There’s a popular parody account on Twitter named Titania McGrath, a self-styled “radical intersectional poet” whose extreme social justice musings — most recently, she’s gone on about how all vaccines are racist and how the term “wet market” is a dog whistle — are often mistaken for earnest arguments.
It’s easy to see why people fall for it: Increasingly, left-wing thought leaders such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have descended so completely into woke madness that it’s hard to tell parody from real life.
The New York socialist’s latest tirade focused on how the novel coronavirus is actually racist and why the ensuing societal crisis the virus has caused somehow makes the case for … slavery reparations.
Yes, really.
“COVID deaths are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities,” the congresswoman tweeted. “Why? Because the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions.”
“Inequality is a comorbidity,” she concluded. “COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations.”
It’s hard to know where even to start dissecting this woke sandwich of intersectional buzzwords. Ocasio-Cortez is not technically wrong that the virus is manifesting itself differently in areas with different demographic makeups — after all, New York City is faring much worse than, say, Iowa. And if we’re very generous, we could probably come up with arguments that this is an indirect result of racism or the lingering influence of past racism. But many, many other factors could instead be driving this trend — for example, smoking rates.
Herein lies the fundamental flaw with Ocasio-Cortez’s everything-must-be-about-identity worldview. The coronavirus affects men and women differently, smokers and nonsmokers differently, and elderly and young people differently. But that doesn’t mean that a virus is sexist (against men — a majority of its victims) or ageist. It simply shows that real life is complicated, and different people face different risks. Not everything can be boiled down and blamed on secretive, malicious, systemic action by bigots.
The real problem with Ocasio-Cortez’s racially inflammatory coronavirus rhetoric is that it contributes to the divisive politicization of what ought to be an apolitical, unifying response to a crisis. The congresswoman’s followers are probably tired of their social justice claptrap being ignored in favor of health issues. They have probably been eager to hear coronavirus described with woke buzzwords. But most people, even liberals, see that kind of stuff and know just to roll their eyes. Leaders, especially those in New York, which is suffering the direst coronavirus outbreak in the United States, should be rallying everyone in the country to achieve results — not framing the crisis based on tribalism or using it to promote an unrelated political agenda.
Ocasio-Cortez, in advocating slavery reparations as part of coronavirus relief, has invoked one of the most racially divisive and least popular proposals in America today. Per Gallup, a whopping 70% of the public opposes the idea of slavery reparations, but support cuts deeply along racial lines — 73% of black respondents supported the proposal, and 81% of white respondents opposed it.
Just the sort of thing to bring people together in a moment of crisis.
