Ayanna Pressley is a member of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Squad.”
She recently stumped in Boston for a 79-year-old senator who won't debate.
And Ayanna Pressley just labeled the 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump as Confederates.
Pressley's Exact Words at Roxbury Community College
Standing before a progressive crowd on Monday, Pressley didn't hedge.
She said it plainly: "The Confederacy is still alive and well. That's all MAGA is."
She added that "White supremacy is still alive and well" and "anti-blackness will still be alive and well."
This wasn't a slip.
It wasn't taken out of context.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/2092716795631194203?s=20
The congresswoman stood at Roxbury Community College in Boston and declared it to the room.
She did this at a campaign event for Senator Ed Markey – a 79-year-old incumbent who now holds a double-digit lead in his primary, buoyed in part by endorsements from the Squad.
Pressley wasn't finished either.
Back in May, she told an MS NOW interview that there are people in the Trump administration who would "rather black Americans pick cotton than pick the president."
This is a sitting member of Congress using their platform to call political opponents slaveholders.
Democrats Ran the Confederacy. Democrats Ran the Klan. Now They're Calling You One.
The Confederate States of America was governed by Democrats.
The soldiers who fought to preserve slavery were Democrats.
The secessionists who triggered the Civil War were Democrats.
The Ku Klux Klan – founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 by Confederate veterans – terrorized black and Republican voters across the South for the explicit purpose of restoring Democrat political control of the region.
Its members and its political utility aligned with Southern Democrat interests for decades.
Democrats ran the Jim Crow South. Democrats filibustered the Civil Rights Act.
Democrat Strom Thurmond spoke for more than 24 straight hours trying to kill it.
https://twitter.com/OffThePress1/status/2092722261711036880?s=20
This isn't obscure history.
It's eighth-grade American history.
Pressley is a member of the party that owned slaves lecturing Trump voters – many of them working-class Americans who simply want secure borders, cheaper gas, and safe neighborhoods – about their Confederate sympathies.
The audacity isn't even the most remarkable part.
The most remarkable part is that nobody in the room pushed back.
What This Is Really About
Pressley didn't drive to Roxbury Community College because she cares about the Confederacy.
She drove there because Ed Markey is in the fight of his political life against Seth Moulton, a centrist Democrat who has the nerve to suggest that a 79-year-old senator might not be the future of the Democrat Party.
When you can't win on substance, you call the other side racists.
When the other side is your own party, you call Trump voters Confederates.
The strategy is transparent: energize progressive activists, keep the Squad's base in Markey's column, and make the primary about identity instead of ideas.
It worked at the Massachusetts Democrat convention, where Markey won 73 percent of the delegate vote.
It might work in the September 1 primary.
What it won't do is help a single working-class family in Boston afford groceries.
What it won't do is stop fentanyl from crossing the border.
What it won't do is make the streets safer.
But for a party that lost the 2024 election in a historic repudiation, this is the playbook they've got.
The Voters She's Calling Confederates Voted for Trump Anyway
They've been calling Trump voters racists since 2016.
The voters Pressley is calling Confederates include black men who left the Democrat Party in record numbers.
https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2092731879900217490?s=20
They include Hispanic voters who chose secure borders and economic growth over radical leftist ideology.
They include working mothers who looked at the left's agenda and said no thank you.
The Confederate analogy isn't just historically illiterate – it's politically suicidal.
Pressley doesn't want those voters back.
She wants them silenced and shamed.
That's what this speech was.
That's what it's always been.
Sources:
- "Ayanna Pressley: 'The Confederacy Is Still Alive and Well – That's All MAGA Is,'" Breitbart, August 26, 2026.
- "In Contested US Senate Race, Markey Beats Moulton for Endorsement of Mass. Dems at Convention," GBH, May 30, 2026.
- "Ayanna Pressley Passes on Senate Run, Despite Seeing 'Strong Path to Victory,'" WBUR, December 3, 2025.
