Today, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chose disgrace.

Charlie Cooke and I wrote at length yesterday about the obscenity of Elizabeth Warren’s response to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brad Thompson. Warren’s on-the-record response, you will recall, was “Violence is never the answer, but . . .” at which point she proceeded to mount an utterly vile series of political arguments, labeling the deranged, politicized act of a child of enormous privilege an opportunity to warn that America was “in danger” if it didn’t abolish private health care. It was the hatefully insensitive act of a cold, bloodless academic who sees every tragedy — even an ultimately unrelated one — merely as an opportunity to ply her own ultraprogressive grievances. It transcended mere bad taste and felt like an authentic moral enormity.

So, let’s also proudly induct Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the club, for today she chose disgrace. In an interview outside the Capitol this afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez went on the record with her take on the Thompson murder, and, much like Elizabeth Warren, she likes big “buts” and she cannot lie:

This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them. People go homeless over the financial devastation of a diagnosis that doesn’t get addressed. When we talk about how systems are violent in this country, in this passive kind of way, our health care system is like that for a huge amount of Americans.

As I am often fond of saying, Read that one again, folks. Amazingly, Ocasio-Cortez’s response somehow managed to be almost as repulsive as Warren’s while remaining perfectly in sync with it. (You have to hand it to AOC: She’s not about to be outperformed by some shriveled bag of bones like Warren in the “Most Viably Progressive” branding sweepstakes on the Left.) Being told “no” by an insurance company — something I have been told many times, with no better answer to turn to — is now commensurate to an act of violence, and for no other reason than the fact that we culturally ceded the commonsense definition of the term to activists and affectedly wounded fauns like Ocasio-Cortez over a decade ago. What does the “violence” of pumping five slugs into the back of a stranger merely for holding the wrong symbolic job really mean, Ocasio-Cortez asks us to consider, compared with the “passive kind” of violence of the health care system?

Understand that AOC is every bit as much a moral vacuum as Elizabeth Warren; she is merely a more telegenic and less intellectual version of the same political type. Unfortunately, these are the sorts of people who can do very well in national politics, and my greatest concern about her is that she is far better at getting away with these sorts of appallingly inhumane, instrumentalist political positions than the charmless, humorless Warren. I don’t fear Warren, despite her awful politics and terrible utterances, simply because I recognize that she is supremely unpersuasive as an advocate on a human level. I think conservatives need to genuinely fear Ocasio-Cortez, who with big eyes and a petulant shrug can seemingly glide from one awful position or compromising public statement to another with all the ease of a soap bubble floating emptily in a sink full of tepid dishwater.