Welp, AOC - or at least the ambitious, public version of her - is furious.

In a dramatic social media clip circulating this week, the New York congresswoman warned that Republicans "do not know the sleeping giant they just awakened" after Southern Republicans moved aggressively to reduce Democratic representation through redistricting efforts.

"It is time for the North to pull up to the South," she declared ominously from behind bulletproof glass, calling recent Republican moves merely "the opening silo."

(She apparently meant salvo.)

Of course, there is a kind of silo that can also fire a salvo!

The problem with AOC's rhetoric is not simply her hyperventilation combined with her lack of English acumen. It's her breathtaking historical amnesia. The Right did not invent this style of politics. They learned it.

For years, Democrats have operated under the assumption that aggressive institutional hardball was perfectly legitimate so long as they were the ones wielding it. Media pressure campaigns, lawfare, court-shopping, cultural intimidation, corporate coordination, activist bureaucracies, partisan district engineering - all of those things have been treated as normal political behavior. When Obama weaponized it, media marveled at his savvy and shrewdness.

Then Republicans started responding in kind, and that is the dynamic many like AOC still seem psychologically unable to process.

Consider: Despite only possessing a handful of districts in most of its states, heavily-Democrat New England already effectively eliminated meaningful Republican congressional representation long ago.

Democrats already played the maximalist version of this game, gerrymandering the snot out of other portions of the country as well.

In other words, the "scorched earth" phase did not begin in Texas or Florida.

AOC speaks as though Republicans are uncorking something dangerous and unprecedented. But what she is actually witnessing is retribution politics arriving at her own doorstep.