Democratic socialist congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday declared that there is nowhere in the U.S. “too red” for progressive candidates to flip.
The 28-year-old first-time candidate made the comment during her remarks at Netroots Nation, an annual progressive conference.
“There is no district too red for us to flip,” she said at the end of her speech, calling on supporters to “go home, [and] recommit ourselves” to electing progressive candidates.
Her comments come less than 100 days before the midterm elections, as Democrats’ hopes of a “blue wave” continue to build. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congressional candidate from New York who touts honesty and authenticity as her greatest strengths, used to describe herself as a follower of Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism — and said that terms like “feminism” and “empowerment” were “relics from the past.”
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez has come out as an unapologetic democratic socialist, wishing to see greater taxation and expansion and creation of wide-ranging social programs such as a single-payer health care system, free education, and housing as a right.
“I think my strength is I’m honest and authentic,” she told “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah last week. Those qualities helped her in June to beat top Democrat Joe Crowley, whose name was floated as the next speaker of the U.S. House.
But not that long ago, 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez harbored a lot milder if not radically different views. During her time at Boston University, where she studied economics and international relations and graduated in 2011 with cum laude honors, she described herself as a believer in Adam Smith’s analyses and wrote a number of blog posts hinting at her views, according to posts reviewed by Fox News.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes in Mahatma Ghandi’s methods, Adam Smith’s analyses, and Pablo Neruda’s love. Her experiences growing up in a Puerto Rican household, from the boroughs to beyond, has afforded her a uniquely American experience with all the tragedy and hilarity it accompanies,” she described herself in a student-run publication called BU Culture Shock, which she co-founded.
In a 2009 blog post, Ocasio-Cortez called feminism into question, writing that “the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘empowerment’ don’t seem to capture the priorities of our generation, and the words themselves sound like relics from the past, frumpy and outdated.”
“We no longer live in the same fight for equality of prior generations, we have moved to the widely accepted reality that marginalizing 50% of a given population doesn’t make much sense, mathematically or socially,” she wrote. – READ MORE
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