Ms. Woke (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) Seeks to Distance Herself from What She Calls “Woke 1.”
I can’t think of any politician more associated with wokeness than New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So, it was with great surprise that I heard her acknowledge that “woke 1”, as she terms it, was crazy. This admission naturally would lead a curious person to follow up with obvious questions such as, what was crazy about it, and has AOC changed her positions since she embraced the woke agenda? Well, she didn’t say, and more significantly she wasn’t asked, you see she was not doing an interview with a real reporter. Rather, by design, she made her “crazy Woke 1” comment while doing an interview last week with ABC fake news reporter Jonathan Karl.
First, I feel I should explain my contempt for the way Karl handled the interview. When doing an interview, a good reporter, or even a bad reporter, tries to pin the interviewee down. Because an interview is designed to get clarity. If at the end of an interview a politician’s views are less clear, then it was a waste of time. At least from the standpoint of journalism.
In every interview the goal of a reporter is to get answers, and the goal of the politician, getting interviewed, is to avoid answering questions. The politicians want to maintain flexibility; they want to dodge; they don’t want to take a stand. So, the reporter must design every question for clarity, that is, the questions are worded in such a way to force the interviewee to take a position. In short, to pin them down.
In the twenty-minute interview last week, Jonathan Karl did not ask AOC a single reporter competent level question designed to get an actual answer. Every question that Karl asked was designed to allow her to avoid taking a clear position.
A good example, Karl mentioned some of the positions in the Democratic Socialists of America platform which includes; abolishment of the Senate, Defund the Department of Defense, Close Overseas Military Bases, Abolish Prisons, Grant Amnesty to All Illegal Aliens in the U.S., Public Ownership of the Largest U.S. Corporation, Get Rid of the Supreme Court, among other horrible ideas, but he never asked her what her position on any one of those planks was.
For example, he never asked, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, you are a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, do you support the abolishment of the Senate.” He never asked her, “You are a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, do you support the Public ownership of the largest U.S. corporations.” At one point he did ask her if she “supported any of that”, meaning the DSA platform in general, and she responded with one word “no.” But that raises the obvious question, which Karl didn’t ask, if she doesn’t support any plank in the DSA platform then why is she a member? Would you belong to a party, or organization whose platform you disagreed with on every plank? Not likely.
But Karl knows that the people who want to abolish the Senate and give amnesty to illegal aliens might vote for AOC, so he didn’t want to put her into a position of having to express her opposition to those ideas.
At times during the interview Karl helped AOC get her talking points in. One example. He agreed with AOC that “Woke 1” was crazy, and as an example Karl offered, “You briefly supported the defund the police” movement. Yes, that’s right. I remember hearing AOC adamantly say that “Defund the police, means defund the police,” but why is Karl telling us that her position on defunding the police has changed? Isn’t it up to her to spell out her positions and if she changed her views, shouldn’t she be asked why. My guess is Karl didn’t trust her to clarify her position, so he did it for her. How nice!
The main reason for the interview was so AOC could distance herself from the woke ideology of the Marxists. Just like the Wuhan Virus escaped from a lab in China, wokeness escaped from the faculty lounges in our universities, and AOC wants to get some distance from the virus that she championed several years ago. So, she declares in general terms, that woke was craziness, but she will avoid specific objections.
And to help her, Karl didn’t even ask what was crazy about it. In fact, AOC after acknowledging that it was a crazy period proceeded to defend it, saying, “We were trying to be open to any way that was going to get us to a better place.” This is false. Wokeness sought to intimidate people into silence. It sought to label people who disagreed with the Marxists as racists, sexists, homophobic. etc. It sought to cancel out people who spoke out against “settled science.” Karl didn’t point this out. He simply accepted AOC’s benign view that wokeness was an attempt to solve problems and find new solutions.
But if we have already gone through Woke 1, as AOC claims, then what is woke 2 going to look like? Well, Jonathan Karl didn’t ask her.
But in fairness to Jonathan Karl, despite his uxorious tone, his puppy dog glances at AOC, and his interest in her decision to freeze her eggs, it was not a completely softball interview, because it should be noted, that not once during the twenty-minute interview did Karl ask her to name her favorite flavor of ice cream.
David is the author of two books: Elections Have Consequences, A Cautionary Tale.
Norton’s Choice: An Inside Politics Exposé: Shephard, David: 9781892538802: Amazon.com: Books
6 comments
It all means AOC is running for President and she is trying to soften and moderate her traditional Leftwing Nutjob positions. That doesn’t mean her positions changed, as she just lied to us through her socialist teeth with the help of a propagandist lapdog organization.
A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, added to an existing treatment, slowed the return of melanoma and its spread to other parts of the body in a late-stage clinical trial, the drugmakers Merck and Moderna announced Wednesday, results that could herald a new, powerful approach in oncology.
So-called “neoantigen” vaccines have long been seen as having potential as cancer treatments, but this is the first randomized Phase 3 clinical trial aimed at definitively proving their benefit. In this case the personalized vaccine, intismeran, was combined with Merck’s Keytruda in adjuvant melanoma, meaning patients’ disease had been surgically removed.
If the results hold up — the drugmakers did not immediately release detailed data — they could deliver new hope and potentially longer lives for patients. They could also be a further testament to the power of mRNA as a platform to develop both traditional vaccines and therapeutics.
“I think this is really an important achievement,” said Jedd Wolchok, the director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and an immunotherapy pioneer. “It tells us what might have been considered science fiction 15 or 20 years ago — that we can produce a personalized vaccine based on sequencing from a tumor from a pathology specimen — could be used to delay progression of melanoma.
Ten years ago, my son was diagnosed with a very rare form of melanoma. He wound up losing a shoulder and arm, but, his life was saved by the experimental drugs that led to the development of these very vaccines. His DNA was compared with the cancer’s DNA and through the MRNA process, medication was developed that targeted his specific form of cancer – he took a cocktail of four pills daily for two years, made him drowsy, but the cancer was cleaned out. While he lost his shoulder and arm, he was saved and today is cancer free.
Of course, you geniuses here – led by an eyeglass salesman, a biblethumper, and a “political consultant” — will tell me otherwise. Which makes me wonder: When these drugs are approved (unless RFK Jr. stops them), just how violent will be the degenerate anti-vaccine propaganda from the Nazi Party, (formerly the Republican Party), that no doubt will viciously attack this development and cost lives.
After seemingly decades of R&D that have seemingly gone nowhere, it is nice to see something that has real promise for cancer prevention and treatment.
You are desperate to exonerate Fauci by pointing to a single example of success. Bravo for the success but condemnation for the failures and abuses is merited.
And you don’t get off that easy either. The miscarriage and stillborn rates as well as turbocancer increases are worse than your silly examples. And why take the 5th if you are a hero?
You are correct, it was not an interview.
Karl was just ” greasing the skids” for himself when aoc is selected as the Dem Presidential Nominee. He will be guaranteed an interview, aoc knows he will be a tail wagging lapdog.