I missed the Chris Hayes special with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on MSNBC last Friday, but I saw a clip of Hayes introducing AOC that sparked my interest.
“… [I]nto the vacuum has come a bold new policy proposal that might be the most controversial thing in American politics at the moment. You’ve probably heard about it. It’s called the Green New Deal. It envisions a carbon zero economy by the middle of the century and a transformation of the American economy and indeed society. Some people call it a socialist monster, some people call it our only hope for survival here in the way of life that we hold dear.”
In addition to the glowing praise for leftist ideology, there was something else that was familiar in this speech. It took me a few seconds, but eventually I realized that Hayes was quoting me. It was my column for Real Clear Politics that had called upon America to quickly “slay the socialist monster” that is the Green New Deal rather that wait for the inevitable chaos, death and poverty that would follow were it ever to be implemented.
Whoa! That’s weird. I couldn’t find the episode online, but I found the transcript and proceeded to enter the Twilight Zone between fascism and socialism where AOC preaches her Politics of the Apocalypse to anyone who will listen.
What quickly became apparent to me is that Ocasio-Cortez is dangerous. She is Barack Obama with a head start. He sort of casually told us off the cuff that he planned to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, but he left the details to our imagination. What most voters imagined was a land where racism had disappeared, where Democrats and Republicans all joined hands and sang folk songs together, where taxes went down an spending went up — and then we got eight years of “meh.”
But AOC is different. As she told Hayes, “in a lot of what the Green New Deal is, it’s about shifting our political, economic, and social paradigms on every issue.” That’s because, “we don’t have time to wait, we don’t have time for five years for a half-baked you know, watered-down compromise position.”
In other words, we don’t have time for another Obama. The next time Democrats get power, it’s gonna be pedal to the metal to the end of time (or as Hank Snow put it, “Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street”).
When AOC talks about the Green New Deal, she isn’t talking about the climate. She is talking about income inequality, social justice, racial justice, Medicare for all, free college, and as she puts it, a “comprehensive reshaping of American economy and society.” And if the world is really going to end in 12 years as she claims, it won’t be from climate change — it will be from the vast overreach of the Green New Deal. Destroy America and you have gone a long way toward wiping out the world we know.
So yeah, I’ll stick with the language I used last time. The Green New Deal is a socialist monster, and if Republicans accede to one inch of it, they are bigger fools than I already think they are.
HeartlandDiaryUSA.com hosts the commentary of Frank Miele, the former editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. Your support for this blog is appreciated. Please consider purchasing one of my books at Amazon. My new book is “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?” — a look at Fake News from the perspective of a small-town newspaper editor. In addition, my “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy documents the downward spiral of the USA that made Trump’s presidency so important. The books are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. Go here for a free sample of “The Media Matrix”: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/sitb/B07PDQBJM4
