“No justice, no peace!” is a chant commonly heard at Antifa/BLM-led “protests” in response to officer-involved deaths. The common assumption when one hears the slogan is that the left-wing agitators at these often-violent demonstrations will back off of antagonizing the police and local communities if the officer in question faces harsh punishment instead of being cleared by various investigations or being found not guilty during their trials.

But even those who have done mere cursory observations of Democrat tactics over just the last couple of decades alone know that actual “justice” for Democrats doesn’t come from the guilty verdicts they claim to want. There is a “long game” associated with calls for “justice,” and that “long game” involves radical policy changes that include disarming citizens and law enforcement and, if they can intimidate public figures enough, defunding the police and putting crime “solutions” in the hands of supposed “community leaders.”

It’s a gigantic bowl of dumb that had disastrous consequences in Democrat-run cities like Minneapolis last year, where all the negative talk about the local PD from public officials as well as the city council’s vote to begin the process of defunding the police in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd contributed to a 21% violent crime spike.

But making crises worse — and then ruthlessly exploiting them for maximum political gain — is one of the things Democrats do best. Their “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality was perhaps best exemplified by two people today after the Derek Chauvin guilty verdicts were read. One was MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson, who my RedState managing editor Jen Van Laar wrote about earlier, and the other was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose comments explaining why today’s verdicts weren’t justice can be viewed below:

‘This is not justice’ @AOC reacts to #chauvinverdict pic.twitter.com/HIhYxPUx3R

— Caity McDuffee (@CaitMcDuffee) April 20, 2021

“This isn’t justice,” @AOC says in an Instagram live. “Justice is George Floyd going home to his family tonight.”

“I don’t want this to be framed as the system working—b/c it’s not working.. It’s really important that this verdict is not used as a replacement for policy change.” pic.twitter.com/SkMoOkDuyu

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 20, 2021

AOC further explained her position in a tweet:

That a family had to lose a son, brother and father; that a teenage girl had to film and post a murder, that millions across the country had to organize and march just for George Floyd to be seen and valued is not justice.

And this verdict is not a substitute for policy change. https://t.co/tiDkhl9Dk4

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 20, 2021

What’s the message AOC and her fellow radical leftists are really pushing here? Don’t stop what you’re doing. Keep agitating. Keep rioting. Keep working to make elected officials fearful of what you might do to them if you don’t give in to their policy demands.

It’s very similar to the comments that landed Rep. Maxine Waters in hot water, when she called for Minnesota rioters protestors to “get more confrontational” in the event Chauvin wasn’t found guilty.

In effect, this was AOC saying the quiet part out loud, which unfortunately will lead to much more chaos and violence orchestrated by the hard left in any city where local officials allow mob rule to be a substitute for clear-headed thinking.

What those officials will learn is that no matter what they do it will never be enough. Because it’s not about “justice” and it’s certainly not about “peace” to rioters and their high-profile supporters like Waters and AOC. It’s about using tragedies to implement radical “progressive” changes in our society that will turn this country into something only a perpetually unhappy, authoritarian socialist like AOC could be proud of.

Related: Today’s House Vote on Censuring Maxine Waters Just Proves the Worst About Democrats