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AOC Radicalism Should Have DNC Smiling

Supporting vandals and commies, AOC might be limiting her appeal and political power.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) political action committee funds zealous activists who vandalize cultural treasures of Western civilization. And a former AOC aide is now a leader of the New York Communist Party. These two revelations broke recently, and though it may sound paradoxical, there must be a lot of happy faces over at the blue wing of Swamp headquarters.

“Courage to Change, the New York Democrat’s PAC, directed a $9,000 donation to the Los Angeles-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) in the fall of 2021, according to federal filings,” Fox News reported May 12. “The CEF finances far-left groups worldwide that undertake radical tactics to draw attention to what they say is a rapidly warming planet on the brink of destruction if aggressive policies are not pursued.”

‘Threw Tomato Soup on a Van Gogh’

“As part of its operations, CEF has provided millions of dollars to radical groups that have engaged in disruptive protests. CEF’s grantees include the A22 Network, which consists of the U.K.-based Just Stop Oil, the U.S.-based Declare Emergency and groups in nine countries, including Canada, France and Germany,” Fox continued. “Late last year, London police arrested Just Stop Oil activists after they threw tomato soup on a famous Vincent van Gogh painting worth millions of dollars.”

One day later, on May 13, The New York Post reported that a former AOC aide “is now working as a senior official in the New York State Communist Party.

“Justine Medina, 33, spent a year employed by ‘The Squad’ leader as a political organizer in 2020 and was paid more than $35,000 between February and November of that year, Federal Election Commission records show,” the paper related.

“Almost immediately after the election, Medina began working as a full-blown Marxist. In July 2021, she was identified as ‘co-chair of the New York Young Communist League’ by the Communist Party newspaper People’s World. The same publication today identifies her as a member of the ‘Executive Committee of the New York State Communist Party,’” The Post wrote. “Social media records show Medina’s Marxist proclivities were in full bloom before and during her employment with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.”

AOC Is a European-Style Political Bloc

Far from being embarrassed by these shameful associations, Democrat establishment forces in DC should be ecstatic. Ever since her stunning 2018 primary upset victory over Joe Crowley, then the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House and a man seen as a possible future successor to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as lower chamber party leader, AOC has been promoted, along with two-time presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), as the focal point of progressive opposition to the Swamp “centrists” who dominate the actual levers of party power.

GettyImages-1487544115 Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Sanders, who turns 82 in September, has all but given up the fight. Swamp mainstay Joe Biden has been in the White House for two-plus years now, and Sanders has not seriously challenged him on anything. This leaves Ocasio-Cortez as the most prominent Democrat voice willing to criticize a historically unpopular administration.

And what exactly does she have to show for it?

Let’s see what a leftist journalist for MSNBC who has written for Vox, HuffPost, and The Intercept, among other progressive outfits, has to say.

“I’m unsure how much the growing ranks of bold progressives matters if they don’t use their numbers to play hardball with the establishment they claim to buck. So far, the Democrats’ most progressive members haven’t used their power as aggressively as they should,” Zeeshan Aleem wrote on Dec. 30, 2022.

“In terms of pushing Biden to the left, the squad so far has a mixed record,” Aleem lamented. He cited major Biden initiatives such as infrastructure legislation and Ukraine war funding as squandered opportunities where “the squad didn’t unite consistently on progressive goals or effectively use its numbers to try to extract major concessions from the Democratic establishment.”

Why so ineffective? Aleem referred to progressives in Washington as “the burgeoning social democratic bloc of Democrats” on the Hill. And therein lies the problem.

GettyImages-1246564028 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Ocasio-Cortez does not represent a united, grass-roots opposition to an all-powerful Democrat establishment. She embodies the kind of factionalism found in European politics, with its dozens of small parties. Factions can be contained in a two-party system, for they are self-limited by particularist agendas embraced by a definable and finite number of supporters.

It is even easier to deal with an oppositional faction when it marginalizes itself by identifying with communists and cultural vandals.

The Republican establishment has been shaken to its core by Donald Trump’s America First movement precisely because it is not merely a faction. Despite the “extremist” framing that its establishment foes in the political and big-box media ranks ceaselessly employ against it, Trump heads a genuine populist response against the status quo that has proven attractive to millions of Americans not tied to a rigid ideological viewpoint.

Though it is the last thing its establishment ruling class wants, the Democrat Party desperately needs a similar authentic populist oppositional movement. This is what makes the supposedly longshot campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so intriguing. Unlike AOC, Kennedy has the ability to reach independent voters not fueled by an inflexible agenda. The dominant press has already dutifully labored to label him an extremist by pointing to his questioning of the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines. But the tide has turned on the administrators of the COVID social curbs of years past. It is they who are on the defensive today.

Kennedy may prove much more difficult for the ruling elite to demonize than it believes. And marginalization of opposition is how it stays in power. With AOC, that has never been a problem — and never will be.

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