evidence: I’m not sure that AOC was ever strongly attached to the label or identity of "socialist" to begin with. According to Take Up Space, AOC only joined the Democratic Socialists of America in early 2018, "around the same time she was seeking its endorsement." The book also notes that AOC said: [...] Young people today tend to reject capitalism in favor of socialism. But socialism can’t just be a negative rejection of capitalism in rhetoric and a synonym for a kind of generic "progressivism" as limited by the Democratic Party. As AOC said in a 2020 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, "We don’t have a left party in the U.S. The Democratic Party is not a left party." Just as the Democratic Party is not a left party, the DSA is not a political party. We have to build an independent working-class party. The work of building this working-class movement includes supporting a third-party leftist candidate for president, such as Jill Stein, Claudia De la Cruz, Cornel West, or Joseph Kishore.