Change takes courage.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
We are fighting for an unapologetic movement for economic, social, and racial justice in the United States.
To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It's asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It's one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.
Mentors of mine were under a big pressure to minimize their femininity to make it. I'm not going to do that. That takes away my power. I'm not going to compromise who I am.
Healthcare as a human right, it means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade-school education if they so choose it, and I think no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.
I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education - that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.
Our democracy is designed to speak truth to power.
Women like me aren't supposed to run for office.
I was born in a place where your ZIP code determines your destiny.
I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.
Before ICE, we had Immigration and Naturalization Services, but it wasn't until about 1999 that we chose to criminalize immigration at all. And then, once ICE was established, we really kind of militarized that enforcement to a degree that was previously unseen in the United States.
I don't think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.
Capitalism has not always existed in the world and will not always exist in the world.
I wake up every day, and I'm a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. Every single day.
The biggest hurdle that our communities have is cynicism - saying it's a done deal, who cares; there's no point to voting. If we can get somebody to care, it's a huge victory for the movement and the causes we're trying to advance.
For me, democratic socialism is about - really, the value for me is that I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.
We have a political culture of intimidation, of favoring, of patronage, and of fear, and that is no way for a community to be governed.
Congress is too old. They don't have a stake in the game.
I started my campaign out of a Trader Joe's bag with a bunch of printed palm cards and an idea.
When we talk about the word 'socialism,' I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.
The only time we create any kind of substantive change is when we reach out to a disaffected electorate and inspire and motivate them to vote.
I don't think most of Congress understands how economics works.
It's really scary or it's easy to generate fear around an idea or around an -ism when you don't provide any substance to it.
If you're differently-abled, if you're a person of color, if you express your identity in a way that's different from the norm, for whatever reason, there's an implicit bias where people, frankly, sometimes take you less seriously.
The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.
I'm very hands-on about social media. That's my voice.
People try to identify who is the most likely person to turn out, and what we did is that we changed who turns out. And that changes the whole electorate.
I felt like the only way to effectively run for office is if you had access to a lot of wealth, high social influence, a lot of dynastic power, and I knew that I didn't have any of those things.
There's this false notion that you have to separate and choose between issues of class and issues of race. What people do when they say that you need to separate class from race is that they are really just saying that people of color should come second.
It's not just that I'm a woman of color running for office. It's the way that I ran. It's the way that my identity formed my methods.
I can't name a single issue with roots in race that doesn't have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn't have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them out and choose one is a con.
We have to have a diversity of age represented in Congress, too.
What I see is that the Democratic Party takes working class communities for granted, they take people of color for granted, and they just assume that we're going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping these proposals are.
I'm not running from the left; I'm running from the bottom. I'm running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.
I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.
The Republicans galvanize their base by inciting a lot of fear; they operate on a lot of mythmaking. So we have to have something compelling. We shouldn't be afraid to be bold.
In Puerto Rico, we continue to see the perpetuation of second-class citizenship in the United States.
I think there's a weapon of cynicism to say, 'Protest doesn't work. Organizing doesn't work. Y'all are a bunch of hippies. You know, it doesn't do anything,' because, frankly, it's said out of fear, because it is a potent force for political change.
There has almost never been a period of substantial economic growth in the United States without significant investment. And no investment pays off within the same cycle. No investment pays off within the same year - especially a governmental investment. Even businesses don't work that way.
We absolutely do need to make sure that our borders are secure. But what we need to realize and remember is that ICE was established in 2003 right at the same time as the Patriot Act, the AUMF, the Iraq War - and we look back at a lot of that time and legislation as a mistake now. And I think that ICE is right there as a part of it.
I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family - mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.
There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can't do it.
What we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision that people can believe in. And getting into Twitter fights with the president is not exactly where we're going to find progress as a nation.
At Standing Rock, we experienced, first-hand, people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, 'We don't want this in our community; we don't want this in our backyard,' and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process.
Nobody ever wins the first time they run for office. Nobody's ever supposed to win their first bid for office. Nobody's ever supposed to win without taking lobbyists' money. No one's ever supposed to defeat an incumbent. No one's ever supposed to run a grassroots campaign without running any ads on television. We did all of those things.
It's disingenuous to... pretend the sources of our money don't impact the policy we write - you just can't serve two masters.
It's time we acknowledge that not all Democrats are the same. That a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn't live here, doesn't send his kids to our schools, doesn't drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us.
I'm an educator. I'm an organizer.
I want to speak to people directly as much as possible.
Working-class Americans want a clear champion, and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.
