Scary but true: the Green New Deal is coming
/Or so says Robert Spencer, and it’s dispiriting to think he’s probably right.
Democratic socialist wunderkind Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been receiving torrents of ridicule for the “Green New Deal” program she unveiled with great fanfare and media adulation on Thursday, and it’s well deserved. But conservatives may come to find that laughter catching in their throats: as stupid as it is, and as disastrous as it would obviously be if it were implemented, many powerful figures on the Left aren’t laughing. And it’s not in the least impossible that they'll bring that disaster upon the nation by trying to implement it.
…. Cortez really [has no] any significant civic, historical, or economic knowledge. But none of it matters. She is a darling of the Leftist media and a rising star in the Democrat Party. Netflix paid ten million dollars for a documentary about her. Al Jazeera has already anointed her the next president of the United States.
Is she better equipped to be a bartender (which she was not long ago) than a member of the House of Representatives? Of course. But that won’t stop her rise. The Left ridiculed Donald Trump and called him stupid all through 2016, and he was elected president. What Ocasio-Cortez has on her side is the fact that powerful people on the Left take her seriously.
For all its talk (in the FAQs provided by Ocasio-Cortez’s office) of becoming able within the next few years “to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes” and providing “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work,” the most arresting passage in the entire Green New Deal plan is this: Nearly every major Democratic presidential contender says they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee.
Those Democrat leaders aren’t laughing Ocasio-Cortez out of the room for announcing a plan that includes the intention to “upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.” They’re nodding their heads and signing on. They don’t think it will make them look just as dimwitted as Ocasio-Cortez to endorse a plan that calls for constructing “high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary." Those railway bridges connecting California with Hawaii, Australia, and Japan are going to be, like, awesome.
They’re happy to lend their names to a plan that calls for “a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases,” in other words, destruction of the existing automobile industry, as well as the aeronautics industry. And the prospect of a massive carnage of “farting cows” doesn’t seem to trouble them.
The Green New Deal as Ocasio-Cortez has presented it will never be implemented in full, because the United States would go bankrupt and a new civil war would break out before all of its recommendations could be put into place. But that won’t stop Democrats from moving in the direction of a unitary socialist state in which all means of production are in the hands of the government – for the good of the climate and the people, of course.