My New Year’s resolution for 2025 was to avoid writing about politics. America has become so polarized that facts no longer matter, with everyone seemingly willing to blindly latch on to their preferred narratives and unwilling to even question for a moment the merits of their beliefs. Discourse in America is a veritable Tower of Babel, the biblical temple that God prevented from being built by confusing the language of the workers so they couldn’t understand each other.
My resolution didn’t include refraining from writing about Jew hatred or tolerating the legitimization of appalling ignorance, so New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fair game.
AOC, as she has become known, has never struck me as knowledgeable or a particularly deep thinker. She graduated from Boston University with an undergraduate degree in economics, and fashions herself as a democratic socialist. According to Jonathan Zatlin, a BU professor of history, democratic socialism is a nebulous term and people who profess an adherence to the imaginary movement rarely make clear whether they want to reform or abolish capitalism.
AOC pal Bernie Sanders also professes to be a democratic socialist. Having leveraged his career in “public service” writing books that supposedly were responsible for him becoming a multimillionaire while serving in Congress, it’s a safe bet that Sanders is fundamentally a capitalist. I’ve previously written about how a proposal by Sanders and AOC to reform the credit card industry was misguided and flawed because they didn’t understand the business.
AOC is in the news again, and her feigned concern for Nazism and Jew hatred cannot go unchallenged.
The Anti-Defamation League refused to join the corporate media bandwagon and label Elon Musk’s Trump rally gesture placing his right hand over his heart and then extending his arm in the air as a Nazi salute. The organization, whose mandate is to combat antisemitism, urged people to resist the rush to judgment.
“Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety,” the ADL said.
In response, AOC questioned the integrity of the ADL.
“Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response to the ADL on X.
“People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all,” she added.
This is the same AOC who proclaimed earlier this year proclaimed that Jews were “weaponizing” antisemitism to demonize pro-Palestinian activists.
“It is also true that accusations and false accusations of antisemitism are wielded against people of color and women of color by bad-faith political actors, and weaponizing antisemitism is used to divide us,” AOC said.
AOC has been critical of Israel’s war effort since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack and was among the few Democrats who last April opposed sending military aide to the country. She accused Israel of committing genocide during a Congressional speech. AOC signed on as a co-sponsor of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s resolution defending boycotts, a bill that was widely understood to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
AOC vigorously defended Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the former Congressman who was rabid in his condemnations of Israel. Two of AOC’s other squad members are Representatives Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, respectively the recipients of the 2019 and 2023 “Antisemite of the Year” awards.
The chutzpa of AOC deriding the ADL wasn’t lost on a big swath of social media, including Nioh Berg, an Iranian dissident who bills herself as “possibly the most famous Iranian Jew on X” and #17 most wanted by the regime in Iran.
What’s especially alarming is how AOC flaunts her ignorance without even a modicum of due diligence. With nearly 13 million followers on X, I’d expect she’d look up the background of ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and his record of criticisms of Elon Musk, including allegations of antisemitism, before dismissing him as a Trump/Musk sycophant.
Greenblatt previously served in the White House as a special assistant to President Obama and his attacks have often reeked of partisanship. Greenblatt once accused Republican Ted Cruz, one of Israel’s stalwart supporters in Congress, of being antisemitic after the Texas senator humorously noted a puff piece Bloomberg Media published about owner Mike Bloomberg when he was running for president.
“It’s almost as he owns the media,” Cruz quipped.
The ADL under Greenblatt’s leadership turned a blind eye to the virulent Jew hatred espoused by leaders of the Black Lives Movement and that organization’s Democratic and corporate media supporters.
“Organizations such as BLM have done nothing to hide or sugarcoat their animosity toward Israel,” Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley noted in this column. “In 2016, four years before Floyd was killed by police, BLM released an official platform that referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and declared that America is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
“What’s shocking isn’t the rhetoric of BLM leaders in the aftermath of Oct. 7 but that so many people who ought to have known better got played,” Riley said. “In 2020, an open letter that endorsed the BLM movement appeared as a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was signed by more than 600 Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to fight anti-Semitism. If accusing Israel of genocide isn’t defamation of Jewish people, I don’t know what is. Yet Jonathan Greenblatt, the executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, is a prominent defender of BLM.”
Not surprisingly given his political affiliations, Greenblatt began tarring Musk as being antisemitic as the entrepreneur’s increasingly Republican leanings became known. The ADL alleged that Twitter’s content became more virulently antisemitic after Musk acquired the social media site. Greenblatt publicly railed about Musk after he endorsed a Twitter post promoting the Great Replacement Theory, an antisemitic trope that Jews are behind an effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.
Musk previously accused Greenblatt of being responsible for corporate advertisers boycotting X, and the “free speech absolutist” went so far as to threaten to sue the ADL for lost revenue damages.
Despite his record of criticisms against Musk, even Greenblatt wasn’t prepared to accuse Musk of making a Nazi salute and took a more charitable view of the gesture, urging others to do the same.
AOC is yet another validation of the Starkman Approved Theory, which holds there is an inverse relationship between those claiming the mightiest morals and ethics and how they actually live their lives. While AOC is quick to imagine and malign people she doesn’t like as engaging in Nazi symbolism, she is closely aligned with those who would celebrate the achievement of Hitler’s Final Solution.