arrest before a swarm of cameras, complete with imaginary handcuffs.
It'll come as little surprise that only after the cameras arrived on the scene did the theatrics begin. Capitol Police politely asked AOC and friends to stand up, whereupon they were gently led over to the shade, handed a bottle of water and banana, and allowed to bask in the effervescent glow of a press junket. Goodness, it must feel so good to partake in Social Justice™.
The Squad drew ridicule online when they appeared to clasp their hands behind their backs while being escorted off the street, much in the same way that perps do when they’re handcuffed. At no point were they told to do this. Nor were any of the Squad members detained or locked in the back of a police car, and of course they weren't processed or put before a judge.
“No faking here. Putting your hands behind your back is a best practice while detained, handcuffed or not, to avoid escalating charges like resisting arrest,” AOC tweeted in response to the deserved tsunami of ridicule.
I'm pretttttty sure that’s false. In fact, common sense would seem to suggest that unless you're specifically told to do so (like when you’re actually being cuffed, not led away like a child going to time-out), putting your hands behind your back and close to your waistband where they can’t be seen — and where firearms are stored — is precisely what you don’t want to do. Imagine if a perp in Chicago tried that. It’s akin to making furtive movements in your car while a cop runs your ID. Obviously, far Left AOC and friends are the sort of people who perform cursory absolutions any time they come into contact with a gun, so it’s not like the cops viewed them as a threat in the slightest. Chicago, though? Different story.
Point being that this was agitprop. Like, literally so. The Washington Examiner discovered that the entire thing was a publicity stunt:
“Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the 15 other Democratic lawmakers who were arrested Tuesday outside the Supreme Court coordinated the stunt with a progressive dark money group funded by billionaire George Soros.
Getting arrested was the whole point of the stunt, Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram post on Tuesday. She said organizers of the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund asked her and her colleagues to ‘submit themselves for arrest in front of the Supreme Court.’
The New York lawmaker insisted in the post what she and her colleagues did was ‘very different than a publicity stunt.’”
Why does it matter? Because every single mainstream media outlet specifically said they were “arrested” and posted misleading photos like this:
In a national poll conducted by Pew Research, racism was ranked 14th out of a total of 18 issues. Number one? “It's the economy, stupid.”
Ironically, support for Trump shot up ten points in Ocasio-Cortez’s own district in the 2020 election, which is almost 50% Latino and over 80% nonwhite.
I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that slavery first appeared nearly 9,000 years ago and became so common around the globe after the Atlantic slave trade started in 1444 that even the Native American Cherokee Nation held African slaves (and sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War). It was NOT the uniquely American depravity it is so often described as nowadays.
This dude, whom I cannot stand, was charging schools and companies $20k for 1-hour “virtual discussions” during the pandemic. The only person in America who is arguably more of a farce is Nikole Hannah-Jones, whom I also cannot stand. Both are massive grifters.
know these people. They are the developmentally-challenged junior-high cafeteria crowd who hated themselves almost as much as they hated everyone else. They've managed to live in bodies that continued developing after age 13 with no effect at all on the brain.