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After AOC’s 2018 primary victory, her campaign got a call from a representative at the pro-Israel lobby offering to start a relationship.

_Voices _Voices Support Us _Voices AOC Was Offered $100,000 by AIPAC to “Start the Conversation.” She Turned Them Down. After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 primary victory, her campaign got a call from a representative of the pro-Israel lobby offering to raise big money and start a relationship with the group. Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Ryan Grim December 5 2023, 11:26 a.m. Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Today is the day! The book is out. It should be at your local bookstore, or you can order a copy through an independent bookstore, which I hope you’ll do. HuffPost‘s Daniel Marans is out today with a piece of news from the book: In 2018, roughly a week after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stumbled through an interview question about her criticism of the killing by Israel Defense Forces of dozens of nonviolent protesters in Gaza, her communications director got a call from AIPAC. The pro-Israel lobbying group offered her campaign $100,000 in contributions to “start the conversation” so that she would never flub the question again. AOC turned them down. What follows is a brief adapted excerpt of that section of the book, which is called “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” Go get your copy! We also published an audio excerpt today in the Deconstructed podcast feed. The following excerpt is drawn from Chapter 3, “Occupation”: Regular Updates on News and Politics Politics With Ryan Grim When the morning of July 13, 2018, dawned, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been on an unbroken streak of interview victories. The streak wouldn’t last the night. When she stunned the political world by upsetting Rep. Joe Crowley on June 26, the assumption was that the big story of the night was the shock defeat of the next Speaker of the House. It soon became clear that Crowley would be the one to become a trivia question, and the real story was the rise of the politician quickly branded AOC. In the days after her victory, she was consistently a presence on national TV, creating viral moments that sent her star rising further with each one. On Twitter, her clapbacks were feasted on by a rapidly growing social media following. Her direct-to-camera Instagram dispatches were bringing a rawness to politics that young people were craving. “She was just hitting homer after homer and kept doing these interviews and just blowing it out of the park,” Saikat Chakrabarti, who helped run her campaign and would go on to become her chief of staff, told me. “And every time she would do one, we’d get bigger and bigger people asking her to come on. And then, at some point, all the late-night shows were asking to have her, but then, they have this weird competition thing, where you can’t be on one and then also the other; they get really mad about that.” Still, the toll of her popularity was about to hit its limit. “A mistake we made early is we did not do enough to just figure out how to keep AOC from not getting exhausted. I mean, it’s incredible she didn’t have a nervous breakdown.” In the middle of July, the stress finally caught up to Ocasio-Cortez, and she did the unthinkable: She took on the Israel–Palestine question unprepared. “Corbin [Trent, her communications director,] and I put her in a bit of a vulnerable position,” Chakrabarti said, “on a topic that wasn’t her thing. She never really talked about Israel–Palestine, and that’s just not something she’d ever really thought a lot about, other than a little bit during the campaign.” Ocasio-Cortez was still surging in celebrity when she agreed to a sit-down interview on PBS’s “Firing Line.” In the midst of the primary campaign, she had attracted attention with her full-throated criticism of the Israel Defense Forces, which had fired on Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, killing many. Her criticism hadn’t been a commentary on the politics of the region, she said when pressed about it during the interview, but merely a defense of the right to protest without being killed. “This is a massacre,” she had posted to Twitter in May 2018, as Israeli forces continued to kill protesters in Gaza, with the numbers of dead climbing north of two hundred. “I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.” Most Read Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund Is a Handout to His Hardcore Supporters Natasha Lennard How Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Puts You at Risk Nick Turse, Jessica Washington, Noah Hurowitz Thomas Massie Loses His Seat in a Win for Trump — and AIPAC Matt Sledge But among Puerto Rican families, the issue just doesn’t come up all that often, outside of those who are heavily engaged in geopolitics, and if it does, there’s a reflexive solid...