I was excited to check out Ryan Grim’s newest book The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. As a person on the left, the last 5-10 years have been the most hopeful in my lifetime, so I was interested in reading something about progressives in the American congress.

Boy, this book was depressing at times.

It was nice to see that progress is being made at the electoral level. Not enough, obviously, but there is some. Still, my god, the pushback from Democratic leadership in the House under Nancy Pelosi against nearly everything that Congresspeople like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman (among others) proposed is infuriating.

It is nice to know that it sounds like there is a better relationship between “the Squad” and the leadership team of Hakeem Jeffries, but Pelosi’s hatred at least seems to be out of power.

One of my big takeaways early from this book is that Nancy Pelosi’s so Russia-pilled that her brain is partially leaking out of her head. In her first sit down meeting/lunch with AOC, Pelosi spent nearly an entire hour ranting about how she thought the “Abolish ICE” protests were “Russia’s plan”. Sure thing, Nancy!

The other major takeaway for me in this book is that the various progressive groups — from abortion rights to environmentalists to voting rights to healthcare groups — melted down from internal squabbles just when they needed to form a unified block to deal with Joe Biden’s inauguration.

I think Grim did a good job at setting where the progressive movement was at an electoral place from the 2016 US Presidential election through the 2022 Midterms. The book does a great job of picking the major event of the time and giving you the background of things from various progressive perspectives.

You can pick up the book here.