12/2/23: Krystal and Ryan LIVE at Politics and Prose Presents THE SQUAD

battling their own parties sclerotic leadership. As they've grown in office, they've had to contend with the eternal question that confronts outsiders whose power their way into the inside. Are they still radical organizers, willing and able to lead a political revolution? Ryan Grimm is the Intercept's DC bureau chief and the co host of Counterpoints. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for huff Post, where he led a team that

won a Pulitzer Prize. He's the author of the book We've Got People from Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio Cortes and the End end of big money and the rise of a movement, and this is your country on drugs, The Secret History of Getting High in America. Grim will be joined in conversation with Crystal Ball, an American political commentator and co host of Breaking Points. She was previously

a political candidate as well as a television host on MSNBC. Now, enough of my voice, please join me in welcoming Grim and Ball to the stage.

for letting me be involved in this conversation. Congratulations on the book, which is fantastic, which I read cover to cover, and I encourage all of you all to do as well. I actually thought a good place to start was one of the questions that we got from you all, sort of a philosophical question about the book itself, which is is the squad, a brand or a moment. Is it something that can be nurtured and cultivated or is it more of a progressive click? In other words, what even is the squad?

changed everything that came after it. The Occupy moment is over. But and as I write about in the book, you probably don't get Bernie Sanders without the Occupy moment. But you also wouldn't have either of them if the material conditions were not there to like ripen both of those ripe in both of those things. And so black lives matter again the moment, but the moments that we live in after that are shaped by that moment. So I think on a political electoral scale, they are a moment.

It was a you know, the arc of the book is kind of like mid twenty fifteen's Bernie Sanders launching his campaign up through the twenty twenty two midterms, and that's kind of the moment. I think you could kind of see it kind of cresting in twenty twenty and breaking, and then after that moment, something new is born from it that is different for it having happened. Ilan Omar told me as I was reporting this book, She's like, you know, there is no such thing as the Squad.

I know that, but also there is. So there's no there's no regular meetings, there's there's no kind of criteria for membership. There was a really if people remember the Onion article from twenty nineteen I forget, which like eighty five year old New Jersey lawmaker the Onion said was like appealing for membership in the Squad, and they then

jokingly said you're in, You're in. Sure, you're in. But it then becomes a so it' as ilin Omars put it was, it's a media creation, and it was created by an Instagram caption, like AOC posted a picture of the four of them and just wrote squad in the caption, and it took off. From there, So that's that's where it comes from. So it is a media creation. It's

also a creation of the political moment. But then as its adversaries identify it, they forge it into a thing, and so now it's a thing, whether it wants to be a thing or not.

personality traits. So talk about, you know, how she views the job in that moment where you were just reading the book, where she's occupying Speaker Pelosi's office and she's there with the activist, et cetera, to the moment where we find her now more focused on building relationships and trying to play the sort of more traditional political inside game.

of pursuit of her climate agenda. So she really does want to be there, potentially even getting arrested occupying her office, but also as the person they're supporting her, and part of her really like it's genuine Like I contrasted a little bit with Obama, who kind of people wanted to be able to put whatever they wanted onto Obama, Whereas I think AOC genuinely feels like she can do that, Like she wants to lead a political revolution by just

persuading everyone that it's the right thing to do. It's like she just she's like, well, of course, Nancy Pelosi has been for climate, for a strong climate agenda for decades.

All we're doing is supporting her here. But at the same time, she also knows like she also doesn't want me occupying her office, So this is so there's this there's this tension throughout and she talks about and her staffers will also talk about how there was a kind of marriage of convenience that kind of that you couldn't

see from the outside. And both she and some of the people from Just Democrats used that kind of same phrase that like, in order to become a member of Congress, like she couldn't just our system is not set up where Bartender can just win without any help from anybody else. And so there was this organization at Justice Democrat. And also nobody else could challenge Joe Crowley, like nobody within

New York politics could challenge Joe Crowley. And this is a point that she would make because if they tried, their career would absolutely be over. Like that's that's what it means to have a machine. So it had to be someone from outside machine.

their goal. By the end of the year, they realize they're on the brink of electing zero and In the meantime, they had split into Justice Democrats, which worked on the Democratic side, and brand new Congress was stuck with the original thing of doing candidates in every primary note regardless of the party, and so when they realized that they might get zero, they then put all their resources into AOC. So when she then wins, the people that she knows

are the people that supported her. She can't she beat

Joe Crowley. Going to work for her at that point in the Democratic Party would have been career suicide, and so it was very hard for her to find people from inside the party so that brings them together and create But from the outside it looked like it was this kind of revolutionary vanguard that had been well organized and kind of powered its way through, when in fact the four members didn't really know each other right and were there just kind of it was a coincidence that

they all arrived on the same themes at the same time, and then they're expected to work together as this media creation and then immediately their hit starting in January with the constant question are you anti Semitic for not kind of kind of condemning ilhan Omar or for the Benjamin situation, and all like the first six months just consumed by attacks from APAK and its allied organizations.

was a really good question as well. That gets to some of the heart of the critique that the left has had of the squad. The question here is why haven't the progressives hijacked the Democratic Party in the manner of the Freedom Caucus, especially considering the comparably slim majorities of the one hundred and seventeenth one hundred and eighteenth Congresses, asked Jonathan.

do it without me. Then. So Democrats have always had that had some of that problem because they you can always come back and say, well, all right, here, we're giving you this, and it's so easy to whittle them away. So that's the kind of that's one that's one structural problem that they have. But then just if you think about the timing when they came in Donald Trump as president, and so they it's not as if they're going to kind of hold up legislation and get a Democratic president

to sign it into office. That only that only comes later. And so their first six months they're really in this kind of two front war, one with with Apak, which is keeping them on their heels and kind of making it harder for them to kind of organize a kind of offensive, forward thinking strategy because it's just every single

week it's just they're playing playing defense. But then also this constant battle with with Nancy Pelosi, which is which breaks out into the press and ultimately ends with a couple of the staffers being pushed out of the office and things really shifting around. So then soon after that the presidential campaign picks up. And so at that point the squad three of whom endorse Bernie Sanders. Iona Presley with her eye on Massachusetts politics and a potential Senate seat.

She's like, oh, Elizabeth Warren getting a nomination a Senate seat opening up. Yes, I endorsed the LILI form. So three of them endorse Bernie Sanders, and they really believe that he can win the nomination. He comes within hair's breath of winning that nomination. Democratic primary voters are much more affectionate toward the Democratic Party than Republican primary voters are, Like, if you watch Republican primary ads, they're all kind of

running against the Republican Party. Like, to them, the Republican Party is just as bad as the other elites. And whereas the Democratic Party. If you're considered not a good democh like happened to Nina Turner and her special election, then a lot of kind of normal Democratic primary voters

are going to reject you. So Bernie Sanders running as an independent Democratic socialists who caucus with Democrats had that uphill climb and so you had he and the squad constantly trying to assure Democratic primary voters like, we're not radical like and you know, he gave that speech, I'm

just running on the legacy of FDR. And so if you're trying to convince the Democratic Party that you're you're good Democrats, you're just a lot more kind of democratic socialists, and you just want kind of higher minium wage, you want Medicare for all, you want a Green New Deal, but you're you're a Democrat, then that makes it harder at that point, and that's where you hear some of the stuff that she'll get criticized for. She when she said, uh, I think she called Pelosi Mama Bear at one point.

People have never forgiven her for that. That was while Bernie was well, it looked like Bernie might win the nomination, and she's trying to win the kind of noormy Democrats over into the camp to say no, no, no, we're the water's fine, we're not threatening, we're not dangerous. And then of course he within within three days there's that

massive turnaround and it all all collapses. So then twenty twenty one becomes their opportunity and they did then, and I have some interesting examples of it in the book,

particularly around the American Rescue Plan. They there was so much outside pressure and anger about particularly the fifteen dollars minimum wage not being kept in the legislation that when Mansion came back and tried to pull a lot of the unemployment benefits out, Schumer went over to the House and said, look, Mansion's not with us unless we do

these massive cuts to unemployment benefits. And Primila Giapaulic, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair, was able to tell Schumer, if he does that, it's like, you know, I'm fine with it. You know, I mean, I'm not fine with it, but you know, don't worry about me. I'm still with with you. But you're going to lose the squad and it's going to go down. And because there was so much outside pressure and anger, that was a credible threat, and Mansion caved on it and this and hundreds of billions and

unemployment benefits went through. So there were moments where it could happen, but it was but it was never done in a way that kind of made kind of the outside folks happen because they still didn't get the fifteen dollars minum wage. So from the outside you were still like frustrated about it.

inside legislator. But I think also I think she thinks some of it is fair that and but there also is there's no coordinating mechanism, and she has talked about this as well. That say, back in the nineteen sixties, you had major mass organizations that had steering committees that were in contact with each other, that were setting ambitious strategies and tactics and then executing them and had the manpower to do it. You know, they had the grassroots

kind of mobilization to do it. That doesn't exist now, Like what has replaced that is basically Twitter and Twitter is reactive, so Twitter usually can give feedback to legislators after it's too.

out of the park. Interview after interview, and then she sits down for one interview and gets asked about Israel and Palestine, And that's your jumping off point to talk about the way that that conflict has both been a difficulty a challenge for members of the Squad and sort of the Squad adjacent members as well, but also how strangely, because there was so much organization on the other side trying to enforce unanimity on the topic, it actually strengthened

their spine in terms of their position. Talk about a little bit about that, starting with that moment with AOC, which is incredible.

you don't know what the Great March Return was. That was a civil society led initiative in Gaza that kind of came from the grassroots where people would say, every Friday, we're going to go near the fence and we're gonna we're gonna picnic. It's gonna be a joyous thing. And then we're gonna march non violently to the to the fence and we just do this every Friday, just and we're gonna look out at the places where our parents

and grandparents used to live. This will be a fun community event, but also symbolic of our our hope that one day there will be peace and we can return.

And the Israeli troops started shooting and every so every Friday they'd started shooting, and it became this uh kind of infamous thing since then where eventually they started shooting, they started aiming for legs, and so it created then they shot out so many people's legs that in Gaza, you'd have it just became a very regular thing to see people going around with, you know, missing one or both legs. Of the number, the un has the numbers,

but they're they're astronomical. And so after one of these mass shootings, I sixty people were killed and these are non violent. You know, there's some stone throwing and but you know, generally there's there's not kind of Hamas led actions. Hamas eventually reluctantly supported them, but they had but there

was nothing armed about them. And so AOC spoted on Twitter saying, it's appalling that sixty non violent protesters were killed in this Gaza demonstration, and it's appalling that there's so much silence from so many here in New York

City about that. And that created a lot of interest in this congressional candidate from the Bronx and from Queens who's standing up for the rights of Palestinian because it was so unusual, and so she then gets asked about that question on this in this interview, and she's been nailing kind of interview after interview, and it initially it seemed like the biggest event that the night that she

won her primary was Joe Crowley losing. It very quickly became clear after as she was nailing all these interviews that the biggest event was actually her winning, and that Joe Crowley would be somebody who was like a trivia question a couple of years later, did anybody know what he's doing? He's a lot lobbyist, right, he had to be Yes, he's a lobbyist. And so she's so she's doing great, all of these interesting and then she gets hit with this question and Margaret Carlson says, you use

the word Palestine, what do you mean by that? And you can see her whole demeanor change where she's sort of like, I know that there are third rails everywhere on this issue, and I might have touched one a night, but I don't know if I did or not. And she sort of tries to explain, she's just saying that she sees it if sixty people were killed at a protest in Puerto Rico, or sixty people were killed at protest in Ferguson, I would stand up for that, and so I stand up for it when it happens in

Gaza as well. And she's like, yes, but you use the word occupation. What do you mean by that? And again you see like, oh God, what's happening here. It's finally she says, look, I'm not a geopolitical expert. This wasn't something that we talked about a lot at my Bronx dinner table growing up, which Summer Lead later told

me this same thing just growing up in Pittsburgh. It's that's not an issue that you're steeped you're steeped in if you're growing up in the African American community in Pittsburgh. And so she just at that point they kind of pull her off the trail and she realized, I need to start need to learn more about this, because clearly

this is going to be a very big issue. And I think once you once you're kind of pressed to look into the history and to look into the reality, you're probably going to get pushed in the direction of

saying that this this is wrong. Jamal Bowman did an interesting interview recently kind of who became one of the you know, either the fifth or sixth squad member who talked about his experience of visiting the West Bank and bizarrely, there are people who on the left who are angry that he even took that trip, But everybody who takes that trip and sees the West Bank in person kind of comes back changed because there are streets that you

can't walk down if you're Palestinian. There are there are front doors of Palestinian homes that are like sealed shut, like they have to go out their back door, only like they can't go out through this street. Different so you know, different streets are blocked off for people with different license plates. And you and you see this up front of you, like this is this is wrong? It just it just feel it just feels wrong. And so I think that over the years as they've learned more

about the issue. Now obviously Omar until he didn't need that education, but also as they as they realize that this is this is going to be much bigger than I thought it was, like one of the Kyle Kyle would vouch for this too well. Will Lead Scheids, who also helped launch Justice Democrats, said he always gets asked, why do you guys focus on Israel Palestine so much. He's like, we don't We're just always getting hit on it, so we have to respond.

of foray into it. Their first huge effort was trying to stop Jamal Bowman from unseating the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Elliott Angel, one of the most tawkish, unapologetic defenders of Israel in Congress, and the idea that he could that he could be beaten by a former principle nobody backed by Justice Democrats was unthinkable, and so DMFI spent two million dollars plus in this primary, but he still ended up losing, even lost in heavily Jewish precincts,

and so it ended up being a blowout, something like something like fifteen points. And in the wake of that, DMFI, which was kind of an offshoot of a pack and APAC, realized, okay, we need to this. Two million dollars is not going to cut it, Like, we need to come in here with some serious money. And so in the next cycle, the twenty twenty two cycle, DMFI again came up with

something like ten million dollars so to spend. Some affiliated groups came up with another couple of million, but a PAC launched its own own super pac, which was new in

its history. It had always been purely a brick grassroots organization with chapters and sub chapters all over the country, and they launched the United Democracy Projects superPAC, which they put more than thirty million dollars into and put almost every penny of it into democratic primaries trying to knock out progressive incumbents or to stop progressive challengers from winning primaries.

And that's just an absolutely enormous amount of money. Like the organization j Street, which was set up to be a counter to APAK, told me that they had seen what happened in twenty twenty, and so then they organized their own super pac to try to defend progressive candidates who they felt were strong on Israel. That they felt the argument that APAC is pro Israel as a misnomer, that Apak is actually leading Israel in a direction that's not only going to be harmful for the Palestinians but

also for Israel. And so Jay Street was able to raise about two million dollars, so they thought the MFI will have ten million, will have two million. The mfi's positions are extremely unpopular and so they have to spend much more money in primaries to overcome that. So at a five to one disadvantage, we can, you know, we can hold we can hold our own. Then when APAC comes in with thirty or forty million, they're just able to annihilate people. They spent There may be some former

constituents of Donna Edwards here. They spent I think seven million dollars to make sure that Donna Edwards did not get back into Congress. Like a third. She's like a thirty point lead. Popular former Democrat. She had voted. They didn't like a particular vote she took in two thousand and eight on the war in Gaza. Wow and wow, seven million dollars later she was she was beaten Nita Alam, who was her her good friends. I don't know if

people remember. There was this horrific and became a national story, a hate crime in Chapel Hill, Durham, that area where three Muslim students were killed and she was good friends with them. She became the first Muslim county commissioner in Durham. She was running for Congress and was expected to win. It was popular with a lot of the Democratic voters in there. They spent something like five or six million

like to stop her from winning. Candidates around the country started seeing this, and so there would be consultant calls. They'd say, Okay, how do we stop this money from coming in? We can't raise enough to compete against it, but how do we stop it? Say? Well, one direct way to stop it is just to ask them how we can stop it. And so that's what Fetterman did.

So Fetterman's campaign reached out to DMFI. At the time, Fetterman was running against a concern vative Democrat named Connor Lamb, who was his campaign was openly sending out memos saying, if we get super PAC support, here is how we can beat John Fetterman. If we do not get super PAC support, we will lose and Democrats are going to lose this seat and it's going to be a disaster. Like they were very explicitly making this point, going on TV and circulating the memos to the meeting. We need

super PAC money. We can't beat him without super PAC money. And the super Pac money they're talking about is DMFI for the most part, and Mainstream Democrats, which is a Mainstream Democrats pact is allied funded by Reid Hoffen, but allied with DMFI. So they go directly to the MFI and say what does our Israel Palace dine position need to be basically, and Mark Melman, the head of DMFI later told later said on the record that the meeting went very well that Fetterman's staff then sent over their

Israel Palace time platform. It was pretty good, not quite there, so they d some edits, kicked it back to the campaign campaign checked said this is good posted it. This is our position, and Connor lamb out of luck, We're not gonna We're not going to support you because this

guy's this guy's good enough. And you saw that happen in a lot of different races that candidates who hoped they were going to get a pack support to beat a progressive didn't because the progressive was able to persuade APAC and DMFI that they were that they had sufficiently switched their position on the issue.

race to prime I'm marry Rashida to leab. I mean, that's like as naked as it gets, a donor calling you up. This is not even legal, by the way to do, but a donor call you up and saying, hey, I'll give you twenty million dollars in your primary campaign against Rashida to leave if you drop out here based on your reporting and your knowledge of how all of this has gone down in the past, I mean you surprised by just the brazen nature of.

couple cycles after that. But twenty twenty two, an apax spending of the thirty plus million dollars kind of really really changed, I think the calculation because that is, on the one hand, so much money that it can reshape how the party positions itself on Israel Palestine, it can purge like an entire faction of critics from the party, but it's also not much money, Like there is a

small number of donors the super Pac. Now there's you know, a lot of apax money is dark money that goes for kind of general operations, but the super Pac money is public and you can see this person gave five million, this person gave one million, this person gave one million, and then you'll see like on a single day and you can look at the FEC reports on it, on a single day, thirty different people gave one hundred thousands. You're like, oh, must have been a nice fundraiser somewhere.

And so it only takes a few people spending a small amount of money to them, right, like they it's an a rounding error to them. And once you can see you can have an impact, then you're like, oh, well,

let's let's do this again. And I think they one miss kind of mistake they feel like they made is they did not spend heavily against Ilhan Omar, like they felt like she was comfortably ahead in the race and that it was going to be a waste of money, and also that she in this I get into this in the book she and Pelosi had a very close relationship, which might surprise a lot of people, and so they would have been going against Pelosi to go after Omar.

She ended up only winning by a couple points, and so now she's facing the same person, and I don't think they'll they'll make that mistake again, like they're gonna, I think, to leave and we can get into we could go race by race, but they they feel like there's enough shot at winning and it's a it's cheap enough that why not.

and inability at times to challenge Democratic leadership directly. I have never seen them be as forceful in critique of Democratic leadership and especially President Biden as they have been in this moment with Israel's you know, all out war being waged on Gaza. So what do you think of this person's question? Do you think it proves that this was worthwhile? And what are some of the factors that led them to be so strong on this particular issue.

of bringing small donors into the game. Obama kind of showing that you can do it on a national scale in two thousand and eight with small donors, obviously combining it with a lot of Wall Street and other big donor money. That opens up the possibility for outsiders without without money to then come in and challenge. Since then, you've seen some co opting of that by the Democratic

Party more broadly. I'm sure everybody here has their inbox completely carpet bombed with messages saying that the world's going

to end if those those are the nicest ones. The others kind of look like phone bills or something, So, you know, taking something that that ought to be a beautiful thing, you know, democratizing the process, bringing people in and then allowing candidates to take positions based on what people want rather than what their donors are demanding, gets then contorted by consultants who then own the kind of

big emailing firm, so then blast your inbox. So that that coupled with the fact that you can't really scale the squad in the sense that one reason that AOC can raise ten million dollars every cycle is that she's AOC. But she's AOC because other people aren't. You can't have two hundred and fifty people like that. It's just like there is a limited amount of kind of stardom that's

the definition of stardom. And so but it has built, and in collaboration with the kind of Sanders ecosism, built at least an ecosystem that is there and can be and can be triggered when when the moments arise. And so this moment is an example of that where you know, if you didn't have them in office, now you know where where would the pressure have come from on, you know, from within the Democratic Party. And so it's it's not it's not I don't think it's ever worth giving up.

But there are the challenges. This system is very adaptable and the challenges are just going to keep replicating.

the right place when legislation is being crafted. However, just at the moment when you know you had a democratic trifecta and progressives really needed to be flexing their muscles, a lot of these organizations were eaten up by sort of internal turmoil. And I've got a quote from you from the book about what was going on within these organizations.

You say, a sense of powerlessness on the left had nudged the focus away from structural or wide reaching change which felt hopelessly beyond reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. One former executive director of a major nonprofit advocacy group told me he saw those in his organizations turn inward out of desperation. Maybe I can't end racism myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed,

or I can hold somebody accountable you relate. People found power where they could and often that's where you work, sometimes where you live or where you study, but someplace close to home. How did this dynamic play out over the years that you're covering here, and how did it intersect with progressive goals getting accomplished through the House and with this White House.

become these stars. And you then had almost every Democratic president presidential candidate endorse a Green New Deal. Even Joe Biden's climate platform was arguably like to the left of

Bernie's from twenty sixteen. Like that's how far things had gone. Varshne, the head of Sunrise, was put with AOC on the like six person task force assigned to with John Kerrey to design the Biden climate agenda, and Sunrise had this direct line to Ron Klain, who was the White House Chief of Staff, who very much believed that and better for worse, and whether it's right or wrong, that Sunrise represented a real youth movement and that their input was

important and that winning them over meant keeping together the coalition that would be needed in the to pass legislation

to hold the House and Senate to win reelection. And so Sunrise found itself in this unique and surprising position to them where they were constantly able to like shape legislation as it was being crafted before it was even sent over to the Senator House, which is in many ways like a more important place to be in the beginning, because the product that starts, you know, goes over to Congress and then people push it to the left or push it to the right, but where it starts dictates

like ninety percent of where it's gonna end up. And so they're right there in the beginning shaping it, and it right at that point, Uh, the organization just implodes over internal internal strife that it had. It was like the maybe sixth near implosion there had been you know, Uh, there have been tussles over mostly over kind of uh wages and white supremacy would be the would be the buckets,

and they'd be tossed in together. But they had been suppressed first by you know, we're doing the Green New Deal, We're doing Bernie Sanders. Uh, you know, we're we're pushing this agenda. But once Biden gets into office, and this was this became true for a lot of other progressive organizations there. There there was a lack of kind of faith in a direction, and so there and so those pressures that had been suppressed before kind of burst burst through.

And so I talked to the political director of Sunrise who was in who said that right at this moment of maximal kind of influence, it turned out fifty percent or more of his time instead was directed toward like zoom meetings sorting out all the different issues that they were having back in Sunrise. And he was like, and

has he put it? You know, if I'm not there either, the Biden White House is just writing its own agenda, which you don't necessarily want to leave them to that or some big green groups around there, or oil and gas groups are in there. And so that's one example, but there are others in the way that the thing just kind of falls apart.

Apex influence on the squad and those around them? Are people gonna think I'm crazy for like chapters on the money behind No Labels and Joe Manchin and Josh Gottheimer is a basically the founder of No Labels because covering this stuff every single day, I saw how kind of determinative this money was, not just influential, but just completely

driving things. And so I even though people, even though this isn't the thing that gets into the news like this, it has these have to be major themes of the book. Now sure, sure enough, Yeah, Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penner are looking to raise yeah what or they say they claim they have raised seventy million dollars to get Joe Manchen or whoever they can convince to be on their ticket in an effort that would you know, the only way you can put it is it would help Trump

get re elected. Like that's there's no other way to see that. Like some some of the weird ones like RFK, you're like, I don't know how that plays out, But No Labels, that's this, that's pretty clear. That's purely a play that's gonna hurt Democrats and help Republicans, and that that that Gotttheimer and Mansion are are able to like participate in that so actively yet be held up as

kind of these kind of paragons of democratic virtue. Well, how folks like the Squad who are who are constantly bending over backwards against the wishes sometimes of their own base to support the Democratic Party are constantly being told that they're not good enough Democrats. Is the kind of the contradiction that runs through the book.

set in, but it hasn't kind of taken over. When you have destroyed that not just the healthcare system, but the sewage treatment system. You know, people talked about how awful fire festival was because they didn't didn't have sewage treatment for like two days or something. You know, this is endless, and so I think some of it will be will be shaped, will be shaped by that. But I do think the new generation of voters is is

kind of structurally different than previous ones. You know that people have always thought that young people are to the left, like that's but if you if you go back and look, young people supported Reagan. There's some debate over whether or not they supported Nixon, but it was very very close. It was not, by no means a blowout for the for Democrats. It's just that the media likes to talk about the left wing ones lot more, and so it

always seemed like generations were left wing. These people under thirty thirty five today really genuinely are much more progressive. And so that is that is going to mean that they're going to see the politics of the squad as just normal, like this is how politics ought to be. Like, They're not going to see that as radical at all.

And I finish toward the end of the book with this wild poll that came out in January in New Hampshire where they asked New Hampshire voters, you know who are who's your most popular, who's the most who's the Democrat that you liked the most? And you would not have expected it when in twenty eighteen, but the answer was Okazu Cortez and I asked her if she'd seen that poll and she was like, I did see that. I don't believe it, but I but I did, but

I did see it. So that's that's an interesting place that this goes.

built a lot of it anyway. So on January twenty second, twenty nineteen, a month into what would become the longest government shut down in US history, House Democrats made a bid to open things back up, unveiling legislation to fund only the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. There would be no wall money, but some supplemental funds would go toward improving conditions at the border for detained migrants.

Six months earlier, AOC had been at those facilities and had been shocked by what she saw the treatment of the migrants, she said was fascist. Photos of her pained emotional reaction had become synonymous with democratic outrage over Trump's policy. In her televised debate with Joe Crowley, she had savaged him for his hypocrisy on the issue, arguing that while he had called immigration and customs enforcement fascist, he wouldn't

do anything about it. If you think this system is fascist, she asked him, then why don't you vote to eliminate it. He had no answer. There is no good answer, But now it was her responsibility to offer one. She sat down with her staff and opened the discussion. Do we vote against this funding proposal? She laid out the terms of the debate to her team. The bill includes money for things we don't support, and we might be the only vote against it. Meanwhile, a lot of this is symbolism.

The party is trying to reopen the government. And it's not like this bill will pass the Senate and get signed by Trump. It's a messaging bill, and the message is that Democrats are being the adults in the room while Trump is having a tantrum. Assembled that day was most of her team, including Chakrabardi, Corbyn Trent, her legislative director Ariel Eckbald, and her new legislative aid Dan Riffle.

AOC noted that eventually she would have to vote for a CR short for continuing resolution, a bill that continued to fund the government on the same terms as it had been funded. The c R would include the money not just for Homeland Security, but also for many other agencies whose missions she supported. Drawing a line in the sand now, she said, would mean voting against all future government funding bills, even when it came to actually reopening

the government. Where do we draw that line? She asked? What is enough? Before she could finish the question, Trent interrupted with an answer in the form of his own question, Yeah, what is enough to fund a fascist agency that cage's children. Nobody had an answer. We all just kind of looked at each other. Dan Riffle recalled, like nothing, nothing is enough, so we're a no on this. Trent's intervention had ended the conversation, but it was clear that what they were

trying to do was going to be a challenge. You could see not just her but me, everybody in the office sort of like doing the thing. Riffle said, it's going to be hard. He realized it's going to be hard for us to be principled here. The squad huddled and agreed to vote as a block, making up the only four no votes on the bill. A few days later, Trump caved and the House voted on a measure that was actually meaningful. The bill would reopen the government and Ice,

the fascist agency AOC wanted abolished. This time, it wasn't a messaging bill. This funding would actually get to Ice. AOC. Stuck with her no vote on the way to the House floor, she shot an Instagram video. Walking beside her was Riffel, and she introduced him to her followers. He's every billionaire is a policy failure on Twitter, so yeah. She equipped a reference to his handle, which had recently sparked a national conversation about whether the claim was was fair.

She subtitled the video with an explanation of her vote. Most of our votes are pretty straightforward, but today was a tough, nuanced call, she wrote. We didn't vote with the party because one of the spending bills included ice funding, and our community felt strongly about not funding that. When the role was called, precisely one Democrat voted no. Representative Okazio Cortes. The rest of the squad had gone along casting The vote was draining. She'd been pressed on the

floor by party leadership to switch. Told by whipstaff she'd be put on a list. What kind of list? Nobody said, but did it, but it didn't sound like a good one. She'd been called in for a personal meeting with Steny Hoyer. Everyone had told her that what she was doing was wrong, that was hurting the team. It weighed on her. The final vote came laid into the night past midnight, and

Chakrabarty walked aoc back to the apartment. Back to her apartment, as they passed Capitol Hill's famous Mexican restaurant, Tortilla Coast, a worker was leaving, having just closed it down. Alexandria, is that you, he asked? She told him it was. I just wanted to say thank you for standing up for me and my family. It means so much, he told her. The wait for just that moment had lifted. Thank you, Ryan, I believe we'll be signing some books up here. Thank you, Crystal, My pleasure.