New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) reviewed the potential adverse impact of the 2024 election and highlighted freedoms that could be threatened by President-elect Trump’s win in a social media video.
“I'm not here to sugarcoat what we all are about to collectively experience, but I think that what we can do to prepare is build community,” Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday on an almost hourlong Instagram livestream.
She cited a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, along with holding the White House, as a means to spur a federal abortion ban, mass deportation and the removal of vaccines, citing the anti-vaccine stance of presidential dropout Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is poised for a high-ranking public health role in Trump's administration.
“We are about to enter a political period that will have consequences for the rest of our lives. We cannot give up,” Ocasio-Cortez noted.
Since the race was called, Kennedy has promised not to remove vaccines, and Trump has said a federal abortion ban was "off the table."
In lieu of their comments, Ocasio-Cortez warned against partisanship.
“Our main project is to unite the working class in this country against a fascist agenda, period,” she said. “We have had an enormous setback in this election, because the fascist won a lot of working-class support, which has happened before in history.”
Ocasio-Cortez reflected on her own background and financial history as the fuel for her career in politics.
“This was not a cute summer job that I had as a teenager, and then I did some jobs and then I got elected to Congress years later,” she recalled.
“I went from wiping down a bar and walking behind it to walking into the halls of Congress, and the reason I did that and the reason I ran was not because I was running against a Republican, it's because I ran against a Democrat that I did not believe centered families or communities like mine or saw the pain of people like me," she continued. "And a lot of what I saw at that time was a Democrat that only ran against Trump and did not support a vision that with clarity that spoke to my material reality, and I got to a point as a waitress where I felt like if my member of Congress wouldn't support a $15 minimum wage and say it with their full chest with clarity.”
She then commended Vice President Harris for running hard in her effort to win an unprecedented race, pointing to the limited time she had to prepare a platform and make it stick as a possible factor in her loss.
“A party loses and another party wins, and I think it's important to also state here that Kamala Harris was given an assignment that no other person in American history was given — to construct a presidential campaign in 90-100 days with absolutely no expectation or anticipation that she would be called to that assignment, and have to deliver the country from an enormous fascist threat that had already been campaigning and priming the pump for essentially eight years,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
