Tom Brokaw can laud the sacrifices of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and then went on to fight in World War II, but for firebrand freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the Greatest Generation are millennials.
The 29-year-old Queens-Bronx Democrat stroked the egos of both her fellow millennials and the subsequent Gen Z in her latest Instagram live video, claiming that young people are more “informed” and “willing to go to the streets” in protest than earlier generations.
“I think they’re badass,” said Ocasio-Cortez of young people in the clip, a copy of which was tweeted by conservative political voice Caleb Hull. “I think young people are more informed and dynamic than their predecessors.
“I think they’re profoundly courageous, because they’re willing to puncture more taboos and have conversations that, frankly, older generations sometimes struggle to have,” said AOC.
Immediately after saying that she didn’t “want to paint everybody with a broad brush,” AOC did just that, acting as though young people pioneered the concept of political activism — and apparently forgetting the Vietnam War protests and push for racial equality of the 1960s — let alone the WWII generation that saved the world from authoritarian rule and dubbed by former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brokaw in his 1998 book, “The Greatest Generation.”
“I think this new generation is very profound and very strong and very brave, because they’re actually willing to go to the streets,” she said. “How ’bout that?
“Previous generations have just assumed that [the] government’s got it,” she said, leaning into the camera and cupping her hands to her mouth. “Let me tell you something: You are the government. As a democracy, ‘we the people’ means you.”
Despite the tone-deaf bashing of veterans in the fight for social reform, AOC lauded her generation’s familiarity with history.
“They actually take the time to read and understand our history,” she said. “The history of the labor movement, history of civil rights, history of racial struggles, history of economics, history of the United States, history of colonialism.”
The rant was just AOC’s latest in her series of Instagram chats.
In June, she took to the platform to liken the Trump administration’s detention of illegal immigrants on the Mexican border to “concentration camps,” drawing the ire of Jewish politicians and groups.