It was five years ago today, April 17, 2019, that the Intercept collaborated with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on one of the most cringe-inducing pieces of political propaganda I've ever seen. I'm speaking of course about "A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" the 7 1/2 minute film aimed at presenting the Green New Deal as a fait accompli and a turning point in American history.

Professor of Climate Justice Naomi Klein wrote a forward for the film as a "green dream," an art project whose main goal was helping people overcome their innate skepticism of utopian fantasies.

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like then?

This is a project unlike any we have done before, crossing boundaries between fact, fiction, and visual art, co-directed by Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt and co-written by Ocasio-Cortez and Avi Lewis. To reclaim a phrase from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it’s our “green dream,” inspired by the explosion of utopian art produced during the original New Deal…

We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late.

Was the film a success? It has been viewed just over 1 million times but there's no telling how many people were laughing while watching it. One commenter noted it was sad to see someone writing fan fiction about themselves and that's really what it feels like. AOC wrote this using herself as a kind of framing story, an inspirational figure who is looking back on her accomplishments some decades later. This is a fantasy with clear heroes and villains and she is the hero. The villains are, of course, fossil fuel producers.

It begins on a bullet-train from New York to DC with an aging AOC reminiscing about a time before she was the most important person in the world. The villain in this fairytale is the dark energy (aka oil) and Exxon as a kind of dark knight wielding its power. Absent from this story is any recognition of the positive results of all the cheap energy fossil fuels have provided. The high standard of living into which AOC was born and the personal freedom that comes with it doesn’t merit a second’s thought. AOC is basically calling the most productive, creative, free time in world history complete rubbish and she’s doing it without even a nod to the role oil has played in that. In her story, fossil fuels are a purely negative force.

There is a bigger villain lurking behind the scenes, though it is never named. Capitalism is presented as the real source of everyone's problems and that becomes clear almost exactly midway through the film when AOC narrates how we can save ourselves from a terrible future. "The only way to do it was to transform our economy, which we already knew was broken since the vast majority of wealth was going to just a small handful of people and most folks were falling further and further behind," she said. Then she adds of this implied socialist revolution, "It was a true turning point."

There has, at least in my opinion, always been a clear sense that the Green New Deal was about saving the planet by ending capitalism. AOC herself said as much back in 2018: "it’s inevitable that we can use the transition to 100% renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America. That is our proposal and that is what we are here to do." The push for full socialism is the only thing that makes sense of the GND.

There’s a skeleton key of sorts that makes sense of this odd leftist wish list. It’s called capitalism. Really, making sense of this jumble of a proposal is that simple.

The reason much of the document seems to be aimed at rearranging the economy far beyond the already extreme measures that would be required to fight climate change is, I believe, that AOC sees capitalism as the root of the problem. And if capitalism is the root, then it’s not enough to cut emissions or install more solar panels. What you need is to end capitalism by reducing air travel, giving jobs to people even if they won’t work, guarantee free health care, free college, affordable (government subsidized?) housing, and using whatever’s left to repair historic oppression. Because if you do all of that, there is no capitalism left...

The secret of the Green New Deal is not that it’s an odd grab bag of unrelated priorities, but that it’s an even more extreme proposal than it appears to be. This isn’t a plan to save the planet, it’s a plan to save the planet by ending capitalism.

Again, we know this is what AOC really believes because she's made it clear. The best future, in her view, is a future in which we've evolved beyond "hyper-capitalism."

Which brings us back to this short film. It's one woman's fantasy about a future in which all of her beliefs were proven right and the US undergoes a peaceful transition to green socialism thanks in part to her leadership. The similarity between AOC's 10-year-plan and the 5-year-plans of Chairman Mao is something that still bothers me:

As propaganda films go, it’s certainly visually appealing. Imagine what Chairman Mao could have done with YouTube if he’d had it during the Great Leap Forward. Of course, millions of people wound up dead during the Great Leap, but don’t let that put a damper on AOC’s vision of a new economy overnight. Ten-year plans to totally revamp the economy are very different from five-year plans that someone else had in the past. Don’t let your mind wander, comrade! Instead, remember your place in the great struggle and trust that the Party is creating a glorious future for everyone. It’s already done.

Democrats did take the White House in 2020 but five years after this was released are we really halfway to AOC's dream? I don't think so. We do have a lot more electric cars on the road but most of them were made by a guy AOC and the left now consider public enemy #2 (and even he is having trouble at the moment). So I suspect this is going to look even sillier in five more years, but at the halfway point it's already pretty cringe.