I Was Wrong About AOC

A twenty-eight-year-old bartender beat a ten-term incumbent in a New York primary back in 2018, and I pretty much knew what I thought about it before I knew anything at all about her.

By the summer of 2018 I had already started to feel the floor moving a little bit under my theological foundation. Certain doctrines had stopped making sense the way they’d always seemed to before. I had questions I would not have permitted myself to ask just a few years earlier. But I was still a registered Republican, still an elder in a reformed church, and still seeing the world through a lens I had not stopped to examine more deeply because it didn’t feel like a lens at all; it felt like the plain and obvious truth.

And when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up on the national scene, that hidden lens of mine worked exactly as designed. She openly called herself a democratic socialist and that was enough. I did not need to hear a particular policy proposal or read a position paper, because that word had already done the thinking on my behalf.

Here is what I heard when she said socialist: bread lines, Politburo, the Berlin Wall, a boot on the neck of the free enterprise that God had apparently directly ordained somewhere in the fine print of the book of Genesis. Cold War socialism, state ownership of the means of production. You know, the gulag on an installment plan.

But here is what she was actually proposing. Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, and the Green New Deal. Pretty much like Denmark with inferior dental coverage. You can go ahead and think every one of those is bad policy, and plenty of thoughtful people can and do, but none of them involve seizing a factory. The argument against Medicare for all is about cost, provider capacity, and the transition mechanics of moving a fifth of the American economy around. This is a legitimate argument. I never made it myself, because I never allowed my reasoning to go that far. Most don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, there was definitely a defensible version of my objection. She intentionally kept the word, for example. Why would you do that? She has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization with a genuine internal conflict about whether the goal is a more humane version of capitalism or something well past it.{1} When a word carries that much history and negative connotation and you still choose to keep affirming it, people are naturally going to react viscerally to it. That’s not paranoia; it’s just the way language and meaning works.

But I never really made that argument either. I never once asked what she actually meant by it. The word was uttered, the alarms went off, and I chalked it up to proper discernment and a defense of freedom and liberty on my part.

Words equivocate. Meanings evolve and split and take on regional accents. Anybody who has spent any time at all with a biblical text in its original language knows this well, or they ought to, and I had spent a good amount of time with biblical texts. I knew perfectly well that a term can mean one thing in the fifth century and something else entirely by the sixteenth. I applied that care to this Greek preposition or that one and refused to extend it to a political label. The intellectual rigor was available to me, and I chose not to engage it. Why? It didn’t fit my narrative.

That socialism read was wrong, but it was at least an argument with some substance. The second thing was worse.

Christian media and conservative talk radio decided that AOC was just plain stupid. Not mistaken, not naive. Stupid. A dim former bartender who wandered into Congress by accident somehow and could not independently think her way through a coloring book. That was the tenor of the repeated framing, touted so consistently that it stopped coming across like a claim at all and started to sound like normal background noise. I absorbed it, repeated it, and laughed at the jokes.

That said, let’s go to the tale of the tape here, Johnny.

This May she sat in an Energy and Commerce oversight hearing and asked the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, Jessica Kramer, whether the agency was tracking complaints that data center construction was contaminating residential drinking water. Kramer said she was aware of concerns about availability but had heard nothing about quality. So Ocasio-Cortez reached down and sat two mason jars of brown water on the table, which she had collected herself in Morgan County, Georgia, where Meta is building a data center and where she had gone in person to talk to the families whose wells had turned.{2}

“The only difference between clear water and this was that data center,” she said. “This wasn’t just one well. This wasn’t just one family’s situation. This is what the drinking water now looks like next to that data center.”{3}

Morgan County went for Trump by more than fifty points.{4}

She had the numbers with her too. Families shipping in water to cook and bathe, bills projected to rise by a third, ten percent of the community’s daily water going to the data center, the whole county on pace for a total deficit by 2030. Kramer said she would look into it as soon as she got back to the office. Ocasio-Cortez called for a congressional investigation, and a week later a bipartisan amendment directing the Energy Department to work with EPA on data center impacts to water and grid reliability was attached to a $58 billion appropriations bill by a Republican from Tennessee.{5}{6}

She came back to it in a full committee a few weeks ago. “We have one of the most precious and sacred water supplies in the United States. Once you compromise that, it’s done. Ask people in Flint, ask people across the country. When their critical water supplies are compromised it takes years, if not decades, to clean up again.”{7}

So that’s a Democratic Socialist congresswoman from the Bronx driving to rural Georgia to defend the well water of people who probably wouldn’t vote for her at gunpoint, and doing it well enough that Republicans signed onto the follow-up. Call it grandstanding if you want; call it simply politics. But stupid isn’t a viable adjective.

This is old form for her, incidentally. In February of 2019, six weeks into her first term, she got roughly four minutes with Michael Cohen in front of the House Oversight Committee. Nearly every other member on that dais, from both parties, burned their five minutes on speeches. She skipped the speech and asked where the documents were, who else had seen them, and what the committee would need to subpoena in order to compare Trump’s financial statements against his tax returns. Cohen named three people under oath. Ro Khanna singled her out afterward as the most effective questioner in the room, and a former Oversight Committee counsel writing for NBC made the same call.{8} That praise came from people who do this for a living and had no reason whatsoever to compliment a freshman.

Then there is the part of all this that was public the entire time, just a quick search away from anyone who cared to look. In 2007, as a high school student in Yorktown Heights, she placed second in microbiology at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, competing against roughly 1,500 students from more than fifty countries. Her project tested the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of C. elegans, work she did out of Mount Sinai. MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory named an asteroid after her for it. Asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez is a rock about a mile and a half wide, currently going about its business in the asteroid belt, named for a teenager’s research on free radicals.{9} Hmmm. Yep, dumb as a rock.

She went on to Boston University on a fellowship, interned in Ted Kennedy’s immigration office, and graduated cum laude in 2011 with a double major in economics and international relations.{10} Then she went home to the Bronx and tended bar, because it was 2011, she was carrying tens of thousands in student loans, and her family needed the money. I know, just shameful.

That last part is the best. Or worst. The bartending was supposed to be the punchline. In the world I was living in, a service job told you where somebody’s ceiling was, never what their circumstances were, and I had spent almost two decades in the beer industry standing behind bars and sitting at them. I knew better than almost anyone that the person pouring your pint might have a graduate degree, a failed business, speak three languages, or all of the above. I knew this firsthand and I still let the joke land when it came to AOC. It served my purpose.

She has her own answer on that question, by the way. Asked how she got so much out of Cohen, she credited the bar experience. Talking to thousands of people over the years, she said, forces you to get great at reading people and hones a razor-sharp BS detector.{11} Turns out the punchline was really the qualification.

Now put this exact frame up against the audience. The people telling me she had no brain went on to spend the following years vehemently defending a man who stood at a podium during a pandemic and queried as to whether disinfectant could possibly be injected into the human body, because he had heard it kills the virus in a minute on a countertop.{12} They defended a Secretary of Defense who put the flight schedules of F/A-18s into a Signal group chat two hours before the strike, then put much of the same material into a second Signal chat that included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.{13} You see, the intelligence test was never an intelligence test, it seems. It was really a loyalty test all along.

When I wrote about being wrong on Obama, a portion of readers on the left told me the real explanation was my obvious racism I was too dishonest to admit. The charge is unfalsifiable by construction, which is what makes it completely useless. Deny it and you have proven it. I said then and will say now that my hostility ran through ideology, through policy, through a worldview that told me his politics were a threat to something I held deep and sacred.

I fully expect the analogous charge to resurface here, and I want to anticipate it with more than just a flat denial.

The straightforward version is true enough. I would have reacted the same way to a white male democratic socialist from Vermont, and in fact I did precisely that, for years, regarding Bernie Sanders. The trigger for me was always the position; the ideology.

But I am not going to pretend the contempt I heard for AOC arrived in any kind of a neutral container either. The specific vocabulary that was often directed toward her, such as the fixation on the sound of her voice, her clothes, her teeth, that infamous dancing video, that vocabulary does not attach to a sixty-year-old man from Burlington. It was already sitting there, assembled and ready, and I picked it up and used it without much inspection. I did not build that register; I adopted it. Adopting an ideology and actually deploying it are different acts, but both carry culpability.

That is as honest as I can get about it looking back. Anyone who claims total access to the machinery of their own reflexes is telling you a tale. I believed what I believed and I believed I was correct about it. That is, until I didn’t.

None of this changed because of one speech or one revelation. There was no road to Damascus moment on this for me. I started actually listening to her, in full and in her own words, without a talking head translating for me first, and the person I encountered bore no resemblance whatsoever to the figure I had been caricaturing for so long. She is quick, she is unusually good at the mechanics of a legislative hearing, and she is also wrong about plenty, just the same as every other politician who has ever held the job. I can claim all of that at once now without needing her to be a complete fool.

It turns out, I’ve been, am being, and will be wrong about some things too.

The pattern here was identical to Obama in this respect. As my theology deepened and expanded, my politics followed suit, mostly because both had been resting on the same tenuous foundation without my noticing. When you have been taught that a particular political persuasion is what Christian obedience looks and sounds like, dismantling the theology eventually costs you the political proclivities too. It takes a while. The doctrine tends to go first. The reflexes hang around long after the beliefs that justified them have quietly moved out, though. In fact, some don’t go without a long and difficult fight.

And that machine is still running. Watch what is happening to Zohran Mamdani in New York right now and you will see the same assembly line, same components, same finished product being propagated. Socialist as a synonym for Soviet. Unserious, unqualified, dangerous to something the accuser rarely bothers to specify. I recognize the process easily because I used to be one of the people it held in its sway.

For those who despise AOC, I do not care if like her politics. I care that you notice how little work it took to make you certain about what you think of her. That’s the part that should keep you up at night and make you do some soul searching. Are you fighting for your faith? For your country or party? Or are you fighting to bolster and support a system and a tribal expectation that you can’t see beyond? It very well could be the latter without you even realizing it; at least in any fully developed form.

That last question is, largely, rhetorical because I did it too. But now I’m not. I’m not making a claim to be better than anyone else, or somehow more enlightened, but I am recognizing that certainty is a hell of a drug and once it finally wears off a more objective, honest reality can begin to seep in. I regret my attitude toward President Obama and I regret my attitude toward AOC too. I’m ashamed of my former caricature of both of these public servants and hope that God continues to remove that veil and that I, and others, will learn to participate more and more in the divine nature and not our own agendas.

1. Ocasio-Cortez has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America since before her 2018 campaign. The organization’s internal debates over reform versus rupture are ongoing and public, and are not resolved by the label itself.

2. Michael Doyle, “Water woes unleash congressional calls for data center scrutiny,” Agri-Pulse, May 27, 2026. The exchange occurred May 20, 2026, before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

3. Quoted in “Ocasio-Cortez Corners EPA Administrator on Water Quality Near Data Centers,” Common Dreams, May 21, 2026.

4. Morgan County, Georgia, 2024 presidential results. Trump carried the county by a wide margin; the local paper reported that roughly three-quarters of Morgan voters chose him. Morgan County Citizen, November 6, 2024.

5. “Ocasio-Cortez Presses EPA Assistant Administrator Kramer on Jeopardizing Clean Water Access by Caving to Major Data Center Construction,” Office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, May 20, 2026. Full remarks as delivered are posted there. Her Morgan County visit was documented by More Perfect Union, May 18, 2026.

6. The amendment came from Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), chairman of the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, and was added to a $58 billion fiscal 2027 energy and water appropriations bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee. See Agri-Pulse, May 27, 2026.

7. “Ocasio-Cortez: ‘If Anyone Wants to Live Right Next to One of These Data Centers Here on this Committee, Please Raise Your Hand,’” Office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, July 2026, remarks delivered during an Energy and Commerce full committee markup.

8. Jeremy Herb and Manu Raju, “Preparation paid off for new House Democrats at Cohen hearing,” CNN, February 28, 2019, quoting Rep. Ro Khanna. See also the NBC News THINK assessment by a former House Oversight Committee counsel, February 28, 2019, and PolitiFact’s full transcript, “In context: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questions Michael Cohen during the House Oversight Committee,” February 28, 2019.

9. “Did U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Graduate Cum Laude from Boston University?” Snopes, April 3, 2019; Society for Science, “Intel ISEF alumna headed to Capitol Hill,” November 2018; NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory small-body database entry for 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.

10. Boston University Department of Economics, 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award citation. BU’s listing describes the degree as a BA in International Relations and Economics; her office described it as a double major. Both point to the same registrar record.

11. Ocasio-Cortez, quoted in Julia Conley, “’A Pretty Amazing Line of Questions,’” Common Dreams, February 28, 2019.

12. Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, April 23, 2020, Trump White House Archives. The transcript reads in part: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning.” Trump said the following day he had been asking sarcastically. FactCheck.org reviewed the full passage and found no clear indication in the remarks themselves that he was joking. See “The White House Spins Trump’s Disinfectant Remarks,” FactCheck.org, April 24, 2020.

13. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” The Atlantic, March 24, 2025. On the second chat, the New York Times reported April 20, 2025, confirmed independently by CNN, ABC News, and the Associated Press. The second chat included thirteen people, among them Hegseth’s wife Jennifer, his brother Phil, and his personal attorney Tim Parlatore, and contained F/A-18 flight schedules. Hegseth told reporters in Honolulu that “nobody was texting war plans.”