Ocasio-Cortez: Lack of ‘police in riot gear’ at gun rally ‘racist’; Democrat Party ‘center or center-conservative’

There were no arrests or confrontations with heavily armed police at Monday’s gun-rights rally in Richmond.

This caused Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to wonder aloud why that was … and blame racism.

The New York Democrat and avowed socialist said in an interview for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday that was posted on social media that the United States was founded on, among other things, “racism and the protection of capital over human beings.”

@AOC contrasts today’s gun rights march in Richmond with protests against Eric Garner’s killing: “Why were there almost no police officers” despite protesters “flying confederate flags and [carrying] semiautamtic weapons”? pic.twitter.com/JRL9B76EQW
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2020

She claimed that the policing at Black Lives Matter and similar racial protests as the image that has stuck with her about “this gun rights protest that’s happening in Richmond.”

“When we go out and march for the dignity and the recognition of the lives of people like Freddie Gray and Eric Garner the whole place is surrounded by police in riot gear without a gun in sight,” she claimed.

“And here are all of these people flying Confederate flags with semiautomatic weapons and there’s almost no police officers at that protest,” she continued.

There was at least one Confederate flag photographed at Monday’s rally of about 20,000 people in Richmond.

She then concluded that “who or what are our institutions protecting from who? And that image conveys it all, conveys it all.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, derided her party as insufficiently left-wing and too beholden to capitalism.

“We don’t have a left party in the United States. The Democratic Party is not a left party,” the freshman congresswoman said to audience applause. “The Democratic Party is a center or a center-conservative party.”

Be sure to click on the video clips.

As evidence, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez cited the fact that not only doesn’t the U.S. have socialized medicine but that Congress — presumably including the Democratic-led House — won’t vote on it.

“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare-for-all – not even a floor voted that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party,” she said, while adding that “there are left members inside the Democratic Party that are working to try to make that shift happen.”

She blamed that blockage on what she called “true believers” in capitalism.

“There are a lot of true believers, [who think] that we can capitalism our way out of poverty in the Democratic Party. If anything, it’s probably the majority,” she said.

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