Screenshot : MSNBC

Last night, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes broadcast something that is almost unprecedented in our modern era: four left wing people on TV, speaking about politics. Whoa.




The panel was made up of The Majority Report’s Sam Seder, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, and The Intercept’s Senior Politics Editor Briahna Gray. They were there to talk about conservative media’s reaction to the surprise primary victory of New York City congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The 10 minute segment featured the four discussing their opinions on the reaction from the right to Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, and the deep fear she seems to inspire among conservatives. Though Hayes and his three guests could all be classified as progressive, they disagreed in their assessment of what it is about Ocasio-Cortez that both terrifies the right and energizes the left.

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Hayes, Goldberg, and Seder, who are more to the center than Gray, expressed their belief that it is Ocasio-Cortez’s natural political talent that has gotten her to where she is, rather than her platform alone. Goldberg also disputed the claim made by Gray in a recent article for The Intercept that Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal is non-partisan, arguing that she so terrifies the Republicans because her social democratic promises are what they fear will lead to a Communist-style authoritarian government.

Gray came back with her experience reporting on the Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rally in Kansas, where she said that within a 10 minute car ride she was able to convince a Trump voter that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have the right ideas about what needs to happen to fix America.


Near the end of the segment, Goldberg commented that in Pennsylvania, she met volunteers who were both working for centrist candidates like Connor Lamb, and the further left candidates who are running as socialists. “They didn’t see them as being on opposite sides of some great divide,” she said. Maybe there’s life outside of Twitter after all.

