From Esquire

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the little push some conservatives need to go right off the cliff into madness. Just take the Fox Business guest Tuesday who said she's a "demogague" trying to "assimilate" Americans to "Latin American values" because she's called for a Green New Deal to address climate change and wealth inequality. Why Latin American values? Because, uh, Venezuela! Surely it has nothing to do with her name or complexion.

But even the folks who've still kept some tenuous grip on reality are shook by the freshman New York congresswoman-so much so that they are flailing about on television, showing off their true colors. Tuesday's Exhibit B arrived via The Fox News Channel:

Fox, apoplectic over its own polling showing wide public support for @AOC and @ewarren's wealth tax proposals, literally blames the fact that schools teach kids to be fair:



"The idea of fairness has been promoted in our schools for a long time." pic.twitter.com/GowAZWYWpZ



- Steve Morris (@stevemorris__) February 5, 2019

You know you're on TV, right? People can hear you.

It has been so long since folks truly had to defend the current policies-which shove the vast majority of the wealth our economy generates towards a tiny percentage of citizens-that they seem to be out of practice. (Also, it's worth remembering these millionaire TV hosts are beneficiaries of the status quo.) The majority of normal people do not want to hear the half-baked odes to Job Creators or vacuous promises about Trickle-Down Prosperity any longer. Nobody buys that cutting taxes on rich people and corporations is The Answer. That's why, when Republicans were forcing through a tax plan in 2017 that was a giveaway to the rich, they billed it as benefiting everyone. Even Donald Trump's supporters identified that the status quo is an almighty scam, they just fell for a compounding scam-that the Scammo di Tutti Scammi was the one who'd put a stop to it.

So now we get this incredibly revelatory discussion of how schools are emphasizing "fairness" too much as a value. Why should we try to make our tax code more fair? This is a discussion between people who, for at least a decade but probably more, have held up "freedom" as the only legitimate value in a democratic republic. It's been so long since they considered things like "equality" or "justice"-crucial values in a functioning society that might be colloquially described as "fairness"-that it does not compute in their heads that this might be a priority for a democratic people. Conservatives now find the idea of prioritizing justice so ridiculous they treat the term Social Justice Warrior as a pejorative.

This is not the first example of AOC driving these folks to clarifying derangement. Previously, Sean Hannity inadvertently promoted AOC's platform on his show, thinking it was self-evidently absurd:

look at this pic.twitter.com/ePDHhAQpf4 - Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 28, 2018

And elsewhere, Fox News hosted a guest to lament that, when she attended one of her rallies, "They say things-I mean, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially like, if you are a parent." Each time it demonstrates that these conservative Thought Leaders are woefully inept at defending their ideas, or at throwing out anything beyond ridiculous nonsense when faced with bold progressive ones that meet the scale of the problems facing our society. It's just they got a free pass for far too long, as Democrats tacked to the center and offered inoffensive-and, ultimately, ineffective-incremental solutions to massive social problems, like wealth inequality.

AOC is not a revolutionary because of her ideas. Howard Schultz, who routinely calls them and other progressive plans "un-American," is quickly learning that they enjoy strong support among the public now that they have finally been aired by someone with a platform. Ocasio-Cortez has changed the conversation because she had the courage to stake out a position she believes is right, regardless of the backlash from precincts like Fox News. If anything, they're the ones cranking up the volume on her megaphone.

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