Nothing much happening here, just the most famous progressive in the country (under the age of 77) who’s also a sitting congresswoman casually condoning riots as a response to certain injustices.

Which injustices? It’s not clear. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank? Yes, she says. Lacking clean drinking water? Yes, that too.

What about persistent refusal by the federal government to address climate change, such as by passing a Green New Deal? That doesn’t come up in the clip, but to progressives it’s a momentous injustice affecting everyone.

Seems like some mighty large riots might be justified.

Likewise, she called ICE detention facilities at the border “concentration camps” not long ago. Surely some rioting by “marginalized communities” in protest would be justified in that case under AOC’s logic.

Of note: Some headlines about her comments are framing what she said as being specifically about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not so, although that’d be bad enough. She was quite clear in saying that riots in response to injustice are justified in many contexts, including here in the U.S.

“Once you have a group that is marginalized….once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot,” Ocasio-Cortez said about a half-hour into the 55-minute interview… “I’m not even talking about Palestinians,” she said. “I’m talking about communities in poverty in the United States, I’m talking about Latin America, I’m talking about all over the world.” “Social destabilization is what happens when people do not have a plan or feel like there’s no vision for their future,” she said.

In one sense, she’s making an elementary point. Everyone has a right to resist tyranny. Defenses of the Second Amendment are explicitly premised on the need for people to be able to defend themselves with force from the government if need be. Rarely, though, do you hear members of Congress citing specific cases in which armed resistance is justified, for the sensible reason that there are oodles of cranks out there who might perceive some encouragement towards “direct action” on behalf of their own pet cause if they heard a moral defense of it from an influential political leader.

I mean, in AOC World, practically everything to the right of full socialism is tyranny of one form or another.

You have to look at it from her perspective, though. She completely escaped accountability for how her “concentration camp” rhetoric might have encouraged that nut who threw firebombs at ICE vehicles in Tacoma, as our media’s interest in how partisan rhetoric might encourage a “climate of hate” runs one way only. That being so, why shouldn’t her attempts at incitement get more brazen? She’ll pay no penalty.

Here’s the clip. I’m excited for the “you have no choice but to riot” phase of woke populist politics!