Chris Cuomo Calls Out Super PAC Head for Hypocrisy of AOC-on-Fire Ad: ‘This Is Toxic Politics, You Must Know That’

CNN’s Chris Cuomo clashed with the head of the New GOP Faces SuperPAC, Elizabeth Heng, calling out her group’s incendiary ad that analogized Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s democratic socialist policies with the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime: “This is toxic politics, you must know that.”

The ad, which aired in a few, select cities during the 2020 Democratic debate in Houston, Texas, has drawn widespread rebukes and stinging criticism for its implied threat against the New York Congresswoman. Cuomo zeroed in on the hypocrisy of a political attack that tried to condemn violence while simultaneously stoking it with personally destructive imagery.

“Here’s what I don’t get. I get you that want to make political points,” Cuomo said. “But socialism doesn’t mean shoot you dead in the streets.”

“It has evolved,” Heng said. “You know, when Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was talking about socialism in that country, he was promoting many of the same ideologies.”

“But it’s not going to wind up in genocide,” Cuomo countered, before noting that President Donald Trump, whom Heng praises, might not have even let people like her Cambodian immigrant parents into the country had he been president at the time.

“Your fight is with the president that you support,” he said. “He’s the one who talks about people, like your parents, like they’re some other that shouldn’t be in this country because they came here with nothing except the hope in their heart and wanting to make it. He doesn’t want those people in this country now. AOC isn’t your enemy.”

“I don’t believe this, Chris,” Heng responded,

“You may not believe it, but it’s the truth, Elizabeth.”

“I don’t believe this,” Heng repeated. “I stand by the president. The thing is with the president he defends — he fights against socialism in every turn that he can.”

“But he embraces dictators everywhere he finds them!” Cuomo shot back, before offering a litany of examples of Trump praising or accommodating violent, authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Philippine dictator Rodrigo Duterte.

“You know, I’m not going to — I’m not here on the show to talk about some of what the president is doing from a foreign policy standpoint,” Heng said, trying to change the subject.

“Do you what want to do,” Cuomo responded, moments later. “But the idea of saying if you want a Green New Deal, if you want single-payer health care, you’re going to wind up killing people in the streets like what happened with my family and people they knew in Cambodia. That is toxic politics, you must know that.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.