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DEAR LEFTIST: STOP ATTACKING AOC  
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Tom Gallagher
August 9, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ We should not do the billionaires’ work of dividing us. They have
enough money to do it for themselves. _

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (left) and Bernie Sanders (right) on the
tour at Mullett Arena in Tempe, Arizona,

 

Recently a Facebook friend of mine—whom I’ve actually known since
before Mark Zuckerberg started at Harvard, and whose political
activism I hold in high regard—surprised me by posting an article
entitled “AOC is a genocidal con artist.” I can’t tell you what
the article said because I’d be as likely to read an article
proclaiming that “AOC is a lying communist child-murderer” as I
would that one.

And really, the particulars of the article concern me less than the
spectacularly myopic political stance on display. Political
—allowing smaller or infrequent differences to outweigh broader
agreement on larger issues—is always going to be a hazard for a
group of intensely committed people whose concern with an issue
extends down to the smallest detail. It is, however, a tendency we
really can’t afford to fall into if we aspire to actually achieve
goals like winding down the nation’s war machine or supplanting our
corporate-dominated economy with a democratically controlled one.

The concern here is both general and specific. General, in that this
type of short-sightedness diminishes the effectiveness of all of us
who share the above-mentioned goals. Specifically, in that I consider
attacks upon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]] (D-N.Y.)
particularly wrong-headed and damaging. And while few approach the
level of absurdity of the above-mentioned article, claims that she’s
only a “so-called progressive” can too often be found coming from
people who really might benefit from taking a moment to consider
things from a broader perspective.

When Rep. Rashida Tlaib
[[link removed]] (D-Mich.) authored a
letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring that the
Israeli government food “blockade is starving Palestinian civilians
in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will
not help,” and going on to “demand an immediate end to the
blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry
into Gaza [[link removed]], the restoration of
U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting ceasefire,” she
was joined by only 18 other members of Congress—Independent
Senator Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]] of Vermont and 17
Democratic members of the House. This did two things: it told us just
how insensitive to the devastation of Gaza the U.S. Congress actually
is and it provided a marker of just who constituted its anti-Gaza war
hardcore. Ocasio-Cortez was one of those 19.

On the domestic front, the April 16, 2025 _New York Times _headline
said it all: “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Electrify Democrats Who Want
to Fight Trump.” It referred to their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour
which has taken the pair before crowds of 36,000 people in Los
Angeles; 34,000 in Denver; 30,000 in Folsom, California, where the
line to get in was three miles long and thousands more watched through
the fence and from the surrounding hills; 20,000 in Salt Lake City;
20,000 in Tucson, Arizona; 15,000 in Tempe, Arizona, with another
thousand outside; 12,500 in Nampa, Idaho; 10,000 in Greeley, Colorado,
with an overflow crowd said to be of equal number; 7,500 in Missoula,
Montana, with another 1,000 listening outside; 4,000 in Bakersfield,
California; and 1,000 in North Las Vegas. Additionally, AOC held a
rally with New York Representative Paul Tonko in the district of Elise
Stefanik, Trump’s one-time nominee for ambassador to the United
Nations.

In short, the claim that Ocasio-Cortez is something less than a
“real progressive” is preposterous. If someone were to take such
an assertion to court they would have to hope for a Trump-appointed
judge to have any hope of winning their case. The only political
figure to have done more to rally opposition to the Trump regime than
Ocasio-Cortez is Sanders himself. So whence this recent flurry of
muttering that she’s not the real deal?

Much of the current discontent concerns a failed amendment to
H.R.4016, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2026. The
amendment in question would have eliminated funding for Israel’s
so-called “Iron Dome,” a missile system designed to intercept
incoming missiles. It was offered by one of the most Trumpist members
of the House, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and received only
six votes—that of Greene, one other Republican, and four of the 18
hard-core opponents of Israel’s Gaza devastation. Ocasio-Cortez was
not one of the four.

Members of legislative bodies may opt to deal with various amendments
to bills in a variety of ways. For one thing, they are obviously taken
more seriously if one intends to vote for, rather than against the
final bill, as well as if or when the amendment is deemed to have a
chance of passing. In a situation such as the one involving this
Greene amendment, other considerations may come into play. In this
case, for instance, one might imagine some deciding to vote against an
amendment with no chance of passage out of disdain for the overall
political stance of its author. (The vote in question occurred before
the shocker of Greene becoming the first Republican in Congress to
call the Israel [[link removed]] assault on
Gaza genocide.)

I am in no position to speculate as to the reasons that the majority
of the Tlaib-letter signatories voted against it, but Ocasio-Cortez
actually articulated hers: “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment
does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of
U.S. munitions being used in Gaza. Of course, I voted against it. What
it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing
the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated
that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent
victims to this war is constructive to its end. That is a simple and
clear difference of opinion that has long been established. I remain
focused on cutting the flow of U.S. munitions that are being used to
perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.”

The counter-argument to this is that to the extent that the Iron Dome
is effective—in itself a disputed matter—it allows Israel to act
with impunity, inflicting damage on others without fear of
retribution. I share this take on the issue, in fact. At the current
moment I’d vote against sending aid of any kind to Israel. However,
I do not consider the Ocasio-Cortez viewpoint to be beyond the pale,
and I also view her vote in the context of the ongoing necessity of
clarity on the point that we opponents of Israel’s military
operations oppose both Israeli and Hamas attacks upon civilians.
Hopefully, all of us who hope to convince an ever greater sector of
our population to oppose the Israeli onslaught recognize that
necessity. And the possibility of erring in that direction should by
no means be seen as treason to the cause on the part of one of the
staunchest congressional opponents of Israel’s effort to destroy
Gaza.

To take the question from a different angle, let’s consider the
Israelis who are currently publicly demonstrating against this
extermination campaign. Surely we’d have to count them among the
most courageous and impactful protestors against their government’s
actions to be found anywhere in the world. While I personally don’t
know any of them, I strongly suspect that there are some among their
number who support the Iron Dome system because they believe that it
does offer some protection to them and their neighbors in the case of
attack—a real possibility in their lives. If that were to be the
case, would we deem their opposition to the war as insufficient, or
less than genuine? Arguing and debating every fine point regarding the
current horrific situation is in many ways an admirable thing; it’s
a facet of commitment. But when it creates needless divisions or even
turns friends into foes, it ceases to be admirable. And certainly, on
this question, Ocasio-Cortez’s stance does not justify articles with
absurd titles like the one cited above.

Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie
Sanders too is lately under attack by some adherents to what we might
characterize as a crossword-puzzle approach to politics—that is to
say, if you don’t use the right word, it doesn’t count. The word
in question here is “genocide.” Many, perhaps most opponents of
Israel’s actions believe they meet the definition of genocide
created by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But there are also equally
staunch opponents who—because they think Israel’s devastation of
Gaza, although abominable, doesn’t fit that definition; or because
they adhere to a different definition of the word; or for some other
reason – choose not to use the word. Sanders is one of those, which
has resulted in some people going to far as to argue that the fact
that the word “genocide” does not appear in his statements
actually outweighs, for instance, the importance of his authoring the
Senate resolution that for the first time drew a majority of that
body’s Democrats into public opposition to what Sanders
characterized as “an all-out, illegal, immoral and horrific war of
annihilation against the Palestinian people.” I even recently ran
across someone who called him “a coward” on those grounds. Bernie
Sanders—a coward! (He has, by the way, recently extended his
Fighting Oligarchy tour to West Virginia and North Carolina and is
headed there this weekend.)

Nor is this sort of thing new. Before she even took office, comedian
and YouTube program host Jimmy Dore was denouncing Ocasio-Cortez as a
“liar ... coward ... gaslighter” for refusing to make her first
vote for Speaker of the House contingent on Nancy Pelosi’s agreement
to schedule a full House vote on Medicare for All legislation.
Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of progressive members of the House
ultimately decided against the tactic. Perhaps Dore’s Force-the-Vote
advocacy was right, perhaps it was wrong, but one thing the subsequent
five and a half years have clearly demonstrated is that he was wrong
in his name-calling.

In a sense, these outbursts of political myopia—“I don’t care
about what you’ve done or think about anything else, if you disagree
with me on this, you’re a (pick one)
coward/genocide-supporter/gaslighter/so-called
progressive/con-artist/liar—are actually a-political. The decision
to be political involves commitment to overcoming the well-known fact
that no two people will agree on everything, in the interest of
finding areas of agreement to act upon. The Internet does wonders in
allowing people to share their ideas—including their
differences—but it can unfortunately also make it too easy to forget
that commitment.

I stated above that I considered misguided attacks on Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to be particularly damaging. The reason is 2028 and the
next presidential election. Bernie Sanders’s decision to enter the
2016 presidential race was a game changer—his ultimate failure to
win the nomination notwithstanding—as it belatedly brought American
politics into the 21st Century by introducing working class-oriented
democratic socialist ideas into millions of living rooms during the
Democratic primary debates. Likewise in 2020. But not so in 2024, when
the only candidates in the limelight, Donald Trump
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then Kamala Harris [[link removed]],
vied to be Bibi Netanyahu’s best friend, and all opposed Medicare
for All.

Assuming that Bernie Sanders will not make another run, we find
ourselves very much in need of a candidate who will carry the banner
he ran on—one who will reject a minimalist “At least we’re
better than Trump” message instead calling for turning away from the
disastrous endless-war foreign policy that has reigned supreme for
decades and against economic policies that favor the interest of the
few who are fabulously wealthy over the interests of the many who are
not. It is certainly not too soon to consider this question, as we
know all too well how prepared the other side is.

To my eye, at this point the obvious choice would seem to be
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, should she be interested. Perhaps the reader
sees it differently or has another candidate in mind. Nevertheless, we
should all be able to agree that it’s imperative not to lose sight
of the broader goals because we have obsessed over differences on
lesser matters. We should not do the billionaires’ work of dividing
us. They have enough money to do it for themselves.

* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* Bernie Sanders
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* sectarianism
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* BDS Movement
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