Ocasio-Cortez Promotes Unsubstantiated Conspiracy Theory About Trump

[Ubiquitous]

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) promoted a new and
unsubstantiated conspiracy theory on Monday, suggesting without evidence that
President Donald Trump was intentionally trying to get her assassinated.

Ocasio-Cortez made her wild claim on Twitter in response to the police
officer who reportedly said on Facebook that Ocasio-Cortez "needs a round —
and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve."

"This is Trump's goal when he uses targeted language & threatens elected
officials who don't agree w/ his political agenda. It's authoritarian
behavior," Ocasio-Cortez claimed without evidence. "The President is sowing
violence. He's creating an environment where people can get hurt & he claims
plausible deniability."

This is Trump’s goal when he uses targeted language & threatens
elected officials who don’t agree w/ his political agenda. It’s
authoritarian behavior.

The President is sowing violence. He’s creating an environment
where people can get hurt & he claims plausible deniability.
https://t.co/GuYKPGzSLm

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 22, 2019

It's worth noting that a far-left domestic terrorist recently attacked an ICE
facility in Tacoma, Washington, and used Ocasio-Cortez's "concentration camp"
rhetoric in his manifesto. Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly refused to denounce
the terrorist attack on ICE, which she has repeatedly demonized.

This is not the first time that Ocasio-Cortez has made wildly unsubstantiated
claims like this.

Two weeks ago, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was
targeting her because Pelosi wanted her to get "death threats."

"It's singling out four individuals, and knowing the media environment that
we're operating in, knowing the amount of death threats that we get, knowing
the amount of concentration of attention," Ocasio-Cortez told CNN's Manu
Raju. "I think it's just worth asking why."

Often short on facts, Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly resorted to promoting
conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality.

In March, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that there was a "far-right" conspiracy
targeting her that involved a "dark-money internet operation" and a cable
news "propaganda machine."

"It’s almost as though there is a directed + concerted far-right propaganda
machine with a whole cable news channel, and a dark-money internet operation
propped up by the Mercers et al dedicated to maligning me & stoking nat’l
division, reported on by @JaneMayerNYer or something," Ocasio-Cortez claimed.


--
Watching Democrats come up with schemes to "catch Trump" is like
watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Road Runner.

[Steve is offline now]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 21:05:01 -0400, Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net>
wrote:

The dipshit shouts ridiculous rhetoric from the treetops and claims
she's being targeted when someone laughs at her.

[David Hartung]

This is far worse a comment than imagined racist tweets by the President.

[Rudy Canoza]

On 7/23/2019 9:05 AM, David Hartung wrote:
> On 7/22/19 8:05 PM, Ubiquitous wrote:
>> Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) promoted a new and
>> unsubstantiated conspiracy theory on Monday, suggesting without evidence
>> that
>> President Donald Trump was intentionally trying to get her assassinated.
>>
>> Ocasio-Cortez made her wild claim on Twitter in response to the police
>> officer who reportedly said on Facebook that Ocasio-Cortez "needs a round —
>> and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve."
>>
>> "This is Trump's goal when he uses targeted language & threatens elected
>> officials who don't agree w/ his political agenda. It's authoritarian
>> behavior," Ocasio-Cortez claimed without evidence.

No. Trump's behavior is authoritarian on its face.

Bullshit.

[AlleyCat]

On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 09:12:39 -0700, Rudy Canoza says...

> Trump's behavior is authoritarian on its face.

Annnnd Obama having a rodeo clown fired for mocking him, and having a
parade float "investigated", wasn't.

"We done it with Bush." - Tuffy Gessling

https://youtu.be/WXR6KPy196g

http://oi60.tinypic.com/24bso6o.jpg

Gotcha.

Poor Rudy... suffering from little-dick syndrome and Trump derangement.

=====

Despite the Hysteria, Trump Is Trending LESS AUTHORITARIAN Than Obama

Through personnel and policy, President Trump is LIMITING the executive
branch.

Lost in most of the coverage of President Trump's decision to rescind the
Obama administration's transgender mandates is a fundamental legal reality
- the Trump administration just relinquished federal authority over
gender-identity policy in the nation's federally funded schools and
colleges.

In other words, Trump was less authoritarian than Obama. And that's not
the only case. Consider the following examples where his administration,
through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling that the executive
branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more
accountable to internal and external critique.

- Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just
for his intellect and integrity but also for his powerful legal argument
against executive-branch overreach. Based on his previous legal writings,
if Gorsuch had his way, the federal bureaucracy could well face the most
dramatic check on its authority since the early days of the New Deal. By
overturning judicial precedents that currently require judicial deference
to agency legal interpretations, the Court could put a stop to the current
practice of presidents and bureaucrats steadily (and vastly) expanding
their powers by constantly broadening their interpretations of existing
legal statutes.

For example, the EPA has dramatically expanded its control over the
American economy even without Congress passing significant new
environmental legislation. Instead, the EPA keeps revising its
interpretation of decades-old statutes like the Clean Air Act, using those
new interpretations to enact a host of comprehensive new regulations. If
Gorsuch's argument wins the day, the legislative branch would be forced to
step up at the expense of the executive, no matter how "authoritarian" a
president tried to be.

- Trump nominated H. R. McMaster to replace Michael Flynn as his national-
security adviser. McMaster made his name as a warrior on battlefields in
the Gulf War and the Iraq War, but he made his name as a scholar by
writing a book, Dereliction of Duty, that strongly condemned Vietnam-era
generals for simply rolling over in the face of Johnson-administration
blunders and excesses. In his view, military leaders owe their civilian
commander in chief honest and courageous counsel - even when a president
may not want to hear their words.

- When the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump's immigration executive order
(which was certainly an aggressive assertion of presidential power), he
responded differently from the Obama administration when it faced similar
judicial setbacks. Rather than race to the Supreme Court in the attempt to
expand presidential authority, it backed up (yes, amid considerable
presidential bluster) and told the Ninth Circuit that it intends to
rewrite and rework the order to address the most serious judicial concerns
and roll back its scope.

Authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not by
the rightness of his goals.

Indeed, if you peel back the layer of leftist critiques of Trump's early
actions and early hires, they contain a surprising amount of alarmism over
the rollback of governmental power. Education activists are terrified that
Betsy DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back
government mandates regarding campus sexual-assault tribunals.
Environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less
activist. Civil-rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff
Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local
disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops.

A president is "authoritarian" not when he's angry or impulsive or
incompetent or tweets too much. He's authoritarian when he seeks to expand
his own power beyond constitutional limits. In this regard, the Obama
administration - though far more polite and restrained in most of its
public comments - was truly one of our more authoritarian.

Obama exercised his so-called prosecutorial discretion not just to waive
compliance with laws passed by Congress (think of his numerous unilateral
delays and waivers of Obamacare deadlines) but also to create entirely new
immigration programs such as DACA and DAPA. He sought to roll back First
Amendment protections for political speech (through his relentless attacks
on Citizens United), tried to force nuns to facilitate access to birth
control, and he even tried to inject federal agencies like the Equality
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into the pastor-selection
process, a move blocked by a unanimous Supreme Court. In foreign policy,
he waged war without congressional approval and circumvented the
Constitution's treaty provisions to strike a dreadful and consequential
deal with Iran.

There's no doubt that Trump has expressed on occasion authoritarian
desires or instincts. In the campaign, he expressed his own hostility for
the First Amendment, his own love of expansive government eminent-domain
takings (even to benefit private corporations), endorsed and encouraged
violent responses against protesters, and declared that he alone would fix
our nation's most pressing problems. But so far, not only has an
authoritarian presidency not materialized, it's nowhere on the horizon.

Instead, he's facing a free press that has suddenly (and somewhat
cynically) rediscovered its desire to "speak truth to power," an
invigorated, activist judiciary, and a protest movement that's jamming
congressional town halls from coast to coast. This tweet, from Sonny
Bunch, is perfect:

Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist dictator that literally no
one fears speaking out against him on literally any platform.

- Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) February 12, 2017

Comments

It was just three weeks ago that David Frum published a much-discussed
essay in The Atlantic outlining how Trump could allegedly build an
American autocracy. Over at Vox, Ezra Klein wrote at length about how the
Founders' alleged failures laid the groundwork for a "partyocracy." And
now? Trump's early struggles are leading pundits to ask, "Can Trump help
Democrats take back the House?" In the American system, accountability
comes at you fast.

Liberals were blind to Obama's authoritarian tendencies in part because
they agreed with his goals and in part because their adherence to "living
Constitution" theories made the separation of powers far more conditional
and situational. But authoritarianism is defined by how a president
exercises power, not by the rightness of his goals. It's early, and things
can obviously change, but one month into the new presidency, a trend is
emerging - Trump is less authoritarian than the man he replaced.