Right wingers are outraged, and I think it’s because they’re scared: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is doing all the public relations work that you see when a potential candidate is considering a run for president. 

I know that a lot of people believe, or claim to believe, that only a white man can win. I disagree. I think we’re seeing a lot of energy out there for Democrats who actually have a spine and put up a fight. Like it or not, most of them right now are not white men. And AOC may have the best chance of all. I did a video about this possibility last July and I think it holds up.

The situation in New Jersey regarding hunger strikes and outside protests at an ICE facility is an important and underreported story right now, both for the immediate human impact and for what it says about the struggle for democracy. For those unaware of this: Sen. Andy Kim was pepper sprayed during a protest and Gov. Mikie Sherrill was denied access to the detention center, where detainees say they’re being abused and denied medical care. Both officials are Democrats, in case that isn’t obvious.

It’s hardly news thaat Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want to operate cruel and sadistic concentration camps for immigrants isn’t news, but what just happened in New Jersey has terrifying implications regarding their view of power and government. Elected officials are supposed to have access to places like this, because they represent the people that ICE supposedly works for. 

By denying elected representatives access, Trump and Miller are sending a message: They don’t believe this is a democracy. They see themselves as dictatorial leaders with absolute power and see ICE as a private army, the kind a warlord in some failed state on the other side of the world might have. They don’t view ICE as being accountable to you or me, the people who actually undewrite their paychecks. Of course, they don’t think they themselves can be held accountable, either. 

This alleged torture of human beings in places like Delaney Hall, the detainment facility in Newark, is being performed in our names but without our consent. I’m glad people are getting angry about it. It would be all too easy to decide that it’s somebody else’s problem, especially if you’re a U.S. citizen and believe you’re not in danger. But ICE’s war on America isn’t just about deporting immigrants. It’s also part of a larger agenda to make Trump into a de facto king, no matter how he denies it. That affects all of us, and should be resisted by all of us too. 

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The moral panic over declining birth rates is about one thing above all: sublimated fury at women for their growing independence. No, it’s really not about the labor market, and it’s not about some vague hope for the future. It doesn’t take much digging to figure out that people who are hyperventilating about slightly fewer babies being born almost invariably hold weird views about sex and gender.

Yet the mainstream media keeps litigating this issue as if good-faith concerns about a shrinking population were actually being expressed. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic recently published a credulous interview with University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, which effectively stoked this panic without noting that Fernández-Villaverde works for a Koch-backed right wing think tank or that he co-wrote a paper that implied parents don’t shame teen girls enough for having sex. 

Furthermore, if you dig into declining birth rates, you’ll discover two things. First, this mostly reflects a dramatic decline in teen pregnancy, as well as the fact that women of color now have fertility rates close to where white women have been for decades. So one way to think about this is that women who previously were shut out of the gains of the feminist movement are now gaining more power over their lives. 

Right-wing efforts to turn back the clock would inevitably hurt working-class women and girls the most, by limiting their options for higher education and financial independence. That, I would argue, is the real agenda driving this panic. As I’ve covered on my YouTube show “Standing Room Only,” this subtext is becoming the text, as more conservatives openly call for more teen pregnancies. You can bet it isn’t their daughters they want to start having babies at age 16. They want to push other people’s kids out of school and into low-paying, dead-end work. That’s all this is about. 

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