Bezos And The Oligarchs Are Terrified Of AOC. She Just Demonstrated Why.

President? She's aiming MUCH bigger than that.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did an interview this weekend with Obama guy David Axelrod, and it’s getting a lot of attention for how good it was. As is often the case when AOC speaks freely, away from people’s preconceptions about her!

The clip that’s getting the most attention is how she handled the question of whether she’d like to run for president in 2028. Or for the Senate. What are your ambitions, young woman, so that we may tear them down! (Not that we’re suggesting that was Axelrod’s motivation here.)

And her response was whaaaaat? President? No, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is thinking much bigger than that.

“My ambition is to change the country,” she said. “Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”

Huh, it’s almost like politics are supposed to be good for something.

The beginning of Ocasio-Cortez’s answer there was fun, because she referred directly to “this op-ed that Jeff Bezos paid for in the Washington Post” attacking her. In fact there have now been two pissy little whinyass blog posts from the Washington Post editorial board in the past few days attacking AOC, one about how you CAN TOO “earn” a billion dollars, the other about how she is being very mean to AirBnb.

It’s almost like they’re terrified of her. The way the rest of her answer unfolded demonstrates why.

“There was this line […] about ‘As a potential 2028 contender, X, Y, Z.’ And in the context of that it was very clear this was a veiled threat. Right? So it was the elite thing, ‘If you want this job, you just stepped out of line, and we want you to know where the real power is.’ And it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms, and ‘We’re gonna — we’ll make an example out of you.’”

Correct assessment of situation. Then she counter-attacked and got to the part we quoted above:

“And what’s funny about that is they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.

Well then, that is much bigger. It almost seems like she’s not even going to want us to make a graven image or golden calf unto her divine glory.

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Ocasio-Cortez continued, and in the process took aim at all those out there who are obsessed with the titles and offices:

“When you aren’t attached, right, when you haven’t been like fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating.

“Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment. And conditions change radically all the time. So, I make my response less to an attachment to some positional, like, you know, title or position and working backwards from there, but I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country. And saying what move or what decision can I make today that is going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, better than yesterday.”

And if she’s not obsessed with the title of office, she’s going to be a lot less susceptible to people like Jeff Bezos offering to buy it for her, we reckon.

As many have noted, that’s approximately the best answer to that question anyone has ever given, and that most politicians offer up “pablum” in response to anything resembling that subject matter.

Mehdi Hasan responded to that clip, saying, “The reason Republicans are so freaked out by AOC is because they know when normie Americans of any party hear her speak like this, they all agree with her.” He added later, “So I think AOC’s super power in 2028 is that a bunch of terminally online Republicans and addicts of Fox have convinced themselves AOC is dumb or extreme, totally underestimate her, and they don’t have any clue just what a powerful and inspiring communicator she is and how much ordinary Americans - as well as Republican base voters, will be impressed by her mission statement.”

This is actually a good piece of what we have to get back to if we’re going to have a prayer of actually changing the country after we beat the absolute shit out of these fascists, or of making sure the fascists are never allowed to spring forth and take power again.

There was another moment in the interview that got a lot of attention on certain weirdo corners of the Bluesky and Twitter internets, where AOC got loudly condemned by some for saying that she doesn’t trust Marjorie Taylor Greene — “a proven bigot and anti-semite” — on subjects of Gaza or Israel. She said, “I don’t think that it benefits our movement, in that instance, to align the left with white nationalists.” Radical stuff, we know!

What do we keep saying about that, whenever a nutbag like Greene or Tucker Carlson is technically correct about something for four seconds while still coming from an extremely questionable and bad place? That’s right, we say “Under no circumstances do you have to hand it to this or that insane batshit white nationalist anti-semite garbage person,” whichever one we are currently talking about as we chronicle the rending apart of the MAGA right into all these little fighty factions.

We don’t really want to spend any more time on this, but we will say that if you’re memoryholing everything Marjorie Taylor Greene has ever done, putting her on a pedestal and turning AOC into your enemy, you’re an idiot.

Want more AOC content? Here is the Rev. Senator Raphael Warnock welcoming her to the Ebenezer Baptist Church this weekend, whereupon she spoke with fiery passion to the congregation about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and more.

She tweeted, “As legislatures across the South seek to draw Black Americans out of power, we gathered this Sunday to steel ourselves for the work ahead. We will always stand together, and we will not go back.”

To which we reply … um, could this be a 2028 ticket? And then AOC would reply back to us, Did you not see what I said to David Axelrod up there? And then we would reply back, OK, OK, fine.

Here, have the full hour and a half conversation with Axelrod, put it on if you have time, it is all excellent.

OPEN THREAD.

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