Most of the world thinks that when Old Joe Biden indulges in his habit of leaning forward and dropping his voice to a whisper in the middle of a speech, he doesn’t appear persuasive but just weird and creepy. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-School of Leftist Indoctrination), however, has apparently been attending the Joe Biden School of Rhetorical Tricks, as she took to Instagram on Friday to whisper a “secret” to her followers: capitalism is bad, socialism is good. It doesn’t sound any truer whispered than it does spoken out loud.

“Let me tell you a secret,” the renowned intellectual Congresswoman whispered. “Most people don’t really know what capitalism is. Most people don’t even know what socialism is. But most people are not capitalists, because they don’t have capitalist money. They’re not billionaires … The label doesn’t matter as much as just talking about policies. 

That’s easier to understand. Do you think people should die because they can’t afford insulin? Do you think that fossil fuel CEOs should decide whether the planet gets set on fire? Me neither.”

So in AOC’s world, capitalism means that you’re a billionaire, presumably wearing a top hat and dressed like the Monopoly man, complete with a big cigar, of course. You cackle fiendishly at the prospect of sending poor people to their deaths, unable to afford medication, but even if they had been able to afford life-saving insulin, they would have died in the fires you set by insisting on burning fossil fuels that led to catastrophic global warming.

If that sounds like Soviet-level Communist propaganda, that’s only because it is. Merriam-Webster defines capitalism as “an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.” Right, nothing in there about having to be a billionaire or forcing people to die.

Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster defines socialism as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” And, intriguingly for AOC, “a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.”

Is AOC herself advocating for a transitional phase between capitalism and communism? Whether she is or isn’t, others will certainly exploit her advocacy for socialism to try to move the country toward communist authoritarianism. The problem that AOC presents to the world is that, as clearly ignorant and uneducated as she is, she is a committed ideologue, and she appeals to equally miseducated people of her age.

She is widely ridiculed for saying silly things that demonstrate how little she knows, but all that ridicule rolls off the back of her considerable following (she has 8.5 million followers on Instagram) because it comes from people they have been conditioned not to like or trust.