Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to have a better understanding of what’s happening in the United States then lawmakers who have been serving in Congress for several decades. During a recent appearance at Sundance, she admitted that removing Trump from office will not magically solve all of the problems in this country, and she is 100% correct about that. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
This past weekend, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appeared via Skype at the Sundance Film Festival to speak after a documentary. The documentary was called knockdown the house. It talked about Ocasio-Cortez and several other freshmen members of Congress, all of them women, and that’s basically the point of the film. They wanted to show how these women overcame these great odds to get into office and during her skype talk, after the film aired, Ocasio-Cortez made one of the greatest points that I have been waiting for an elected official to make since the day Donald Trump was elected. She told the crowd this. This is her exact words. This is not just about the president of the United States. He could be gone tomorrow and that will not change the systemic injustices that led to his election. So it’s important that we continue to be all hands on deck in this fight.
Now, here’s the thing, a lot of us in the progressive media have been talking about that since day one. All of the problems that we see, what the Republican Party, all of the racism we’ve seen spring up since Trump was elected, Trump is not the cause of any of this. He is the symptom. The Republican Party has been leading itself down this path for well over a decade. Trump is just the end result and he might not even be the end result. There could be something even worse that follows him, but nonetheless, getting rid of him doesn’t solve the problems. All it does is put a nicer face on those problems. Again, we’ve all been talking about this for years, but it’s refreshing to finally see someone in Congress and elected official come out there and tell us, hey, we know we all want to get rid of Trump, but that doesn’t solve anything.
Yes, he’s a horrible person and should be removed. He likely committed a lot of crimes, but then we still have to deal with the mess. That is the current incarnation of the Republican Party. They’re still packed with bigots. They’re still trying to take away basic civil rights from American citizens. They’re trying to strip people of their right to vote. They’re trying to decimate the environment. They’re blocking things like Medicare for all the green new deal, a $15 minimum wage. That is what the Republican Party is today and it would still be that way. Even if Donald Trump wasn’t sitting in the Oval Office. It would be that way. If Trump got impeached and was replaced with Mike Pence, we would see absolutely no difference whatsoever in any of the policies coming out of the Republican Party or the White House. None. We would see the same policies in place today had ted Cruz or Marco Rubio won the Republican primary.
We would see the same if it was Lindsey Graham, except we might actually have a wall completed. At this point. Trump is not the cause of the problems within the Republican Party and that is what Ocasio-Cortez was trying to tell us. And honestly, it’s not just the Republicans as she pulling out the systemic injustices here in this country. You know the, the corporate policies that favor men over women, you know the gender gap in pay, the racial disparities in pay, those things still exist with or without Donald Trump. The fact that we have more men in office than women, even though we’ve got more women as citizens here in the United States, everything is rigged in favor of white men. That’s just a fact and those are the systemic injustices that are going to exist with or without Donald Trump and to be honest with or without Republicans calling the shots in DC. They have existed for a long time, but this documentary film that she was speaking about is he showing us that we can overcome that and Ocasio-Cortez Rashida Tlaib and so many others that just got elected to Congress. They are living proof that we’re not stuck in the systems of the past and that we can if we work towards it, break out of this cycle of injustice.
