Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the stage at the Democratic National Convention a little after 9:30 p.m. Monday, smack dab in the middle of primetime.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, was relegated to a speaking slot outside of the coveted broadcast window nearly two hours later.

The striking contrast of their scheduling said a lot — not just about Biden’s and AOC’s personal trajectories, but about the ideological course of the Democratic Party.

In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, we’ve seen a concerted effort to recast Harris as the kind of candidate that moderates can unreservedly pull the lever for.

Within hours of Biden stepping aside and endorsing her, The New York Times published a puff piece explaining “How Kamala Harris Rose as a California Moderate.”

Harris’ communications team has been hard at work slowly recanting the radical platform she ran for the White House on back in 2019.

And her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has had his far-left record papered over by his Midwestern affect.

But the optics of Monday night betrayed the true nature of both the Democratic Party and its standard-bearer.

This is not a party trying to persuade moderate voters, appeal to them or make concessions to their values.

Instead, it’s trying to dupe them.

Ocasio-Cortez was treated to a hero’s welcome on the stage Monday, and her speech — which featured plenty of her signature economic demagoguery condemning “two-bit union busters” and lauding “working people,” but also saw her tout Harris’ “tireless” work toward a euphemistic “cease-fire” in Gaza — received rave reviews from the media chorus.

“Once an outsider, AOC now has the entire DNC hall chanting her name,” HuffPost’s Daniel Marans observed on X.

At The Nation, Jeet Heer declared that she had cemented herself as part of “the future of the Democratic Party.”

“I think the young congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, may have a prominent future in American politics,” submitted Matthew Yglesias in what was meant as a wry understatement.

“AOC is the closest thing to Obama level speechmaking talent in Democratic politics today,” gushed activist Armand Domalewski.

“Damn,” offered Obama alum and Pod Save America bro Jon Favreau, “AOC knows how to give a speech.”

Of course, the fact that Ocasio-Cortez is enjoying a coming-out party of sorts at a convention celebrating Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket should come as no surprise.

Five years ago, Harris campaigned for the presidency as an AOC-style Democrat, endorsing Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal, flirting with the Defund the Police and Abolish ICE movements, and showering Ocasio-Cortez herself with praise.

Asked about Ocasio-Cortez’s support for income tax rates of up to 80%, Harris gushed that the congresswoman was “challenging the status quo,” calling the effort “fantastic.”

Even after her own White House hopes had gone down in flames, Harris kept up the bit, urging Americans to send their hard-earned cash — in the midst of a pandemic — to a bail fund that later sprung murderers and rapists from prison.

It’s been this new Harris campaign’s operating theory that it can put all of the veep’s past leftist foolishness behind her by never letting her be pinned down about the kinds of policies she would implement from the Oval Office.

That’s why nearly a month after becoming the presumptive nominee, her website still says nothing about what she hopes to accomplish as president, and why she’s yet to sit down for a single major interview or stand for a single press conference. 

But AOC’s address — and Democrats’ celebration of it — has betrayed the party’s true direction with Harris at the helm.

That the proud socialist’s shining moment came at the expense of Biden was doubly symbolic.

In 2020, Biden was the only viable non-radical candidate to seek the Democratic nomination.

Four years later, his presidency and his legacy have been undone — in no small part because he embraced an unpopular progressive agenda that has produced chaos abroad and suffering at home.

And as a final indignity, Biden was kept off the stage until everyone but the true Dem diehards had turned off their TVs, so that his party could begin to lay the groundwork for their new, far-left wing to take the reins.

The only question that remains is whether Americans will heed the warning signs before their eyes — or let Democrats off the hook for hiding their radicalism behind a smokescreen of platitudes.

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.