Fresh from gazing into her crystal ball, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has delivered what she calls “A Message from the Future.” It’s presented in a slick video about how she saved the world via her Green New Deal, a work she narrates with the cocksureness of a 20-year-old boxer boasting about how he’s going to whoop a (in reality) superior opponent. Unfortunately, were her prescriptions ever followed, it’s our civilization that would suffer a knockout.
In the 7.5-minute propaganda film, put out by the Intercept and presented from a perspective of approximately 20-years hence, “the radical socialist, in partnership with comrades Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, and Kate Aronoff, has gone bananas in appointing herself the global conservator of Planet Earth,” as American Thinker puts it.
Ocasio-Cortez 2039 related that the Democrats took both chambers of Congress and the presidency in 2020 and then gave us the “decade of the Green New Deal,” which sparked the “social and ecological transformation [necessary] to save the planet.”
“‘Lots of people gave up, they said we were doomed,’ she said after blaming fossil fuel companies like Exxon for saddling the public with the cost of climate issues,” Fox News relates. “‘But some of us remembered that as a nation, we’d been in peril before — the Great Depression, WWII — we knew from our history how to pull together to overcome impossible odds,’ she said.”
“Her plan included public works projects, a ‘federal jobs guarantee,’ and Medicare-for-all, which she predicted would become ‘the most popular social program in American history,’” Fox also tells us.
AOC’s future is also full of bullet trains — which failed in California — a “universal child care initiative,” and, onward un-Christian soldiers, an “Americorps climate” army (video below).
Marketing the video, the Intercept asks, “What if we actually pulled off a #GreenNewDeal? What would the future look like?” Apparently, not very male or white.
While Ocasio-Cortez trumpets how in 2019 she entered the most “diverse” Congress in history, every representative “depicted in the video is female. The ‘children’ from her district are all female. All the fat-cat oil and banking and political figures she demonizes are white men,” American Thinker also reports.
The site continues, “Writing for the Jacobin magazine in February 2019, the film’s writer, Kate Aronoff, called America’s energy CEOs ‘mass murderers.’ The artist incorporates this sentiment and the message ‘white men are the bad guys’ in the film’s drawings. The anti-capitalist, anti-corporation theme runs through the video from start to finish.”
Just as how “diversity” here, Newspeak-style, excludes certain groups, the overall message of the video is a complete inversion of reality. It’s not just that Ocasio-Cortez’ Green Leap Forward would have an estimated price tag of $93 trillion, four times our national debt. It’s that the “whole climate crisis is not only Fake News; it’s Fake Science,” as former president of Greenpeace Canada Patrick Moore put it; moreover, pursuing Ocasio-Cortez’ prescriptions globally could “result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth,” as he also warned.
Social-media users were quick to weigh in on Ocasio-Cortez’ lightweight thinking:
We were all going to die in 12 years back in the 70s, the first time they tried this b..s.
— Nickarama (@Nickarama1) April 17, 2019
See Venezuela
— JohnG (@jgoose514) April 17, 2019
Disturbing level of delusions, fantasy, and egotism displayed here by @AOC .
She thinks that she and she alone knows how everyone else should live. She thinks everyone else isn’t capable of deciding how to spend their money or behave so she must force them. #Totalitarian
— Abbadon21 (@EVEProGuides) April 17, 2019
Best satirical children’s fairytale EVER. pic.twitter.com/2vFeCzd06e
— Chicks On The Right (@chicksonright) April 17, 2019
Unfortunately, while it’s easy to poke fun at the congresswoman (and sometimes justifiable), demagoguery that could kill millions is no laughing matter.
Ocasio-Cortez certainly isn’t brilliant, but she’s not dumb as much as she’s ignorant. She has her assets, too: She’s relatively articulate and, though opponents might be loath to admit it, she has charisma. This is no surprise. It was reported that she was handpicked to run for office, open-casting-call style, out of 10,000 applicants by a leftist group called the Justice Democrats. The point?
As with virtually all politicians, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t rise based on knowledge and wisdom, but on acting, self-marketing, and speaking ability and comfort in front of the camera.
As to her cocksureness about life, the universe, and everything — including precognitive capacities — there’s a name for a person with little knowledge who thinks he knows it all, who fancies he knows better than those with far more experience and even more than the sum total of wisdom distilled through millennia.
A modern teenager.
This is no snide shot. Far from the days of 12-year-old provisional naval captain David Farragut, modern civilization stunts people’s moral, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development; thus is adolescence extended today into the 20s and beyond.
A modern teenager may be overconfident and arrogant because, as the saying goes, “A little knowledge is dangerous.” He has greater knowledge than a child, but not enough — and not sufficient wisdom — to grasp how little he knows. He doesn’t understand the full complexity of the world; the law of unintended consequences; Chesterton’s Fence; how speciousness can deceive us; how man’s nature thwarts utopian plans; or how nine “out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes,” as G.K. Chesterton put it. He’s juvenile.
Ocasio-Cortez exhibits in her video just precisely this youthful idealism — the modern, Hollywood-enabled, new-age notion that we can do anything “if we just believe.” The details don’t matter. The naysayers are just harshing her mellow. Don’t be a buzzkill — let’s just do it! It’s what Professor Thomas Sowell has called “arrogant ignorance.”
But life is not a movie, and reality can be tougher on you than your permissive parents. As to foretelling the future, if Ocasio-Cortez thinks she can, she doesn’t know the past.
Far greater minds than hers have predicted environmental/man-authored doom, as Professor Walter E. Williams illustrated in “Environmentalists’ Wild Predictions.” After mentioning that environmentalist Nigel Calder warned decades ago that the “threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” Williams continued:
C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
If you were a gambler, would you take even money that a 29-year-old socialist’s doom-and-gloom prognostications are correct today?
Image: screenshot from YouTube video