It’s easy to chalk up the Green New Deal as a naïve wish list put out to get headlines and Twitter attention by a 29-year-old who should be demanding a tuition refund and a senator who seems to be decades past his sell-by date, but other Democrats are chiming in with cautions, including many of the 2020 presidential wannabes.

This could simply be an effort to distance themselves from the most ridiculous of what they realize is being viewed by most people as a farce, or it could have been a deliberate and coordinated strategy to shift the negotiating plateau. They could have decided to harness the 29-year-old, whose radical, socialist-based set of proposals are so outrageous that when other far-left Democrats modify it a bit, they will come across as “centrist.”

The unfortunate fact is that people, particularly Millennials and Gen Xers, are more receptive to radical climate-change proposals, punitive taxes on the “rich,” single-payer health care, government-guaranteed jobs, and soaring debt levels than the GOP may think. It’s what they have been brainwashed to believe by our institutions of higher learning for decades.

So the GOP would be idiotic to dismiss the Green New Deal as folly and try to just laugh it off. It needs to be confronted, compared with conservative positions, and called out for what it is at its core — phony science and unsupported doomsday claims that lead to a government takeover of every aspect of our lives and utter loss of freedom. That’s no exaggeration. When the government controls jobs, income, health care, climate, and education, it controls everything.

The GOP needs a positive counter-agenda. Remember the 2018 elections. In essence, the GOP platform was that the economy is humming, we need a border wall because otherwise caravans with bad people will pour into the country, and Democrats are unhinged (witness their outrageous behavior at the Brett Kavanaugh hearings).

Do you really wants folks like that running the country? Democrats responded simply with coverage for preexisting conditions (the GOP had a perfectly acceptable, slightly different approach that accomplished the same thing, but never got that message out) and a promise that they were not like the jerk who spends his days sending out revolting tweets. Enough suburban women and Millennials bought the Democrat sales pitch. Guess how that all worked out?

The GOP also needs a better communication strategy because the media will never help. In the last few days we have seen the media skew things even more than its normal left-wing spin. The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling putting a stay on a state law regarding abortion limits was characterized as High Court affirmation of late-term abortion, with Justice John Roberts as the Left’s new swing-vote darling.

The law, similar to one in another state that the Supremes had already struck down, would have put such strict conditions on abortion clinics that it could easily be seen under Roe v. Wade as an undue burden. All the Supremes did was follow precedent and send the case back to the lower court. They didn’t affirm anything about late-term abortion. And frankly, as long as Roe is the governing law, I probably would have voted with the majority as well.

A casual comment in a court hearing by a Robert Mueller staffer hinting that their probe is still investigating quid pro quos between Trump and “Russian” representatives over sanctions and the treatment of Ukraine was turned into a full-page article claiming Trump is a Putin puppet, and prison time is just around the corner. Obviously, there is a conspiracy between Trump and the National Enquirer to trash Trump’s sworn enemy, Jeff Bezos. After all, the publisher of the National Enquirer is a “close confident” of Trump, so there you go.

The real problem in Virginia is that a GOP state senator edited a newsletter in college 40 years ago that had pictures of folks in blackface. Shameful.

Three experienced business associates of Trump offered pro bono advice a year ago to the head of the Department of Veterans Affairs regarding possible private-sector alternatives to running the VA. How dare them. Of course, they are now being investigated by the Democrat Congress for violating some obscure FACA act, and the media is outraged.

Matthew Whitaker has a week to go in his temporary role as attorney general, but that didn’t stop the Democrat Congress from grilling him on his obvious illegal collaboration with Trump to undermine the Mueller probe, and the media piled on.

There are so many positive things the GOP should be building its case around. Being proactive on that is a must in the face of radical Democrat proposals that are being endorsed at least in part by every 2020 candidate. It’s also thought of as reasonable by more voters than the GOP thinks. The overlay is big picture, not granular.

What kind of country do we want to be?

The GOP can grab the high road by being unabashedly proud of American freedom, sovereignty, and limited government. Contrast that with the radical Democrat platform that will turn the country upside down and take the lead on those few targeted programs that make sense, like government-funded cash pools to take preexisting conditions out of the private health-care system.

If the GOP does that, it will leave the inevitable far-left Democrat 2020 nominee nowhere to go but the unelectable full socialist corner, with coattails that put the rest of the Democrat congressional candidates in the same boat. It’s a recipe for taking back the House and winning 45 states.