When Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis suggested that “this girl Ocasio-Cortez” is a symptom of Democratic disarray, the self-styled “girl from the Bronx” (who actually grew up in Westchester County) retorted with a tweet wherein she claimed: “I am a Puerto Rican woman.” Leaving aside the possibility that she suffers from multiple personality disorder, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t seem to know any more about the history of her newfound homeland than she does about the Middle East. She delivered herself of several tweets on Wednesday that suggest she believes Puerto Rico was an independent and sovereign nation before the U.S. arrived in 1898.
120 years ago today (July 25th, 1898) Puerto Rico was invaded and made a colony of the United States.… Puerto Ricans are US citizens. But they STILL don’t have the right to vote federally, nor do they have voting rep in Congress (unless they move). Nor are they a sovereign people.
If this kind of rhetoric sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it was the party line of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a radical Marxist terrorist group whose 120-plus bombings murdered and maimed dozens of innocent New Yorkers, including four dead and 63 wounded in the notorious bombing of Manhattan’s Fraunces Tavern. By parroting the FALN party line, Ocasio-Cortez confirms that Rep. DeSantis was accurate in his assertion that she lives “in a totally different universe” than the rest of us. She evidently believes that the fictitious U.S. “subjugation” of Puerto Rico is morally equivalent to the mythical Israeli “occupation” of Palestine.
Meanwhile, back in our universe, Puerto Rico’s actual history fails to conform to the mythology imbibed by our “Puerto Rican woman.” The island was a Spanish colony beginning in 1493 and remained under Spanish control until April of 1899 when Spain ceded it to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War. In 1917, all Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship. It is, at present, a U.S. territory subject to the powers of Congress under Article IV of the Constitution. In a referendum held last year, the voters of Puerto Rico supported U.S. statehood in a landslide. Nonetheless, Ocasio-Cortez insists on viewing Puerto Rican history through a Marxist lens darkly:
The subjugation and treatment of Puerto Ricans as 2nd-class citizens of the United States is nothing new.… It’s codified into law.… It’s codified in status.… And recognition of this gross injustice is bipartisan: @SenJohnMcCain has introduced legislation to lift the Jones Act.
https://spectator.org/ocasio-cortez-channels-faln-on-puerto-rico/
