Racial Widgets

By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, August 31, 2018

Harvard wants to discriminate among its applicants on racial grounds. A group of Asian Americans says,“No.” The Justice Department says “No.” There is an excellent case that the 14th Amendment says “No,” too, in spite of what the courts have held from time to time.

“No,” is the right answer. And it has been a long time coming.

Perhaps Harvard will get the message. It is, and long has been, as one of its more famous alumni likes to say, “On the wrong side of history.”

Hillsdale College, that bastion of conservatism, has accepted female and African-American students since it was founded in 1844. The enlightened Ivy League does not have so good a record. Harvard did not graduate its first black student until 30 years later — and Princeton didn’t until a century later. Columbia excluded women from its undergraduate liberal-arts college until 1983. The Ivy League treated Jews disgracefully and discriminated against Catholics, too. The managers of these schools, then as now, argued that they were using racial and other discrimination in the pursuit of beneficial social ends. Harvard magazine reports:

In August 1912, Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart: racial purity. It was being threatened, he declared, by immigration. Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. “Each nation should keep its stock pure,” Eliot told his San Francisco audience. “There should be no blending of races.”

Eliot’s warning against mixing races—which for him included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, and blacks marrying whites—was a central tenet of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children.

The former Harvard president was an outspoken supporter of another major eugenic cause of his time: forced sterilization of people declared to be “feebleminded,” physically disabled, “criminalistic,” or otherwise flawed. In 1907, Indiana had enacted the nation’s first eugenic sterilization law. Four years later, in a paper on “The Suppression of Moral Defectives,” Eliot declared that Indiana’s law “blazed the trail which all free states must follow, if they would protect themselves from moral degeneracy.”

It is worth remembering that the policy of forced sterilization endorsed by the president of Harvard was confirmed by Harvard graduate Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, having had the best education that our finest institutions could afford him and achieving a place on the Supreme Court, considered the case of a young woman who had been remanded to a mental institution for “promiscuity” after having become pregnant as the consequence of a rape and concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

To the progressive mind, society is a vast factory, the machinery of which needs tinkering with from time to time. (By whom? By all the best people, those being Charles William Eliot, Oliver Wendell Holmes, etc.) The progressive mind has contempt for organic institutions and social arrangements that evolve according to their own logic over time, considering their practices and conceptions irrational, as indeed they consider irrational anything that is not under the discipline of a master plan. In a society as complex and populous as ours, it is impossible for the master-planner to account for genuine diversity, much less to consider cases on an individual basis. For that reason, it is inevitable that people with the mental habits of a Charles William Eliot or a Frederick Winslow Taylor will force people into crude categories, generally ones that are based on readily identifiable demographic features or quantifiable variables.

That isn’t always bad. Quantifiable variables such as scores on standardized tests are a useful way to establish standards (at least minimal standards) and to impose some limitations on processes heavy on subjectivity and therefore vulnerable to favoritism, prejudice, and other kinds of abuse. But behind the organizational theory is ideology, and Harvard insists on the use of race for ideological reasons rather than pedagogical ones. A statement put out by a group of Harvard students and alumni demanding that the university continue its racial discrimination insists: “Applicants’ opportunities to amass credentials that make for a competitive college application are greatly affected by race,” and that racial discrimination is necessary “given racial bias in standardized testing and endemic racial inequities.”

None of that is entirely true. The fastest-growing groups of black Americans are immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, many of whom have every opportunity to amass those educational credentials and whose progress in life has not been meaningfully impeded by race at all. The privately educated son of Nigerian professionals has a biography and a portfolio of resources that does not look very much like that of a black American raised by a single mother in East Tremont. One of them is more likely to end up applying to Harvard: A 1999 study of admissions in top U.S. universities found that more than 40 percent of the black applicants admitted were either immigrants, the children of immigrants, or from mixed-race families. Immigration in the subsequent two decades has changed the applicant pool even more dramatically.

Given Harvard’s lamentable history, and given the difficulty of sorting out the extent to which affirmative-action programs benefit the people they were actually designed to help, perhaps it is time to go another way and judge the applicants to this academic institution on academic criteria. Doing so probably would mean more Asian-American students at elite institutions.

“Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group,” the school’s administration insists in a statement. The claim is absurd on its face: If Harvard were not engaged in racial discrimination, then eliminating its race-based criteria would have no effect on the racial makeup of the student body. Harvard knows that this is not the case. Perhaps Lawrence S. Bacow, president of Harvard, would like to visit with some Asian-American students in the fourth or fifth grade and explain to them and their parents that, from Harvard’s institutional point of view, he doesn’t want too many of them.

Discrimination against African Americans continues. It remains a blot on our national character. And that discrimination is not limited to a few retrograde individuals. Black Americans routinely are failed by the most important social institutions in their communities. But students of any race teetering on the precipice of admission to Harvard are among the people in these United States that we could probably stand worrying about the least. They are going to be okay, even if they barely miss the cut and end up at Stanford or Michigan or the poor old benighted University of Texas.

One of the funny consequences of the fact that both our policy-making and our media discourse are dominated entirely by elites is that issues of interest to elite audiences take center stage. Who gets into Harvard matters a great deal to some people, and not because they have lifelong commitments to the pursuit of social justice.

Black Americans are not mainly held back by the fact that Harvard is hard to get into. If the powers that be at Harvard are curious, they could take a drive to the Boston exurbs to the Oxford school district, where the dropout rate for black students is 25 percent. (It is 0.0 percent for Asian students.) They might walk around the corner right there in Cambridge to the Schott Foundation for Higher Education, which tracks dropout rates and race, producing a great deal of worrisome data. They might visit New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, or Atlanta, where the difference in dropout rates between black students and white students is more than 20 percentage points in every case. Not a lot of likely Harvard recruits in those dropout pools.

Worrying about who gets into Harvard is not going to do very much for black Americans corporately, and the Asian-American plaintiffs have a convincing case on simple justice grounds. They should not be discriminated against in order to pursue someone else’s social ends. That is unjust and, in the long term, impossible to defend, even if Harvard’s motives are goodhearted.

And on the question of managing human beings as racial input and racial outputs, Harvard might want to give serious consideration to the possibility that it is getting it all wrong now, just as it has so often for so long.

Fixing the Kangaroo Courts

By Rich Lowry
Friday, August 31, 2018

A judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American.

Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms.

The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual assault and harassment allegations. It will be a significant advance for due process, which is almost as out of style on campus as free speech.

In one of its least defensible actions, the Obama administration used its Office for Civil Rights to impose its preferred procedures for handling sexual-assault cases on all the universities in the country that receive federal funds. It did it via a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter, in the name of Title IX, the provision in federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education.

The process was terrible. It blew right by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment before such rules go into effect. And the substance was worse. If the letter reads as if it were written by inflamed activists who had no interest in balanced proceedings, that’s because it was.

It required colleges to adopt a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than a “clear and convincing” standard.

It more or less forbade colleges from allowing the cross-examination of accusers.

It adopted a remarkably broad definition of sexual harassment to include “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”

The administration also encouraged the use of a “single investigator-adjudicator system,” i.e., one person as investigator, judge, and jury.

The Obama rules are medieval in the sense that they ignore central developments in Anglo-American justice that arose hundreds of years ago.

In their important book The Campus Rape Frenzy, K C Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. describe how the rules often played out:

Start with an alcohol-soaked set of facts that no state’s criminal law would consider sexual assault. Add an incomplete “investigation,” unfair procedures, and a disciplinary panel uninterested in evidence of innocence. Stir in a de facto presumption of guilt based on misguided Obama administration dictates, ideological zeal, and fear of bad publicity.

The result has, inevitably, been jaw-dropping miscarriages of justice. Everyone should want perpetrators of sexual assault to be punished — and in the criminal-justice system, not just by colleges — but elementary protections for the accused can’t be discarded in the process.

One reason the Obama rules were so lopsided is that they were crafted in an atmosphere of moral panic. It was assumed that there was a spiraling epidemic of sexual assault on campus. Taylor and Johnson note, to the contrary, that sexual assaults of female college students dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2013, and that young women in college are less likely to be assaulted than those who are not in college.

The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still taken seriously.

A U.S. District Court judge wrote in a 2016 ruling against Brandeis University: “If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision. Put simply, a fair determination of the facts requires a fair process, not tilted to favor a particular outcome, and a fair and neutral fact-finder, not predisposed to reach a particular conclusion.”

This is the animating spirit behind the DeVos changes. They are still being formulated, but a New York Times report suggests that they will correct the worst excesses of the Obama rules and interject fairness into proceedings that were, shamefully, designed to lack it.

J.D. Martinez’s Second Amendment Stance Isn’t ‘Controversial,’ It’s Patriotic

By David Harsanyi
Thursday, August 30, 2018   

Someone recently dug up an old pro-Second Amendment Instagram post by Boston Red Sox star J.D. Martinez, in which the potential Triple Crown winner posted a picture of Adolf Hitler featuring the quote, “To conquer a nation, first disarm it’s [sic] citizens.” Martinez captioned the post, “This is why I always stay strapped! #thetruth.”

Needless to say, the discovery triggered a torrent of stories about the “controversial” nature of Martinez’s six-year-old post—because, apparently, disagreeing with a Hitlerian sentiment is now a provocative position. Some writers lazily created the impression that Martinez was quoting Hitler admiringly, while the usual suspects said the usual silly things.

As it turned out, Hitler hadn’t said the words in Martinez’s pro-gun meme, although the dictator indisputably embraced such a policy in both rhetoric and action. Perpetuating a questionable quotation can happen to the best of us. But what seems to really tick off people– and it’s difficult to judge how many average sports fans really care about Martinez’s politics (I suspect far fewer than the coverage suggests)—is the notion that an armed population can be a freer one.

“The rhetoric of invoking Hitler is indefensible because it trivializes what he and the Nazis did,” Mike Godwin of “Godwin’s Law” fame argued in a column at the Boston Herald. “It’s historically inaccurate to state that Hitler wanted to take people’s guns away. If anything, he wanted all citizens to have guns, except Jews.”

Avoiding Nazi analogies is, generally speaking, a very good idea. But there’s no evidence that Hitler wanted “all citizens” other than Jews to possess firearms. It’s true that the Nazis relaxed a few gun laws that had been forced on Germany after World War I, but by 1938 the Third Reich had banned all Jews, gypsies, and “enemies of the State” — which is to say, anyone the state deemed problematic — from possessing any weapons, including knives, firearms or ammunition. Even for Germans, gun laws remained relatively strict.

The gun-controllers seem more offended by the meme’s intimation that they, like autocrats, are interested in restricting the public’s right to own firearms. You may remember the feigned outrage over Ben Carson’s 2015 contention that through “a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.” The folks at PolitFact rated his argument completely false, because factcheckers now believe they are gifted with the supernatural capability of judging the veracity of counterhistories.

The thing is, Carson hadn’t claimed in his book that the Holocaust could be averted (neither does the admittedly crude meme Martinez used). He argued that Nazis wouldn’t have been able to implement their plans with “relatively little resistance.” Considering the damage Jews were able to inflict with only few weapons at the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto (and Jewish and non-Jewish partisans could throughout Europe) a person can plausibly argue that, at the very least, an armed populace makes it harder for tyrants to succeed.

So while the notion that an armed population can stop mechanized armies or domestic military forces from implementing something like a Holocaust is debatable, what isn’t debatable is that, whether we’re talking about Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin or some tinpot dictator of a banana republic, there’s virtually no authoritarian, tyrant, or statist in modern history who hasn’t attempted to disarm citizens. That includes Fidel Castro.

“As most of you guys know, I’m Cuban-American,” Martinez explained. “Most of my family was run out of Cuba because of a brutal dictator. And it’s terrible. My parents still talk about family members that are back in Cuba that I’ll never get to meet. And it sucks.” It sure does. Here in the United States, though, Martinez can celebrate the fact that a heavily armed citizenry helped repel subjugation.

“I love my country,” Martinez went on tell the New York Daily News. “I stand by the Constitution and I stand by the Second Amendment.”  The Founders believed that disarming the populace was an attack on a fundamental liberty and a recipe for tyranny. John Adams argued that the right to have a weapon was a “primary canon of the law of nature.” George Mason maintained that disarming the people was “the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

Nearly every Founding Father believed that an attempt to disarm the population was casus belli. The men at Concord and Lexington didn’t stand up to the far superior British force because they were concerned about income inequality. They were protecting a cache of weapons. (I take a deep dive into the topic in my forthcoming cultural history of the gun in America, “First Freedom.”)

Yet Red Sox president Sam Kennedy told The Boston Herald that the team had spoken to Martinez about being more cautious on social media. The question is: Why should an athlete be subjected to warnings from his team’s owner—or a nonsensical controversy ginned up by some reporters—for showing appreciation of an enduring American value?

Safe Spaces and Thuggish Violence at King’s College London

By Tamara Berens
Thursday, August 30, 2018

King’s College London’s student union has a “Safe Space Policy” enforced by marshals who are paid the equivalent of $16 an hour to restrict free speech on campus. Under the policy, a speaker or student can be forced to leave a room if they are accused of using speech that discriminates against someone on the basis of ideology, culture, gender, race, religion, or age, among other characteristics. These categories are so ill-defined that almost any speech could be deemed a violation of the policy. The rationale is that if students have the unequivocal right to shut down those who offend them, the university can create a “Safe Space” where everyone is emotionally protected at all times. The administration believes that this approach is key to keeping student satisfaction high and preventing unrest on campus. But declaring the majority of student events “Safe Spaces” has in reality only served to encourage recurring unsafeness, in the form of violence against visiting speakers.

In January 2016, the Safe Space policy was in place when a mob of anti-Israel students prevented former Israel Security Agency head Ami Ayalon from finishing his talk on the university’s main campus. After the protesters barricaded the room, screamed deafening chants, and set off fire alarms, attendees were forced to flee the event through underground tunnels. This March, an offshoot of Antifa stormed a debate organized by the Libertarian Society between Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook and political YouTuber Carl Benjamin. A familiar scenario unfolded in which smoke bombs were set off, a security guard was seriously injured, and the entire event was ultimately shut down by the actions of masked vigilantes who were invited onto campus by students at the university. At both events, declaring a “Safe Space” failed to stop students from making it unsafe.

The college now faces a scourge unprecedented in the U.K.: rampant violence against visiting speakers on campus. The violence is perpetrated by a small but organized coalition of radical leftist students. Rather than punish those students, the administration has opted to extend free-speech restrictions to the student groups targeted by the unrest. In the aftermath of Antifa’s disruption, the college enacted punitive restrictions on all of the upcoming activities of the Libertarian Society. The college even cancelled a scheduled talk about free speech with Dr. Adam Perkins, one of its own professors.

The administration is being held hostage by intolerant leftist students who dictate which ideas should be restricted through the threat of violence. Speakers associated with the far left are therefore given a free pass when invited onto campus, while conservative, libertarian, and pro-Israel groups are frequently forced to alter their events in order to allay extensive complaints from the agitators. Restrictions forced upon student events by the administration include the imposition of an extra speaker to create debate, a limit on the number of attendees, and, of course, the authoritarian Safe Space policy. The message these restrictions send is that “controversial” ideas, rather than autonomous individuals, drive violence on campus.

Physical aggression should be a clear red line for any college administration. But King’s fears that countering the violence will arouse fury among those in the powerful student union. An investigation into recent violence found written proof that specific students involved in union politics were guilty of orchestrating Antifa’s presence on campus. Yet these students were somehow simultaneously exonerated in the investigation, as the report claimed there was no proof that they knew Antifa would perpetrate violence on campus. This is plainly false, considering Antifa’s well-known penchant for violence and intimidation. These students have not only managed to escape punishment, but now hold positions of authority in the student body. One student who was recorded chanting alongside Antifa has been permitted to continue with a paid role as a welfare-and-community officer with the student union this coming year.

King’s College London has made the mistaken assertion that students should feel emotionally safe at school. In fact, emotional unsafeness is integral to student life. Debating the topics protected under King’s Safe Space policy may lead to discomfort and even offense. Yet such discussions are also key to both intellectual inquiry and personal growth. The leftist students who want to shield themselves from these discussions are fundamentally at odds with the ideals of higher education. As the fourth-oldest university in the U.K., King’s was founded to further outstanding scientific progress. It is now considered a premier research-based university with influential alumni worldwide in the arts, sciences, military, and government. Rampant violence and Safe Spaces should have no place at such an institution.

Other universities in the U.K. face similar problems. Spiked magazine’s 2018 Free Speech University Rankings found that 54 percent of universities in the U.K. actively censor speech. Violence has also begun to spread, as a talk in February by British MP Jacob Rees-Mogg at the University of the West of England was aggressively disrupted by a group of thugs associated with Antifa. Without a culture or legal protections supportive of free speech in wider British society, external pressure won’t bring about change. Administrators must take the initiative themselves to stand up to student censors, mounting a vigorous defense of free speech and their own institutional integrity before it is too late.

Facebook’s Conservatives Find Their Courage

By David French

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

In my many years of traveling the country, speaking at universities, litigating against universities, and interacting with conservatives who live and work in the most seemingly uniform progressive enclaves, I’ve come to understand three key truths:

First, there are more conservatives in virtually every major progressive institution than people realize.

Second, they tend to be scattered across the company or university and therefore perhaps feel more alone and isolated than their true numbers would suggest.

Third, they’re afraid of reprisals if they attempt to organize in any manner similar to their progressive colleagues.

The resulting sense of isolation and lack of collective action renders them increasingly vulnerable, reinforces the sense that one has to keep his head down to survive, and builds in the Left a false sense of unanimity that only reinforces their view that all sensible people share their views. Progressive activists interpret silence as agreement, and the lack of dissent only spurs more activism.

It takes real moral courage to break the isolation, declare your beliefs, and seek to organize like-minded conservatives (and sympathetic liberals). It also happens to be the single most effective way of breaking groupthink and initiating internal reform. As I’ve written before, it’s the internal mob that matters — especially when dealing with immense progressive institutions that hold commanding market positions. Harvard and Google care far more about their employees’ positions than they do about the political beliefs of customers who largely either have nowhere else to go or desperately seek the credential that only that institution can provide.

And that’s why the internal conservative revolt at Facebook may — just may — represent one of the most consequential news developments of the year. A senior engineer named Brian Amerige posted a short statement on Facebook’s internal message board. It began with words that will ring true to employees at hundreds of major American corporations and academic institutions:

We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views.​ We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in ​*obe​ and ​*ist​ at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.

We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically.​ HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity,” and “equality.” On this issues [sic], you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.

Amerige invited colleagues to join a group called “FB’ers for Political Diversity” and — as the New York Times reports — more than 100 employees have joined. It’s a small fraction of the Facebook workforce, but it’s enough that it can’t be easily squelched.

Indeed, the Times reports that angry colleagues have already tried to appeal to Facebook to shut down the group. So far, they’ve failed:

The new group has upset other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to minorities. One engineer, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had lodged complaints with their managers about FB’ers for Political Diversity and were told that it had not broken any company rules.

To understand the potential importance of the new group, one only has to understand the most basic facts of human nature and how those facts impact our present, intolerant times. Let’s be honest: When a person’s livelihood or reputation is on the line, courage is hard to come by. At the same time, however, a little bit of courage can go a long way. Groupthink is more easily shattered than one might imagine.

Even one dissenting voice in a room can alter the entire dynamic of the conversation and moderate the whole. The lack of any dissenting voices naturally and inevitably causes the group to migrate to the extremes. The resulting extremism further deters dissent and fosters even more extremism — to the point where the received wisdom of the in-group can seem utterly mystifying to outsiders.

With all due apologies to the Harry Potter franchise, if Amerige can become “the engineer who lived” — the man who dissented, gathered a coalition, and made a difference — then his influence won’t be limited to Facebook (and given Facebook’s power, even if he “only” influences Facebook, he’ll have made an impact); it will extend throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Reform from the inside is typically more consequential and durable than reform imposed from the outside. And now we have evidence — from the heart of a social-media giant — that the monoculture may see a challenge. The monoculture is facing a threat, and that is good news indeed for America’s embattled culture of free speech.

How Ocasio-Cortez Makes the Case against Socialism

By Katherine Timpf

Thursday, August 30, 2018

On Wednesday, it was reported that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign had spent $4,000 on Uber rides — despite the fact that the self-described Democratic socialist herself had previously decried the company on Twitter.

This is, of course, nothing short of hypocrisy. If you really thought a company was so bad, you’d probably make sure your campaign didn’t use it. If you really thought something was a problem, you probably wouldn’t give that problem $4,000. What’s more, if you were really concerned about the plight of NYC taxi drivers, you might, you know, give them some business, instead of giving your business to the very company you’d criticized for ruining them.

What we have with this revelation is just another example of how Ocasio-Cortez’s time in the spotlight has made an argument against socialism, instead of for it. Her words may say that the heavily regulated taxi companies are better, but her actions say that she prefers Uber — a service that is only possible because of the thing she stands most opposed to: capitalism.

Now, this is not the first time that something like this has happened. As Investor’s Business Daily notes, Ocasio-Cortez seemed to make an argument against herself again last week when she expressed her sadness over the closing of a restaurant where she used to work. In her post about the good times that she’d had there, she failed to mention that the reason it was closing was because it could not comply with New York City’s soon-to-be-implemented $15 per hour minimum wage. Perhaps unknowingly, she had expressed regret over something that had been caused by the very sort of policy she supports.

Then there is, of course, the repeated and complete breakdown of her positions whenever they are evaluated through the lens of reality and facts. On August 7, she stated flatly that the “upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America” — undoubtedly an argument for a socialist-style redistribution of wealth — when the reality is that the upper-middle class has actually grown under our capitalist system in the last few decades. The very next day, she claimed that “Medicare for all is actually much more, is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now,” when the reality is that her plan would actually “raise government expenditures by $32.6 trillion over 10 years,” according to a fact check of her comments by the Washington Post. What’s more, her recent interview with Trevor Noah proved that many of her positions come from a foundation of a complete misunderstanding of the facts. As my colleague Charles Cooke notes, that interview “revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about ‘private equity’ firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park.”

Many people might be tempted to see the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, and particularly her popularity in the media, to be some sort of sign that her version of socialism might actually be viable in this country. Anyone who is actually paying attention, however, would see that the opposite is true. At almost every turn, the spotlight on Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist ideals has shown how completely infeasible they are, and how often they are rooted in false information and misunderstanding.

No one should know this better than Ocasio-Cortez herself. After all, if you look at her actions instead of her words, it seems that even she herself understands the benefits of capitalism — and her campaign has the Uber bill to prove it.