One of my role models, H.L. Mencken, famously wrote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

As a Christian, I hope that each of us gets better than we deserve. And I pray that Americans don’t fall for politicians like the one that just bobbed up to the surface, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A photogenic socialist, she won the Democratic primary in a New York congressional district. (That means she’s a shoe-in in November.) Cortez crushed the long-term incumbent, Rep. Joe Crowley. Many had seen him as the likely heir to Nancy Pelosi as leader of Democrats in the House. 

Just a few months ago, Cortez worked as a bartender in Greenwich Village. Blind-sided political journalists are now scrambling to see where she came from, and why she won.

I have a theory:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the frozen embryo love-child of Hugo Chavez and Evita Peron.

DNA from Evita’s Fingernails, and Chavez’s Nose Hairs?

I can’t speak to the mechanics of it. Maybe they harvested Evita’s eggs. Then kept them in some Nazi laboratory in Argentina. When Chavez came to power, he used some of that wealth he looted from Venezuela’s productive classes. (Before driving four million of them from the country.) Or George Soros worked with “Red Cardinal” Oscar Maradiaga. They took a piece of Evita’s fingernails, and one of Chavez’s nose-hairs. Then they cloned and mated the cells in some deep vault laboratory owned by the Bilderbergers.

Maybe they harvested Evita’s eggs and kept them in some Nazi lab in Argentina.

I’m no reproductive biologist. I’m just calling the facts as I see them.

The leftiest fringe of the unhinged Democratic party is celebrating Cortez’s victory. She trounced a genuine villain, after all: An open borders, tax and spend, pro-abortion liberal Democrat. Yeah, yeah, his policies sounded like Bernie Sanders’. But you’re missing just one thing: He is a white male. The “primary oppressor” in Intersectionalist dogma jargon. And the Washington Post just warned us in a headline. “The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.”

“Greedy Jewish Landlords”

Appeals to racial hatred aren’t far from Cortez’s campaign. As the Daily Caller reported:

One of Ocasio-Cortez’s most enthusiastic campaigners and a man who stood behind her at her victory party, Thomas Lopez-Pierre, is a known anti-Semite and racist. Lopez-Pierre has regularly used slurs against Jewish and black New Yorkers in public forums and while running for office himself.

While running for office in 2017, Lopez-Pierre specifically campaigned on “protecting tenants from greedy Jewish landlords.” Lopez-Pierre’s own campaign website shows his rantings agains “Greedy Jewish Landlords.” His campaign website applauds the arrest of “Greedy Jewish Landlords” and says that “Jewish Landlords” are “punishing” black and Hispanic families.

That’s what happens when you start campaigning based on your inborn, fixed identity. You invite your followers to attack others based on the very same thing.

Such racial groupthink is never far from left-wing populists and socialists. Conservative political theorist Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddihn wrote a brilliant book, Leftism Revisited. I read it at age 16 and it shaped me for life. In it, he lays out the spectrum of Left to Right this way: The Left represents conformism, tribalism, ultra-nationalism, racism and class consciousness. The Right stands for individualism, eccentricity, natural inequality, and meritocracy. Using this criterion, he groups the Nazis and Fascists together with the Communists and Socialists on the Left.

From First World to Third World

That certainly fits the career of the couple that ruined once-rich Argentina, Juan and Evita Peron. In the early 20^th century, Argentina looked a lot like the United States. The nations had almost identical per capita GDP. Each relied on international trade, and accepted economic inequality as the price of a free economy that provided growth for all. But Juan Peron could not accept the status quo. With the glamorous social-climbing populist icon Evita at his side, he rode to power in repeated terms as president. He coopted the far Left’s agenda of economic redistribution, class warfare, and hatred of foreign investment. He nationalized industries. Drove out British investors. Lavished the ordinary voter with government handouts. That’s how he made Argentina perhaps the first recorded case of a country slipping from the First World into the Third. If Ms. Cortez has her way, it won’t be the last.

Venezuela, Ruined

Hugo Chavez came to power decades later in Venezuela by following Peron’s talking points. First he tried and failed to seize power by force. (Tragically for Venezuela, nobody thought to put him up against a wall and shoot him.) Pardoned by a foolish president, he followed a Hitlerian path from prison to power. As happened in 1933, once Chavez had won a narrow victory, he set about dismantling democracy and outlawing the opposition. Chavez wasted the country’s oil wealth on massive giveaway programs, and left the economy in ruins upon his death. His successor, Francisco Nicholas Maduro, pursues the same policies, enriching only the increasingly outright criminal element that dominates his party. Dissidents live in terror, and the remnant middle class is pouring into neighboring Colombia, like exiles from Castro’s Cuba.

Don’t Cry For Me, Westchester County

This blend of leftist economic populism is what Ocasio-Cortez offers America. (Her mom now reports that Cortez has her eyes on the White House, by the way. Before she has even entered Congress. Echoes of Obama.)

She’s not from the economic underclass. Her dad was an architect. He moved their family to Westchester for the sake of better public schools. But that was the seed of Cortez’s rage, as the New York Post reports. She saw that her schools were better than those of her cousins back in the Bronx. And that planted in her at a young age a (guilt-fueled?) rage at inequality.

Cortez joined the farthest left political movement with any visibility in the U.S., the Democratic Socialists of America. Her rage at inequality gave her the script for her rise from part-time bartender to the Democrats’ new Congressional Evita. In her campaign, Cortez showered promises on the voters like cash from a drunken sailor.

Imagine that: Better-off families, who pay much higher taxes, getting in return a superior product for their children.

That might strike you and me as simply unfortunate, an effect of living in a fallen world with limited resources. We might even condemn the government’s public school monopoly, and call for tuition tax credits that could be used at parochial schools.

Everyone Gets a Pony. Don’t Worry About the Poop.

But it made Cortez a radical, egalitarian statist, on the model of Hugo Chavez. It drove her to work for Ted Kennedy. But toiling for that white male was a bland half measure. She soon joined the farthest left political movement with any visibility in the U.S., the Democratic Socialists of America. Her rage at inequality gave her the script for her rise from part-time bartender to the Democrats’ new Congressional Evita. In her campaign, Cortez showered promises on the voters like cash from a drunken sailor.

• Virtually open borders. Beyond a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, Cortez would dismantle ICE, leaving the U.S. incapable of turning away any of the 147 million adult immigrants whom Gallup report wish to enter the U.S., along with their children.
• Medicare for all. Socialize all medicine in the United States, which would (as in Britain) bring all care down to the lowest common denominator.
• Free tuition for all public colleges and universities. Because not enough kids are wasting four to seven years pursuing degrees in Queer Theory, while skilled trade jobs go begging.
• A federal jobs guarantee. According to her campaign site, the federal government must provide “baseline quality for employments that guarantees a minimum $15 wage (pegged to inflation), full healthcare, and paid child and sick leave for all.”
• Housing as “a human right.” Reports Business Insider, “she wants to extend tax benefits to working- and middle-class homeowners, expand the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, provide housing for the homeless, and permanently fund the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund.” Never mind that the last time the federal government decided to make virtually every American a home-owner, it caused the economic crisis of 2008.
• Laxer law enforcement. Per Business Insider, she favors “legalizing marijuana at the federal level, releasing individuals sentenced for nonviolent drug offenses, ending cash bail, and ‘automatic, independent’ investigations when people are killed by law enforcement officials.” So every time a cop shoots a perp, he gets his own special prosecutor.
• Campaign censorship. Cortez wants to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which guarantees private citizens free speech during political campaigns. You know, the one context where our Founders considered it particularly essential.
• As Business Insider reports, “a carbon-free, 100% renewable energy system and a fully modernized electrical grid in the US by 2035 in an effort to combat climate change.” Because “green energy” is working out so well in brown-out ridden Europe.

Catholic Antisocial Teaching

The pro-choice Cortez is even polishing her decrepit Catholic credentials, with an article in the leftist, dissident Jesuit magazine America presenting her plan to empty our prisons as inspired by “Catholic social teaching.”

She’s not entirely nuts. The utopian agenda of Venezuelan-style socialism she’s promoting is eerily similar to the manifesto signed in 2017 by 24 U.S. Catholic bishops. And by Vatican cardinal Peter Turkson. Fittingly, it emerged from a meeting led by the Soros-funded Latin American leftist group PICO. That’s the group which Wikileaks revealed served as the conduit for Soros’ $650,000 slush fund, given PICO for a campaign to cast Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. as a whistlestop tour for leftist Democrats. The bag man for the money? The corrupt and scandal-ridden “Red Cardinal” Oscar Maradiaga.

A Woman of Valor

Not every Latina political leader echoes Evita Peron. Not by any means. I was privileged last week to attend Acton University. That’s an international gathering of churchmen, economists, entrepreneurs and activists. Their mission? Unlocking the power of free markets and free citizens to uplift the poor. One of the keynote speakers had to address us via Skype. María Corina Machado is a democracy activist in Venezuela. She has been hounded for years by the thugs of that country’s socialist government. An engineer, mother, and devout Christian, Machado started a foundation to take care of street children with private funds. She also served in Venezuela’s congress. She was one of those blind-sided by Hugo Chavez’s climb to power.

Trying to save her beloved country, Machado helped found the civic organization Súmate, which sought the legal removal of Chavez from office. He charged her and her group with treason. Government-paid thugs have attacked her in public and stoned her. The government took her passport, so she may not leave the country. The treason charges against her still stand, and she doesn’t know from day to day when she will be carted off to prison.

Machado spoke to us over a shaky Skype call (which was certainly  bugged by her government). She asked for our prayers. And begged us to treasure the gifts of freedom, private property, and respect for the rule of law. She warned us that socialism inevitably corrodes each of these things, using envy and resentment to turn citizens against each other. When the Skype connection started to fail, she wondered along with us whether some state censor was jamming the signal.

That’s the kind of thing you have to worry about under socialism. That’s if the lights are even on, which they often aren’t in oil-rich Venezuela. You stop concerning yourself about the fancy meals of the rich, since (as Machado recounted), most of the restaurants are closed. Those that remain have long lines of once-self-sufficient citizens, waiting patiently for their chance to rummage through their dumpsters. Even the animals starve, in the ruins of the national zoos. The apes and antelopes at the Bronx Zoo were doubtless relieved to hear that Ms. Cortez will be leaving their neighborhood and heading down to D.C.