New York socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has dominated headlines over the past month due to her radical leftist views, lack of political experience, and at times, apparent cluelessness.
Although, to her credit, at just 28, Cortez ran a successful grassroots campaign when she beat 10-term incumbent congressman Joe Crowley. Her ability to mainstream socialist views has made many Republicans rightfully uneasy, wary of an increasing push to the far-left among many liberals and questioning how could someone with an economics degree could back the socialist agenda that's ruined so many nations throughout history.
Well, it turns out Cortez was a capitalist in college.
Fox News dug up some old blog posts from a student-run publication co-founded by Cortez called BU Culture Shock — and the results are shocking.
One sentence from Cortez’s profile reads:
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes in Mahatma Ghandi’s methods, Adam Smith’s analyses, and Pablo Neruda’s love.”
To remind, Adam Smith is an 18th century Scottish economist who is thought of by many as one of the founding fathers of capitalism, and whose pro-capitalist work on free trade and the “invisible hand” of government has revolutionized political thought even to this day.
Cortez, who is currently running for Congress on a single-payer health care system, appeared to have a free market approach to health care in a 2009 blog when she wrote, “health care is largely an intersection of money and people, which means health care discussions often involve the prioritizing of people according to available funds. How can one possibly measure the needs of children, the elderly, the sick, and the healthy against one another?”
To answer that question: you can’t — and that’s way single-payer healthcare is a disaster.
In another blog post, Cortez expressed her opposition to third wave feminism.
She wrote 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seem to capture the priorities of our generation, and the words themselves sound like relics from the past, frumpy and outdated.”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 continued.
It’s interesting that Cortez turned so radically left later in her career when, unlike most people, she actually had some solid ideas in college.