Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

"There is no such thing as being “pro-life” while supporting laws that let children be shot in their schools, elders in grocery stores, worshippers in their houses of faith, survivors by abusers, or anyone in a crowded place."

"Overturning Roe and outlawing abortions will never make them go away. It only makes them more dangerous, especially for the poor + marginalized. People will die because of this decision. And we will never stop until abortion rights are restored in the United States of America."

"Let’s be real: there’s a WHOLE lot of men whose lives, careers, and families have benefited from an abortion (including several “pro-life” GOP Congressmen). Men, we need you right now. You can get through in rooms others can’t. Your power matters. Speak up. This is about us all."

"Forced pregnancy is a crime against humanity."

"Yesterday, a man sharing that member’s rhetoric tried to assassinate the Speaker and her spouse. What has @GOPLeader said? Nothing. This is who he is"

"the way that we create urgency on the issue of climate is when we have people all across the world in the streets — in the streets — showing up, demanding change and demanding a cessation of what is killing us. We have to send the message that some of us are going to be living on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now, and we will not take “no” for an answer. Climate must be a centerpiece of inside and outside organizing, an electoral and a popular force that cannot be ignored. This issue is one of the issues, the biggest issue of our time, and because of that, we must be too big and too radical to ignore."

"Don’t let the cynics win. The cynics want us to think that this isn’t worth it. The cynics want us to believe that we can’t win. The cynics want us to believe that organizing doesn’t matter, that our political system doesn’t matter, that our economy doesn’t matter. And we’re here to say that we organize out of hope. We organize out of commitment. We organize out of love! We organize out of the beauty of our future! And we will not give up! We will not let go! We will not allow cynicism to prevail. We will not allow our visions of a collaborative economy, of dignity for working people, of honoring the Black, Brown, Indigenous, white working class — we will not give up!"

"They said: 'We can do it all. We can fight for our families held hostage by Hamas, stand against occupation, stand with impacted Israelis, stand up for innocent Palestinians"

"at the end of the day, I haven’t changed a single policy position that I originally ran on. I have all of the same exact convictions, values, policy commitments. I’ve just gotten better at executing on them. And I understand that my role is in that inside-outside political strategy that the left has built an increasingly sophisticated outside, but we have an anemic inside. And I feel like right now my role is to build a juggernaut of momentum. And goddamn, honestly, if we can get to a place where a regular old Democrat believes in trust-busting and a regular old Democrat believes in a full path to citizenship, and Medicare for All, and combating climate change, and a Green New Deal, fuck yeah. That’s literally what my goal was from the beginning. My goal has always been to bring the mainstream to me, and in the process, have my beliefs be mainstream."

"I will not yield because it was a terribly disrespectful comment, and I will not yield to disrespectful men."

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would become a hugely visible and audible figure and a significant voice for progressive issues. She sponsored the Green New Deal in the House of Representatives in February 2019, little more than a year after taking her oath of office. Notice the confluence of Standing Rock, the Justice Democrats, Sunrise, and this young woman's life. She said, "I was really wallowing in despair for a while: What do I do? Is this my life? Just showing up, working, knowing that things are so difficult, then going home and doing it again. And I think what was profoundly liberating was engaging in my first action-when I went to Standing Rock, in the Dakotas, to fight against a fracking pipeline. It seemed impossible at the time. It was just normal people, showing up, just standing on the land to prevent this pipeline from going through. And it made me feel extremely powerful, even though we had nothing, materially-just the act of standing up to some of the most powerful corporations in the world. From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope." She went from looking for hope to making it, through her work on many issues and her brilliant leadership on key issues for the country and the world, including climate."

"It was there that I met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She knew about all that we'd accomplished in Ferguson, and I was immediately struck by her fierceness and clarity of vision."

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., slammed Abbott in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Tuesday, saying he lacks basic knowledge of biology. "I'm sorry we have to break down Biology 101 on national television, but in case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late for your period," Ocasio-Cortez said. "And two weeks late on your period ... can happen if you're stressed, if your diet changes or for really no reason at all. So you don't have six weeks.""

"Ocasio-Cortez also took issue with Abbott's comments on rape, noting that the majority of people who are raped or sexually assaulted are assaulted by someone whom they know. The anti-sexual violence nonprofit RAINN says 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. "These aren't just predators that are walking around the streets at night. They are people's uncles, they are teachers, they are family friends, and when something like that happens, it takes a very long time, first of all, for any victim to come forward," Ocasio-Cortez added. "And second of all, when a victim comes forward, they don't necessarily want to bring their case into the carceral system.""

"One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged. Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated. Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google."

"People compared my election (in 2018) to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. In both districts of roughly a little more than 700,000 people, it was a good day for democracy."

"Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion energy plan Tuesday with a heavy focus on the Green New Deal agenda being pushed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-left flank of his party. Speaking in Wilmington, Del., Biden promised a “clean energy revolution,”... Biden’s announcement comes as the presidential wannabe courts idols on the left of his party including Bronx-Queens Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the hope that they will support him and steer young voters his way in November. In May, AOC announced she had been selected to co-chair Biden’s climate change panel along with former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. In a statement to Reuters after news broke that AOC was joining Biden’s climate change panel, a spokesperson for the Democratic socialist said the congresswoman believed in applying pressure “both inside and outside the system.”"

"This is the hood that spawned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the country’s most privileged revolutionaries. She called herself Sandy Cortez back then. She imagined that every place could be just like Yorktown Heights if only we got rid of the police. Apparently, she still believes that."

"This entire interview is real but this by AOC stands out: "So I need my colleagues to understand that ... their base is not the enemy.""

"The best part of the night, by any metric, was the eye-blink time slot afforded Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to second Bernie Sanders’s nomination. Her remarks were a song, a poem of hope and defiance, and they speak better for themselves than I ever could... One minute and 37 seconds out of a program two hours in length, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez made the most of all of it. Imagine if she had been given the same amount of time as Kasich, or Powell, or even the commercials CNN ran during the roll call? Well, maybe by 2024, the Democratic establishment will have realized which way the tide is running, Biden or no Biden, and give the ever-rising progressive wing of the party its due."

"Four of the most dynamic women of color in Congress – representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib"

"Pretty incredible that centrists are allowed to directly blame AOC for losing their own races but when AOC defends herself by pointing out that they rejected her help while the candidates who accepted her help in swing districts won she gets accused of dividing her party."

"AOC embodies the kind of leadership we dream of: brilliant, courageous, and gifted, with a quick mind and an understanding of our history and the political moment from which she emerged. And most importantly to me, she believes in environmental justice."

"Ocasio-Cortez... has repeatedly called out Trump in the past month over his immigration policies, and has compared migrant detention facilities near the southern border to concentration camps. The comparison prompted backlash from multiple GOP lawmakers, who called her remarks disrespectful to the Holocaust and the millions of Jews killed during it. Ocasio-Cortez has stood by her comments, saying she would "never apologize for calling these camps what they are." The New York congresswoman reiterated her stance to Yahoo News, arguing that Trump's tendencies compared to that time period. She also held the president directly responsible for the poor conditions at the migrant detention facilities, saying his policies have led to numerous Central Americans fleeing their native countries."

"The right doesn’t dislike @AOC because she's ineffective. They despise her precisely because she communicates boldly, passionately and in a Twitter-native manner. When AOC talks, Republicans know they are losing."

"Stop the handwringing about @aoc and concentration camps. First of all, she's right. Second of all, she has single-handedly forced a debate about the barbaric and inhumane treatment of migrants at our Southern Border. She is smart, moral and correct."

"We see...Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC ... they’re all out there saying, look, we need to do something about corporate greed... the way that they were involved with loans... Over the most of the 20th century... you had caps... And then all of a sudden there was deregulation. And when deregulation took place, all of this bad stuff started occurring. You know, Wall Street stole from mom and pop. The economy crashed."

"Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders just put postal banking back where it belongs: high on the agenda of those who seek to create a just and equitable United States. On Thursday, the pair drew national attention with the announcement of their Loan Shark Prevention Act, a sweeping plan to “combat the predatory lending practices of America’s big banks and protect consumers who are burdened with exorbitant credit-card interest rates. The legislation imposes a 15 percent federal cap on interest rates and empowers individual states to establish lower limits.” ...modern-day loan sharks... work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions...and head financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America... Despite what the knee-jerk anti-government echo chamber may tell you, what Americans need now is banking that serves people, not the Wall Street speculators. American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein...says that the USPS can and should answer the call with “a nonprofit alternative to the big banks”..."

"I don't think that she knows who Adam Smith was."

"Denouncing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's new policy of cutting off firms that work with primary challengers as "divisive" and "harmful," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday advised small-dollar donors to stop giving money to the DCCC and instead donate to progressive candidates directly."

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows the power she wields as a woman makes some people very uncomfortable ― and she’s learning to use that to her advantage. “The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with,“ the freshman Democrat from New York told The New Yorker in an interview published Monday. “But I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy.” Being the object of a sexist label, Ocasio-Cortez said, is helpful in one area: It really throws off her adversaries, including President Donald Trump."

"“I can see Trump being enormously upset that a twenty-nine-year-old Latina, who is the daughter of a domestic worker, is helping to build the case to get his financial records,” she said. “I think that adds insult to injury to him.”"

"Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get the food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death."

"Patrick Moore, as reported in ‘Pompous twit will get us all killed’: AOC tweet-tacked over Green New Deal by ex-Greenpeace founder, 3 Mar, 2019 21:19, Russia Today"

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) went viral again yesterday... thanks to her sharp questioning of Michael Cohen at the House oversight committee hearing... The freshman New York congresswoman “expertly laid a trap” to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns, and “won” the Cohen hearing, according to two raving press accounts. Ocasio-Cortez’s testimony focused primarily on Trump’s alleged deflation of his financial assets in order to lower his tax burden. First, she zeroed in on Trump Links, a golf course in Ocasio-Cortez’s district that was constructed with $127 million in city taxpayer funds. “This doesn’t seem to be the only time the president has benefited at the expense of the public,” Ocasio-Cortez said, pivoting to the heart of the matter: Whether Trump deliberately deflated the value of Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, to lower his local property tax bill. Her knack for clever questioning, which is a marked contrast with other members’ preference for grandstanding, is ultimately rooted in a commitment to moving the needle for her constituents."

"One advantage Ocasio-Cortez has over some colleagues is that she consistently attends even the most mundane committee hearings, since she does not spend any of her day calling donors for money. Her online presence is strong enough that she has chosen to rely on it exclusively to raise contributions in smaller increments."

"A viral video of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using a "Corruption Game" to highlight the need for campaign finance reform during a House Oversight Committee hearing last Wednesday has become the most viewed video of any politician in Twitter history... the 29-year-old lawmaker... [highlighted how easy & legal it is for politicians to] enrich themselves... Her examples ranged from taking "special interest dark money" from corporate PACs to fund a campaign to using hush money payments to make potential scandals disappear and writing laws that benefit donors and then buying stocks in their companies for personal financial gain."

"During a hearing, the freshman lawmaker created a game in which she pretended to be “a really, really bad guy” who wants to abuse the system as much as possible. Then, in a series of questions, she exposed the world of payoffs, dark money, PACs and more. She even revealed how it was perfectly legal for a lawmaker to invest in an industry, then write laws to benefit that industry."

"@AOC is on NPR talking about funding the Green New Deal by decoupling tax revenue from government spending. Heads are exploding across Washington."

"Not doing a Green New Deal for lack of tax revenue would be like a beaver saying it just can’t afford to build a dam. If you’ve got the sticks and the labor, build the damn dam."

"Sure, polls show 70 percent of Americans support Medicare-for-all, 74 percent support a wealth tax such as the one proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax rate finds comfortable majority support. But … socialism! Surely not... Trump would have us believe that these are our only two choices: We can either have smash-and-grab capitalism, where so many hands in the cookie jar has resulted in so many government scandals, and where the top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, or we can have what’s happening in Venezuela, where the economy has collapsed and humanitarian and political crises have ensued..."

"Trump’s dig on socialism means he’s scared, Ocasio-Cortez said after his speech. What really scares the pro-plutocrats on both sides of the political aisle about her, Sanders and other democratic socialists is that they have become messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision — the simple idea that it’s up to government to intervene and equalize the playing field between the capital that owns the politicians, the system and the rewards, and the general public toiling to provide those rewards. Everybody deserves to live a life of dignity, with their bare-minimum needs met in... “the richest society in history of the world.” It’s an idea whose time has come..."

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., think they have a start to a [climate change] solution... They are introducing... a "Green New Deal", The bill calls for a "10-year national mobilizations" toward accomplishing a series of goals... Among the most prominent... meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources... ultimate goal is to stop using fossil fuels entirely... to transition away from nuclear energy In addition... a variety of other lofty goals....upgrading all existing buildings... for energy efficiency.... working with farmers "to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions... as much as is technologically feasible....while supporting family farms and promoting "universal access to healthy food... Overhauling transportation systems... expanding electric car manufacturing... charging stations everywhere... expanding high-speed rail to "a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary".... guaranteed job "with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family... medical leave, paid vacations.... retirement security.... High-quality health care for all Americans..."

"A C-SPAN tweet of her nearly four-minute speech garnered 1.16 million views in a little more than 12 hours, setting a record for the most-watched Twitter video from the outlet of any remarks by a House member, according to a tweet from Howard Mortman, C-SPAN’s communications director. By Friday morning, it had surpassed 2.3 million views."

"It’s no accident that this Green New Deal has been championed by a legislator not yet 30. It’s Ocasio-Cortez’s generation who’ll bear the full brunt of the results of three decades of legislative inertia on climate change. All of us owe it to her generation and future ones to ensure that the political and economic choices she and others face in 20 years won’t be even worse because of our failure of leadership, nerve and imagination today. Timely support of this bold new deal, and the principles it stands for, may in fact be our only hope."

"Earlier this month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated the idea of a 70 percent tax rate on incomes over $10 million....The irony of all this is that AOC’s tax proposal finds inspiration not in Karl Marx, but in mainstream American political philosophy... AOC’s proposal reflects a surprisingly moderate view of economic justice. Her plan can trace its intellectual lineage to John Rawls, the giant of American political philosophy. Central to Rawls’ philosophy is a defense of inequality... A rising tide is just, as long as it lifts all boats. John Rawls would applaud AOC’s tax as being wholly consistent with the principles of justice... just 16,000 Americans make more than $10 million per year... literally the 1 percent of the 1 percent."

"In the last few days... Politico and the New York Times have reported that freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ruffled the feathers of fellow congressional Democrats... Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent support for progressive primary challenges against centrist Democrats... [is] one of the most significant ideas the young New York congresswoman has brought... The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power structure in Congress should fear losing their seats... And Democratic voters should understand that if they want to change the party, the only path to do so is to change the people who represent them."

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clearly has superpowers. When was the last time a freshman member of Congress was able to not just vault policy issues up the agenda with a remark in an interview or a visit to a protest, but whip much of Washington into such a frenzy of consternation and jealousy?...A young, charismatic, unapologetically progressive Latina booting out a doughy-looking old-school white guy...? ...She has shown some unusual skills... that seem to be driving Republicans absolutely nuts. Despite the occasional misstep, she seems earnest and even joyful (a rare quality), and has become a social media star... Not only is she not afraid of being attacked by Republicans, she's eager to advocate policies like single-payer health care and dramatically higher taxes for the wealthy despite the fact that she knows Republicans will react in horror... Conservatives are appalled by her for much the same reason progressives love her..."

"In an interview, Ocasio-Cortez suggested...that income above $10m may need to be taxed up to 70%... Just to be clear: she said that when people earn $10m, the 10 millionth dollar and above should be taxed at a high rate. So unless you earn $10m, she’s not talking about “your” income."

"What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot."