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      We need to discuss the word ‘woke’

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      OpinionLife and styleWhat does the word ‘woke’ even mean? We asked our panelistsMalaika Jabali, Laura Kipnis, Rebecca Solnit, Bhaskar Sunkara, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zaid Jilani and Derecka PurnellAOC and James Carville just got into a spat over the word. But what does it actually mean? Tue 9 Nov 2021 10.08 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 12.51 ESTMalaika Jabali: ‘Woke has become distorted beyond recognition’It’s mostly people who don’t understand the original connotation of “woke” who still say woke. They can have it. Whether we’re talking about “critical race theory” from Black scholars, “identity politics” from Black feminists, or “woke” from Black slang, terms indigenous to our way of thinking or advocating get co-opted and distorted beyond recognition in mainstream society.Woke was another way to say “conscious”: having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Amid police killings in that “post-racial” society, these myths became untenable.Slang is organic. It arrives from particular conditions. There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. And just as “woke” evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. And others will continue to co-opt and distort.
      Malaika Jabali is the senior news and politics editor at Essence Magazine
      Laura Kipnis: ‘Wokeness is about style, not substance’The term “woke” wasn’t around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker – the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy “wokeness” against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude.The instinct is that something’s going on with you, the rebuker, that you can’t see in yourself; all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. Excessive. “Woke” is a one-word hermeneutics of suspicion, shorthand for the sort of characterology Maugham was performing, dissecting a fulminator’s self-relation and self-delusions.I believe it’s more useful as applied to political style than political substance, however: I can agree with the woke on politics – I’m for social justice too! – though I may be warier about righteous vanguards and missionary zeal.Mr Davidson says things like: “If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast in to the flames,” referring to the South Sea Islanders he and his wife mean to convert. “We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions,” says she, his equal in uprightness. Note the punitive rigidity underpinning the “good works”, the authoritarian streak, the self-congratulatory religiosity. Compare to your Twitter feed.
      Laura Kipnis is a writer. Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, will be out in February
      Rebecca Solnit: ‘Woke was kidnapped and has died’Once upon a time, the past tense of “wake” left its life as a verb and became an adjective of sorts, a term for describing the quality of having awakened, especially to injustice and racism. Like other vernacular words in the English language, Woke’s youth was among young Black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives. They were often angry at words, especially new words, most particularly words that disturbed their rest – awakened them, you could say – and Woke was such a word.This fairy tale ends badly. Rather than kill Woke, they tried to turn him into a zombie mercenary sent out to sneer at those who were concerned about racism and other injustices. This backfired and “woke” became a marker of the not-OK Boomer, a bilious word whose meaning was more in who said it than in what it meant or mocked. In other words, Woke died. Cool young people were not sad that Woke was dead, because he was no longer their word, and mean old people were not sad because they did not know he was dead. The end.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Language on the left can be a problem’To be “woke” once meant to be alert to the continued realities of oppression, particularly the oppression faced by Black Americans. But today, its meaning has shifted. To be “woke” is to lack urgency about building the coalitions that can win over working-class people and actually redistribute money and power to the oppressed.This isn’t to say that progressives have to avoid questions of social justice to win a mythically conservative working-class, but that we need to acknowledge the reality that working-class people of all races want basically the same things: good jobs, secure housing, dependable health care, and the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Framing universal concerns with identity-focused messaging or language stolen straight from academia is a huge mistake.James Carville absolutely has a point when he talks about Democratic party messaging being too far removed from ordinary voters — including the party’s base of black and brown voters. But he’s quick to conflate unpopular rhetoric with popular demands like Medicare for All pushed by the figures he maligns like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders.Our language on some parts of the Left is a problem. But that’s an easier problem to fix than the fact that Carville and Clintonite Democrats have lost the trust of millions of Americans with their defense of elite interest and decades of unpopular policies. Progressive have a program that can win — we now just need the right way to communicate it and new approaches to organizing people around their most pressing economic concerns.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor of Jacobin and a Guardian US columnist
      Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Woke is not a viable descriptor’Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. “Woke” is not, and has not been for some time now, a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains interested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber.The term has been co-opted and diluted of meaning by lazy ideologues and bad-faith actors on the right, which is a shame, since it’s more poetic and evocative than any pithy substitute I can think of.The challenge for anyone interested in something deeper than culture-war point scoring is to develop new language that is specific enough to persuade those who don’t already agree to consider the same old questions from new angles.Fairly or not, “woke” and “wokeness” now overwhelmingly signal that you’re not fundamentally interested in that rhetorical labor, and those who need the most convincing give themselves permission to stop paying attention.
      Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White. His next book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf
      Zaid Jilani: ‘You’re either with us or against us’The word woke loosely refers to a social media-fueled, leftwing political ideology that emerged in the English-speaking world in the early 2010s. The term is derived from the state of being awake to or conscious of structural inequalities in society and being hyper-aware of one’s own role in those inequalities. Someone who is woke is constantly inspecting every institution in society, looking for the presence of racism, sexism, and other forms of pervasive prejudice.What separates someone who is woke from someone who is merely progressive is not only this vigilance and awareness but a fervent belief that everyone must be enlisted into their social causes at all times and that the end justifies the means when battling injustice.Unlike traditional liberals, woke Americans place very little stake in value-neutral norms like freedom of speech and non-discrimination. As the antiracist activist Ibram Kendi says, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Kendi also informs us that you can only be racist or anti-racist, there is no middle ground, echoing former president George W Bush’s instruction that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.
      Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the Intercept and the Center for American Progress
      Derecka Purnell: ‘You have to wake people up – then you get action’From street corners to kitchen tables, friends and I have laughed and shouted each other down about the state of Black America. We argue about whether our people are “asleep” – unaware of, uninterested in, unconcerned with the violence that white people inflict upon us. Such violence can be found in demeaning interpersonal interactions with individual white people, and in the structural white supremacist violence in our housing, hospitals, jobs and schools.If “sleep” prevents us from collectively resisting this savagery, then one must remember Malcolm X’s message: “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.”Political expressions derived from Black activism, including “stay woke”, “Hotep”, “Black Lives Matter”, have strange careers. Like our heroes, they are lauded, branded, dehistoricized, co-opted and caricatured. For example, the Democratic strategist James Carville bastardizes “wokeness” as a “stupid”, inflexible commitment to ideas that seek to drastically improve society. His usage robs the term of its value to make us more politically aware and active on our terms. Why? James Baldwin explains that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” This rage threatens the status quo, what Carville and other wealthy, politically powerful people fight to protect.Ironically, Carville’s condemnation is exactly why Black people continue to tell each other to stay woke: elite white actors and institutions benefit from exploiting Black votes, activism and culture while telling us to bury our grievances about their violence. It’s how the Democratic party scribbles “Black Lives Matter” on banners for their conventions yet give more money to the police who kill Black people quickly.I suspect that, like his rightwing counterparts who are antagonistic to “critical race theory” and “white privilege”, Carville refuses to learn why Black people historically use wokeness to inspire our activism.I suggest he starts with Langston Hughes: “Negroes Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind. Beware the day They change their minds!” Or Malcolm X: “… there will come a time when black people wake up and become intellectually independent enough to think for themselves … this type of thinking also brings an end to the brutality inflicted upon black people by white people and it is the only thing that will bring an end to it. No federal court, state court, or city court will.”
      Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
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      Progressives are now heavy-weights in the Democratic party | Gary Gerstle

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      OpinionUS newsProgressives are now heavyweights in the Democratic partyGary GerstleThe ambition of Biden’s spending package reveals the distance that US politics has travelled since the Great Recession Tue 12 Oct 2021 06.18 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 08.32 EDTThe stench of defeat has clung to the Democrats’ failure to get either of their major infrastructure bills passed by Congress during the last week of September. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had committed herself to 27 September as the date by which she would bring to a vote the smaller, bipartisan bill infrastructure package already passed by the Senate. This was going to happen, she said, even if no progress had been made on meeting the progressive Democrats’ key demand: passing the larger reconciliation infrastructure bill at the same time. But Pelosi held no vote that day or even that week, even as she vowed with increasing frequency (and seeming desperation) that one was imminent. The week ended not with a dramatic roll call but with plenty of Democratic handwringing and gleeful Republican predictions that the collapse of Democratic rule and, with it, of Biden’s presidency, was at hand.Treating that fateful week as the moment when the promise of the Biden presidency vanished may be too hasty a conclusion, however. The difficult challenge facing Pelosi was to unite Democrats behind a second infrastructure bill much larger and more ambitious than the first. It was never going to be easy to pass that second bill, and not just because the Democrats were holding a slim majority in the House and the thinnest of majorities in the Senate. It is also the case that a bill of this size and scope has no clear precedent. We hear a lot about FDR’s remarkable accomplishment, passing 15 separate bills in the first 100 days of his New Deal administration in 1933. The Democrats’ second infrastructure bill, if passed, would have been equally remarkable. It is best understood as an attempt to compress the equivalent of Roosevelt’s fifteen separate initiatives into one giant piece of legislation.It’s exhausting simply to read through the list of the second infrastructural bill’s major provisions: universal preschool, subsidies for child and elder care, a program of school lunches, paid medical leave, expansion of Medicare (and Obamacare and Medicaid), massive investments in a green economy, additional investments in physical infrastructure, a Civilian Climate Corps (modelled on FDR’s storied Civilian Conservation Corps), affordable housing, Native American infrastructure, support for historically black colleges and universities, and an expanded green card program for immigrant workers and their families. We’ve heard a lot about the way in which the filibuster warps American democracy and about the arcane process of “reconciliation” that, in a few instances, allows for a filibuster “workaround.” We’ve heard a lot less about how the Democrats, in difficult political circumstances, have come within two Senate votes of achieving a legislative breakthrough on a scale that rivals FDR’s legendary 100 days.And despite pundit declarations to the contrary, Democrats’ attempt at breakthrough is not yet dead. It is true that the reconciliation infrastructural bill no longer has a chance of reaching an expenditure level of $4tn. If such a bill passes, it is likely to be in the $1.5-2tn range. The many major initiatives currently contained within it may have to be shrunk by a third. That will disappoint Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their supporters, who had originally set their eyes on a $6tn package. Yet, history offers a different perspective. The Biden administration might still deliver a package of programs across its first year totaling $5tn: an estimated $2tn for a downsized reconciliation infrastructural bill; $2tn for America’s Rescue Plan already approved; and the $1tn for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that is sure to pass the House at some point. This “shrunken” 2021 package as a whole would still rival (as a percentage of GDP) government expenditures during the most expensive years of the second world war. It would exceed by more than five times the size of Obama’s 2009 economic recovery plan.The ambition of Biden’s spending package reveals the distance that US politics has travelled since the Great Recession, when Obama relied for economic guidance on a group of economic advisors drawn from the neoliberal world of Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs, and of Wall Street more broadly—figures such as Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Michael Froman. Elizabeth Warren had not then launched her political career, and Sanders was a lonely voice in the Senate. They were certainly not regarded as Democratic Party heavyweights. They now are. That Biden ultimately sided with the progressives during the 27 September week is a sure sign of their influence.The progressives’ influence is equally apparent in Biden’s decision, in the days leading up to the expected vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, to nominate Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency. Omarova, a law professor at Cornell University, is a radical who wants to democratize and nationalize finance in America in ways never done before. In her legal writings, she has argued that the Federal Reserve ought to be turned into a people’s bank where Americans would keep their deposit accounts (rather than in private banks, as is currently the case). This newly configured Fed, in her vision, would also establish a “national investment authority” charged with directing Federal Reserve capital to projects that serve the public interest. Omarova may not receive confirmation from the Senate; even if she does, she may simply be a pawn in Biden’s campaign to get the mainstream Jerome Powell reappointed as Fed chairman. But by nominating Omarova, Biden has spurred a conversation already underway about how to restructure the Fed in ways that make it less of a cloistered institution serving elite interests and both more transparent and more responsive to the democratic will.Omarova is hardly a singular figure in Biden circles. Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at Binghamton University and a former chief economist for Democrats on the US Senate Budget Committee, has argued in a widely-read book (The Deficit Myth) that governments can sustain much larger deficits than conventional economic theory prescribes. High-volume government expenditures, properly targeted, she asserts, will not slow economic growth but enhance a “people’s economy.” Lina Khan, appointed by Biden to chair the Federal Trade Commission, believes that social media and e-commerce giants such as Amazon exercise the kind of monopoly power that damage both the economy and American democracy. She has authorized the FTC to scrutinize the practices of these corporate titans with a view toward either breaking them up or subjecting them to much stricter public regulation than they have yet known. More generally, she aims to restore a regime of public regulation of private corporate power that FDR and his New Dealers did so much to bring into being—and that the Reagan Revolution did so much to break up. The bipartisan fury directed at Facebook during congressional hearings last week suggest that Khan’s views may have broad popular appeal.It is still too soon to know which of these progressive views and the governing proposals that issue from them will prevail. The Democrats are operating in a political environment far more hostile than what Roosevelt faced in 1933, when he enjoyed large majorities in the House and the Senate. If they fail to pass versions of both infrastructural bills this autumn, the Democrats will seriously damage their chances of maintaining their majorities in the House and Senate in 2022. But it is also true, as is the case with the populist mobilization that Trump has engendered on the right, that the new progressivism is not going away anytime soon. We have entered a new political era, one in which the principles and strategies that guided the party during the Clinton and Obama eras no longer suffice.
      Gary Gerstle is Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge and is writing The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). He is a Guardian US columnist
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      AOC’s guide to getting noticed at parties: drape yourself in the garments of class war | Van Badham

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      OpinionAlexandria Ocasio-CortezAOC’s guide to getting noticed at parties: drape yourself in the garments of class warVan BadhamThe backlash to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Tax the rich’ Met Gala dress was instant and glorious Wed 15 Sep 2021 00.42 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 00.48 EDTAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not the only celebrity to take a political statement as her date to the Met Gala. The actor Cara Delevingne celebrated the “American Independence” theme of the visually dazzling annual ball in a vest that read “Peg the Patriarchy”. The US congresswoman Carolyn Maloney was resplendent in a “suffragette gown” made of trailing “Equal rights for women” banners. The actor Dan Levy donned Aids-era queer art. The Trump-baiting football megastar Megan Rapinoe carried a dainty purse embossed with the words “In gay we trust”.‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreBut it was AOC in a slyly bridal white Aurora James dress who made the most impact of the evening. James is an immigrant to the US, a black woman who built her brand from hard-work beginnings, selling her clothes in Brooklyn’s neighbourhood markets. Yet the congressional representative from New York’s 14th district bared her shoulders above James’ orchid-like couture creation not merely as a celebration of local effort and enterprise. The back of AOC’s gown came adorned with the words TAX THE RICH in the red Pantone shade “Beheaded Capitalist”.The backlash was instant and glorious. It was something of a delight to watch the US right prioritise a conniption about economic redistribution over so many immediate visible opportunities to be sexist and homophobic. Then again, the theme of “America” has always been implicitly twinned with “money” and, while capitalism happily finds markets to exploit among girls and queers, collectivised wealth has never been the radical chic it prefers to embrace.A symbolic case in point is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the host and beneficiary of the Met Gala. It’s a taxpayer-funded institution, legislated into existence to serve a century-old mission to “be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year”. Yet its famous Costume Institute must fundraise for itself, hence seeking voluntary contributions from rich people in the form of $35,000-a-head tickets to this disgusting, decadent, fabulous Met Gala annual party. This week’s event raked in $16.75m.There are those who condemn the fatuous, end-of-empire-level-indulgence event that sees Debbie Harry turn up as a floating ribcage while the more-money-less-talent Kardashian women conspicuously underwhelm on the couture front every year. I am not one of them. I say let the rich eat all the cake they want if paying for it means a kid from a poor community can experience, for free, the transformative joy of an accessible art museum. Or get care in a hospital. Or go to school. Find any way at all to squeeze the money out of them – indeed, this is the very principle of taxation.How lovely to see in the photography of a celebrity gala event that it’s a principle shared by AOC, whose dress was not actually a performance of faux activism but a press release in the form of wearable art summarising the activism she has made meaningful where it matters. The seismic leftward shift she’s effected on Democratic party politics and the political discourse beyond it has provided Joe Biden the vanguard for leftist policy ambition unthinkable to decades of party predecessors. It was the new US president – not AOC – who published on social media on Tuesday: “A teacher shouldn’t pay more in taxes than an oil company. We’re going to cut taxes for the middle class by ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their share.”The Met Gala 2021: eight key moments from fashion’s big nightRead moreI adore AOC. Not merely for her meticulous congressional preparation and policy work, her skilled questioning, or her Jacinda Ardern-like ability to calculate the most impactful ratio of ideological purity to ruthless pragmatism – remember, AOC did not waste her radical progressivism on a doomed minor-party project, but brought it with her to the centre of real power. I also adore her because she pre-empted criticism of her Met Gala appearance with a quote from Marshall McLuhan, the brilliant Canadian media theorist who predicted the internet back in the 1960s. Those awed by AOC’s adept use of social and other media to brand, communicate and radicalise others may wish to consider that she may have absorbed something of use from the man who pointed out “sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard”.In this way, she imparts in her person a specific instruction to urban young women desperate to be noticed, and yet overwhelmed by inaccessible standards of celebrity glamour, surgical beauty and unaffordable livery on show at the Met Gala. It’s “before you order the dress, do the reading”.There’s always one surefire way to get noticed at parties and it isn’t rocking up in a dress made from sequinned pantyhose, or aping the style of one of those 1970s dolls with big skirts that used to decorously cover the toilet paper. It’s to arrive AOC-style – in the blood-spattered garments of fighting class war.TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezOpinionMet Gala 2021US politicsDemocratscommentReuse this content More

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      ‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met Gala

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met Gala‘The time is now for childcare, healthcare and climate action for all,’ the congresswoman wrote on Instagram02:25Alexandra VillarrealTue 14 Sep 2021 14.06 EDTFirst published on Tue 14 Sep 2021 09.25 EDTWhen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red to the Met Gala, one of New York’s swankiest events, she was sure to ruffle some feathers.The Met Gala 2021: eight key moments from fashion’s big nightRead moreCritics duly disparaged the move as both hypocritical and tone deaf. The New York congresswoman, a leading House progressive, was happy to set the record straight.“The medium is the message,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram.“NYC elected officials are regularly invited to and attend the Met due to our responsibilities in overseeing our city’s cultural institutions that serve the public. I was one of several in attendance. Dress is borrowed.”Ocasio-Cortez was also determined to use the spotlight to reiterate her commitment to principles that have made her both an icon and a lightning rod on the national political scene, widely known by her initials, AOC.“The time is now for childcare, healthcare and climate action for all,” she wrote. “Tax the Rich.”The dress turned heads at arguably the hottest red carpet event of the year. Ocasio-Cortez lauded Aurora James, the Black, immigrant creative director and founder of luxury brand ​​Brother Vellies, for helping her “kick open the doors” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.“Fashion is changing, America is changing,” James said, according to Vogue. “I think Alexandria and I are a great embodiment of the language fashion needs to consider adding to the general lexicon as we work towards a more sustainable, inclusive and empowered future.”Fans dubbed the look “simply iconic” and called Ocasio-Cortez “an anti-capitalist queen”. Some appreciated that when surrounded by the elite, Ocasio-Cortez chose to flash a message meant to make fellow guests sweat.“AOC wearing this dress at an event full of rich people … this woman has more balls than any man in Congress,” one supporter tweeted.Detractors across the political spectrum highlighted what they saw as hypocrisy.“If [AOC] hates the rich so much, why is she attending an event that only the wealthiest people in America can afford to attend?” asked writer David Hookstead.Vanessa Friedman, fashion director for the New York Times, called the disconnect between Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the gala and her message “a complicated proposition”.A leading progressive voice, Black Lives Matter Greater NY, accused the congresswoman of being “performative” and “not very socialist”, especially after protesters were arrested outside the Met.“If you wanted to party with celebs … we get it,” a statement said. “But this right here cannot be excused.”Others came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, noting how her dress made a “core message” go viral.In response to her critics, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram that she was accustomed to being “heavily and relentlessly policed from all corners politically”.“Ultimately the haters hated and the people who are thoughtful were thoughtful,” she wrote. “But we all had a conversation about Taxing the Rich in front of the very people who lobby against it, and punctured the fourth wall of excess and spectacle.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezMet Gala 2021US taxationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      AOC on Texas governor’s ‘disgusting’ abortion remarks: ‘He is not familiar with a female body’

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      AbortionAOC on Texas governor’s ‘disgusting’ abortion remarks: ‘He is not familiar with a female body’Congresswoman explains basic biology to Greg Abbott after he claimed six weeks was ample time to get an abortion Maya YangWed 8 Sep 2021 11.40 EDTLast modified on Wed 8 Sep 2021 16.47 EDTDemocrats including New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have decried Greg Abbott’s “deep ignorance” after the Texas governor inaccurately defended his state’s new anti-abortion law, saying that it does not require victims of rape and incest to carry pregnancies to term because it provides ample time for a person to get an abortion.The law, which took effect on 1 September, is the most extreme anti-abortion measure in the US and essentially bans most abortions, offering no exceptions for rape or incest.Asked by a reporter on Tuesday why he would “force a rape or incest to carry a pregnancy to term,” Abbott denied that was the case, saying the law “doesn’t require that at all because, obviously, it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion”.Ocasio-Cortez called Abbott’s remarks “disgusting,” adding: “I do know that he is not familiar with a female or menstruating person’s body because if he [was], he would know you don’t have six weeks.”Cortez went on to explain the basic biology surrounding pregnancies, and that many pregnancies are often undetected at six weeks. She said: “In case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late on your period. And two weeks late on your period, for any person with a menstrual cycle, can happen if you’re stressed, if your diet changes, or for really no reason at all. So you don’t have six weeks.”Cortez added: “He speaks from such a place of deep ignorance, and it’s not just ignorance. It’s ignorance that’s hurting people.”Julián Castro, former Democratic presidential candidate and mayor of San Antonio, tweeted: “Greg Abbott is lying. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant by the six-week mark when abortion is outlawed in this bill. Rape and incest victims would be forced to carry a pregnancy to term at that point – or face civil lawsuits for getting an abortion.”While defending the radical new law and its lack of exemptions for victims of sexual violence, the governor also vowed to purge the state of all rape and sexual assault.Abbott said: “Rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting off the streets.”In 2019, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported more than 14,650 cases of rape, constituting nearly a quarter of all violent crimes across the state. Fewer than 3,900 people were arrested for rape and other sexual offenses.Ocasio-Cortez fired back at Abbott’s comments about eradicating rapists, saying: “The majority of people who are raped or are sexually assaulted are assaulted by someone that they know. These aren’t just predators that are walking around the streets at night.”Ocasio-Cortez, who in February revealed that she is a sexual assault survivor, went on to say: “When something like that happens, it takes a very long time … for any victim to come forward. Second of all, when a victim comes forward, they don’t necessarily want to bring their case into the carceral system. They don’t want to re-traumatize themselves by going to court.“They don’t necessarily want to report a family friend to a police precinct, let alone in the immediate aftermath of the trauma of sexual assault.”Texas state representative Gene Wu mocked Abbott’s answers, tweeting, “Governor Abbott had a solution to end all rape and he sat on it until now? Does it involve a horse dewormer?”, referring to ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug mostly used on animals that has been falsely promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19.As the US’s most radical abortion law continue to face backlash, the Department of Justice on Monday vowed to “protect the constitutional rights of women and other persons, including access to an abortion”.TopicsAbortionTexasGreg AbbottAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘First of all, I’m taller’: AOC dismisses Greene’s ‘little communist’ attack

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has dismissed comments in which the Georgia Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene called her a “little communist” and said she should be locked up, tweeting: “First of all, I’m taller than her.”Greene is a far-right congresswoman and controversialist who was stripped of committee assignments for comments including advocating violence against political opponents. This month, she apologised for comparing public health rules to combat the coronavirus to the Holocaust.Greene has harassed Ocasio-Cortez on Capitol Hill, prompting the prominent progressive to raise concerns for her security and that of others.Greene was speaking on Saturday evening to supporters of Donald Trump at a rally outside Cleveland, staged to bring the former president back to the campaign trail and to target an Ohio Republican who voted for Trump’s second impeachment.Referring to Ocasio-Cortez as “the little communist from New York City”, Greene responded to boos and remarks from the crowd when she said: “Right. Yeah, lock her up too, that’s a good idea.”Chants of “lock her up”, aimed at Hillary Clinton, were a salient and to many observers troubling feature of Trump rallies in the 2016 and 2020 elections.“She’s not an American,” Greene said of Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in the Bronx, to parents born in New York and Puerto Rico. “She really doesn’t embrace our American ways. You want to know why? She has something called the Green New Deal.”Ocasio-Cortez responded with the dismissive tweet.According to another tweet, from 2019, Ocasio-Cortez is 5ft 4in. A CrossFit profile for Greene says she is 5ft 3in.In May, Ocasio-Cortez offered rather more words in response to harassment by Greene in the halls of Congress.According to the Washington Post, two reporters saw Greene shout: “You don’t care about the American people. Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”Speaking to reporters, Ocasio-Cortez referred to the deadly assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January.She said: “I refuse to allow young women, people of colour, people who are standing up for what they believe to see this kind of intimidation attempt by a person who supports white supremacists in our nation’s Capitol.“I’m not going to let kids see that we’re going to be intimidated out of our fight for justice.” More