AOC Is Damaged Goods

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demurred when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked her if she was prepared to run for president in 2028. “I’m focused on winning the midterms,” she replied. But she was quick to admit that she hadn’t “ruled out the possibility.” Neither have Democratic primary voters.

 

In the extremely preliminary polling of the 2028 Democratic primary electorate, the self-described socialist from New York typically trails better-known candidates like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and even Pete Buttigieg. On the eve of the “invisible primary,” however, in which presidential candidates corner donors and influencers in advance of a campaign, the oddsmaker Kalshi has put Ocasio-Cortez in the pole position in the race for the party’s presidential nod.

 

AOC is enjoying a boomlet, but she’s got a lot of work to do if she’s going to translate that enthusiasm into national momentum. Echelon Insight’s latest survey found that just one-third of respondents have a favorable outlook toward Ocasio-Cortez. Forty-three percent view her unfavorably. Nearly one-quarter of respondents are either neutral on AOC or have never heard of her.

 

The congresswoman’s opponents will bombard those open-minded voters with information designed to boost AOC’s already disproportionately high negatives. They’ll have plenty of material to work with. Partisan Democrats may have forgotten all the baggage Ocasio-Cortez will lug with her into the campaign season. Perhaps they could use a refresher.

 

Ocasio-Cortez was a passionate supporter of the “defund the police” craze right from the start. Within days of George Floyd’s 2020 death, she described herself as an advocate for stripping the NYPD of its budget, which “costs us books in the hands of our children.” And she wasn’t dealing in metaphors. “Defunding police means defunding police,” she said in a statement. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”

 

She seemed to relish the degree to which her advocacy antagonized the very voters she must court if she’s going to win the White House. AOC expressed her contempt for those in her party attempting to refurbish her “defund” rhetoric to make it more “palatable for largely affluent, white suburban ‘swing’ voters.” Indeed, to make her vision manifest, she asked those despicable Americans to endure hardships. “What are you willing to sacrifice to make sure that overfunded police departments are defunded?” she asked America’s voters. It turned out that the answer was “nothing.”

 

The “defund” mania of 2020 is now in bad odor among Democrats with any sense. But the passions that animate the activist class today have recast their hostility toward federal immigration enforcement in a more flattering light. It’s a presentist bias, however, to conclude that what animates Democrats today will appear wise two years from now. For all the public’s distaste for Donald Trump’s imperious approach to immigration enforcement, voters approve of his efforts to close the border. Those voters will soon learn that AOC does not and never has.

 

In her first campaign for Congress, she called the existence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “moral problem” due to its “fascist” origins. It was a product of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 reforms and is, therefore, tainted in the same way that “the Patriot Act, the AUMF,” and “the Iraq War” were. ICE is an expression of America’s inherent racial hostilities, she added — an expression of a “policy based on racial exclusion” that is at “the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy.” True to her convictions, AOC cosponsored legislation that its advocates correctly said would “decriminalize unauthorized border crossings” as well as “ban local law enforcement” from supporting federal immigration enforcement initiatives or housing detained migrants.

 

At the time, the Washington Post was curious. “Nobody knows how ‘abolish ICE’ plays politically,” it observed. But within a couple of cycles, we did. “No one should say ‘defund the police’ ever again,” then–Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger told her colleagues in an angry call following a disappointing election cycle for Democratic House candidates in 2020. “Nobody should be talking about socialism.”

 

By then, AOC had already left a bright-red socialist mark on her party. She was perhaps the loudest advocate for what she called the “Green New Deal” — landmark legislation that attracted more than 60 cosponsors in the House and was endorsed, in whole or in part, by eight of the Democratic candidates who sought the White House in 2020. But the GND wasn’t just a “climate thing,” according to AOC’s chief of staff at the time, Saikat Chakrabarti. Rather, “we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” He wasn’t kidding.

 

The ambitious ten-year plan called for the shuttering of every fossil-fuel power plant in America, the refurbishing of the nation’s energy grid and water-related infrastructure, the elimination of all greenhouse-gas emissions produced by transportation, the truncation of America’s industrial agriculture sector down to “local-scale,” and the renovation of “every residential and industrial building” in America.

 

A humiliating companion document that burst into flames upon contact with the broader American electorate explained that the Green New Deal would retire the internal combustion engine and replace air travel with “high-speed rail at scale.” Of course, “guaranteeing a job” to “all people of the United States” would have to be part of this initiative, just as “free college” and taxpayer-funded job training must accompany the GND’s economic disruptions. And to compensate for the public’s impoverishment, the government would of course provide a “universal basic income” to all — even those who are “unwilling to work.”

 

To socialists and Democrats alike, all that seemed reasonable at the time. In our era, it seems just as reasonable to echo the progressive left’s monomaniacal hostility toward Israel. But just as the Green New Deal soured with age, it’s easy to envision a future in which it is all but universally acknowledged that, when it came to Israel, the far left got out over its skis.

 

AOC accused Israel of executing a “famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance.” It turns out that, if there ever was a famine, much less an engineered one, the Palestinians managed a miraculous recovery (ten months after the end of major combat operations in Gaza, Palestinian children are today afflicted with “obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5”).

 

“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she said in the same speech. Her eyes, however, were and remain closed to the preponderance of evidence that refutes her charge. “I believe we have crossed the threshold of intent,” she told CNN. “Starving a million innocent people to death by halting and slowing U.S. humanitarian assistance is a massive, deliberate choice.”

 

It’s unlikely that AOC has revised her outlook. She didn’t need evidence to allege that Israel is a genocidaire, just as she didn’t need it when she accused Israel of being an apartheid state in 2021. “Apartheid states aren’t democracies,” she observed. True enough. Presumably, the full rights of citizenship enjoyed by Israel’s substantial Arab population, some of whom are members of Israel’s national legislature, render the Jewish state a full-fledged democracy in AOC’s own formulation. Much like her fellow Democratic Socialists, AOC has never reconciled her prejudice with the observable reality of life inside Israel.

 

The same could be said for AOC’s economics. At a time when “60% of American workers make less than $40,000 a year, billionaires shouldn’t exist,” she wrote at a time when Democrats were debating whether they should expropriate all or part of the wealth amassed by America’s most successful. It was pure demagogy — avarice masquerading as a policy preference. It isn’t “that all billionaires are immoral,” she said. But “a system that allows billionaires to exist” sure is. What else could she mean but the Constitution and its jealous protections for property rights?

 

AOC’s distaste for the engines of wealth creation has downstream effects. Just ask the Brooklynites whom she saved from “displacement” by blocking the development of Amazon’s East Coast headquarters in her district. She succeeded in scuttling that project. Amazon’s HQ2 went to Northern Virginia, after which the online retailer went on a hiring binge. Since 2018, “Amazon has invested more than $2.53 billion in capital and created nearly 8,500 jobs at HQ2,” the company notes. That’s precisely the kind of “help” from a government agent of which Ronald Reagan warned us.

 

AOC made headlines in her interview with Karl, not for flirting with a presidential bid, but for laughing off the excesses of what she called “Woke 1.” She hopes you’ll forget that she was an eager advocate for those excesses. Indeed, she has demonstrated throughout her political career a fatal weakness for the latest progressive intellectual fad, the more impractical the better. Call that a deficit of wisdom and prudence or simple naiveté — neither is a desirable trait in a president.

 

AOC may try to divorce herself from her old views. Like other DSA types, she’ll contend she underwent a conversion, but she cannot retail a persuasive conversion narrative if one doesn’t exist. Ocasio-Cortez is a true believer. And if she runs for president, voters are going to become intimately acquainted with what she believes.

The Presidential Soft-Launch Has Begun

By Raleigh Adams

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

As someone who swallowed the “girlboss feminism” propaganda of the last decade whole, my lingering instinct watching Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) in the news these past two weeks has been: Good for her!

 

AOC has frozen her eggs, on livestream at that. Reports emerged that she quietly ended her years-long engagement to her longtime fiancé Riley Roberts. And, perhaps most surprisingly, one of the most recognizable faces of contemporary progressivism has begun laughing about the excesses of the very political culture that helped make her famous: “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”

 

Taken separately, these are all seemingly favorable developments to see in the congresswoman. Publicly documenting egg freezing helps normalize difficult conversations about women’s fertility and reproductive health, even if the reasons or efficacy behind AOC personally choosing to do so are dubious. Ending a relationship that no longer works or is going nowhere is hardly a scandal. Possessing the humility to admit that, to borrow former Biden White House aide Temi Egbewole’s formulation, “Peak woke got weird” is a welcome development in practically anyone, even if admittedly a shallow act. Somewhere out there, patron saint of millennial girlbosses Carrie Bradshaw is raising a Cosmopolitan to AOC.

 

So why does the whole thing feel so off?

 

Perhaps because, taken together, these revelations look less like a series of unrelated developments in the life of a 36-year-old congresswoman (even representatives are entitled to an early midlife crisis) and more like the construction of a 2028 presidential candidate.

 

The 2028 presidential soft launch has begun, and its first stage is making America’s most ambitious politicians seem like normal people again.

 

AOC didn’t need to launch a grassroots campaign: She’s already famous, too much so if anything. Her problem is the AOC that the American public is familiar with was crafted for a particular historical moment: democratic socialism, abolishing ICE and decriminalizing illegal immigration, the Green New Deal, 2020 racial politics, defunding the police and the military, and abolishing prisons.

 

For a presidential campaign, particularly after Democrats’ recent electoral disasters and the rising internal threat of the DSA to the Democratic Party’s institutional makeup, she has to become someone who could plausibly win a presidential election as the Democratic nominee to voters who currently regard her as a creature of the progressive internet.

 

The goal here isn’t to bring AOC into the limelight. Rather, it is to show the American public that, despite the limelight, she’s just like them! Axios has suggested this separation from “peak woke” politics is perhaps more indicative of AOC’s ulterior motives. She is distancing herself from the beliefs that were convenient for her to get into elected office at the time, and is now trying to present a public image that is more appealing to the national electorate. The Woke 1.0 vote is secured, but if the rumors of her presidential aspirations are true, AOC’s appeal must expand beyond her online fan base.

 

Enter Alexandria, the normal thirtysomething woman. She’s worried about finding the right partner to marry, about how time may be running out, about whom to possibly start a family with. The public egg-freezing disclosure is fascinating because it makes one of the most ideologically defined politicians in America suddenly legible through an extremely conventional dilemma faced by many professional millennial women.

 

Her public explanation explicitly framed the decision in terms of preserving options and resisting the scrutiny women receive over their reproductive decisions. For these reasons, at least, AOC should be applauded. It is not the public’s business to opine on whether she will, or should, have children. And, setting aside the considerable question of whether fertility treatments such as egg freezing are financially accessible to the average American woman, AOC managed to shift a conversation about reproductive health away from the familiar trenches of abortion politics and toward fertility instead. That is potentially fertile political ground. Even women who disagree with AOC on abortion can recognize the anxiety of wondering whether motherhood will remain an option, and Republicans — despite a politics increasingly preoccupied with declining birth rates, marriage, and family formation — have not always proven particularly adept at speaking to those anxieties.

 

Alongside the egg freezing, the news of her breakup with Roberts, without suggesting that AOC herself directly orchestrated the timing of the break-up coming to light, only rounds out this developing biography. To the public eye, AOC is becoming less Rosa Luxemburg and more Carrie Bradshaw.

 

Still, lest Republicans ridicule AOC’s spectacle too much, their prospective candidates appear to be undergoing the same ritual.

 

In a recent interview with Katie Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio answered that if given the opportunity for a free weekend, he would ideally spend it watching College GameDay before the Saturday afternoon games, and then follow that up with the NFL games on Sunday — checking with his wife first, of course. Similarly, the key to a lasting marriage for the Rubios? Compliance on the husband’s part, according to the secretary. And finally, something everyone can get behind: The benefits of the keto diet just don’t outweigh the joy of a good Pop-Tart.

 

Why is the secretary of state presenting the general public with this information about his personal and family life?

 

Because it communicates, in approximately thirty seconds, that he’s just like you. He may be secretary of state and managing foreign wars, nuclear powers, and diplomatic relations, but behind all that, he’s a wife-guy and football fan — in other words, relatable to the average American voter. That’s a political biography compressed into a TikTok-ready soundbite.

 

Anecdotal accounts commenting on Rubio’s interviews seem to point to their effectiveness, with viewers declaring he “would win the 2028 election in a landslide if he were the nominee. He is far more impressive and likable than JD Vance,” and that “I don’t ask for a lot, but I need them to be POTUS and FLOTUS.”

 

Such publicity moves aren’t new among politicians with a potential eye on the White House. American politicians have always manufactured relatability: eating at diners, kissing babies, talking about baseball, clearing brush, Bill Clinton at McDonald’s, Obama filling out March Madness brackets.

 

But social media has changed the required texture of the performance.

 

The old litmus test for a political candidate was whether you would have a beer with them. Now, in 2026, that judgment has shifted to whether they are someone with whom you could share memes in a group chat.

 

What is emerging is something closer to the politician as influencer. Social media has collapsed the old distance between public figure and private person, and politicians are now expected to cultivate the same parasocial intimacy as the people populating our Instagram and TikTok feeds. Voters do not merely want to know a candidate’s policies; they want glimpses of the person supposedly existing between press conferences — the marriage jokes, strange eating habits, weekend plans, anxieties, and occasional oversharing. The politician no longer simply needs a platform and a biography. He needs a personality compelling enough to follow.

 

Americans expect politicians to disclose hobbies, dating habits, favorite foods, fertility decisions, television habits, music tastes, memes, marriages, divorces, and workouts.

 

And because voters are extraordinarily practiced consumers of influencer culture, generic relatability no longer works very well. For Rubio to say he enjoys spending time with his family sounds focus-grouped and scripted. To say his wife may hate it, but he would love to spend a weekend only watching football sounds like a dad you would meet in your local Walmart. Likewise, AOC could have claimed that she believes Democrats should learn from their past mistakes. To quip about Woke 1.0 being crazy is something you would say over Saturday brunch. That distinction is central to what both AOC and Rubio are doing as they size up their futures.

 

AOC needs voters to forget, momentarily, that she is AOC, the Democratic Socialist champion. Rubio needs voters to remember that Marco Rubio the dad exists underneath his all-consuming roles in the Trump administration.

 

The time is ripe for this kind of experimentation. With likely contenders but no inevitable heirs apparent in either party, ambitious politicians have the luxury of spending the next year or two quietly testing an increasingly important question: What version of me would Americans be more likely to elect president? For Ocasio-Cortez, the answer emerging looks something like an economic populist shorn of some of the cultural baggage of 2020, repackaged as a recognizable Millennial woman contemplating marriage and motherhood while downplaying the mistakes of her political youth. For Rubio, it is the inverse: the seasoned statesman who spends his working hours negotiating with foreign powers but, given the choice, would rather spend his weekend planted in front of a television watching an ungodly amount of college football. The résumés are already written. What remains to be workshopped is the person attached to them.

 

None of this is to say that the personalities being presented are necessarily false. AOC really froze her eggs, and Rubio probably really would happily liquefy his brain watching 14 straight hours of college football. The artifice, if there is any, lies not in invention but in selection. Presidential politics does not require constructing a human being from scratch so much as deciding which of a person’s perfectly genuine pieces might add up to an electable character.

 

And perhaps my lingering girlboss instinct was right after all. Good for AOC. Freeze the eggs. Dump the fiancé. Repent of Woke 1.0. Cheer on your SEC team and snack on Pop-Tarts. Just don’t be surprised if, somewhere between the fertility clinic and the next round of Sunday games, an exploratory committee appears.

The Oligarchy Myth

By Michael Dresdale

Saturday, June 13, 2026

 

In California’s gubernatorial primary, Tom Steyer — the billionaire investor and patron of progressive causes — was widely seen as the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s socialist faction. He won the endorsements of the Bernie Sanders-founded Our Revolution and progressive stalwarts like Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), despite the vast personal fortune he amassed as a hedge fund manager — a job that sits just below Big Oil executive in the progressive hierarchy of moral opprobrium.

 

But despite having poured over $200 million of his own money into electing himself, he will ultimately be on the outside looking in come November. Steyer outspent former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on advertising by a nearly twenty-to-one margin, but Becerra has advanced to the general election; Steyer, in contrast, failed to secure enough primary votes to get the second spot on California’s November ballot, losing out to Republican Steve Hilton.

 

Steyer’s underwhelming performance has exposed the limits of the very charge he and Sanders have spent the past year prosecuting: that what fundamentally ails America is oligarchic control of politics.

 

In barnstorming the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has pressed his case in characteristically blunt terms: “You have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.” Yet when billionaires themselves have tried to convert dollars into votes, the results have been disappointing-bordering-on-dismal. Beyond his gubernatorial bid, Steyer spent nearly $350 million boosting his run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — an effort that failed to win him even a single delegate. Michael Bloomberg, whose fortune makes Steyer’s look like a modest nest egg, spent over $1 billion on his own 2020 campaign; for all that expense and trouble, the only primary contest he won was American Samoa’s — presumably home to many grateful users of the Bloomberg terminal. As New York’s June primaries approach, Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) — scion to the Levi Strauss fortune — looks to be on the cusp of political annihilation at the hands of former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, despite outraising Lander three-to-one and pledging to match every donated dollar.

 

To be fair, the claim that American politics is fundamentally oligarchic does not rest on billionaires holding office themselves. Politicians must still raise money to campaign, and that necessity creates an opening for the moneyed classes. Billionaires need not enter the scrum, this view holds, when so many elected supplicants will do their bidding.

 

The contention that politicians serve their donors rather than their voters is as old as electoral politics. Political scientists have long tested its explanatory power in contemporary American politics. In 2014, two of them, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, lent the view support in a paper finding that the preferences of the rich overwhelmingly shape public policy. A subsequent stream of research, however, challenged the assumption that those laws were passed because they pleased the donor class. To cite just one paper complicating the Gilens and Page view, Alexander Branham and his co-authors found that a huge swath of the rich’s apparent wins could as easily be credited to the fact that their desired policies also enjoyed middle-class support. When their preferences diverged from the middle class’s, the rich won only 53 percent of the time — and even then, the policies leaned in no consistent ideological direction.

 

Step back from the regressions, and the pattern of which causes have won and lost this century suggests that the Business Roundtable and its allies have not held the whip hand in our politics. In 2013, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the institutional home of Sanders’s reviled plutocrats — spent $50 million backing Congress’s push for comprehensive immigration reform. That effort died in the Republican-controlled House at the hands of grassroots opposition. Thirteen years later, neither President Trump’s immigration crackdown nor his dizzying array of tariffs ranks high on corporate America’s wish-list.

 

Perhaps nowhere do America’s billionaires appear more politically impotent than in their own backyards. New York and California are home to 38 percent of the nation’s billionaires, many clustered in New York City and San Francisco. But the two states levy two of the highest top marginal tax rates in the country, with New York City throwing in an upper-bracket income tax of its own for good measure. Moreover, the recent political trajectories of both states — and their most dynamic cities — bear little imprint of billionaire control. In New York City, the mayoralty was won by the self-avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, who ran on ratcheting up taxes on the wealthy. The state declined to enact the full suite of Mamdani proposals, but one tax it did adopt falls on the expensive apartments that the rich keep as second homes. Mamdani has pressed his agenda by picking fights with individual billionaires. In California, meanwhile, several billionaires have fled the state to escape a proposed wealth tax headed for the November ballot, one that would carve a one-time, five-percent chunk out of their fortunes.

 

The more one wrestles with the many instances of billionaire interests losing in the political arena, the clearer it becomes that “oligarchy” has become a political crutch for the left — a way of explaining away defeat as the work of class opponents cunningly deploying their financial power, rather than as the expression of sincere disagreement on the part of the mass of American voters. Many people may have discrete complaints about America’s imperfect capitalist reality, but few of them, false consciousness or not, are eager to see it thrown overboard wholesale.

 

The danger of the left’s embrace of the oligarchy thesis is that it risks blinding the public to a genuinely valuable aspect of American capitalism. “Oligarchy” does fairly describe many economies, past and present. The Economist’s crony-capitalism index captures the difference: It measures the share of a country’s billionaire wealth drawn from state-dependent, rent-heavy sectors — telecoms, mining, casinos, defense — against the share generated in competitive ones. Unsurprisingly, the 2023 rankings put Putin’s Russia at the top, with crony wealth equal to 19 percent of GDP. In the United States, the figure was 2 percent.

 

The left blurs this distinction, treating inequality as equally condemnable whether it springs from cronyism or from competition. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) insistence that there is no ethical way to amass a billion dollars underscores the point. Earning a billion dollars — or many times that — by building a company that hundreds of millions of people freely use is a supremely pro-social act. Of course, we can debate in good faith how much a productive billionaire ought to pay in taxes. But our scorn should be reserved for those whose path to wealth runs through a Machiavellian climb into the inner rings of power, only to use that proximity to exploit their fellow citizens rather than serve them.

 

One of the strongest criticisms of the Trump administration is that it, too, is blurring the lines between these two modes of capitalism through the intense personalization of the executive branch. As the Wall Street Journal has documented, Trump has taken a personal hand in the Food and Drug Administration’s drug approvals, the Federal Trade Commission’s merger reviews, and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadcast licenses. The administration can offer a plausible rationale for any one of these interventions. Cumulatively, though, they leave a different impression — that the administrative state’s technocracy has been restored to a clientelist species of democratic control. Unsurprisingly, spending on lobbying targeting the White House has surged to record levels.

 

Robert Dahl, the political scientist and great student of American government’s messiness, described America’s pluralist political reality as one of “multiple centers of power, none of which is or can be wholly sovereign.” The threat to that reality does not come from a creeping control by business over government, but from government’s desire to insinuate into every corner of business — a tendency visible in different forms in both political parties. Should the trend hold, and a growing share of our companies come to feel that their fates rest on the centralized decisions of regulators and politicians rather than the dispersed judgments of investors and consumers, then today’s overheated accusations will be borne out as tomorrow’s sober predictions.

The Coming AOC Presidential Campaign

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

Axios reports that New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “making new moves toward a possible White House bid. Ocasio-Cortez launched a national tour in recent weeks — without calling it one. Democratic operatives expect she would easily raise $100 million just from small-dollar donors, mobilize many supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ past campaigns, and command attention as few other candidates could.”

 

When lots of people tell a party’s rising star that he should run for president, he often ends up running for president. (AOC was elected in 2018, so she’s probably not a “rising star” in Democratic politics anymore; she’s a full-on star.) There’s no guarantee that four to eight years from now, Democrats will be as enamored with her. Every incentive is to strike when the iron is hot, and if you’re a Democrat, you probably feel pretty good about your odds in 2028 in a national electorate likely to be absolutely exhausted from the Trump era.

 

This is not good news for the U.S., which faces a dangerous world now and is likely to face a comparably dangerous world when the next president takes the oath of office on January 20, 2029. In February, when AOC went to the Munich Security Conference, she was asked a very basic yes-or-no question of “would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to [invade]” and answered with incoherent word salad. If the congresswoman had ever put any thought into what the U.S. ought to do in that scenario, she hid it exceptionally well.

 

Her broader remarks weren’t much better. Asked about balancing a need for increased defense spending and nations’ debts, she veered back into familiar territory about “reining in corporations” and the “billionaire class.” She offered generic comments that international aid is good, and rote denunciation of “NAFTA as a failed policy for many rural and working-class communities.”  (NAFTA was replaced on July 1, 2020.) The Democratic Party is still anti-free trade, even as they denounce Trump’s tariffs.

 

AOC isn’t that interested in foreign policy, beyond the now-standard Israel-bashing; she now opposes all U.S. military aid to Israel, including assistance to air defense systems that prevent Iranian, Hezbollah, and Hamas rockets from hitting civilian targets.

 

We keep getting reminded that foreign policy and national security are second-tier concerns of the American electorate. But the rest of the world never cooperates with presidents who want to focus primarily on domestic issues.

 

It was only a month ago that Axios was telling us that while the AOC is a ubiquitous social media presence, she doesn’t like doing sit-down interviews, and when she does, “it’s usually with an ideologically sympathetic outlet or reporter.”

 

We saw this with Joe Biden, and we saw this with Kamala Harris. We are beset by overambitious, under-studied politicians who are absolutely convinced they’re ready to sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and order U.S. troops into combat when needed, but not ready to sit down for an hour with a major cable news host who’s going to ask them tougher-than-usual questions. If you want to be president of the United States, then you need to be able to sit down with someone who’s going to say some variation of, “your policies, ideas, and agenda stink, and you should not be trusted with power” and you need to be able to respond, “no, my policies, ideas, and agenda are the right answers, and here’s why” in a persuasive matter. This is Politics 101.

 

If you need to be wrapped in bubble wrap to get through a national tour, you are not going to get through the challenges of a presidential campaign.

 

The only constitutional requirements to be president are to be a natural-born citizen and at least 35 years old. (AOC turned 36 in October.) In a better world, we might add a constitutional requirement that a potential president must have run something larger than a congressional office in their life. This is not mocking or thinking less of AOC for having once been a bartender. Bartending is noble and important work, and unlike members of Congress, bartenders get judged on their results. Technically, AOC also founded Brook Avenue Press, a publishing house developing “urban literature for kids.” The state of New York issued the company a tax warrant for failing to pay taxes. As of 2022, the tax warrant against her was still open.

 

Whenever AOC gets criticized, she and her fanbase keep insisting that her critics are “obsessed” with her. (Back in 2018, CNN aired a segment about conservative media’s alleged “obsession” with the congresswoman featuring Brian Stelter, Cenk Uygur and . . . Olivia Nuzzi. I suppose that if you want to discuss the phenomenon of an unhealthy obsession with political figures, you go to an expert on unhealthy obsession with political figures.)

 

These same AOC defenders simultaneously insist she is one of the most powerful, important, consequential, and fascinating figures in Washington. (As of today, no bill for which AOC was the primary sponsor has been enacted into law across her entire congressional career.) You can’t have it both ways. If you are a major political figure who wants to be president, you must accept the scrutiny that comes with being a major political figure who wants to be president, and you can’t reflexively deploy the line from Regina George in Mean Girls, “Why are you so obsessed with me?”

 

Grähäm Plätner, Stark Raving Maniac

 

Maine Democrats have nominated a stone-cold sociopath for U.S. Senate, and now they must pretend like everything is fine.

 

Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner declined to apologize both to voters and a Purple Heart recipient when asked by Fox News Digital about a deleted Reddit post where he said the wounded soldier “didn’t deserve to live.”

 

Platner did not respond at first when asked outside a market near his home whether he regrets making the post, which Fox News Digital reported earlier this week showed him mocking a video of Pfc. Ted Daniels taken during a clash with Taliban fighters in 2012 that ended in Daniels being shot four times and being awarded a Purple Heart.

 

“I did four tours in the infantry, any attempt to say that I disrespect veterans is slanderous and offensive,” Platner said when asked follow-up questions about what he would say to any Maine voters who were offended by his post and if he should apologize to Daniels.

 

“This video never gets old,” Platner posted in June 2019 using the Reddit account “P-Hustle,” which he has acknowledged owning, in reference to a viral video from the helmet Daniels was wearing while taking enemy fire.

 

I’m getting awfully tired of this “how dare you” reflexive indignation schtick when a candidate for Senate has his own comments read back to him. It’s not the reporter’s fault that you sound like an unhinged maniac.

 

Democrats have studied Trump’s success in two out of the past three elections and concluded that the road to political victory requires A) saying outlandish things and B) never apologizing, even when one is abundantly warranted.

 

Down in Texas, Watching the ‘Jail and Castrate Zionists’ Democrat . . .

 

Today, Texans go to the polls for the Republican Senate primary runoff. Walking scandal machine Ken Paxton, who leaves a trail of slime everywhere he goes, is expected to win over incumbent John Cornyn, thanks to President Trump’s strangely delayed endorsement. (Our Jeff Blehar recalls, “Paxton fired multiple whistleblowers in the Texas attorney general’s office for revealing that they had been forced to employ one of his mistresses, and then he was forced by a district court to pay out $6.6 million in damages to them, all with taxpayer dollars.”)

 

But elsewhere in Texas, Democrats have their own high-stakes runoff. Texas’ 35th Congressional District is one of those redrawn districts. Today, Democrats will vote in a runoff between sex therapist Maureen Galindo and sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia. Galindo received the most votes, or a bit more than 29 percent, in the March primary. She has some . . . unorthodox views:

 

In an Instagram post last week, Galindo wrote that she will “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists).”

 

 She initially insisted her remark could not be considered antisemitic because she believed in jailing Christian Zionists as well. Then she told the New York Times, “Everything is based off a local journalist twisting words.”

 

 Ma’am, you wrote that in your own Instagram post. You decided the context.

 

 Now, every new member of Congress begins their duties by swearing an oath.

 

 The Speaker directs the Representatives-elect to rise and raise their right hands. The oath, which follows, is stated in the form of a question, to which the newly elected Members respond in the affirmative:

 

[Do you] I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that [you] I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that [you] I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that [you] I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that [you] I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which [you] I am about to enter[?]. So help [you] me God.

 

If you believe that “Zionists” should be jailed for their views, you oppose the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and thus are not supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. (There is a strong argument that you are, in fact, one of those domestic enemies.)

 

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, a visit to NASK — the Polish national institute for cybersecurity — and an observation that the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments collectively spend billions of dollars on propaganda and information warfare. Meanwhile, we’ve shut down the U.S. State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference center and have Voice of America operating on a skeleton crew. There’s a war going on to shape how the world perceives America and the other great powers, and we have deliberately chosen to concede the battlefield.

The Politics of Unrespectability

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

 

Kamala Harris made a mistake by campaigning with Liz Cheney in 2024, or so a certain type of leftist will tell you.

 

A conservative with Republican royal lineage, Cheney was a strong corroborating witness for Democrats’ case that Donald Trump is a fascist who shouldn’t be trusted with power. Team Harris hoped her endorsement would create a “permission structure” for the Trump-leery center-right to cross the aisle on Election Day.

 

What they neglected to consider, our certain type of leftist would note, is how the Democratic base would feel about partnering with someone whose surname had become a byword for right-wing warmongering. Coalition-building is important, yes, but progressives were already suspicious of Harris on foreign policy due to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s operations in Gaza. Linking arms with the doyenne of neoconservatism seemed to confirm that, if she won, it would be business as usual in Washington with respect to the Middle East.

 

Demoralization followed, then defeat. One Democratic strategist framed the Cheney problem starkly after the election: “People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil.”

 

Which sounds clever—until you remember that the fascist on the ballot became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote in that election. Lots of Americans are quite willing to be in a coalition with the devil, it turns out, if the devil promises to reduce the cost of living and keep the country out of foreign wars. That deal is currently working out for them precisely the way all deals with the devil do.

 

It would be more correct to say that people don’t want to be in a coalition with certain devils. One of those people is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

AOC was willing to join a coalition with Cheney against Trump, albeit with misgivings. “I think there’s plenty of people that aren’t happy about that,” she said in 2024 of Harris’ new conservative campaign surrogate, confessing that she didn’t love the arrangement herself. But strange bedfellows are “part of the nature of putting together a coalition,” she observed. If Cheney wanted to help Democrats get Harris elected, fine.

 

Fast-forward to last week, when Ocasio-Cortez was asked in an interview about partnering with Republicans on matters of common ground. “I care about results,” she allowed, endorsing the idea, but warned her audience against letting wolves into one’s tent for the sake of making that tent bigger. “I personally do not trust someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a proven bigot and antisemite, on the issue of what is good for Gazans and Israelis,” AOC went on to say. “I don’t think that it benefits our movement … to align the left with white nationalists.”

 

Some bedfellows are a little too strange to share a pillow with, it seems.

 

Many of the same progressives who rejected the devil’s bargain with Cheney have spent the past week grumbling at AOC for rejecting a devil’s bargain with Greene. No Republican politician has been more outspoken than MTG in condemning the Jewish state’s war in Gaza as a “genocide.” If Ocasio-Cortez was willing to hold her nose and make common cause with one distasteful right-wing figure to defeat Trump, those progressives reasoned, surely she should be willing to do so with another to move America’s Overton window toward opposing Israel.

 

“For all her professed radicalism, AOC is still beholden to a politics of respectability,” Sohrab Ahmari wrote, more in sorrow than in anger, of the congresswoman’s skepticism of Greene. (One would think Ahmari, of all people, would be cautious about making any new deals with devils right now, but no.) It’s hard to disagree: God knows, if there’s one thing American politics needs less of in year 11 of the Trump era, it’s respectability.

 

Why doesn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, alleged populist, see that?

 

The Israel litmus test.

 

The disagreement between AOC and her progressive critics is only nominally about whether the left should partner with Republicans to contain Israel. Of course we should, I presume she’d say.

 

She’s worked before on subjects of mutual interest with the likes of Ted Cruz and defended cooperating with House Republican Tim Burchett in the same interview in which she denounced Greene. We should work across the aisle “where we trust intent,” she said of Burchett. But she doesn’t trust Greene’s intentions.

 

Who can blame her?

 

MTG has been harassing Ocasio-Cortez since before she was elected to Congress, leading a group of men to AOC’s locked congressional office in 2019 where, according to the Washington Post, they recorded themselves “taunt[ing] the congresswoman’s staff through a mail slot and defil[ing] her guest book, all while mocking Ocasio-Cortez.” When the video of that resurfaced in 2021, AOC called Greene “deeply unwell” and encouraged her to seek help for a “fixation [that] has lasted for several years now.”

 

In 2020, during her first run for Congress, MTG posted a photo of herself holding a gun next to an image of Ocasio-Cortez and fellow progressives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” she wrote in the photo’s caption. The following year, long before she became a critic of Israel, she began referring to AOC’s far-left faction in the House as the “Jihad Squad.”

 

On one occasion shortly after she joined Congress, Greene caught up to Ocasio-Cortez as the latter was leaving the House chamber and began shouting at her about Black Lives Matter and the Green New Deal. “You don’t care about the American people,” Greene reportedly yelled. “Why do you support terrorists and Antifa?”

 

I don’t think AOC is against being in a coalition with the Republican devil against Israel. I think she’s opposed to being in a coalition with this particular devil, whom she has ample reason to distrust.

 

But that’s why progressives want her to do it. The reason the left has picked this fight with her is because it hopes to make opposition to Israel an ideological litmus test on par with, say, support for universal health care. So urgent and righteous is the cause of severing America’s relationship with the Jewish state, they mean to say, that there is never an excuse for declining an opportunity to advance it, even if doing so requires you to glad-hand a crazy person who may or may not wish you personal harm.

 

(It follows, I suppose, that the cause of preventing a second Trump presidency was not so urgent and righteous as to excuse glad-handing Liz Cheney.)

 

What more powerful statement can there be of how committed progressives are to that litmus test than taking sides with Marjorie Taylor Greene, for years the queen of MAGA kookery, against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the avatar of supposedly ascendant young socialism?

 

Poke around on Twitter and you’ll even find a few alleging that MTG is better than AOC on Israel because Ocasio-Cortez once opposed an amendment offered by Greene to cut funding for the Iron Dome missile defense program. AOC has since reversed course and promised that she’ll oppose any new military aid to Jerusalem, but you don’t need to squint to see why an Israel skeptic like her might support money for Iron Dome. Every Hamas rocket that does damage to the Jewish state is cause for reprisal and war; if those rockets are shot down before impact, retaliation becomes optional rather than obligatory.

 

But hard feelings aren’t the only reason that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t want to share a tent with Greene, I’m sure. Ahmari may not have learned the lesson of the past 10 years, but AOC seemingly has.

 

Learning from postliberalism.

 

The lesson is that you can’t partially normalize postliberalism. If Marjorie Taylor Greene is worth listening to on Israel, she’s worth listening to, period.

 

The Republican establishment believed it could partially normalize Trump in 2016. He’s worth listening to on immigration, conservatives conceded to the GOP base. Banning Muslims from entering the United States might be excessive, and we’re not crazy about his admiration for Russia. But building a border wall is worth thinking about.

 

If Trump was worth listening to because he had the right idea on immigration, he was worth listening to, period. And the right did listen. They listened when he said the 2020 election was rigged, that he was entitled to seek “retribution” against his political enemies, that his tariffs would create a golden age of prosperity for the United States, and that the Iran war was no big deal because it would be over in four to six weeks.

 

All sorts of destructive ideas went mainstream in America once Republicans normalized Trumpism. His current Cabinet includes people who think the problem with the military is that it’s too reluctant to commit war crimes and that the problem with public health is that it’s too enthusiastic about vaccines. When you move the Overton window sharply on one issue, you may find that you’ve inadvertently moved it on others.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene has described herself in the past as a Christian nationalist. She supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and marked the fifth anniversary of January 6 this year by lamenting that “political protesters” had been held in a “D.C. Gulag.” Last week she reassured Twitter followers that ivermectin, the antiparasitic medicine embraced by right-wing cranks as a COVID cure-all, would work on hantavirus as well. Those who took “the good ole horse paste” and gained natural immunity from the last killer virus should follow the same protocol for the next one, Greene advised.

 

Telling opponents of Israel that her opinion about the Jewish state holds value inevitably invites them to consider that her opinion about all sorts of other things might hold value too. Progressives weren’t willing to take that risk with Liz Cheney’s neoconservatism but they are, it seems, willing to take it with MTG’s postliberalism—notwithstanding their entirely correct belief that postliberalism is hollowing out America in numerous ways. AOC seems not to be as risk-tolerant in this case as they are, and correctly so.

 

There’s a second lesson she may have gleaned from watching Republicans over the past decade, a corollary to how you can’t partially normalize postliberalism. Namely, right-wing postliberals very seldom have good intentions and eventually that fact will make itself plain.

 

It’s possible that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s concern for Gazans is earnest, an example of human compassion in its purest form. But it’s also quite possible that it’s driven by enemy-of-my-enemy political logic, reflecting the priorities of the “America First” faction to which she and figures like Tucker Carlson belong. Those priorities aren’t limited to questioning whether Israel wields too much influence over U.S. foreign policy, an increasingly mainstream view as the Iran war wears on. In Greene’s case, they include insinuations about larger conspiracies involving Jews and the Jewish state.

 

The most famous example is her “Jewish space lasers” theory from 2018, in which she speculated that a fire in California was caused by a space-based laser connected to the Rothschild family. (Last year she told Bill Maher, implausibly, that she “didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish.”) She toned it down a little after joining Congress in 2021, limiting herself for a while to casual Holocaust analogies by comparing Joe Biden to Hitler and likening proof of vaccination to Jews being compelled to wear yellow stars.

 

But things picked up in 2023, when she opposed a House resolution condemning antisemitism because she thought the language might penalize Christians for believing that Jesus was “crucified by the Jews.” Last fall she sided with Carlson and Candace Owens during an intra-right debate by implying that the martyred Charlie Kirk was preparing to disown Israel before he was shot. A few months later, after her falling out with Trump over the Epstein files, she wrote, “It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?”

 

Last week she cried foul about the White House effort to oust her friend Thomas Massie from his House seat, complaining that “Trump and the 3 billionaires from Israel, NOT Kentucky, are supporting a hollow controlled puppet that can’t even speak his own words!!!” The week before that, she promoted Dan Bilzerian’s primary challenge to “Zionist First Randy Fine,” a Jewish Republican congressman from Florida. Among other things, Bilzerian believes that “most of the problems today are caused by Jewish supremacy,” that fewer than 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, that former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a “hero,” and that John F. Kennedy was likely assassinated by Mossad.

 

It is not crazy for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to look at all of that, suspect that MTG’s views on Gaza are motivated by little more than the Lindberghian impulse to strengthen American (or, rather, white) nationalism by encouraging hostility to Jews, and say no thanks.

 

A question of motives.

 

You don’t need to believe that AOC’s own motives are entirely pure in doing so.

 

One way to understand her reluctance to join hands with Greene is as a matter of pure political calculation. Poll after poll shows opinion in the United States trending against Israel after years of war in Gaza and now months of war in Iran. The Democratic consensus that the Palestinians are the more sympathetic party in that conflict is becoming the national consensus. After decades of being treated as an outré position in establishment politics, opposition to the Jewish state has gone mainstream.

 

The last thing a person who’s pleased with that development should want is to discredit skepticism of Israel anew by promoting cranks who are destined to alienate persuadables. The “Jewish space lasers” lady who’s hoping to see Dan Bilzerian in Congress is not a net gain for normalizing the cause, even if she has a left-friendly view of Gaza.

 

Frankly, it’s not clear to me that Greene still commands a meaningful constituency on the right that the left should covet. That was a core progressive complaint against Harris’ alliance with Liz Cheney, ironically: How many Republicans realistically were still listening in 2024 to Cheney? She’d already been aggressively un-personed within the party by Trump such that any conservatives who still preferred her to him had likely already turned against the GOP, making her endorsement irrelevant.

 

The same is true for MTG, no? She was also excommunicated from the cult by the president, undermining her previous influence with average MAGA voters. And the sort of hardcore groypers who might share her take on Gaza have already ditched the GOP because of Trump’s warm relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

Welcoming her to the anti-Israel cause would be subtraction by addition, in short, deepening the left’s already considerable antisemitism problem while supplying it with few new votes to compensate. Good luck squaring that with “big tent” logic.

 

But if you want to be more charitable to Ocasio-Cortez, you can do that too. She does occasionally speak up against antisemitism; her objections to Greene and comparative tolerance for bigotry among left-wing fellow travelers may be due to an ideological blind spot, not pure partisan hypocrisy. Intentions probably explain why she grudgingly backed an alliance of convenience with Cheney but can’t stomach one with MTG, in fact. Everyone to the left of Ted Cruz understands that Cheney’s intentions in opposing Trump were noble. Greene’s intentions in opposing Israel are considerably deeper in doubt.

 

Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortez’s dispute with progressives in this matter is less an argument over coalition-building strategy than how radically “counter-hegemonic” (to borrow a term from Ahmari) left-wing politics should be. To a burn-it-all-down populist on either end of the proverbial horseshoe, MTG going rogue on Israel is a heartening rebellion against establishment conventional wisdom, the sort of thing America desperately needs more of. Draining the swamp will require bold, transgressive action by leaders who not only don’t care about respectability but actively disdain the concept. Which sounds … familiar.

 

The fact that their favorite progressive congresswoman doesn’t believe that as unconditionally as they do makes her a timid party hack at heart.

 

But to Ocasio-Cortez, I suspect, an effective “counter-hegemonic” strategy means avoiding subtraction by addition and the moral corruption that inevitably comes with welcoming in elements who don’t have the movement’s best interests at heart. The right failed to learn that second lesson and will never fully recover from it. Whether it might learn the first will depend on what happens in November and 2028.

Why Does AOC Think Billionaires Can’t Exist?

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t believe in billionaires.

 

On a podcast the other day, she said that it’s impossible to make a billion dollars without lying, cheating, or stealing.

 

“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right,” AOC declared. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

 

The New York representative makes it sound as though our billionaires are the equivalent of Russian oligarchs who got their riches through government favor, when, in reality, they tend to be epic entrepreneurs and legendary investors who create stupendous value out of nothing.

 

Typical of her, AOC is taking a strength of American society — its openness to talent and innovation — and portraying it as a fundamental problem.

 

No rational person looks at the top ten list of wealthiest people in the United States and thinks, “What have any of those people done for us?”

 

It’s hard to imagine life now without Amazon, Tesla, Google, or Facebook, for example.

 

Judging by the list, becoming a billionaire is quite simple — all it requires is unbelievable talent matched to ferocious will and prodigious executive ability, resulting in a world-changing business enterprise.

 

The idea that any of the most famous U.S. entrepreneurs got where they are through, say, wage theft is laughable.

 

The transformative nature of these businesses is self-evident.

 

Jeff Bezos didn’t just open up a corner store or a department chain. He revolutionized the retail industry. He saved Americans untold dollars through cheaper goods and spared them untold time and inconvenience by obviating the need to travel to and from a retail outlet.

 

There’s also the fact that these enterprises wouldn’t exist absent the millions of consumers who decided that they are useful to them. If Facebook had 300,000 users rather than 3 billion, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t be so wealthy.

 

Defending her categorical dismissal of the possibility of legit billionaires, AOC tried to clarify on X by saying someone can “make” a billion dollars, but that’s different than “earning” it.

 

She cited as an example Airbnb, blaming it for high housing prices in the United States.

 

This is a bizarre accusation to make against a platform that simply allows people who want to rent out their homes or apartments on a short-term basis to connect with people interested in renting them. Again, a concern like Airbnb wouldn’t be so successful if people didn’t find it valuable.

 

The Washington Post points out that guests spent an astonishing $30 billion on Airbnb rentals in the first quarter of this year, while the company’s net income was a relatively paltry $160 million. New York City, by the way, basically banned Airbnb and still has a hideously expensive real estate market.

 

Now, it’s certainly true that businesses maneuver for advantage, and work to avoid regulatory costs and impose them on competitors. The best way to prevent firms from leveraging public policy for their advantage, though, is to have minimal state involvement in our economy in the first place. Needless to say, this is the opposite of the approach favored by the socialist AOC.

 

One can, for instance, fairly criticize Elon Musk for getting tax credits for Tesla’s electric cars, but the green-energy extremist AOC actually favored the credits (Trump eliminated them).

 

The socialist economy favored by the likes of AOC would be more static and less free. It would lavish subsidies on businesses engaged in favored activities and punish businesses engaged in disfavored ones. The economy would, in general, be more politicized. There might be fewer billionaires, but we’d be poorer for it.

 

Despite what AOC thinks, becoming a billionaire isn’t easy, and it’s not possible without creating substantial benefits for the rest of society. Becoming a celebrity representative who is hostile to the sources of American success and who evangelizes for economic ignorance is, unfortunately, much easier.

AOC’s Risible Performance

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did a star turn at the Munich Security Conference, and her appearances went about as well as you’d expect of a celebrity congresswoman who has spent five minutes thinking about foreign policy.

 

AOC is to strategic thinkers what Gayle King is to astronauts.

 

She projects all the authority of an International Relations 101 student who didn’t realize that there was going to be a pop quiz before spring break.

 

She sounds as if she watched the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign and concluded that what sank the vice president was that the candidate’s policy answers were much too substantive and precise. There’s no way, judging by her performance in Germany, that AOC is going to let herself make the same mistake.

 

Ocasio-Cortez critiqued Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarkable speech at the conference for being “a pure appeal to ‘Western culture,’” which she rendered with air quotes as though its existence is somehow in doubt.

 

It is certainly true, as she said, that cultures change over time, but this doesn’t alter the reality of Western distinctiveness as it has developed over a couple of millennia.

 

AOC seemed to consider it a provocation that Rubio had talked about Western culture when discussing a Western alliance, NATO, founded to defend Western countries from a totalitarian menace emanating from a Eurasian behemoth.

 

In fact, the secretary’s speech was well-received and persuasively set out the common history of Europe and the United States.

 

The AOC rejoinder was that what she called “alleged” Western values are illusory because they haven’t always defined our interactions with “the global South.” Even if the West hasn’t always lived up to its values, though, that doesn’t falsify them or make them any less powerful.

 

The best formula for success for underdeveloped countries around the world — the global South — would be for them to Westernize in the sense of embracing the rule of law, property rights, markets, and stable, representative government.

 

AOC also said that culture is “thin” compared to concrete economic interests. This belief that material considerations trump cultural ones — from religious faith to national identity — is an old Marxist chestnut that has proved false over and over again.

 

At the outset of World War I, the AOCs of the time believed that the working classes of the various combatant countries would unite to oppose the conflict. As it happened, they backed the war efforts of their own nations.

 

The average American worker has nothing in common with a Chinese worker or, for that matter, a French or German worker. AOC is hoping for, in effect, a Fourth International as the foundation of “class-based” U.S. foreign policy — democratic socialists of the world unite!

 

This is a childish fantasy, but it wasn’t the least impressive thing she said at Munich.

 

Asked whether the U.S. should defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, AOC hesitated and stumbled as though the question had never occurred to her previously, before not answering.

 

She objected to our operation to grab Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. According to AOC, we undertook it “just because the nation is below the equator,” when Venezuela is north of the equator.

 

She poured scorn on Marco Rubio’s statement that American cowboy culture was “born in Spain,” apparently not realizing that he was wholly correct about this.

 

AOC is young and charismatic with a long career ahead of her, and she isn’t seeking to land a job at the State Department — she doesn’t need to be Prince Metternich or even Antony Blinken.

 

Yet, her time at the Munich conference was another reminder that no matter how much she is billed as a rising star, she is still callow and unserious. If AOC knows what she doesn’t know, she doesn’t seem to particularly care, and her casual disregard for Western culture is symptomatic of a left that, to its shame, considers its own civilization an affront and a lie.

The New York Times Tries Impotently to Fix AOC’s Munich Disaster

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

The New York Times’ Kellen Browning would very much like us all to know that the key problem with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s excruciating performance at the Munich Security Conference was that we noticed it. Today, Browning writes that,

 

rather than the substance of her arguments, it was her on-camera stumbles when answering questions about specific world affairs that rocketed around conservative social media and drove plenty of the discussion about her visit, as political observers speculated whether they would make a dent in a potential presidential run in 2028.

 

Ah, yes. The “substance of her arguments.” Substance such as:

 

Um, you know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a um — this is, of course, a, um, very long-standing, um, policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation — and for that question to even arise.

 

And:

 

What we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West we look the other way for inconvenient populations, to act out these paradoxes.

 

Elsewhere in his piece, Browning notes that Ocasio-Cortez was worried that, having been “microscopically dissected,” her message “was being lost in all the commotion.” But what she said was “her message.” One could dissect her words for the next ten years straight, with the best of intentions, and still one would not glean anything coherent or useful from them. This wasn’t the fault of “conservative social media” or “rocketing” or “speculation”; it was the fault of Ocasio-Cortez herself, who went to a security conference, was asked questions about security, and fell flat on her face at the first hurdle. The “commotion” doesn’t enter into the equation. What AOC said didn’t mean anything because AOC doesn’t know anything. Her ideas weren’t lost in translation. She didn’t “stall,” as Kellen Browning pretends she did. She wasn’t afflicted temporarily by madness or dehydration or anesthesia. She had no clue what she was talking about, so what she was talking about had no content.

 

At best, her answer on Taiwan represented a meandering refusal to respond. She was asked, “Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?,” and, in return, she said, “I hope it doesn’t happen.” Which . . . yes, we all do. That’s why we ask politicians what they’d do if it does. As for the other line — “a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West we look the other way for inconvenient populations, to act out these paradoxes” — I would defy even Kamala Harris to top that exercise in flustered filibustering. If, at some point in the future, Mad Libs decides to contrive an International Relations–themed version of its famous game, I guess they’ll know exactly whom to call.

 

Browning suggests that AOC went to Munich to insist that “wealthy world leaders must better provide for their working classes or risk their countries sliding toward authoritarianism.” Apparently, he considers this exonerative. In truth, though, that is the whole problem: AOC is a one-trick pony. What she says in America is what she says in Munich, because she doesn’t know how to say anything else. At some point in her life she became attracted to warmed-over democratic socialism, and since that point she has declined to learn anything more. She’s a meme, an avatar, a vibe. In her interview with Browning, she griped that the press had focused on “any five-to-10-second thing” from her remarks. But of course it did. She is a five-to-10-second thing. She is a limerick competing with a bunch of novels. What did she think was going to happen?

 

Elsewhere, AOC implies that the media’s interest in her potentially “running for president” has made it tough for her agenda to break through. But one must wonder why, if political drama is to blame, this did not apply to Marco Rubio, who is constantly depicted as being involved in a monumental power struggle with JD Vance, and yet managed to deliver a speech at the same conference that was widely regarded as masterly. As it happens, the explanation for this difference is simple: Marco Rubio went to Germany to make a discrete case to the Munich Security Conference, and AOC went to Germany to make yet another Instagram video about nothing. The results matched the aims.