Pardon?
“Fighting for the working class means uniting across differences,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared in a TikTok video over the weekend.
She then proceeded to utterly wreck the worldview of angry progressives who — we recently learned — routinely attempt to bully a sitting Senator and fellow Democrat into suicide.
As Sen. John Fetterman told CNN News host Dana Bash last week:
“The right would say really rough things and call me names — some I won’t repeat on TV — but on the left, it was like they want me to die. They were cheering for my next stroke, saying things like, ‘That’s terrible that depression didn’t win,’ or, ‘I hope your kids find you.’
They even had a GIF of a stroke happening in someone’s head — cheering. And they said things like, ‘The doctor let us down. Why did they have to save his life?’
I mean, just really — I can’t imagine people saying that. Wishing death on you. Literally cheering for a stroke. I don’t know what kind of place that comes from. That’s much different than just calling me a name, and it’s been really consistent in that community online.” — Sen. John Fetterman
Perhaps Rep. Ocasio-Cortez should brace for just such a wave of white hot hatred. Any Democrat who thinks they wouldn’t get the Fetterman treatment, or the Sen. Krysten Sinema treatment, hasn’t dared cross the Very Online, far-left activist wing of the Democratic Party.
And Rep. Ocasio-Cortez just committed the cardinal sin of humanizing Trump voters. Worse still, she has cast them as capable of redemption.
“I want to say this right now,” Ocasio-Cortez told her followers. “I fully welcome Trump voters into our coalition. And I know that sounds crazy to some people, but just hear me out.”
“I can’t tell you how many times someone has pulled me aside and said either, I was once a big Trump voter and a Trump supporter and I watched FOX News every day, but then I started to kind of expand my world and where I got information,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed in what was basically a campaign ad. “And now I’ve learned and now I’ve changed and I’m with you and I learned from you or people who meet me who are, who are really big Republicans now.”
“And they are shocked when they meet me,” she said. “Cause they’re like, ‘you are nothing like I was told you are.’ And you start to see the cogs turning that maybe everything that they had been told from this one channel or this one ecosystem isn’t the whole truth. And it is enough to spark a curiosity that makes people want to go down a longer journey of learning.”
“And you know, that doesn’t mean that we sacrifice our values,” she hedged carefully. “That doesn’t mean that we change who we are. You know, it’s like when you welcome someone in, you say, ‘Hey, these are the house rules,’ right? We’re not going to give up fighting for people’s equal rights and civil rights. And, but we believe in those civil and economic rights for everybody. And working, fighting for the working class means uniting across difference. And so it starts something that’s important.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shown herself time and time again to be an extremely savvy media marketer who understands her audience well and how to connect over social media.
This move seems calculated to challenge the prevailing wisdom among progressive extremists that Trump supporters are racist, bigoted, deplorables who must be excised, somehow, from the electoral process in order for Democracy As We Know It to survive.
Was this campaign commercial designed to broaden her appeal with moderate voters? Is it a cynical attempt to draw media attention? There is sure to be a progressive backlash against her comments. The resultant kerfuffle might launch a fundraising boon, and raise her political profile accordingly.
Or will the move backfire?
Has the Democratic Party created an extremist progressive monster that no one — not even AOC — can moderate?
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)