The guerrilla warfare arm of the new leftists has sustained three unique injuries. Conservatives everywhere should rejoice, but take heed. The socialists are learning, and will be better prepared next time.
Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, is being investigated on campaign finance violations and has resigned. While this might sound like small-to-medium potatoes, consider that Chakrabarti is the co-founder of Justice Democrats--the PAC that recruited former bartender AOC and her friends Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar--as well as another PAC, Brand New Congress.
He is the Ivy League-educated mastermind with Wall St. and Silicon Valley experience. He was the driving force behind the rise of the Squad, as CD Media has reported previously. A federal conviction might mean trouble for AOC herself, who is under suspicion of trying to cover Chakrabarti's tracks by essentially laundering money through the payment of relatively hefty salaries to campaign staffers.
Adding to his problems, another of Chakrabarti's Justice Democrats candidates, Tiffany Cabán, conceded defeat to longtime incumbent Melinda Katz in the race for Queens district attorney yesterday. The race was closely watched in that it mimicked AOC's ground-shaking ouster of another longtime Democrat fixture, Joe Crowley.
The Justice Democrats' tactics were the same in both cases: find low voter-turnout districts, recruit an attractive, young woman of color regardless of her experience, and saturate voters with aggressive grassroots efforts, and finance the operation with suspicious amounts of money raised outside the district, often as far away as the opposite coast.
It almost worked again. Cabán appeared to have the win, but was forced to concede after a torturous recount left her a mere 55 votes shy. While it comes as a relief, the underlying message is much more somber: these tactics of recruiting empty vessels, filling them with socialist values, and backing them financially is, by and large, working.
Conservatives have two avenues to take: sink to the leftist level and build a similar machine, or go on the defensive and track groups like Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress in order to ramp up retaliatory efforts, and fight them where seek to grow their numbers. The problem is, Republicans aren't the target. Chakrabarti's groups go after moderate Democrats, seeking to replace the party from within.
For now, the only working model is to promote Republicans to unseat the socialists after they have been elected, as in the case of Scherie Murray, a Republican woman of color who will run against AOC in the next election, hoping to bring her common-sense, pro-business message to Queens/Bronx voters who feel deceived--and robbed of potential Amazon jobs--after voting for AOC.
Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), the most accomplished member of the Squad (she had a political career before Chakrabarti took her under the Squad's wing), did not vote with her girlfriends in the case of a recent bill.
As Politico reports, "The matter in question was a resolution opposing a Palestinian-led movement to boycott Israel. The measure passed the House overwhelmingly...Among the 17 'no' votes were three members of the Squad: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Pressley, the fourth, voted 'yes.'"
Given that the bill never had a chance of passing, Pressley's decision to go the other way is all the more surprising. Time will tell if dissent is allowed in the Squad, especially now that the attention they're receiving is the kind no one wants: federal.
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