“They want to take your pickup truck,” Sebastian Gorka said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.”

What the heck? They’re coming for our hamburgers?

The annual CPAC gathering is known for producing eye-popping rhetoric, but sometimes it’s so eye-popping that it sparks interest beyond the conservative-activist bubble. This is one of those times.

Gorka, a Fox News talker and former assistant to President Donald Trump, was ginning up opposition to new Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” proposal, which seeks dramatic investments in clean-energy jobs, technology and infrastructure.

Conservatives, in general, are not onboard. They question the overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is warming and that human activity is chiefly responsible. And they fear disruption of the fossil-fueled-based economy.

As for why Gorka believes a clean-energy economy would mean the confiscation of our pickup trucks and hamburgers -- well, we’re not sure about the trucks. With the burgers, he’s probably referring to the fact that livestock are responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s global greenhouse-gas emissions. When Ocasio-Cortez announced her “Green New Deal,” her staff put out a jokey fact sheet that mentioned the challenge of bringing down emissions “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows.” And Ocasio-Cortez did offer up the blasphemous suggestion that “maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

This much we know for certain: Gorka is wrong that the late Soviet dictator dreamed of eliminating the hamburger. Wrote the Washington Post:

Joseph Stalin was unambiguously pro-hamburger: In the 1930s, he sent his food-supply commisar on a research mission to the United States, which resulted in kotleti, a Soviet rip-off of the classic ground-beef burger, being popularized throughout Russia.

Britain’s The Independent also weighed in, pointing out that Trump’s former aide is “incorrect in singling out the humble hamburger as an emblem of Bolshevik disapproval. At one time, the regime positively envied the all-American lunch option and considered it a model meal: simple, affordable and nutritious.”

Of course, the actual facts about Stalin’s views of the American burger did not matter to those listening to Gorka’s speech.

“You are on the frontlines of the war against communism coming back to America under the guise of Democratic socialism,” Gorka declared.

The assembled rose in unison to cheer his speech -- and chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A.!”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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