Saturday at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in Austin, TX, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said former President Ronald Reagan used “racist,” caricatures to pit “white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans.”

Ocasio-Cortez said, “One perfect example, I think a perfect example of how special interests and the powerful have pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans in order to just screw over all working-class Americans, is Reaganism in the ’80s when he started talking about welfare queens.”

She added, “So you think about this image; welfare queens and what he was really trying to talk about was he was painting this photo, he was painting this like really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing that were ‘sucks’ on our country. And it’s this whole tragedy of the commons type of thinking where it’s like because these one, this one specific group of people, that you are already kind of subconsciously primed to resent, you give them a different reason that’s not explicit racism but still rooted in a racist caricature. It gives people a logical reason, a ‘logical’ reason to say, ‘oh yeah, no, toss out the whole social safety net.'”

(h/t The Daily Wire)

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