“Fighting oligarchy” may pay off in the polls, but it turns out it’s hell on the environment.
As you may have heard, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has surged to the front of the field for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. It’s early days, of course, and there are a number of factors for this.
First, she’s the biggest name among the younger generation of Democrats — and, for a party that’s clamoring for a youth movement and where 60-year-old Kamala Harris was young enough to be considered a fresh(er) face when she pinch-hit for Joe Biden in the middle of the 2024 campaign, the 35-year-old AOC would mark a huge generational shift.
There’s also the fact that she might primary Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer out of a job in 2026 — another profile-raising move which would make her the prohibitive front-runner. Her progressive policies are more in line with the party’s activist base, as well. But perhaps most importantly, she’s one of the few possible 2028 challengers making good headlines these days.
As you may have heard, AOC has been barnstorming the West with independent socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour over the last month, a political bonanza, which has been received like Taylor Swift’s “Eras” gigs, except with strident politics instead of strident breakup songs and cheaper tickets.
Liberals can’t seem to get enough of the fact that she’s drawing huge crowds and are fooling themselves into thinking they’re so back:
BREAKING: 35,000+ now at Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fight Oligarchy” rally in Los Angeles.
How’s that for crowd size?
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) April 12, 2025
🇺🇸Massive crowd for
Bernie and AOC at the Fighting Oligarchy tour in Tempe, AZ
3/20/25 pic.twitter.com/oJ0jNrKz9L— coco🇺🇦 (@cocopekoe7) March 22, 2025
Fighting the Oligarchy tour brings another crowd of more than 26,000 together in Folsom, CA 📸 @danielapardotv pic.twitter.com/Y0CLtId44L
— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) April 16, 2025
Now, let’s leave aside the fact that, if rally crowd size equalled votes, Kamala Harris would be president right now; these same sorts of posts were going up last summer and autumn, trying to convince everyone that Harris had totally shifted the vibe and was going to win — only to lose every swing state by not inconsiderable margins. Forget all that. Assume the hype is real.
That still doesn’t mean that the sentiments about runaway wealth, corporate greed, climate change, and fighting oligarchy are.
According to a Wednesday report from the New York Post, the plane AOC and Bernie have been using to fight those oligarchs is a private Bombardier Challenger 604 — an oligarch special if there ever was one:
Bombardier Challenger 604
N100XV
past phot about 1year ago. pic.twitter.com/zW8VFVXslo— Bee (@bee_beesupercub) November 7, 2024
That ain’t Spirit Airlines, I’ll tell you that much.
We already know that Bernie is a champagne socialist, but he’s not the one gearing up for another presidential run here. He’d be 87 on Election Day 2028, and although there’s a recent history of Democrats not knowing when to say when, even socialist Waldorf knows it’s time to call it a day, I’d hope.
Thus, we’re left with AOC essentially starting out her 2028 campaign piggybacking on Bernie’s tour. And after running an AI analysis of how much resources this whole tour might have used up, we could practically hear Greta Thunberg yelling “how dare you?!” all the way from a solar-powered catamaran flying a Hamas flag somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean.
First off, we must warn you: This is a Grok estimate. We asked the X-powered AI client what we would use up if, say, we got ahold of a Bombardier Challenger 604 and flew from Washington, D.C., to Tucson, Arizona, then back to D.C., then to Los Angeles, then to Salt Lake City, Utah, then to Idaho, then to Bakersfield, California; Folsom, California, Missoula, Montana; and then back to the District of Columbia.
You know, the itinerary that AOC and Bernie undertook.
Would AOC ever voluntarily reveal how much of her life is paid for by other people?
The total flight time for the voyage would be about 25-and-a-half hours if everything went smoothly — a little more than a day aloft in a private jet. To fight oligarchy. The cost, given the estimated $15,000 hourly rate for the jet rental: $383,100.
And it gets even better, schadenfreude-wise, when we look at the carbon calculation: “The Bombardier Challenger 604 typically burns approximately 1,800-2,000 pounds of fuel per hour during cruise, depending on conditions like altitude, speed, and load. For accuracy, we’ll use an average of 1,900 pounds/hour (860 kg/hour), which aligns with industry data for similar business jets,” Grok found.
That means that 48,526 pounds of fuel were used, with 152,856.9 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted.
“This is like driving a car around the Earth’s equator (~24,901 miles) 7 times, or one car driving from New York to Los Angeles (~2,800 miles) 62 times,” Grok found. “Your trip emits as much CO₂ as 1.5 years of all energy use (electricity, heat, cars) for a typical U.S. household of 2-3 people” or “as much CO₂ as 66 people flying round-trip from New York to London in economy class on a commercial airliner.”
“It would take over 3,150 mature trees absorbing CO₂ for a full year to offset the emissions from your trip,” Grok also noted, estimating that the trip used as much carbon as the average person used in over 4.5 years.
Oligarchy successfully fought, ladies and gentlemen!
Now, there are two obvious caveats here. First, the actual itinerary and the vehicles used weren’t published by the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, nearest we could find, so we have no idea whether the Bombardier was the only plane used. (It’s arguable, however, that we’re underestimating here, since we’re not taking into account any of the CO2 emitted by the vehicles that needed to be rented or the logistics in setting up the venues.) Second, this is AI. AI will give you a pretty good estimate of things, but exactitude is pretty much impossible.
That all said, this number likely isn’t off by, say, an order of magnitude. This is an expensive trip, both in terms of cost and carbon emissions — all to fight those perfidious oligarchs whilst riding aboard a CEO special to the rallies. The only way this could have looked worse is if she did donuts in a Bentley with a “Free Luigi Mangione” bumper sticker out in the parking lot after each event.
Again, I hate to say it, because — as much as I don’t think she has a chance in hell of winning — it’s clear AOC is making herself the front-runner in the Democratic primary process, which seems to have already begun in earnest. If you think this is hilarious, remember that the Democrats and RINOs thought the words “President Donald Trump” were hilarious, too, until a very unpleasant reality set in for our establishment elites.
Thus, now is the time to remember that the woman who once lectured us all about changing our lives to eliminate “cow farts” is traipsing around the continent in a private jet to make the case, in part, for a Green New Deal that would entail austerity and misery.
Orwell’s maxim on how socialism invariably ends remains undefeated: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Particularly animals in Bombardiers.
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