Power, Firebombs, and the Progressive Rebrand: AOC’s Ascent and the Left’s Anti-Semitism Problem

She's clever, charismatic, and, like all aspiring authoritarians, she's willing to tolerate the intolerable to gain power

By now, you’ve probably read a dozen pieces on the surge in anti-Semitic violence in America. Why read mine? Because while everyone else is busy blinking in astonishment, I’d like to draw your attention to the most important part everyone is missing: the political payoff.

The pursuit of power is a time-honored condition of the human heart—often dressed up as principle, but unmistakable when ambition starts elbowing out moral clarity. In today’s political drama, that ambition has found a particularly compelling protagonist in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

With Bernie Sanders heading into political retirement, somewhere between a Vermont commune and a podcast on Scandinavian social policy, AOC is taking the reins. She’s got the charisma, the social media acumen, and the ideological fervor. But she also brings something else: a deft fusion of Saul Alinsky’s tactics with Barack Obama’s strategic acumen.

In other words it’s ok to tolerate the intolerant so long as it leads to public confusion between what’s grievance and what’s reality. As always, there’s opportunity in chaos and AOC has figured out how to manage it.

Over the past two years, America has endured a steady uptick in anti-Semitic violence, particularly from the left. Not that you’d notice if you only read the mainstream press, where attacks on Jews emerge only from the right.

As example, Axios recently reported a 40% year-over-year increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes. They blamed an environment created by white nationalists, anti-LGBTQ groups, and anti-government militias. Their source? The far left, entirely discredited, Southern Poverty Law Center.

Somehow they missed the molotov-lobbing, hostage-march-attacking, anti-Zionist elephant in the room. Apparently, if you scream “Allahu Akbar” while killing Israeli embassy personnel, you’re just “expressing discontent with Israeli foreign policy.”

In fact, much of the media is now blaming Donald Trump and immigration policy for an illegal Egyptian immigrant’s firebombing Jews in Boulder Colorado while shouting slogans pulled from a Hamas flyer. Eight were injured, including a Holocaust survivor.

Kash Patel at the FBI quickly called it what it was—terrorism. But while AOC, and fellow Squad members condemned “political violence,” they made no mention of anti-Semitism, the victims being Jewish, or the pro-Hamas sympathies of the attacker. Just a generic disapproval, drafted as if by a risk-averse HR department.

It’s the kind of condemnation you issue when you're trying to keep your polling numbers with both anarchists and NPR listeners.

AOC is quickly perfecting the delicate art of appearing moderate while winking at the mob. It’s all so sadly cynical. And yet, I expect there is a better than even chance it will work.

Despite public condemnations, political violence has an odd way of validating the causes behind it. The American public, ever charitable, assumes no one would hurl a firebomb at an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor unless they had a legitimate grievance.

We’ve seen it before. During the Vietnam era, radicals burned police stations and universities. The result? Sympathy for the radicals. Jane Fonda vacationed in Hanoi, and somehow the U.S. became the villain. Today, Vietnam is a tourist destination, and Ho Chi Minh is remembered more fondly than LBJ.

More recently, George Floyd’s tragic death sparked riots, looting, and the fiery redefinition of “mostly peaceful.” Despite evidence from the autopsy suggesting his death was due to a mix of fentanyl and pre-existing conditions, the public narrative settled firmly on police murder. Cops went to jail, and Democrat officials began “re-imagining” criminal justice in our cities.

When emotions run hot and cities burn, people tend to see righteous grievance in the smoke signals.

AOC is uniquely positioned to play Jew-hate for all its worth. She’s a digital-era populist with a talent for walking the line between moral outrage and political calculation. Her condemnations of violence are always carefully curated—just enough to stay respectable, not enough to question the perpetrator’s slanders, and never enough to alienate her activist base who see Israel’s existence as the ultimate provocation.

AOC is positioning herself well to benefit from this grim equation. Whether it’s the arson at Governor Josh Shapiro’s home or the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside the Jewish museum in Washington DC, AOC’s response is always calculated to portray her as just moderate enough. At the same time, her refusal to name left-wing radicalism as the core problem positions her well with Democrats donning keffiyehs to symbolize solidarity against Israel’s colonial apartheid. It doesn’t matter the charge is libel, Americans are increasingly coming to believe it must be real or else why all the excitement.

Meanwhile, American Jews continue to support Democrats at the rate of 70% even as their loyalty is rewarded with indifference. If the Democrat problem with Jews doesn’t soon become a Jewish problem with Democrats, they will pay a steep price indeed.

AOC’s rise matters not only because she’s a socialist who will take America to dark places economically, but because she’s so convinced she knows what’s best for the rest of us she’s willing to tolerate the intolerable as a means to gain power over us.

Political violence should not be a career ladder. But in our era of moral outsourcing and identity-driven politics, that’s where it’s headed. And unless more Americans - Jewish and otherwise - begin to question the stories we’re being sold and the people doing the selling, we may all find ourselves complicit in the normalization of something we once vowed never again to allow.