Tag Archive for: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The Delusional Premises of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

“Do we see largely that it’s the global south and communities of color that may be bearing the brunt of the initial havoc from climate change? – Without a doubt. – And in terms of that wealth, the people that are producing climate change, the folks that are responsible for the largest amount of emissions, or communities or corporations, they tend to be predominantly white, correct? – Yes, and every study backs that up.”
– Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Congressional Hearings on Climate and Race, October 2019

Welcome to yet another example of the nexus between climate change alarm and a socialist redistribution agenda that relies on fueling racial resentment. That may be old news to those of us paying attention, but thanks to birdbrained stooges like “AOC,” the blatant race baiting rhetoric is being turned up a notch.

And why not? If you’re a socialist, or a globalist, there is only upside to tagging nations of European heritage with guilt for the problems facing their “communities of color,” or the problems in the rest of the non-European world. It would be far too painful to consider the alternative explanation, which is that socialism, in all of its antecedents and derivatives, is the primary cause of the societal afflictions that plague “people of color” both in America and abroad.

Deconstructing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s convoluted logic isn’t intellectually hard, but the implications are hard indeed, at least for anyone who shares her delusional world view. Her arguments rest on three premises that build upon one another, and all of them are easily shattered by hard facts. Those premises are the following: White racism is pervasive and explains income inequality, climate change is an ongoing catastrophe that primarily harms “people of color,” and socialism is the solution.

To get the most obviously flawed premise out of the way first, examine the plight of “communities of color” both locally and globally. The immediate fact that destroys this premise is that there are examples of “communities of color” that are prosperous and thriving. Most of East Asia falls into that category. As for the “global south,” Singapore comes to mind. Sitting just one degree north of the equator, it is a sun drenched, monsoon swept city, situated in the absolute heart of the tropics.

Singapore’s success comes despite it being a multicultural nation overwhelmingly populated by “people of color, coping with a supposedly hideous legacy of colonial oppression; its territory is a steaming jungle with no natural resources. Yet it is one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.

You can look to communities within America and make the same myth busting observations. According to a 2018 study conducted by Pew Research, the richest ethnic group in the United States are Indian Americans, with a median household income just over $100,000 per year. And according to U.S. Census Bureau data, “the median income for households led by someone of Nigerian ancestry, for example, was $68,658 in 2018, compared with $61,937 for U.S. households overall.”

Why? Why do some “communities of color” thrive, outpacing whites in education and income, while others do not? Could it be that those communities that are relatively unsuccessful are not victims of racism? After all, if that were true, why in America are people of Asian, East Indian, and Nigerian descent, along with many other ” communities of color,” evidently exempt from the impact of racism?

Could it be that socialism, or its antecedents – welfare, unionized public education, affirmative action, leftist indoctrination, a victim mentality, and the pure, venal corruption that plagues big Democrat ran cities in America – have combined to all but destroy these “communities of color?” Destroyed their families. Destroyed their work ethic. Destroyed their faith in themselves, their faith in their community, their faith in America itself? There is no “racism” in any of that. Or to put it more precisely: in all these policies promoted by or associated with Democrats, there is none of the white, conservative, Republican sort of racism that seems to concern AOC.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may look at her reflection in the mirror, and believe herself to be a crusader for social justice and a “green new deal,” but in fact she is becoming part of a rich, grasping, inter-generational gang of parasites who build their careers and their bureaucratic empires by spouting racist, quasi-Marxist trash to keep down the people they claim to care about. AOC’s predecessors have not only created the poverty they claim they’re fighting, they need that poverty the way a virus needs a host.

The other flawed premise, fundamental to the socialist goal of global redistribution of wealth, is “climate change,” once known as global warming. The “climate crisis” is the boogeyman that AOC hopes to ride into the White House with president-elect Biden. Heading up his “climate task force,” she has made demagogic fearmongering in the name of the planet a big part of her act. But it’s wearing thin, because unlike the far more convenient threat of imminent death from a global pandemic (however overhyped that may or may not be), anyone with an IQ north of room temperature realizes by now that the climate apocalypse deadlines have come and gone, and come and gone, and come and gone.

As an aside, how sad it has become that the corporate Left, in its odd marriage with hardcore socialists like AOC, have managed to intimidate conservatives into silence on the issue of climate change. Conservatives are so scared of being targeted as “deniers” that they’ll challenge the economics, but not the science. They stammer diffidently about the vast economic costs, the sheer impracticality of shutting down the entire fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries, fearing for their careers if they become too outspoken. They lack the enraged indignation that is appropriate and necessary when challenging these devastating lies. Don’t they understand that if their warnings go unheeded, politicians really will destroy the global economy – permanently – to save the planet. Don’t doubt that they’ll do it. They’re engaged in a dry run for that right now.

Why don’t conservatives also challenge the scientific theory that anthropogenic CO2 is causing catastrophic climate change? Because the “science is settled” and “science” is sacred? “Science” has become so sacred, in fact, it’s become like an Aztec God that must be appeased. Cut a beating human heart out on the altar of Huitzilopochtli. Or throw a human sacrifice into the cauldron of Pele. Or bash in someone’s skull and bury them in a Polynesian pit. The God of Science must never be questioned, and AOC is a high priestess.

This preposterous paradox remains more or less unexamined, that “science” has become weaponized by a gang of green theocrats. But science is no longer science when it is “settled” and is instead used to stifle scientific inquiry and debate and healthy skepticism.

Just as “racism” does not explain disparate outcomes for people of varying ethnicities, “climate change” is not conclusively demonstrated to be associated with burning of fossil fuel, and what climate change we do observe is not demonstrated to be catastrophic. In fact, the net effect of increased concentrations of CO2 may be mostly positive both for humans and ecosystems.

And climate change policies, misguided and misanthropic, have lowered the credibility of environmentalists at the same time as they have flattened the trajectory of solutions to genuine environmental challenges. Clean up the filthy air in New Delhi, for example. The unhealthy pollution has nothing to do with CO2, and everything to do high-sulfur fuel and inadequate exhaust controls. Quit incinerating rainforests to monocrop ethanol from sugar cane and diesel fuel from palm oil. Quit asphyxiating women across the global south who have to cook with wood because natural gas is not “carbon neutral.” Quit pouring finite resources into crony green corporate boondoggles.

Finally, to shatter the core premise of the Left: socialism is obviously not the cure for racism, nor is it the cure for economic inequality. AOC is invited to identify one nation or society, today or throughout history, where socialism delivered freedom, prosperity and social justice. She’ll find instead a hideous legacy of tyranny, poverty, and murder. Even those wonderful Scandinavian economies, held up as examples, do not qualify. They are mixed capitalist economies with (until recently) culturally homogeneous populations. They don’t count. They’re not socialist.

Capitalism, despite its flaws, and requiring judicious regulating, is the only system that can provide equal opportunity. But it cannot provide equal outcomes, nor should it. Because without private property, which is guaranteed in a capitalist system, nobody tries, nobody cares, competence doesn’t matter, effort and ability don’t matter, all that matters is who you know and who you bribe. Socialism, at its core, nurtures resentment, cynicism, corruption, dissipation, decay, despair, and despotism. It is a seductive illusion, promising everything in exchange for nothing. Its adherents are a perilous mixture of the evil and the naive.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is not evil. She is an ignorant, mostly unwitting demagogue, and she is a puppet. The premises that underlie the world view she promotes – racism, socialism, and climate “science” – are dangerous deceptions. They will deliver the most harm to the people they rhetorically aim to help the most. All three of these premises must be challenged without apology, without rest, without quarter.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Attack of the Watermelon People

Supposedly, the “Green New Deal” is “green” because it would help the environment. But a close reading of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed resolution reveals a deal that looks more red than green.

The freshman congresswoman from New York released more specifics of her sweeping idea this week. In simpler times, we called extreme environmentalists “watermelons,” because they were green (environmentalists) on the outside, but red (socialist or communist) on the inside. Ocasio-Cortez, her Green New Deal, and all her fellow travelers, are watermelons through and through.

Almost everything about Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is wrong. The premises, the priorities, and the “solutions.” It’s easy, and necessary, to criticize the priorities and the solutions proposed by this very red, outwardly green plan. But to have a completely honest debate, you also have to challenge the premises.

In the preamble, the resolution claims that sea levels are rising, wildfires are increasing, and extreme weather “threatens human life, healthy communities and critical infrastructure.” It claims humans are to blame. These are flawed premises.

Flawed Scientific Premises

The most threatening of these claims is sea level rise, but even mainstream publications that have completely embraced climate change hysteria are backing off of the most catastrophic forecasts. One of the most credible climate “lukewarmists” (a somewhat derisive term that alarmists attribute begrudgingly to skeptics they haven’t yet managed to silence or discredit) is Dr. Judith Curry, who is frequently called upon for congressional testimony. She recently completed an 18-month study on sea level rise. In the summary, she made the following points:

  • Sea level was apparently higher than present at the time of the Holocene Climate Optimum (around 5,000 years ago), at least in some regions.
  • Tide gauges show that sea levels began to rise during the 19th century, after several centuries associated with cooling and sea level decline. Tide gauges also show that rates of global mean sea level rise between 1920 and 1950 were comparable to recent rates.
  • Recent research has concluded that there is no consistent or compelling evidence that recent rates of sea level rise are abnormal in the context of the historical records back to the 19th century that are available across Europe.

Curry’s findings, consistent with those of other scientists such as the brilliant Richard Lindzen of MIT, are that over the past 150 years global sea level has risen at a “slow creep,” and since 1900, the sea has risen about 7-8 inches. The likely increase between now and 2100, according to Curry, is between 8 inches and 24 inches. While a rise on the higher end of this distribution would increase the destructive impact of storm surges in coastal areas, it is far from the catastrophe being touted by the Watermelon people.

And what of these “extreme storms”? Here again, we have data that contradicts the doomsday predictions.

Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado and author of The Climate Fix, has done extensive research on extreme weather. His unequivocal conclusion is that the cost of weather-related disasters over the past 30 years have decreased as a percentage of GDP. Using IPCC data, he observes that tropical cyclones have not increased in frequency, intensity, or landfall since the 1970s. Quoting the IPCC, Pielke says “there is no trend in the magnitude or frequency of floods on a global scale,” and “there is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail,” and also “there is low confidence in detection and attribution of changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century.”

Why doesn’t any of this make it into the mainstream press?

Flawed Geopolitical Premises

Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution preamble goes on to predict “mass migration from the regions most affected by climate change.” Here again, we have a flawed premise. “Climate change” is neither the reason migrants want to migrate, nor the reason that Watermelon people want them to migrate to America. Expect those regions to be in nations where poverty has always been the norm, only ameliorated enough in recent decades to ensure absurdly high birth rates. Normal droughts and storms don’t cause mass migrations out of successful nations. Rather it is endless internal warfare and recurrent famine that causes teeming populations to flee failed states with corrupt, incompetent governments.

Around the world, desperate people, leaders and ordinary citizens alike, will jump at the chance to blame someone else for “climate” events causing their misery, as they demand reparations including the right to immigrate en masse to America and Europe. And because once they are here, they will vote for greater government benefits, the Watermelon people want them to come. The more the better. The sooner the better.

Flawed Economic Premises

The economic premises underlying the Green New Deal are, if anything, even more flawed. Another part of the preamble states climate change will wreak “more than [$500 billion] in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100.” The United States in 2018 had a GDP of $20.4 trillion. But by 2100, even at the modest rate of 3 percent annual GDP growth, the United States would have a GDP of $230 trillion. So half-a-trillion “by 2100” represents a whopping 0.2 percent worth of diminished “economic output,” eight decades from now. Is that the best they can do? Who comes up with these terrifying numbers?

The preamble also predicts “a risk of damage to [$1 trillion] of public infrastructure and coastal real estate in the United States,” though it doesn’t say by when. But just the public infrastructure in the United States is estimated to be worth at least $37 trillion. What about real estate? All U.S. homes are estimated to be worth a cumulative $31.8 trillion. And that doesn’t include commercial real estate.

The financial numbers sound scary. Obviously, $1 trillion is a lot of money. But put in perspective, their actual economic scope is not scary at all. Infrastructure and homes need to be replaced every 50 to 100 years anyway. Trillions are already being spent each year to build and maintain structures of all kinds in the United States. So the premises Ocasio-Cortez lays out are unconvincing. We adapt. We always have.

But adaptation isn’t good enough if you’re a Watermelon. A brief gallop through the “Resolved” or “solutions” sections of the Green New Deal provides us a glimpse into what is good enough for the Watermelon people. Please note these are just highlights. There’s so much more.

Highlights of the “Green New Deal Mobilization”

Here are some goals Ocasio-Cortez lays out for her Green New Deal:

  • Ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change.
  • Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.
  • Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.
  • Zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing.
  • A Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses.
  • Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities.
  • Ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers.
  • Ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages.
  • Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.
  • Obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous people for all decisions that affect indigenous people and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous people, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous people.
  • Providing all people of the United States with (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.

And it should all be accomplished “through a 10-year national mobilization.”

Reading these highlights, much less the entire congressional resolution, indicates the Watermelon is indeed strong in these people. Notwithstanding the staggeringly unrealistic goals, note the code words that saturate the document: “inclusive consultation,” “vulnerable communities,” “worker cooperatives,” “participatory processes,” “prevailing wages,” “high quality union jobs,” “consent of indigenous people,” “traditional territories.”

Like all Watermelon-inspired rhetoric, all of these words are calculated to sound morally unassailable. But behind the high minded compassion, the message is clear: the Green New Deal is designed to redistribute wealth and power, correct “systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices,” and transfer wealth to people who will vote for democratic socialism.

Imagine a nation where “worker cooperatives” manage the redistribution of wealth in order to provide universal health care, affordable housing, and a guaranteed job complete with family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security. All the while, making certain that whatever is done is first cleared with the “indigenous people” and evaluated for its impact on climate change. And, of course, doing all this in one decade, while simultaneously shutting down the entire fossil fuel industry. What could possibly go wrong?

The Insanity of Watermelon Politics

Finding value in Ocasio-Cortez’s Watermelon vision for America is tough, but there are some elements of her Green New Deal that merit discussion—particularly the frequent references to infrastructure investments. But if the federal government is going to be investing big money again in national infrastructure, it had better be on projects that make sense for sound economic reasons.

Obviously, some infrastructure investment should be in climate resiliency, such as upgraded sea walls to protect major cities on the east coast. Other forms of adaptation may simply involve no longer subsidizing flood insurance in resort communities built on sandbars that probably already should have washed away. But inviting social justice warriors and climate alarmists to join forces to define what the federal government is going to build, and how they’re going to build it, is the worst possible way to adapt to what may come.

It isn’t enough to question the economic absurdity of the Green New Deal. A rational response would be to assert that it doesn’t matter how much it costs. For this reason it is necessary as well to reinvigorate the scientific debate over just how serious climate change is likely to be, what the causes are for climate change, and what the cost/benefits are of various strategies.

One thing is certain: The path of the Watermelon people is a road to poverty and tyranny. There are far better ways to achieve a more universal prosperity, while helping vulnerable communities and vulnerable ecosystems, all over the world.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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AOC Shows Why a Libertarian-Progressive Alliance Will Fail

Implementing a “Green New Deal” probably won’t happen unless Democrats take control of the White House and the U.S. Senate—but that won’t stop proponents from doing everything they can to shape the national conversation around the topic. And the legitimacy of the Green New Deal, its credibility, its urgency, the entire premise on which it stands or falls, is the theory of climate change.

Therefore it’s no surprise that the youthful congressional standard bearer for climate change action, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is trying to prevent corporations from supporting anything remotely skeptical of that theory. Hence the recent letter the freshman House member from New York sent to the CEOs of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, as if these companies weren’t already using their almost unimaginable influence to shape that conversation in a way Ocasio-Cortez would like.

The transgression committed by the tech giants was to participate as sponsors of “LibertyCon 2019,” where, as reported in Mother Jones, “the event featured a group called the CO2 Coalition, which handed out brochures in the exhibit hall that said its goal is to ‘explain how our lives and our planet Earth will be improved by additional atmospheric carbon dioxide.’”

It’s more than a little ironic that these companies, Google and Facebook in particular, should find themselves in Ocasio-Cortez’s crosshairs. These are companies that in all areas—their leadership, their political spending, their employees, and, crucially, how they use their near monopoly power to favor or suppress online content—are overwhelmingly partisan in favor of Democrats like her. The fact that these liberal tech giants aren’t partisan enough for Democratic Socialists is cause for alarm. Consider this excerpt from Ocasio-Cortez’s letter:

“Given the magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis that we are now facing, we find it imperative to ensure that the climate-related views espoused at LibertyCon do not reflect the values of your companies going forward.”

“Urgency.” “Crisis.” “Imperative.” These are powerful, intimidating words. And while it is unlikely the Democratic Socialists in the U.S. Congress could actually do anything to force Google and Facebook to stop sponsoring events like LibertyCon, it’s quite likely that won’t be necessary. Beyond allowing members of the “CO2 Coalition” to pass out flyers that pointed out, accurately, that CO2 is a beneficial gas, not a pollutant, what other transgressions did they commit at LibertyCon?

Back to Ocasio-Cortez’s letter:

“We were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference this month in Washington D.C., known as LibertyCon, that included a session denying established science on climate change.”

Reviewing LibertyCon’s agenda, the offending session was probably the one called “Population, Climate, and the Problem with Externality Arguments.” Here’s the program description: “The existence of external costs is a legitimate economic argument for government interference in a market system. But there are serious problems in applying that argument to an issue, such as population or climate change, where there are both positive and negative externalities of uncertain magnitude with the result that both the size and the sign of the net effect are unknown.”

In plain English, it appears that the panelists in this session discussed why the government should not destroy the energy industry before knowing whether or not it would do any good. After all, that challenges the premise: Climate change is a crisis, urgent action is imperative.

“Progressive Libertarian” Is an Oxymoron

This fight Ocasio-Cortez has picked with big tech illuminates the challenge facing the so-called progressive libertarians. The Silicon Valley is an epicenter of progressive politics. That dominant ideology manifests itself everywhere; the electorate, the politicians, the business community, the philanthropic community, the culture. Yet libertarian philosophy is also popular on the Left Coast. From programmers working for the tech giants to the hipsters driving for Uber, libertarian ideas attract widespread grassroots support. But while libertarians and progressives have much in common, they are not compatible ideologies.

On the one hand, many big tech CEOs and their employees consider themselves libertarians on social issues championed by progressive Democrats. These include legalizing drug use, criminal justice reform, gay marriage, and protecting a woman’s “right to choose.” They also largely embrace libertarian positions on issues such as open borders, cyber currency, innovation, disruptive technology, and maybe even on school choice, police accountability, and military spending. There’s a lot of overlap.

On the other hand, when it comes to other major issues, big tech culture veers away from basic libertarian values. By and large, big-tech culture supports affirmative action, with corporate cultures committed to race and gender “equity.” That these policies have put them on a collision course with the reality of profound disparities in group aptitude is something they have yet fully to confront.

Libertarians, by contrast, object to enforced race and gender quotas in hiring, promotions, college admissions, and the like.

Similarly, big-tech culture is almost monolithically committed to policies and products dedicated to fighting “climate change.” Libertarians have diverse opinions on the question of climate change and object to suppression of dissenting points of view.

For these reasons, it is impossible to be a “progressive libertarian.” For the progressives, the indispensable wedge issues that galvanize the masses and inform the policymakers are social justice and climate change. On those core premises, progressives and libertarians are worlds apart. Yet for progressives, on those core premises there can be no compromise. No cost is too high and resistance must be crushed.

Moreover, reduced to absolutes, progressives seek statist utopia, and libertarians seek stateless utopia. That they happen to agree on some issues, but not others, is incidental to that fundamental schism.

Irreconcilable Differences

From the perspective of a compassionate nationalist, or a Christian, or a secular advocate for the preservation of Western Civilization, libertarians and progressives are both wrong on the most critical issue, which is the sovereignty of nations. Libertarians and progressives may indeed disagree on the fundamentals of governance, but if they are true to their principles—cultural Marxism on the part of progressives, open borders and “free trade” on the part of libertarians—they are two sides of the same globalist coin. As a matter of fact, sadly, what may unite progressives and libertarians despite irreconcilable differences is their opposition to nationalism.

From a practical standpoint, and despite their denials, the ultimate outcome of worldwide progressive political triumph would be a one-world socialist government, and the ultimate outcome of a libertarian political victory would be a world run by multinational corporations. The pragmatists among them both would settle for some hybrid of these competing visions.

What may be worth emphasizing in the here and now, however, is the current disagreement between libertarians and progressives as exemplified by Ocasio-Cortez’s letter to the big tech CEOs. The progressives are trying to shut down any discussion on the critical issue of climate change, just as they’re trying to silence anyone who dissents from their revolutionary agenda on questions of race and gender. Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades are blatant in pursuing this effort, to the point where they are willing to chastise big tech for being a few steps behind and a great deal more refined in their common pursuit of the same goal.

The libertarians, to their credit, are not trying to shut anyone up. For that not insignificant reason, and even if for nothing else, they are to be commended. Libertarians must know that while conservatives and nationalists may disagree vehemently with them on some of the most important questions of our time, nobody on the Right—unlike those on the progressive Left—would ever try to silence them.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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