I think where the criticism of AOC is completely valid, completely valid, and where I'm glad that people on the left would criticize her is to say, where are you in criticizing US policy?

Maybe you can justify voting to send weapons to Ukraine to repel the Russian invasion.

What you cannot justify is complete silence on the US refusal to try and negotiate a diplomatic end to the war.

I think that isn't defensible. I'm quibbling here with the protesters for focusing narrowly on the kind of arguable thing, which is the vote to send weapons, versus the thing that I think is totally not arguable, which is clearly in the wrong, which is not speaking up against the existing United States policy on Ukraine.

I mean, I hear what you're saying. I think the problem is that sometimes when you charge folks with not talking about something enough,

this is kind of what in a very different subject, but also a Newsy subject this week. This was a silverman kind of got in trouble for tweeting the other day.

She says, why is it only Jewish people who are calling out anti-Semitism when it happens? She was specifically talking about the Kanye West tweet and video and all the things.

And a bunch of people responded, well, we do say this. We do say this. And that's that's the problem. When you charge someone with, why doesn't anybody ever talk about this, there's always somebody who's talking about it, and it's very easy to make the case that the charges in bad fate.

That the criticism is in bad faith, because you're always going to find, be able to find a counter example, and especially when you're talking about someone like AOC who has so much broad liberal goodwill attached to her, and who is kind of in this interesting space in the public sphere, where she has, I think, arguably more support from the mainstream Democrats, then a good chunk of the left, not all of the left.

Obviously, a lot of the left is still very enthusiastic about her. But this shift is happening where she's been embraced more tightly, I think, almost by the mainstream.

And so you're going to get in the place where it seems like you're being unfair, you're just harranging this woman who gets a lot of harassment, like legitimately so from people who are not making arguments against her and bad faith.

And so there's something specific about the charge about her vote, which are uncontroversial. You voted for this aid.

But I think the vote can be justified if we took World War II and we said, like, the United States policy towards Japan of demanding unconditional surrender and dropping atomic bombs was a hideous policy.

I mean, I think it's totally indefensible. I think a lot of what the United States did in the bombings of Germany and Japan, which is totally indefensible from a winning the war perspective.

If I was in Congress, however, and I faced with do I vote to continue funding World War II or not, I think it is arguable whether your job is to like vote against continuing to fund the US war effort in World War II, or whether your job is to staunchly critique and demand changes to that policy, even as you say, well, I'm not going to vote to like cut off arms to the US forces in the Pacific and in Europe.

So I think the vote on arms is debatable, but I don't think she has said anything, critiquing the Biden administration is incredibly dangerous refusal to push the parties toward negotiations in Ukraine.

And I think that's not a bad faith criticism. It's a real criticism of things she hasn't done or said.

What some people say when the World War II example is raised is that a reality that exists now that didn't exist then is that the opponent has nuclear capabilities now.

So if you said in a World War II context, we're going to fight this in war to the bitter end, the obvious human life lost the toll, the genocide that's going on requires us to fight until our last resources exhausted.

That looks slightly different in a world without the potential of nuclear holocaust nuclear fallout than a world with one.

How do you reckon with that? This isn't World War II. This isn't a holocaust that's occurring right now.

But whether or not the fact of the in-game being potential world obliteration does that change at all the calculus or how we come to think about what our role in this should be as a nuclear power?

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