“I think that during this time, and especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window.”
New York’s egg-freezing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to This Week on Sunday, urging voters not to listen to past comments of far left candidates, but to instead engage with what they’re saying now. Her remarks come as anti-white commentary and hate from Wisconsin’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong has emerged amid her campaign.
Hong, who hates Thanksgiving and has even criticized the “whiteness” of her own husband and son, has advocated to abolish prisons, abolish police, and extinguish Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in her state.
“I think that a lot of these races, even right now, have a tendency to be nationalized,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “but these races are ultimately local and all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate… She’s moved away from it.”
“I have a local City Councilman,” she went on, “who has this saying ‘woke 1 was crazy.'” Laughing, she continued, “And I think what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
When asked by This Week host Jonathan Karl if “woke 1,” as she called it, “went too far,” Ocasio-Cortez spoke of those years under Covid when far-left Democrat rhetoric, including her claim that people only steal because they are hungry, pushed the Overton window.
“You know,” she said, “I think that during this time, and especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open to trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.”
It was during that era that the notion of “defunding police” took hold, leading to struggle sessions in major cities. Huge, violent protests for Black Lives Matter cost the nation at least 31 lives and billions of dollars. Americans were told that protesting against Covid lockdowns, school, business and church closures was racist but that protesting against racism was essential because that scourge was a bigger “public safety threat” than Covid.
“And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime, in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible,” she went on.
“I think that during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I’m grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they’re campaigning on.”
In other words, Democrats said some crazy thing during “woke 1” and they believed them, and those things helped them get closer to their goals, but they wouldn’t say them again right now because right now they feel they have a good chance of getting elected. Her comments also reveal that, during a crisis, Democrats and leftists are willing to say anything and do anything, regardless of whether or not it’s actually a boon for society, meaning they cannot be trusted to keep an even head during a crisis.