Today the New Yorker published an interview with AOC in which she does her best to really explain herself to people who see her pop up in the news, sometimes for behavior that seems a bit questionable. One of the things that comes up is her recent comments about Republicans wanting to date her.

More recently, a former Trump campaign adviser, Steve Cortes, went online to mock Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, for his sandalled feet, prompting her to fire back, “If Republicans are mad they can’t date me they can just say that instead of projecting their frustrations onto my boyfriend’s feet. Ya creepy weirdos.”

Mary Katherine Ham did a great job of mocking this at the time but if you know anything about AOC you probably know that in her mind everything is a teachable moment. And so, as part of this interview she claims “Ya creepy weirdos” was a teachable moment.

It is a bizarre psychological experience to live specifically now in 2022. We’re not even talking about a culture of celebrity. We’re talking about a culture of commodification of human beings, from the bottom all the way to the top. And there’s absolutely a bizarre psychological experience of this that also plays into these decisions. For example, like what happened in responding to these bizarre things, like about my boyfriend’s feet. I’ve felt for a long time that we need to talk about the bizarre psychological impulses underpinning the right wing.

It’s not “politically correct” to be able to talk about these things, but they are so clearly having an obvious impact on not just our public discourse but the concentration of power. We have to talk about patriarchy, racism, capitalism, but you’re not going to have those conversations by using those words. You have to have those conversations by really responding in uplifting moments. I don’t really care if other people understand it. Sometimes what seems to some folks a moment that’s gauche or something, I often do it with the intention of exposing cultural or psychological undercurrents that people don’t want to talk about. Which, by the way, is why I think sometimes people read these moments as gauche or low-class or whatever they may be. And sometimes how I feel is, if I’m just going to be this, like, commodified avatar thing, then I’m going to play with it, like a toy.

Since AOC has endorsed looking into the “bizarre psychological impulses” of the right-wing I guess it’s fair game to look at the psychological impulses of the left-wing as well and AOC in particular as one of the leading lights of the democratic socialist fringe of the party.

What I notice reading the entire interview is how absolutely closed off from reality she is. It really seems as if nothing penetrates the ideological bubble where she lives. So, for instance, she rejects the idea that the election of Eric Adams as mayor is a sign that people have turned on defund the police.

All too often, I believe that a lot of our decisions are reactive to public discourse instead of responsive to public discourse. And so, just because there was this large conversation about “defund the police” coming from the streets, the response was to immediately respond to it with fear, with pooh-poohing, with “this isn’t us,” with arm’s distance. So, then, what is the vision? That’s where I think the Party struggles…

People often bring up the Mayor as evidence of some sort of decision around policing. I disagree with that assessment. I represent a community that is very victimized by a rise in violence. (And I represent Rikers Island!) What oftentimes people overlook is that the same communities that supported Mayor Adams also elected Tiffany Cabán. What the public wants is a strong sense of direction. I don’t think that in electing Mayor Adams everyone in the city supports bringing back torture to Rikers Island in the form of solitary confinement. What people want is a strong vision about how we establish public safety in our communities.

One of the ways that we engage is by backing some of the only policies that are actually supported by evidence to reduce incidents of violent crime: violence-interruption programs, summer youth employment.

It’s not that people have decided turning on the police was a bad idea and rejected it by electing a former police officer who promised safe streets and maybe even bringing back “stop and frisk” it’s just that progressives haven’t offered a strong vision for defund. As for what works, one of the things that is strongly supported by evidence is having more cops on the street. But of course AOC doesn’t mention that and neither does her interviewer, David Remnick. That fact is outside the bubble and it will remain there.

AOC’s take on cancel culture isn’t any better:

You look at the capture of power in the right wing, the ascent of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth. You cannot really animate or concentrate a movement like that—you can’t coalesce it into functional political power—without a sense of persecution or victimhood. And that’s the role of this concept of cancel culture. It’s the speck of dust around which the raindrop must form in order to precipitate takeovers of school boards, pushing actual discourse out of the acceptable norms, like in terms of the 1619 Project or getting books banned from schools. They need the concept of cancel culture, of persecution, in order to justify, animate, and pursue a political program of takeover, or at least a constant further concentration of their own power.

You talk about cancel culture. But notice that those discussions only go one way. We don’t talk about all the people who were fired. You just kind of talk about, like, right-leaning podcast bros and more conservative figures. But, for example, Marc Lamont Hill was fired [from CNN] for discussing an issue with respect to Palestinians, pretty summarily. There was no discussion about it, no engagement, no thoughtful discourse over it, just pure accusation.

The first thing to notice here is how absurd and inverted her view of reality is. She says cancel culture is a “speck of dust” used to justify taking over school boards but she doesn’t mention the school board in San Francisco which could be recalled because of the sloppy cancel culture efforts they focused on, including renaming schools and covering up historic murals. She fails to mention that many of the opponents to these actions are not right-wing conservatives but left-leaning people including the Mayor of San Francisco. She fails to mention that opposition to the school board is being run by liberals, many of them the parents of Asian students who were offended by some of the anti-Asian comments coming from one woke board member in particular. AOC seems either unaware of this or unwilling to mention it and once again her interviewer doesn’t bring it up.

And having said all of that, she then turns to opposition to the 1619 Project. But is the 1619 Project a speck of dust or is it the most celebrated piece of progressive journalist of the last several years? It can’t be both. If you want to see people freaking out over a speck of dust, just look at the response to one school district in Tennessee removing “Maus” from the curriculum. I certainly think it’s arguable that wasn’t a very good decision on their part but the reaction to it, the fact that it instantly became a bestseller as if the book was in danger of disappearing, suggests the left is not above taking a speck of dust to justify their own collective backlash.

Finally, you may notice that after mocking the seriousness of cancel culture, AOC immediately switches gears and points to the firing of Marc Lamont Hill as an example of it. So is it real or is it “a speck of dust?” It’s both apparently, depending on whose ox is being gored.

As for her claim that the discussions only go one way, that’s completely false. I’ve personally written probably 50 blog posts about the campus takeover at Evergreen State university. The target of those actions was a pretty far left progressive professor named Bret Weinstein. I’ve also written about the cancelation of left-wing data analyst David Shor. Is Peter Boghossian a conservative? Is JK Rowling a conservative? Is Dave Chappelle a conservative? Even the claim that Joe Rogan is a conservative is a real stretch.

The fact is that many of the cancel culture stories we’ve covered have been about people who are on the left, they just oppose the anti-free speech approach of the woke left. But once again, AOC doesn’t seem aware of any of that. The reality of who is getting canceled hasn’t penetrated her bubble and the New Yorker just isn’t going to push back on anything she’s saying. I think this used to be called epistemic closure.