Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York congressional candidate, is currently on a whirlwind talk show tour as a fresh and wide-eyed face of the Democratic Party.
One of her pit stops in her quest to spread socialist ideology to the masses was an interview with “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah.
In the interview, Noah offered a platform to Ocasio-Cortez to explain her “Democratic socialism.”
“The term ‘Democratic socialist’ has never felt like it has more weight to it than now. We hear your name on the news every single day. When you use that term, what do you want people to understand by it?” Noah asked her.
“Well, I think what I want people to understand is that we live in a society that is capable,” she answered. “We are capable of ensuring that we have basic frameworks where people can be covered by health insurance, can send their kids to college, where we can pursue a very bold action on climate change and save our future, and that is part of a moral and ethical economy, and that we can legislate from that value and, where it is possible, I believe we are morally obliged to pursue it.”
Noah then asked if she ever considered not calling herself a “socialist,” since the label carries so much baggage in modern politics.
“I ask this as an argument I saw, an interesting idea, that say millennials in this generation haven’t been indoctrinated in the same way against socialism as the older generation has,” Noah said. “I wonder if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would say, ‘I don’t mind not being called a socialist, but these are still my platform ideas.’ Do you feel you able to run on the platform and say you are who you are? Which way do you prefer to go?”
Related: Trevor Noah Compares Trump to Hitler — and Himself to Charlie Chaplin
“I think my strength is I’m honest and authentic, and I think even Republicans write letters to our campaign saying ‘thank you,’ and one of the reasons they do that, A, is because getting money out of politics is a bipartisan and post-partisan issue,” she replied.
“Right,” Noah agreed.
“Everybody recognizes it’s a problem. But, then, B, I think people appreciate that I am honest and that I’m not trying to not be who I am in order to get you to like me, you know?” she said.
She added, “You know, I’m here, this is what it’s about, Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, a green deal, that’s what I campaigned as. It’s also important to say that this socialist label is something I think the media cares more about, because I don’t knock on a person’s door and say, ‘Hey! Let me tell you about socialism!’ That’s not how I campaign.”
Noah pivoted later to playing devil’s advocate on the Democratic candidate’s views on offering Medicare for All, free education, free child care, and so forth, by asking how she planned to pay for it.
“But then, the pragmatic side of it comes in, as you said. How do you pay for these?” he asked.
“You always see people coming in with economic arguments, and they say, ‘Look, these numbers don’t really add up,'” he continued. “You know, in order to get health care for everybody, this is what it would cost. That is going to be troubling.”
Related: Running Out of Ideas? Trevor Noah Makes Fun of How Trump Drinks Out of a Water Bottle
“Even if you reverse the tax deal, that’s only 5 percent of what we need to pay for Medicare,” he claimed. “How do you pay for education and all these ideas?”
“This is an excellent, excellent question,” she replied. “There’s a lot of the back-of-the-envelope stuff based on our values. I sat down with a Nobel prize economist last week — I can’t believe I can say that, it’s really weird —” she commented, drawing laughter in the crowd.
(Ocasio-Cortez, by the way, recently drew heat for her “pants on fire” claim that unemployment was so low under President Trump because “everyone has two jobs.”)
“But one of the things we saw is, if people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra-wealthy — for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he pays as much as his secretary pays, 15 percent tax rate, if corporations paid,” she said, trailing off, “if we reverse the tax bill, raise our corporate tax rate to 28 percent, which is not even as high as it was before, if we do those two things and close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there.”
“That’s $2 trillion in 10 years, and it’s … one of the wide estimates is that it’s going to take $3 trillion to $4 trillion to transition us to 100 percent renewable economy,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez’s interview should have every voter’s attention. This rambling nonsense is the future of the Democratic Party.
“So we have $2 trillion from folks paying their fair share, which they weren’t paying before the Trump tax bill,” she continued. “They weren’t paying that before the Trump tax bill. If we get people to pay their fair share, that’s $2 trillion in 10 years.”
“If we implement a carbon tax on top of that to transition and incentivize people away from fossil fuels, if we implement a carbon tax, an additional amount, a large amount of revenue that we can have,” she added.
“Then the last key, which is extremely important, is reprioritization. Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for! They’re, like, ‘We don’t want another fighter jet! They’re, like, ‘Don’t give us another nuclear bomb,’ you know?” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez’s interview should have every voter’s attention. This rambling nonsense is the future of the Democratic Party.
Join the Discussion
COMMENTS POLICY: We have no tolerance for messages of violence, racism, vulgarity, obscenity or other such discourteous behavior. Thank you for contributing to a respectful and useful online dialogue.