The Brains Behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Saikat Chakrabarti 

By Robert Wenzel

I have previously posted that the socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been using, in a very skilful manner, Leninist type tactics to advance her socialist cause.

Those attacking her for being ignorant, simple, etc. miss the point. She knows nothing about economics or doesn't care. Her game is completely about politics and the power game.

To understand this, you need to understand how she entered the race that allowed her to capture New York's 14th congressional district seat.

The short answer is she entered a contest or to be more precise her brother entered her name. The contest was run by a group called Justice Democrats to determine who they would support in the 2018 mid-term elections.

Justice Democrats identifies as a progressive group (read: "democratic socialist" group). They don't know anything about economics or how the structures of societies work and what must occur in different structures, but they are very savvy about political activism and politics.

Here is a recruiting video they are now using. It is AOC and the leadership of Justice Democrats, "AOC's brains," explaining how they operate. To understand what is going on now in politics you must view this video. Pay particular attention to the guy in the green T-shirt.

 

The guy in the green T-shirt is Saikat Chakrabarti a co-founder of Justice Democrats. He graduated from Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

He spent about 10 years in Silicon Valley where he co-founded Mockingbird (hmm Mockingbird), a web design tool, and then built up the product team at the payment processor Stripe.

He then left to work on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign as director for
organizing technology. It is believed that most of Sanders' momentum during the 2016 campaign occurred after Chakrabarti started launching social media campaigns. It should be remembered that in early 2015, Clinton held a 60-point lead over Sanders. Then Bernie pretty much closed the entire gap.

From Inquisitr before the mid-term elections:

The software developer [Chakrabarti] explained the challenges faced by the Sanders campaign in organizing the huge groundswell of
grassroots support the candidate received and his part in
developing technological solutions to aide in managing it. As
an example, he described software he created that aided
volunteers in finding other volunteers who lived nearby. The
director explained that, before the Bernie Sanders campaign,
he wasn’t sure if other candidates had ever placed anyone in
a director of organizing technology position... 

Chakrabarti explained that in the early going of the Sanders presidential campaign, and all presidential campaigns, efforts are focused on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, where the first Democratic primaries are held. He said that, at the time, there were million of volunteers in other states, all wishing to help out. As the Sanders campaign deployed field staff into the battleground primary states, Chakrabarti designed “distributed team” software that helped organize those in other states to make calls into battleground states, greatly multiplying the efforts of volunteers available in primary states alone. As the primaries continued, the efforts of volunteers around the country were redirected to states needing the most support.

This is important (my bold)

Chakrabarti explained his view that what corporate
Democrats miss about the Sanders campaign is that “Bernie
Sanders is able to tap into something that creates
enthusiasm,” including a “pure” message and a track record
to back up his words. The director stated the intention of
Justice Democrats to follow the same model, with no
corporate or billionaire funding and going after a “big” goal,comparable with the political revolution espoused by Sanders.

The Justice Democrats game plan in 2018 was to support as many extreme lefty candidates as possible across the country and see who rose to the top.

In the 2018 elections, 26 of the 79 candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats won their respective primary elections. Seven of these candidates won in the general election: Raúl Grijalva, Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal.

AOC was the big winner. The  Justice Democrats created a kind of Darwinian race in 2018 and she came out on top.

Chakrabarti is now AOC's chief-of-staff.

Here are a few other things that Chakrabarti has stated. He has said he doesn't care how many races that Justice Democrats support that result in losses. It is all about advancing as far as one can and continuing the advance.

Also, as far as all those extreme positions that AOC takes, he says they are all poll tested first. In other words, they sort of look into their socialist handbag pull out extreme ideas and then test them to see which ones the public will support. It is a Leninist tactic adjusted for the 21st century. Pure (evil) genius.

It is why AOC was so comfortable calling for a 70% marginal tax rate. She had Chakrabarti and the poll numbers behind her.

Sound economists and others who are in an uproar over the idiotic policy positions of AOC entirely miss the point. She is on a march to introduce socialism and it doesn't matter what extreme position she takes as long as it meets three criteria: It must advance the country toward socialism, create excitement and poll well. Chakrabarti is making sure those conditions are met and he is making sure new followers are snagged as quickly as possible.

The last time I reported in on AOC's Twitter followers, about two weeks ago, she had just over two million followers. She now has over 3 million. This is bad. This is no time to cheer on the goofy policy positions and minimalist tax cuts (questionable if there were any cuts for much of the middle class) of President Trump. It is time for an aggressive counter-offensive against the socialists and other lefties. I will discuss that tomorrow.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of

EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty.  More about Wenzel here.