A new book is coming out, and it’s all about AOC and The Squad. The long and the short of it is, the Democrats are stuck with these dilettante radicals, and they hate it.

The focus of the book, written by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and titled “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” which comes out tomorrow, apparently digs deep into just how much AOC pissed off the Democrat leadership from day one. Everyone should break out the popcorn, because the previews are juicy.

It's the last day to preorder THE SQUAD by @ryangrim and enter the preorder sweepstakes! You can do so here: https://t.co/Dgb7o19Je1 pic.twitter.com/2nkCrUSozu

— Henry Holt & Company (@HenryHolt) December 4, 2023

The details from behind the scenes do a lot to explain some of the things that would occasionally bubble to the surface, but it also shows what an iron hand Nancy Pelosi had when it came to keeping her caucus in line. For example, once AOC was elected, she participated in a climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office. This did not endear her to the then-Speaker, who had some things to tell the newbie.

Not long after Ocasio-Cortez won the general election that November, she roiled Democrats with some of her antics — including joining 150 climate activists for a sit-in at Pelosi’s office.

“She believed she could occupy the Speaker’s office and have Pelosi appreciate it,” Grim recounted of the episode.

Although in public Pelosi trod carefully around Ocasio-Cortez, behind the scenes, she made the political neophyte’s life miserable, according to Grim.

“The amount of times she told me that … ‘I have protest signs older than you in my basement’ s—. Like yeah, but mine don’t collect dust,” Ocasio-Cortez once told Grim in a text, HuffPost previewed.

I absolutely LOVE that AOC thought Pelosi would “appreciate” her protest. That’s hysterical, and it is so indicative of Millennial thinking in a system still tightly controlled by senior citizens from the “Silent Generation.” AOC is young enough to be Pelosi’s granddaughter, and she apparently wasn’t afraid to slap her back into place behind closed doors while posing with her on the cover of Rolling Stone in public. This definitely puts a whole new spin on Pelosi’s comment in 2019 that “a glass of water” running as a Democrat could have won AOC’s district. I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing.

AOC, in becoming a media darling so quickly, also ruffled the feathers of Pramila Jayapal, who apparently imagined herself as some kind of Progressive Kween. But then AOC was elected only two years later, which upset Jayapal.

Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was “firmly usurped” by the Empire State up-and-comer, and this wasn’t “something (she) would quickly forgive,” he writes, according to the Mail.

At one point, Ocasio-Cortez and her then-chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti were summoned into a meeting with Jayapal, who demanded she “keep her staff in line,” Grim writes.

Chakrabarti described the meeting as akin to Ocasio-Cortez being called into “the principal’s office.”

Seeing as Jayapal is a vile human being, I’m thouroughly enjoying the fact that she is annoyed by AOC out-radicalizing her. But as Grim points out, AOC’s one big agenda item, the so-called “Green New Deal,” was a huge bust, and it all stems back to AOC not being nearly as smart as she and her staff thinks she is.

Grim says the Green New Deal, a program focused on climate change and green energy policies, was a “total s***show disaster” — despite Ocasio-Cortez entering Congress with a bang as part of a wave of progressivism stemming from former President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Grim wrote that, while Ocasio-Cortez was embraced by the “Squad” Democrats, she quickly established herself as an outlier and possible champion within the Democratic Party.

The rollout of her token green energy policy, however, failed because “overconfidence had crept in” among Ocasio-Cortez and her followers, according to Grim’s book. Evan Weber, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, which worked with Ocasio-Cortez on the Green New Deal, told Grim the “Squad” had become the “It Kids” of Washington but that arrogance led to their downfall.

“I think we had done such a good job up until that point of massaging the language that there was a kind of arrogance of like: ‘We can actually appease everyone here’ instead of sticking to our guns and making a real choice about charting a different direction,” Weber said in the book via the Daily Mail.

Weber added that the plan was “haphazardly” put together and came out with several mistakes, noting that journalists got the first draft of the FAQ on the Green New Deal instead of the final version. He also pointed to a line that discussed the methane produced by cows, which quickly led to criticism and jokes from conservatives.

The mistakes gave the Green New Deal to Ocasio-Cortez’s critics “on a silver platter,” Weber said.

“Overconfidence,” certainly. Arrogance, definitely.

And then we get to AOC wearing her infamous Met Gala dress with “Tax The Rich” splashed all over her ass. Leaving the all ethics violations aside (and that investigation has not concluded yet), her appearance at the Met Gala made her fellow leftists mad – because she showed up for THAT and not for THEM.

The darling of the Democratic Socialists of America further made waves in September 2021 when she showed up to the Met Gala wearing a white dress with “Tax the Rich” in red letters splashed across the back.

Her appearance “infuriated every organization that had either been told she couldn’t attend their event or, more commonly, simply been ignored by her office,” Grim writes.

Well, did those organizations give her free tickets that she wasn’t supposed to have, or let her play dress-up socialist princess, or give her a big splashy entrance? You see, AOC only loves cosplaying as a radical socialist – she doesn’t actually want to LIVE like one.

But Grim, being a fairly sympathetic author, simply says that AOC is trying too hard.

‘While somebody like Obama wants to be seen as being all things to all people, Ocasio Cortez actually thinks she can be all things to all people while leading a political revolution,’ Grim writes.

Grim claims that AOC was hamstrung because, despite her public persona, she was ‘conflict averse’.

Giving an illuminating insight into her personal struggles, he writes that her colleagues ‘keep feeding this utter vulnerability and failure’.

‘This constant sense she’s failed at something. And she lets it in her head. She really takes that s**t to heart’.

Even when AOC tried some ‘personal warmth’ with colleagues in Congress, it only made them ‘more suspicious’ of her.

They could ‘not accept and even have a working relationship with someone from a different party faction’, as Grim puts it.

Grim writes: ‘They simply didn’t believe that Ocasio-Cortex didn’t plan to oust them’.

Events where AOC attended began with her being asked to apologize for Tweets from her staff, leading to extreme awkwardness.

As Grim puts it: ‘Ocasio-Cortez’s curse was her desire to win consensus that she was there to help, coupled with her radical politics.

‘She wanted to remake the system and to be thanked for doing it’.

Oh, poor AOC, having to be accountable for *checks notes* what her staff puts out under her name on Twitter/X. The horror. Can you hear my tiny violin playing? I also find it hilarious that other Democrats are openly suspicious of AOC because of her radicalism, and she takes that personally. She just wants to be LIKED, everyone. We will have a progressive revolution, she will be Evita, and we will all sing songs about her. Is that really the vision of herself that she had? If so, it would explain a LOT.

It would also explain why AOC has embraced so much of The Squad’s obvious Hamas leanings, despite being a New York congresswoman when New York is having a huge anti-Semitism problem. Her own district is majority Hispanic, according to census data, so she isn’t personally going to be held accountable for her ugly radicalism.

The Democrats have just as much division and strife as the Republicans do. It’s just that the Democrats manage to keep their fights behind closed doors, with occasionally a book like this sneaking out to throw a little sunlight on the state of things. It’s also indicative about how Democrat leadership has changed with Pelosi’s “retirement” from the Speaker’s gavel. Will Hakeem Jeffries be able to exert the same kind of control behind the scenes that Pelosi did? Given the current shenanigans from The Squad, and their increasing radicalism and racism, I’m not sure that he can. If he can’t, this would make The Squad the anchor that the Democrats will have to keep dragging around into 2024 and beyond.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click