Ben Stein on Tuesday claimed policies advocated by freshman lawmaker Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)“invariably lead to bad things,” including genocide.
The actor, former speechwriter to President Richard M. Nixon, and political commentator even made comparisons to Adolf Hitler.
Ocasio-Cortez has made headlines for advocating higher marginal tax rates of up to 70 percent on earnings past $10 million in income as well as a “Green New Deal” to tackle the climate crisis.
But in a Fox Business clip posted online by Media Matters, Stein claimed her democratic socialist politics will lead to dictatorship and genocide:
“We have a society in which there are an awful lot of people who have no idea that Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung all came to power promising the same kinds of things that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is promising. And it led to mass murder, it led to dictatorship, it led to genocide. These promises are old promises and they invariably lead to bad things.”
Stein said the current system “works extremely well” and “allows people to make something of themselves instead of oppressing other people” as they try to earn money.
“Making money is one of the most of harmless things there is to do in the whole world,” he said. “And that’s what our society is about.”
Stein added:
“It’s not about ordering people around, putting them concentration camps. What do you do if a person is a richer or poorer person? What do you do? Do you take him away? Do you shoot him? Well that’s what the communists tried, it didn’t work out very well for them.”
During an event honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) cautioned the audience that climate change would “destroy the planet” by the year 2031 if people fail to address a generational challenge she likened to “Word War II.”
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’” Ocasio-Cortez told interviewer Tanehisi Coates at an “MLK Now” event in New York.
The timeline Ocasio-Cortez referenced was likely based on a U.N. backed report, released last year, that predicted the consequences of man-made climate change would become irreversible in twelve years if global carbon emissions are not immediately and dramatically reduced.
The 29-year-old self-described democratic socialist went on to attack the Democratic establishment for failing to act in a sufficiently aggressive manner to combat what she believes is an immediate, existential threat.
“Right now, with the current administration, with the current circumstances, with the abdication of responsibility that we’ve seen from so many powerful people, even people who abdicate that responsibility by calling themselves liberal or a Democrat, or whatever it is, I feel a need for all of us to breathe fire,” she said.
Since upsetting six-term incumbent Representative Joe Crowley (D., N.Y.) in November, Ocasio-Cortez has frequently utilized her massive social media following to publicly challenge the more centrist members of her party, drawing condemnations from senior lawmakers.
Much of the intra-party dissension centers around Ocasio-Cortez’s focus on developing a so-called green new deal to address climate change by transitioning the U.S. to purely renewable energy within the decade. She was rebuffed by party leadership after publicly demanding, just days after arriving on Capitol Hill, the creation of a specific committee to address the issue.
The comments didn’t sit well on Twitter:
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