In Europe, you will often hear politically savvy people refer to Green Party politicians as "watermelons." The reason is that although they might be environmentalist "green" on the outside, these leftists are secretly communist red if you look beneath the surface.

They typically resort to such subterfuge because environmentalism is more popular than Marxism. A former East German communist is bound to be unpopular, but perhaps not so much if he rehabilitates himself as a renewable energy enthusiast.

The case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, is different in that she openly advertised herself as a socialist in a country with a well-grounded historical aversion to such alien ideologies. But her grand policy initiative, the $93 trillion Green New Deal, was still billed as if it were a legitimate environmentalist idea. We were supposedly trying to save the world from imminent destruction. As Ocasio-Cortez herself put it, "We're, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change."

She would have us think, then, that this is a conversation about science. We need the Green New Deal, or else humanity is doomed. But now we know a lot more about this proposal, and it appears that that isn't what the Green New Deal is about at all.

Her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti (the brains and the money behind her political operation ever since her 2018 primary victory) divulged in an unintentionally blunt comment in the Washington Post that the Green New Deal was not only not based in the science of climate change, but in fact not even designed with climate change in mind. "[I]t wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he is quoted as saying.

In other words, it's not that they looked for a way to save the world, and just happened to find a way that involved full employment pledges, the retrofitting of millions of buildings, income for those unwilling to work, high-speed passenger rail, and the curtailment of plane travel and carnivorousness. That's precisely backwards. The Green New Deal came about because Chakrabarti wanted to transform the U.S. economy into something more primitive, and environmentalism struck him as the best excuse for doing so.

Think of the Green New Deal as an updated (and we hope less lethal) version of the "Year Zero" concept. Americans will be reassigned under a new socialist order to environmentally friendly tasks. The saving of the planet is not the goal of the Green New Deal but rather the excuse for it: the common purpose around which we all unite to pursue the deindustrialized, Utopian America of tomorrow.

And we need that Utopian socialist society because ... wait, why exactly? Because of the despotic cruelty of our tsar and the grinding poverty of his recently enslaved subjects? Because none of the peasants own any land in our impoverished feudal society?

That doesn't seem right, does it?

Perhaps the problem is that workers' wages are at all-time highs and unemployment is at all-time lows. Or perhaps it's that our nation is so poor and bereft of opportunity that everyone who can walk or even crawl is literally risking life and limb and crossing deserts to get here.

Well, then. Now we see why the Green New Deal was sold as an environmental bill, and in general, why the "green" part of the watermelon is always kept on the outside. Like all socialist schemes, Chakrabarti's "Year Zero" is the answer to a question no one is asking and which no one sane would ever ask.

This is why attention-grabbing socialists such as Ocasio-Cortez should not be taken seriously as policymakers and that you shouldn't listen to anyone who claims that the world is going to end unless you immediately pass my bill.