"White hat" and "Black hat" is a very confusing way to look at things. It creates in your mind a belief that someone is either fully evil or fully committed to a fight against evil. Rather than looking at who a person is, it encourages formulating expectations of their role/behavior.
AOC is a character designed to draw attention. She is someone the dems can't ignore, yet also can't get rid of in the classical manner. The full gamut of disinfo and extortion have been launched at her - and largely been ineffective. She isn't a female lefty Trump. She is also not a corporate stooge.
If you look at what the democrats were doing with the GND before AOC was a thing, then you will come to understand just why the democrats have been so vehement in trying to destroy her. The GND was supposed to be set up alongside a restructure of the federal reserve. The plan was to collapse the dollar into the Carbon Credit and use it as the basis for a global financial and taxation system.
The real fun part was the carbon sequestration plan, but that would likely take 200 years or more to take shape. Anyway - AOC gutted that shit and placed the funding burden on taxation, rather than making the "revenue neutral" plan involving the Federal Reserve to be on the books. This all assured the bill would die.
The rest of her antics are just fun, like her defining a concentration camp for the media. Rather fun to see the media's "trump is a nazi" narrative torpedoed in a single tweet by insinuating illegal immigrants are like the Jews.