Elizabeth Heng, founder of Republican-affiliated PAC New Faces GOP, joined CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Friday night to discuss backlash generated by her group’s recent ad, which shows Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bursting into flames.
The ad, which aired during Thursday night’s Democratic debate, was heavily criticized for its depiction of a photo of Ocasio-Cortez catching fire and burning away to show harrowing images from the Cambodian Civil War in the 1970s that Heng’s father fled. In it, Heng can be heard saying, “This is the face of socialism and ignorance.”
“Ms. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the face of socialism,” Heng repeated on Cuomo’s show. “Throughout history, socialism has killed lives, including those in my very own family. And so I was merely wanting to force the discussion of talking about what true socialism is in our country and to force that debate.”
“You are so well educated. You know that you can talk about socialism any way you want,” Cuomo countered. “Pol Pot was a brutal autocrat and dictator. That wasn’t about socialism. That was about him being an evil human being. You can go to Scotland or Denmark and see socialism. They are not killing people. Why paint with that kind of brush against a set of ideas coming from a Democrat in your own country?”
“And that’s the thing, is Pol Pot learned socialist ideologies in France and wanted to create a utopia, and quickly that evolved into the murderous regime it became,” Heng shot back. “We need to have this conversation in this country what socialism has become in this country. We have seen how that doesn’t work.”
When Cuomo pointed out that “socialism doesn’t mean shoot you dead in the streets,” Heng replied, “It has evolved.
“And so the point of this is to not — to force a discussion because I do believe that through freedom and economic opportunities that this country has provided to myself, my family, and many others is what we need to hold on to to strengthen for our country so that people have opportunities,” she said.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Cuomo said. “Your fight is with the president that you support. 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. You can go after policies.”
Heng, however, wasn’t convinced.
“I don’t believe this. I stand by the president. The thing is with the president he defends — he fights against socialism in every turn that he can,” she said. “Look, socialism has always been disguised in these topics of making life better, et cetera, but in reality they don’t work.”
She said, “We’ve seen that time and time again. The more that you implement government into our lives, the less freedoms and economic opportunities we have to succeed. And that is what I’m going to work as hard as possible and that’s why I created the New Faces GOP path to recruit the future generations of the next Republicans that are going to be the anecdote to the AOCs and the —”
Cuomo cut her off to say, “The idea of saying if you want a Green New Deal, if you want single-payer healthcare, you’re going to wind up killing people in the streets like happened with my family and people they knew in Cambodia. That is toxic politics. You must know that.”
“I just disagree with you on that,” Heng said. “I was merely making the point of — I was merely making the point, Chris, that it is — do you want to know what insights violence? That’s socialism. We’ve seen that.”
