Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made numerous false statements during an interview she gave at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event on Monday, claiming that the Democrat Party is not a “left” party and alleging without evidence that the pro-Second Amendment activists in Virginia were waving “Confederate flags.”
“You know, another thing that I’ve been really thinking and sitting with today is that, there’s this, um, gun rights protest that’s happening down in Richmond … but here’s the image that has struck with me the most about that, is that when we go out and march for the dignity and for the recognition of the lives of people … the whole place is surrounded by police in riot gear without a gun in sight,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And here are all of these people flying Confederate flags with semi-automatic weapons and there’s almost no police officers at that protest.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s claim is weak at best as the overwhelming majority of images and video that was available online showed no Confederate flags at the rally. The Daily Wire also spoke to over half a dozen activists who attended the rally, all of whom said they did not see a single Confederate flag.
While there is certainly the possibility that a fringe protester may have had a flag that eluded media scrutiny, Ocasio-Cortez’s claim suggested that the flying of Confederate flags was a common occurrence at the rally, which is verifiably false.
Ocasio-Cortez’s false claim lined up with what left-wing publications like CNN and MSNBC sought to cast the rally as: a white nationalist event. Yet, the event was completely peaceful, no incidents happened, and fringe groups were rejected.
NBC News, which pushed the false narrative that the protest was a white nationalist event, even later had to admit that it was false in an article titled: “At tense Virginia rally, demonstrators reject extremists, defend law-abiding gun owners.”
The event also attracted numerous minorities, women, members of the LGBT community, and Democrats who believed in supporting the Second Amendment.
WATCH:
.@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
Later in the interview, Ocasio-Cortez gas-lighted the audience by falsely claiming that the current Democrat Party is really a “center-conservative” party and is “not a leftist party.”
“We don’t have a left party in the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or center-conservative party. We do not advocate, we can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for All, not even a floor vote that gets voted down, we can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a party.”
Ocasio-Cortez later admitted that there are far-left members of her party that are trying to drag the Democrats even further left.
Even the leftist New York Times editorial board said in its endorsement of two Democrat presidential candidates this week that the current field of Democrats that are running in 2020 are “the most” far-left “in decades on issues like health care, the economy, and government’s allocations of resources.”
WATCH:
AOC: “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center, or a center-conservative party” pic.twitter.com/6TNAC50nXi
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2020