LOS ANGELES — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said America was turning into a fascist society in response to a heckler at a Bernie Sanders rally.
“It is fascism that we’re evolving into,” the New York Democrat told the disrupter in Los Angeles Saturday before admitting the distraction had her “thrown off.”
Ocasio-Cortez, 30, had been quoting the speaker before her, Harvard Divinity School professor and left-wing activist Cornel West, who once said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who came to Congress in January after beating a member of the House Democratic leadership in a primary, riffed on West’s theory.
“Establishing a loving society in the United States of America” is not “an irrational, overly feeling, sympathetic statement,” she said. Rather, it’s the pursuit of “an advanced society.” And an advanced society, Ocasio-Cortez said, guarantees healthcare and tuition-free college and trade schools, among other benefits.
“What we are living in now is not an advanced society,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez, who also ripped the increased military budget just enacted by Congress and President Trump, called California the “heart of where we’re going to change this country.” The “Super Tuesday” state, which goes to the polls on March 3, is a prized pick-up for all the candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. She urged Sanders supporters in the crowd to wear out their shoes and “paper the streets” to boost the Vermont senator and White House hopeful’s “revolution.”
“This is about a movement that has been decades in the making,” she said. “We can’t go back to the way things were before, because the way thing were before is how we got to where we are now. We cannot go back to a world where the rich are put first and working people are put last in Washington day in and day out.”
