Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez adviser challenges Tucker Carlson on Green New Deal claim

An adviser to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Friday night fact-checked Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to his face for peddling falsehoods about the Green New Deal being proposed by left-leaning Democrats.

Robert Hockett, a Cornell University law professor, explained how a claim repeated in the conservative media that the deal ― which aims to render fossil fuels obsolete by 2030 ― wanted to completely replace air travel with rail travel was incorrect.

Carlson noted that the deal proposes “building out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel would stop becoming necessary.” Hockett replied it was “apparently being misunderstood, right? We are really talking about expanding optionality here, we are not talking about getting rid of anything, right?”

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“We are talking about basically making it cost-effective to move into more modern forms of technology, more modern forms of production, which would then enable people actually cost-effectively to transition to that stuff,” Hockett added. “We are not talking about requiring anything or prohibiting anything. That’s sort of 1980s-style environmentalism.”

Hockett explained how the aim was really to obtain carbon neutrality. “Then good, then I’m glad, it’s nice to have a smart person on the show to explain this,” Carlson replied, in a tone that some people on social media have suggested was sarcastic.

The segment of the proposal that Carlson had been quoting came from a Green New Deal FAQ document that Ocasio-Cortez’s staff initially posted on her website and then removed, saying it had just been a draft. The final text of the resolution doesn’t include the phrase about air travel becoming no longer “necessary,” but does say it aims to “remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in ... high-speed rail.”

Carlson also questioned Hockett about several other details in the since-removed FAQ, and he pushed back against them. The AOC adviser later told The Daily Caller he and Carlson had been discussing “different documents.”

This story has been updated to include additional details about the documents Carlson and Hockett were quoting from, and to explain their discrepancies.

• This article originally appeared on HuffPost.