What's up with AOC and Border Security?
Reality Show Politics Episode 2
“New Rule: People on reality shows have to quit saying, "You either love me or you hate me." There's actually a third option: not giving a shit about you.” -Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Sometimes politics is just too cartoonish to be believable. Is Clown World...real? Or something scripted and executed?
Is it possible that AOC's entire political career is just a theatrical event for the purpose of scooping young people into a mimetic narrative designed as a cultural Matrix by globalist oligarchs?
And does it have anything to do with billions of dollars being spent at the border to do nothing whatsoever?
Hear me out...
Let's talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka "AOC"
Before I go to far, I'll note that while putting this article together, I found that the social media personality who goes by Mr. Reagan put together a video suggesting that AOC is an actress playing a role in a Reality TV politics sort of way. Know that what spurred my thoughts on the topic had some intersection, but as you'll see by the end, I take a completely different route regarding a specific political issue. But a few choice quotes before we move on:
Kohls explains that in 2017, a progressive group that formed in response to Trump’s election called the Justice Democrats held “auditions” for potential congressional candidates to run on their platform.
As evidence, he runs a clip from a Justice Democrats video.
“Back in 2016, we put out a call for nominations,” says the group’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas. “We got over 10,000 nominations. Out of those 10,000 nominations, we found Alexandria.”
Ocasio-Cortez herself, in another video, says her brother nominated her.
“My brother told me that he had sent my nomination in the summer, but I was, like, literally working out of a restaurant then. And I was like, there’s no way,” she says.
Kohls comments: “A casting call. They had a casting call. They cast Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the role of congresswoman. And they did this so they could promote their own agenda.
Justice Democrats, on its website, says it aims to reform the Democratic Party by running “a unified campaign to replace every corporate-backed member of Congress.”
What I argue in this article is that the political shift of intellectual resources that took place in her election looks like the best corporate strategy that I can imagine.
The progressive Representative of New York's 14th district is constantly in the media spotlight due to overcoming long odds in her late 20's to oust an incumbent with deep institutional backing. She became both the youngest woman to serve in Congress and the first female member of the Democratic Socialists of America to be so elected (assuming none of the other elected members privately identified as a woman, of course).
Here we examine the question, "Is she for real?" by taking a look back at the roots of her story.
A Genocide-Inspired Casting Call
How did the Young Turks (TYT) fly under everyone's radar as something like a clown world psyop? Why would an upstart left-wing media organization name itself after the very first genocidal executioners of the 20th century (see Armenian genocide for details), which led the Ottomans from a point of instability into a "democratic" era marked by what was essentially a nationalist socialist movement (when it was still well understood that socialism/Marxism was a starkly genocidal movement). It is no coincidence that the alliance then formed by the Ottomans with European powerhouse Germany preceded Hitler's Nazi movement (of nationalistic socialism).
But TYT somehow garners a left-wing audience? So, who is the dog and who is the tail?
Said investors part of the Clinton network
Bernie Sanders pulls support for TYT co-founders congressional bid over "sexist and controversial comments"
While supporting socialist politics, TYT urged staff not to unionize
TYT co-founder wrote a genocide denial piece and seems to have claimed to sort of not understand that the Young Turks referenced said genocide
Cartoonish absurdity?
But a popular one. And it gets worse. Here is AOC calmly exchanging ideas at the Queens Public Library with a woman who says that the world is so out of control (climate crisis) that we must start eating the babies, and right soon.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/03/aoc-dumbfounded-town-hall-must-eat-babies-save-planet/
It's all so over-the-top [you damned pollutant].
If that woman is an actress promoting baby eating (because my friends who discussed such things in high school with a straight face were pushing the envelope of joking with the substitute teachers), think for a moment about how difficult it is to figure out whether it was more likely that she was hired by the left (to shift the Overton Window in a bizarre Hegelian pooping on the goal posts) or hired by the right (to make the progressive left seem 7.3% crazier about their approach to negative externalities than they already appear). I know, right?
So, what does the TYT do with its inexplicable popularity? It urges a "new slate of Democratic politicians" which culminates in interviews and tryouts for candidates during a political cycle in which the most common former profession of other new Democratic candidates is "CIA/other federal agent" (I'm not even kidding). But that's Reality Show Politics for another day…
Saikat Chakrabarti, a former Bernie campaign staffer (and the guy accused of using his company to channel campaign finances as an illegal slush fund), helped put the new candidates into action, including AOC. The accusations of funneling money are important in numerous ways. Aside from skirting disclosure laws, this could hide something like a production-level budget pushed by a large donor.
AOC's boyfriend has also had the finger pointed at him for campaign money laundering.
Ironically, AOC stated that Trump should be impeached due to campaign finance violations.
Before AOC distanced herself from him, Chakrabarti regularly appeared publicly and in interviews wearing a t-shirt featuring Subhas Chandra Bose, an anti-imperialist politician from India whose political ideology settled into a synthesis of Nazi and communist ideologies combined with Indian nationalism, punctuated by a one-party dictatorship for at least 20 years.
Here's Chakrabarti eating cheeseburgers while writing AOC's "meat = carbon annihilation" lines.
Does this look more like progressive values as expressed, or Reality TV politics?
How did AOC even get elected with no political background and such rubbish behind her?
Easy peasy: Simply defeat a 20-year House veteran being groomed as the next Speaker of the House. I mean…duh.
New York's 14th District has a population of around 700,000 and in 2016, 178,132 residents voted with incumbent Joe Crowley receiving 83% of those votes (compared to the Republican candidate's 17%).
This is clearly a secure district for Democrats, and you know this every election season when residential buildings display political signs in windows that are nearly uniformly in support of "the" candidate. In this case, that "the" candidate spent 20 years in Congress, building valuable power connections for his district. Joe Crowley really was the King of Queens.
So, maybe fewer voters show up for the primaries when an expected incumbent win seems like a sure thing?
It seems hard to believe that Crowley and his team failed to understand that the primary is the election in NY's 14th district. It seems unlikely that this primary would not have spurred a greater turnout given the organized following that backed the challenger.
And it was known that polls showed AOC making gains on Crowley. There are still a six-digit number of Irish descendants in Queens, and it's hard to imagine that they've forgotten the importance of having a hand in the politics of their community.
Crowley always got plenty of support from all the other community demographics as well, as seen by his crushing landslide victories year after year. While he could be painted as a corporate Democrat, it has been exactly the corporate Democrats who have owned New York City politics. But after the surprise upset in the primary, Crowley, who might have appealed to independents and Republicans if running independently against AOC in the general election, simply chose not to contest her.
One might almost begin to wonder if Crowley didn't want to win.
AOC and media allies have broadcast a story of walking the district with staffers tirelessly to earn the 78% of 138,868 votes cast in 2018.
But is that really how it happened?
It is said that Crowley outspent AOC 18:1, but did that really happen? If he spent $4.3 million, and AOC's handler funneled $1 million through his company in addition to what was reportedly spent on paper, then the ratio looks closer to 3:1.
A look through Crowley's campaign disclosure shows hundreds of individuals and businesses donating to Crowley's campaign. But the man who received nearly 150,000 votes in 2016 couldn't muster 13,000 against AOC in 2018. Even with broad and deep industry backers who are used to seeing nice returns on investments from experienced incumbents?
Sure, there is some anti-corporate sentiment here and there in the Democratic Party that so loved the Clintons, but a landslide like this seems suspect, at best. It's not like Queen voters are all 20-somethings and Woke. A lot of them work in those industries that Crowley advocated for during his time in Congress, which only got more impactful as his election streak continued. In fact, we are told in a recently published book that Crowley felt that institutional support made AOC's bid essentially impossible, and while he knew about the alleged money laundering in her campaign that he chose not to push the issue during the campaign.
Maybe it all came down to AOC's incredible ability to ring 300,000 doorbells twice?
“Her videos are very well done and her message is clear. She’s articulate. This woman goes right to it,” Holden said. “I thought she would give him a run for his money. I know some people in the district who said she rang their doorbells twice but they never saw Joe Crowley.”
At one per minute, that's 480 per day…nah. I thought Democrats were supposed to be the educated ones who could do math? Or at least envelope arithmetic?
I have also heard, but haven't been able to verify that,
Crowley spent heavily on TV ads that were never aired,
Crowley supporters were unable to obtain window signs that were never printed, and
Crowley's robocaller gave out the incorrect date of the primary.
How far did $4.3M even go? Apparently Crowley made a habit of renting space for his campaign from his brother...space in another district.
Oh, you ask too many questions!
If that seems weird, it's even weirder that where AOC "defeated" Crowley was actually the primary election. AOC received 15,897 (since updated to 16,898) votes (about 11% of the number of votes Crowley received in the 2016 election) to Crowley's 11,761 (since updated to 12,880) votes (about 8% of the number of votes he received in the 2016 election).
Now AOC gets more likes than that for Tweeting about pretty much anything.
And Irishman Crowley could get more of his fellow Irishmen from the 14th District to stand between him and bullets, particularly with Wall Street and Big Insurance buying beers for said Irishmen.
Instead, he said it had almost everything to do with a paltry 13 percent turnout, disgust over the Trump administration and progressives nationwide specifically “targeting” Crowley — whom some liberals see as too corporatist to lead the party — in an effort to help move Washington more to the left.
“I think there was a lot of outside people that wanted to push this,” Den Dekker said. “I believe this particular seat was targeted to make a statement.”
Let me get this straight…the Democratic Party, which elected Joe Biden in 2020…went head-hunting among those in its own ranks poised to wield the most power for the party?
Good story, bro.
Now, assuming Crowley didn't throw the election (but is that a reasonable assumption?), he could have and did challenge in the primary. AOC's momentum led her to receive 100,000 votes (still only 2/3 what Crowley received two years earlier) to Crowley's 8,505 (about 6% of what he received two years earlier).
It might be time to consider the possibility that AOC's election and purpose in Congress are staged like reality TV. Can we just hold that hypothesis open? Or is there some…emotional nudge…of the charge of "conspiracy theory"...holding us back? Because mixing serious politics and reality TV is entirely crazy, right?
If you're wondering if this is all something like controlled opposition of the Democratic Party's rendition of The Hunger Games, you're not alone.
For the record, I don't care who flies first class given that they're not railing about climate change day in and day out. Isn't the point that those seats take up more space per flight? But climate policy may be the smaller half of this story on a policy level…
The Borderline Border Wall Story
Much of the narrative in U.S. national politics over the past six or seven years has focused on immigration policy and border security, with "the wall" taking center stage, thanks to 2016 election politics. Let's take a look back at recent American history to understand where all that started…
I'll start with Department of Homeland Security statistics on border apprehensions.
Over a single decade, mostly starting at the end of GW Bush's tenure, apprehensions took a 65% nosedive. Is that because of lax law enforcement, or because fewer Mexicans were crossing the border? Without getting into the weirdness of tallying "undetected unlawful entries", it looks like the latter case.
How did this even rise to the level of a top-shelf issue in the 2016 presidential campaign?
Now, what happened to these statistics during the Trump era? We can see a 25% reduction in border apprehensions during his first year, but from there, apprehensions more than tripled by the end of 2019, during which there were 977,509 in total. They went down more than 50% the following (election) year, but nearly quadrupled to 1,734,686 during Biden's first year in office.
Part of me wonders if wage inflation has led to a surge in border activity. At least, that's my first instinct. And that is to say that economics drives numeracy of border crossings far more than any border security policy [probably ever tried] aside from building complete walls around entire nations.
Stop and repeat that in your mind. It's so obvious once you hear it: economics drives most [peacetime] human migration. Because duh.
France has walls along its land borders, and still has social issues associated with immigration. Denmark also has along its land borders. Poland built a wall entirely around itself, and maintains strict immigration policies. For the moment, the Polish government successfully stifles most of that traffic, with a focus on Middle Eastern and Belarussian refugees. Though some traffic is getting through since Russia invaded Ukraine. The U.S. has never applied as strict border control as that, no matter who was in office.
When I look at the facts, it would appear that Trump had the least hand in reducing illegal immigration from or through Mexico out of the past several presidents.