As the death toll in Gaza goes over 25,000, with more than 1 percent of the population killed in just over 108 days of ethnic cleansing, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has reiterated her full support for Biden’s re-election campaign.
Her statement was made on the “I’ve Had it” podcast, hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, which describes itself as a “comedic, feel-good podcast,” which will “expose you to all the things you didn’t know you’ve HAD IT with!” Ocasio-Cortez joined the program, the show notes, to play a “hilarious lightning round of Had It or Hit it?”
Welch and Sullivan briefly starred in the short-lived reality television show Sweet Home on Bravo. The show centered on Welch, an interior designer working in Oklahoma City, and her “quirky best friend” Sullivan.
Questioned by the hosts if Ocasio-Cortez “Had it” or would “Hit it” supporting Biden, the DSA member replied enthusiastically “Hit it!”
Struggling to coherently explain her rationale for backing Biden, Ocasio-Cortez offered some grade A word salad.
You know, honestly, here’s the thing, I think sometimes people want electoral politics to be, we overly identify with, it’s like, if you vote for someone they have to be the embodiment of you. And that is actually something I think Donald Trump provided to a lot of people. Where it’s like, if you voted for him and if you were a Donald Trump person, like you, it symbolized so much.
Ocasio-Cortez continued:
But I think what we have here in this situation is a more, just, honest thing. There are plenty of things that the president does that I completely disagree with. I think, right now what is happening in Gaza, I can’t, I just, I can’t go on every single day seeing this. I don’t associate myself with what’s happening.
What’s a little genocide among friends? Ocasio-Cortez declares that she “completely disagrees” with Biden on Gaza, though she is careful not to say precisely what she disagrees with. However, this should not, she counsels, divert workers and young people from supporting the Democratic Party.
In fact, far from “disassociating” herself from Israel’s military campaign, Ocasio-Cortez quickly denounced those who protested Israeli collective punishment following the Hamas incursion on October 7, calling on pro-Palestine protests to be “shut down.” That same month, in an interview with CNN, Ocasio-Cortez recanted her previously tepid opposition to funding Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile system, telling the host she supported “Iron Dome and defense” for the Zionist state.
While Ocasio-Cortez might not “associate” herself with the genocide, in supporting Biden for president she is providing him political cover to continue with the slaughter that has claimed the lives of over 12,000 children and destroyed over half the buildings in Gaza, including every major university.
After restating her support for Biden and ethnic cleansing, Ocasio-Cortez attempted to explain this as part of the fight against fascism.
“But at the end of the day, we have to acknowledge that, we just can’t allow this fascist movement, to grow in this country,” she said. She did not bother to explain, nor did her empty-headed hosts inquire, how one could stop fascism in America while supporting genocide in Palestine.
Nevertheless, for the DSA Democrat, the decision to vote for Biden is an easy one. “If it’s coming down to this next election, for me, personally, the decision to vote, is not a difficult one for me,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
Exuding the complacency of a middle-class careerist, Ocasio-Cortez added, “Because like, just because I am voting for him doesn’t mean that he embodies everything about me.”
Anticipating that her fulsome support for Biden would not be received well by many of her supporters, Ocasio-Cortez preemptively scolded them as if they were children. “So that to me is where I am at. But I think, ya know, people are going to get mad on the internet because that’s what they do, but I think we just got to be adults about the situation.”
The New York congresswoman added that “electoral politics, is just one, just one small sliver of how we make the world better.
“And if we put all our eggs into that basket people start acting way too crazy. And like Donald Trump is what you actually get, Donald Trump is what you actually get when you want a politician to embody all of your hopes and dreams and caricatures of yourself.”
Blaming the population, and specifically “white men” for vomiting up Trump, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Donald Trump affirms insecure men’s idea of masculinity, they affirm insecure people’s idea of wealth…. Insecure white folks’ idea of race, like that is what you get when you want your everything to come, all of your like, life and identity-affirming things to come from electoral politics, you get demagogues.”
Trump did not emerge from the working class either physically or psychologically. The billionaire real estate swindler and tax cheat, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is the personification of the American ruling class—wealthy, ruthless and astoundingly ignorant.
Under conditions where both political parties and the capitalist system are increasingly discredited in the eyes and minds of workers and youth in America and around the world, Trump and Biden represent two sides of the same counterrevolutionary coin.
That Ocasio-Cortez has no qualms about endorsing Biden confirms that she, just like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is another “left” face of imperialist genocide. And she exposes once again that the DSA is nothing more than a faction of the Democratic Party.