Too soon mural in the East Village, Manhattan taken in 2019.

Washington D.C., U.S.A.

This has been quite the new beginning for re-elected wunderkind Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. After easily winning the primary and the general election last November along with Trump falling to a guy who didn’t make any effort to win, AOC became the most culturally powerful figure in Congress with a massive social media following bigger than most celebrity figures in movies and pop music. With this much status and power in presumably good hands, it seem the iconic Latinx from the Bronx had solid momentum to get progressive policies and programs for the working people and working families ratified into laws.

Then all of sudden, a jagoff comedian dared her to back her words and foment change…

Days after her victory, California Man Jimmy Dore released a video from his youtube channel/podcast encouraging her to make a concerted effort to get universal health care on the floor in Congress. Well renowned on social and corporate news media as Medicare For All, Mr. Dore’s video manifesto laid out how it could become a reality if she would use her leverage as the most popular lawmaker to get M4All on the floor. Dore also pointed out how getting it on the floor can be easily realized with more votes from her progressive congressional allies in the “Sqaud”; Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Talib and the immensely popular Ihlan Omar who all recently came off huge victories themselves in their districts. Along with victories by fellow progressives Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman (also from the boogie down Bronx), Dore pointed out that these progressive minds could align and force the vote for medicare for all, and with AOC as social media’s alpha dog, she and they could use that new leverage against Rep. Nancy Pelosi who was looking to get re-elected as house speaker and withhold their votes for her unless Medicare for All gets heard.

Dore’s advice made absolute sense. Forcing the vote was certainly not complex to execute; besides the gains progressives made in the election, the House lost a bunch of seats and Nancy Pelosi’s hold onto the gavel was tenuous to say the least plus her popularity poll levels shown her to be more despised by voters than they were for Donald Trump. Another major factor for forcing the vote for Med4All and against Pelosi is that support for universal free health care has 3/4 support from the citizenry of all political parties. Plus the misnomered Affordable Care Act prices are obscene for working class people who have to pay half their paycheck on rent. Look at these monthly rates for the bronze level which is the lowest tier on the program.

All the facts were on AOC’s side and the odds and momentum were all in her favor. But while Rep. Ocasio-Cortez continued her prolific tweeting and instagramming spree on myriad other issues as #ForceTheVote was furiously trending on those platforms, she never acknowledged the hashtag or the jagoff comedian with a response. She remained insouciant even as a portion of her 11 million followers from the left tweeted her to step up and challenge the Speaker and her peers in Congress and see if they have the collective balls and nerve to deny health care to hundreds of millions of people during a resurgent pandemic. After all, it’s what she campaigned on in her inspiring run for office in 2018 against the corporatist Joe Crowley. But it wasn’t until pro football player Justin Jackson of the L.A. Chargers called her out for her stunning lack of tenacity on the issue.

Apparently, this message somehow triggered Rep. Ocasio-Cortez. which was shocking after weeks of unlimited profanities and laced urgent messaging directed to her from Jagoff Dore, but quite obvious because Jackson got positive hits and RT’s and got showed up a jock and getting ratio’d on social media is clearly to only way to get her attention. Her justification for remaining tentative about forcing the vote was that the votes weren’t there to force it among her congressional peers and then followed up with a feeble example of what she was certain could be passed, like a $15/hr minimum wage (and she wasn’t even sure about that). For someone that has gone all out to distinguish herself as such an influential and righteous figure on social media, her gateway-splaining to Mr. Jackson was uncharacteristically off-putting and dripped with condescension, which led to blowback attacks from her disappointed and disillusioned followers who were stunned by her betrayal of her promises and her remarkable ignorance of historic progressive change.

AOC, clearly affected by J.J.’s tweet and also by her hard left followers and political twitter personalities, followed this up by resorting to throw shade at Jimmy Dore because of his salty language.

For a woman that didn’t mind to swear to make a point before when she called out a Republican congressman who called her a fucking bitch and used those words on the house floor and in a cream puff interview and fashion shoot in Vanity Fair magazine and most recently while talking shit about a hypothetical run to primary Senator Chuck Schumer, AOC becomes quite an arbiter of speech when those same dirty words are used for an agenda to institute national health care for everyone that has bipartisan agreement from everyone that counts. Really off character from a Bronx resident who at times throws down her provincial street cred and can’t even handle a fucking curse word. That she suddenly equates these words with actual violence is inherently absurd and she kind of comes off like a pussy.

As the days went on, Jimmy kept railing her but AOC kept defensively tweeting her legislating tactics about and against forcing the vote while more progressive pundits, comedians, regular folks got more hip to her blatant gaslighting. But AOC still persisted and strangely still wanted to make the force the vote for Med4All issue all about language and tone on social media. When it clearly got too for the social media icon to temper reasonable retorts to her obsession with words instead of fomenting change to nationalize free health care, she threw one her tweets into the memory hole.

This sudden erasure by the congresswoman is a far cry from what she tweeted a few weeks earlier (and which she didn’t delete). AOC not only lost her political courage but also some of her thin skin. This sure is a far cry from the earnest working girl from the Bronx that was presented in a well produced, brilliant and (seemingly) sincere campaign video she put out. on her way to her stunning victory and immediate national and worldwide fame.

But her insouciance towards her social media followers concerning Medicare For All is worse is that she wasted no time getting the COVID vaccine and did an instagram video chronicling the procedure for it, considering that her elderly and essential worker constituents are having trouble getting inoculated because of the botched rollout by her state of New York and that her other constituents and millions of other people don’t have health insurance because they are unemployed during a resurgent pandemic. Clearly a vote for Nancy Pelosi is also a vote to bankrupt the infected.

But when the opportunity came for the political courage to force the vote on Medicare For All and take the gavel from Speaker Pelosi’s lizard hands, AOC still persisted and she meekly voted to re-elect her, following the lead of her fellow and new Squad members

Even though this resulted in universal condemnation from a wide swath of her base that believed in her, AOC benefited for her fealty to Pelosi and was rewarded with an oversight committee role (along with a few other squad members). Noting how this was a way to push Biden to implement progressive policies, it would seem that AOC now had the ability to influence the House to get the votes on the floor for Medicare For All.

But then January 6th happened. (Which was the day after she got her committee role),the new day of infamy when Ex-President Donald Trump whooped up hundreds of thousands of his MAGA horde to bum rush an under-guarded and under-surveilled U.S. Capitol and after a woman veteran got shot to death and a cop got killed and then roamed the halls and chambers calling out for elected officials as they hid for their lives.

After this, AOC and her fellow committee members and Pelosi  got busy and wrote up new articles of impeachment practically overnight against Trump even though he had 2 weeks left in the oval office. Following the majority vote for impeachment, AOC suddenly recovered her political courage. After posting a rather self-indulgent video that was presented as a town hall  on her Instagram account where she described how she and her fellow legislators were close to being killed, she has been at the forefront for calling for government committees to explore  moderating social media platforms and deprogramming bigots and proclaiming that the government should spare no expense in getting these inherently unconstitutional policies into bills then laws post-haste

Queens Chronicle

“This is not a problem that’s going to go away Jan. 20,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding, “What Trump has created doesn’t dissolve overnight.”

She noted that Trump cut funding in 2017 to a Department of Homeland Security program known as “Countering Violent Extremists,” which provides grants to communities to counter radicalism through outreach.

“We have to get that funding right back up and we probably need to double, triple, quadruple or increase funding for these deradicalization programs en masse,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

While she’s right about Trump’s omniscience and his role in the political zeitgeist is not going away soon, all the things she’s advocating for have already manifested with Big Tech Social Media’s banishment of Trump and his followers and web services collusion clampdown to ban a competitive social media platform Parler. As for the need for stronger surveillance for domestic threats, the Patriot Act is already there to pursue them, but it’s looking clear that what AOC and her elected peers are proposing is Patriot Act 2.0 to make organizing and discourse even more surveilled with the assistance of the Big Tech monopolies.

It’s amazing how fast progress can be made when your own house gets invaded, in this case the House Of Representatives and their Senate Chamber co-op neighbors. Also amazing and disturbing that AOC has devolved from a Democrat Socialist to the new Sen. Joe McCarthy, but the signs clearly were there when she was deflecting from progressive people’s tweets and cowardly putting the onus on Jimmy Dore’s videos criticizing her, trying to get her growing brunch liberal/Dem establishment base to back her up in attempts to undermine him and everyone else that was ratioing her. It’s apparent that there is something motivating her to be such an arbiter and growing authority and expert on violent words and proactive legislating when she’s on Jack’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s Instagram while she’s calling them out to arbitrarily shut down people on their platforms.

But during all this, she clearly has forgotten all about Medicare For All and is more about forcing the vote for a surveillance state dictated by Big Tech monopolies; during a fucking pandemic with new strains of COVID spreading. AOC not only lost her political courage but also her thin skin. Along with this betrayal, she is now sacrificing what’s left of our constitutional liberties. AOC‘s rejection of most of her base at the dawn of a new term in Congress is worrisome to say the least. Sadly, she’s clearly more concerned with her career and her social media celebrity status than for the welfare of her constituents and the rest of millions that are unemployed in this nation. She ran on democratic socialism and has meekly embraced establishment pragmatism. At this rate and at this moment, those Dem votes she claims that aren’t there for Medicare for All won’t come in 2 years or even 100 years.