Scott Walker Loves Tweeting About AOC
But she has 18 times more Twitter followers.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Scott Walker
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was thrilled earlier this year when Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about him.
Speaking Monday night to a crowd of conservative students, Walker bragged about his Twitter spat earlier this year with Ocasio-Cortez (to whom he refers by her initials and Twitter handle, “AOC”).
Back in January, Walker mocked the freshman New York lawmaker’s suggestion that some of the wealthiest people in the United States pay tax rates as high as 70% to fund a “Green New Deal” plan to combat climate change.
Explaining tax rates before Reagan to 5th graders: “Imagine if you did chores for your grandma and she gave you $10. When you got home, your parents took $7 from you.” The students said: “That’s not fair!” Even 5th graders get it.
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) January 15, 2019
Explaining marginal taxes to a far-right former Governor:
Imagine if you did chores for abuela & she gave you $10. When you got home, you got to keep it, because it’s only $10.
Then we taxed the billionaire in town because he’s making tons of money underpaying the townspeople. https://t.co/Wcnn2sEgek
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 15, 2019
“AOC didn’t like this,” Walker said Monday. “I tweeted about this, she actually tweeted back at me. It got 25,000 retweets, I loved it.” (Walker’s tweet got about 6,000 retweets; Ocasio-Cortez’s response got about 42,000 retweets. Walker has 281,200 followers; she has 5,000,000.)
He was speaking to the Young America’s Foundation annual conference for conservative students. Walker was elected president of the foundation earlier this month, a position he’ll formally assume in 2021.
Throughout his speech, “AOC” was a favorite punchline.
Walker said the Green New Deal, which she has been pushing in the U.S. House, “is neither green, nor a deal.”
He went on, “what she does is just about a big power grab. I mean the idea that you give jobs to people who aren’t willing to work is crazy.”
The Green New Deal, which was introduced as a non-binding resolution and hasn’t been adopted by the House, says that the federal government ought to guarantee “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”
Walker pointed to the aspirational Green New Deal to criticize how far left the Democratic Party has moved ahead the 2020 presidential election.
“When Joe Biden is in a primary and he looks like a moderate, you know we have fallen off the deep end, because Joe Biden is not a moderate, he’s not even close to a moderate, but yet in that primary he looks like one because they’re that far off the deep end,” Walker said.
He said he was amazed earlier this year when Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter that her generation “somehow has missed out on American prosperity. Really?” He told the crowd of students, “This generation is better off than any generation in the history of the world, and you’re not done yet.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in 1989, told Time Magazine in March, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity. I have never seen that, or experienced it, really, in my adult life.”
Walker told the students he’s “absolutely optimistic about the future,” although he said he’s troubled by the amount of young people in the United States who say that socialism is acceptable.
“I always laugh when I go to campuses because I can tell the college Republicans usually have blue blazers and khaki pants on. The progressive student organizations usually look like they got mixed up and thought they were at the free pot seminar. And somewhere in between, there’s a lot of curious faces out there. … I think that’s the group we’ve got to get at.”
Walker’s last question from the crowd Monday evening came from a student who introduced himself to Walker as “an attendee of AOC’s alma mater, Boston University.”
Walker replied, “You in any dance videos?” — an apparent swipe at a dance video in which Ocasio-Cortez performed as an undergraduate at Boston University. The video was released by her critics in an attempt to damage her credibility, but the move instead endeared her to supporters.
Reprinted with permission of Wisconsin Examiner.
Scott Walker is an interesting and important case. Not an interesting person, but an interesting case.. Even in the mediocre cast of Republican characters running for president in 2016, he stood out as a boring, not-to-bright know-nothing with memorized talking points. How then had he risen to become governor of an important state, a prototype for the kind of reactionary politics that now dominate the United States and a key link in the process that put Donald Trump in the White House?
Although he clearly lacks Trump’s theatrical skills, the two share several qualities that have allowed them to rise to high levels in a fractured society. First, in place of intelligence, each has a kind of low cunning that is linked to their narcissism and ambition. Then, as important, they both have a sharp eye for human weakness and how to play on the worst instincts of people, in this case white people. Walker would never have become governor, just as Trump would never have been inserted into the presidency without playing on racial animosity, fears and hatreds. Without inner city Milwaukee as a foil for what would become his suburban white base, Walker would probably be a middle manager in a car dealership today.
Once in office, both Walker and Trump stuck to the same plan: throw red meat to the base in the forms of racial bigotry, nativism and white victimization, while turning over the state and now the country to the wealthiest people, retrograde corporations and a range of corrupt self-seekers. The seminal events in Scott Walker’s governorship came very early. They were the suck-up phone call with the fake David Koch, along with the “divide and conquer” conversation with the right-wing plutocrat Diane Hendricks.
It is interesting to review Walker’s “open for business,” “white people #1” legacy. That legacy is a state mired in corporate corruption; a rigged system of government designed for permanent Republican rule, regardless of the numbers and including a Supreme Court on the edge of a legitimacy crisis; decaying infrastructure,;rapid environmental decline in a state that was once a national leader; poisonous race and political relations, and entrenched poverty in the state’s largest city, about which the governor did exactly nothing. All of that without mentioning the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were promised, and the ongoing Foxconn charade.
In other words, a perfect prototype and model for the America that Trump will leave behind whenever he exits office.
And, Walker is now proving that using low cunning and a willingness to poison the well, you can fail upward to a million dollar job, cultivating the next generation of Walkers who will see him as a model to be emulated and an example of how high a mediocrity can rise if they are willing to do almost anything.
Well put, Frank. May God save us from a re-emergence of Scott Walker as a player in politics. The Donald has set him up financially in an undeserved position at The Smithsonian. Hopefully, people will recognize that he has no business there. It is good to know that Alexandria O.C. has many times more twitter followers than Walker. It puzzles me that anyone would follow Walker’s feeble tweets.