Doubtless you're familiar with the famous phrase, "Let them eat cake." According to Britanica.com, the legendary quote is "attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution. As the story goes, it was the queen's response upon being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread. Because cake is more expensive than bread, the anecdote has been cited as an example of Marie-Antoinette's obliviousness to the conditions and daily lives of ordinary people."
Even though Marie-Antoinette likely never uttered the phrase, the line has come down through history as something only a politician could say, oblivious to the reality of what the peasants have to deal with.
Well, guess what? We have our own home-grown version of Marie-Antoinette in the form of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the biggest bimbos to ever enter the Washington Beltway.
AOC's latest bimboism involves community gardens, a "core component" of her Green New Deal. As an avid gardener myself, I think community gardens are wonderful ideas. But just growing vegetables apparently doesn't cut it for AOC. Instead, people are only supposed to grow politically correct vegetables.
Specifically, AOC took aim at cauliflower, claiming that growing the plant in non-white neighborhoods is – wait for it – an act of colonialism. As Fox News put it, "Growing cauliflower in community gardens is part of the 'colonial' attitudes that her Green New Deal will stamp out."
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Instead, AOC is urging non-white gardeners to grow … yuca. "What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community. It's so important," she said as she filmed a community garden in the Bronx.
(Side note: Yuca is "culturally familiar" in the Bronx? It can't even be grown there!)
"So that's really how you do it right," she continued. "That is such a core component of the Green New Deal is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context, and it's an area that we get the most pushback on because people say, 'Why do you need to do that? That's too hard.' When someone says that it's 'too hard' to do a greenspace that grows yuca instead of, I dunno, cauliflower or something, what you're doing is you're taking a colonial approach to environmentalism. … And that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements – because they come with a colonial lens on them."
In other words, growing cauliflower in non-white community gardens is a "colonial approach," and the reason communities of color oppose environmentalist movements is because they're feeling alienated by not being able to grow their "native" vegetables. Therefore, support for the Green New Deal would be stronger among minorities if they weren't being subtly coerced into growing "colonial" cauliflower in their communal gardens.
Now tell me, who's wearing a racist lens? Do urban non-white gardeners really get offended over cauliflower? Are communities of color "resistant to certain environmentalist movements" because of what they are voluntarily planting in their own gardens? Really?
Seems to me folks who grow cauliflower instead of yuca simply enjoy eating it. Or perhaps it's the simple reason that yuca won't grow in cooler climates (like the Bronx) but cauliflower will. Duh.
(Second side note: Did you know yuca – also known as cassava – contains cyanide? The roots must be processed properly to avoid a chronic and crippling form of cyanide poisoning known as konzo. Is AOC trying to poison Bronx gardeners?)
"Ironically, AOC talked up the Swiss chard, spinach and collard greens she is growing in another video," noted the New York Post, "even though none of those are native to North America, and collards are actually part of the same family as cauliflower, Brassica oleracea."
Cauliflower's "heritage has never before been the source of contentious discussions on colonialism, and AOC's comments stunned Twitter users," observed the Daily Mail. As one commenter put it, "Sometimes a cauliflower is just a cauliflower." (Bonus comment that made me laugh: "But what if the cauliflower identifies as a yuca?")
Now perhaps you're thinking I'm making too big a deal over AOC's blithering stupidity about vegetables, but in fact it's simply another example of what progressives do best: pitting people against each other, this time over something as laughable as one's gardening choice. In the eyes of liberals, everything is potentially racist, no matter how innocuous.
Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent of National Review, noted: "Ocasio-Cortez has a lot of opinions on the right way to do things, and she's eager to share them with everyone, including a signature proposal that calls for requiring the upgrade or replacement of every building in the country in a ten-year period. In her worldview, there is no detail of life that is beyond the scope of the government's authority, including what vegetable you plant in your garden." [Emphasis in original.]
"What can I say – Alexandria, you're supposed to eat the cauliflower, not smoke it," mocked author Eric Worrall.
But of course, AOC really doesn't care whether someone grows cauliflower or yuca. What she cares about is promoting socialism, a political philosophy in which central planning by politicians supersedes common sense and gardening zones. Ironically, yuca grows just fine in socialist Venezuela, something I'm sure all Venezuelans appreciate as they starve in the cities.
As additional food for thought, consider this point on AOC's fantasy of socialist self-sufficiency made by Monica Showalter in American Thinker:
Guess who else was big on promoting yuca for the inner city locals in self-sufficient urban farms?You got it, socialist cult leader Jim Jones of the 1970s Jonestown Guyana fame. Jones promoted yuca as a panacea through his central directive, citing the same colonialism Ocasio-Cortez did. He ordered the cult's people to grow it and eat it – and they pretty well starved, not knowing how to farm it and not having anything but that to eat. …
What we are seeing here is a wannabe socialist dictator skirting perilously close to the worst failures of socialism– from Jonestown to Venezuela – as she promotes yuca cultivation for the Bronx. Sound like someone you'd like to have running things? Sound like someone who knows what she's talking about around socialism, self-sufficiency, colonial sensitivity and a green new deal? Not on your life.
So there you have it, folks. AOC's socialist solution for us peasants: Let them eat yuca.