Far-Left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) again made her disdain for the moderate Left well know on Thursday, posting a photo of herself glaring at moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) via Twitter over his recent pushback against the Left’s calls to “defund the police” and their socialist proposals.
“Defund the police? Defund, my butt,” Manchin wrote in a Twitter post published Wednesday. “I’m a proud West Virginia Democrat.”
“We are the party of working men and women,” he declared. “We want to protect Americans’ jobs & healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.”
Defund the police? Defund, my butt. I'm a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans' jobs & healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police. https://t.co/EIFHX5OQ37
— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) November 11, 2020
Ocasio-Cortez quote-tweeted the post with an image of herself glaring at Manchin for daring to stand up and applaud at a State of the Union address from President Donald Trump:
https://t.co/4D4LVOyYhc pic.twitter.com/MwNIc41Szj
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 12, 2020
Manchin on Tuesday made no bones about his position regarding the Democrats’ dive toward socialism and identity politics. “We are the party of the working men and women, and we forget how to talk about that in a meaningful way,” he said, according to The Washington Examiner.
The moderate Democrat also veered from the Left’s moves to break the filibuster. “I really think that when you break the filibuster, you break the Senate, and I’m not going to be part of breaking the Senate, I can tell you that,” he argued. “The Senate is a pretty special place because the Founding Fathers intended it to be that way. But they also intended us to work in a bipartisan way and to where the minority always had input. You break the rules of the filibuster, the minority has nothing. There’s no purpose whatsoever. You’re no different than a glorified House.”
AOC, of course, is on the other side of the divide, fully embracing identity politics and so-called democratic socialism.
“We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues,” Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview last weekend. “We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.”
Moreover, as noted by The Daily Wire, Politico recently reported that Ocasio-Cortez has “argued that the Democrat Party ‘never formed an offensive strategy’ on key issues like ‘racial justice'”:
“It’s not just like some moral question about how you confront racism in elections, but it is now an existential crisis for the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said. The problem, she said, is Democrats don’t want to talk about race. “Anti-racism plays zero percent of a role in Democratic electoral strategy — zero, explicitly, implicitly. I’m not telling people to virtue signal, but there’s just like no plan for it.”
According to the lawmaker, Democrats need to “take our gloves off with Republicans.”
“We’re always messaging around bipartisanship and how much we love working with Republicans all the time in a lot of these sensitive areas,” she said. “We need to have an unapologetic agenda, have an actual alternative and counter-messaging that is distinct from the Republican Party instead of trying to play to notions of civility. … I just really hope that it gets through to a lot of people that this idea that we can win over white voters on a civility argument is like not a reliable strategy.”