Last week, Hillary Clinton unveiled an energy and environmental policy platform that sounds like an updated version of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, except it moves away from modern industry while carrying out its repressive goals.
Forced leftward by the success of Bernie Sanders and the “bear is loose” mentality inspiring Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, Clinton’s proposal is as offensively statist as it is “ambitious.”
A main plank of Clinton’s plan is to harness the power of the sun like never before. By increasing production from solar energy to 140 gigawatts by the end of 2020, President Clinton promises her followers the equivalent of adding 140 nuclear reactors to the grid without any of the trade-offs inherent in burning carbon (as long as you don’t count exploding birds).
A Retread of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans
The specificity of her ambitions, the assumption of divine right to command America’s energy production, and the chilling consequences for her opponents should set all students of history on edge.
In November 1927, according to the Library of Congress, Joseph Stalin began his “revolution from above” by calling for rapid industrialization of the Russian agrarian economy. His goal was a 250 percent increase in overall industrial development, with a 330 percent increase in heavy industry alone. Clinton’s solar boondoggle, meanwhile, would be a 700 percent jump in solar capacity. You can’t say it isn’t “ambitious,” eh?
How and where does Clinton plan to build out the infrastructure for the 500 million solar panels she wants America to rely on? Well, the Obama administration, in coordination with its cronies in the “green energy industry,” has already begun forcing more solar on federally subsidized housing projects. To reach her goal of 250 million homes outfitted with solar, Hillary will just have to up the ante.
If she can win a national election with the statist rhetoric she’s employing, she may just have a mandate for forced reorganization of land-use (President Obama is laying the groundwork on that, too).
You know who else liked using government coercion to put land to better use? Returning to the Library of Congress, we learn:
The First Five-Year Plan also called for transforming Soviet agriculture from predominantly individual farms into a system of large state collective farms. The Communist regime believed that collectivization would improve agricultural productivity and would produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Collectivization was further expected to free many peasants for industrial work in the cities and to enable the party to extend its political dominance over the remaining peasantry.
Stalin focused particular hostility on the wealthier peasants, or kulaks.
So don’t worry, the “wealthy” will be the ones whose McMansions and estates are confiscated to create the Solar Farms of the Future®. Well, they’ll be first, at least.
Complete With a Smear Campaign
To complete the Stalinist trifecta, Clinton will require some political enemies to distract the attention of her opponents and her media sycophants. In “A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End,” Peter Kenez summarizes this phase of the first Five Year Plan, writing, “the centerpiece of the campaign [against the ‘old intelligentsia’] was a series of trials, in which the accused were compelled to confess to imaginary crimes.”
Fortunately, Hillary Clinton will not be usurping the courts to try individuals for espousing climate skepticism. But she and her followers can discredit her foes in the court of public opinion and make their ideas just as verboten as Stalin did his enemies’. Unsurprisingly, she has already begun this abhorrent campaign to smear and other-ize her potential Republican opponents.
In an online video released with her climate plan, Clinton mocks the Republican candidates’ skepticism (formerly a hallmark of “science”) and deems herself, like a character left on the “Wizard of Oz” cutting-room floor, “just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain,” who accepts “the settled science of climate change.” As the Left has already attempted to outlaw independent thoughts about same-sex “marriages” and transgender rights, watch for Hillary to push the bounds on banishing “deniers” from the public square.
The nakedly statist rhetoric of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is an homage to the groundwork laid by progressives over the last seven years. Emboldened by a radically progressive President Obama and facing only token opposition in the form of congressional Republicans, the totalitarian Left is ready to enact their agenda. Hillary is riding the wave, and she may be just the dictator we deserve if the American people don’t recognize her policies for what they are: an utter repudiation of liberty, free will, and self-determination.
