U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday night suggested what she admitted may be a “radical idea” to help fight the coronavirus outbreak.
“All private hospitals should be made public for the duration of the virus,” the Minnesota Democrat wrote on Twitter.
She said a government takeover could help address “some of the pressures our healthcare system is facing.”
Omar offered no specifics on how the takeover of private property would be achieved, but critics on social media quickly reacted that Omar’s plan sounded like communism.
“Here is another radical idea,” one Twitter commenter wrote. “Let’s admit that communism doesn’t work and that it caused the #ChineseVirus.”
“So you can run them in to the ground?” another wrote.
“Spoken like a true Castroite,” a third commented.
Omar has given her presidential endorsement to Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont who has drawn criticism for past statements in support of the late Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba, as well as Daniel Ortega’s socialist rule in Nicaragua.
Both Sanders and Omar have spoken in support relieving student debt and providing Medicare for All, proposals that critics have derided as giveaways for which taxpayers would foot the bill.
At Sanders campaign rallies, Omar has called for a “mass movement of the working class” to defeat President Trump and “Western imperialism.”
Seizing private property from citizens is a hallmark of many communist and socialist governments.
About a year ago, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, another Democrat, pitched the idea of city government seizing some buildings from landlords in a proposal that critics derided as “straight communism.”
“My first reaction was: Is this communist Cuba?” state Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, who ran against De Blasio in the 2017 mayoral race, and is now running for Congress, told Fox News at the time. “I can say that as a daughter of Cuban refugees who fled Castro’s Cuba in 1959, this is what happened to her family, she had her home taken, my grandfather had his gas station taken.
“This is extreme even for Mayor de Blasio,” she added, “because we know that he has socialist leanings, but this is straight communism and I think it’s very scary to America-loving, democracy-loving people.”
Earlier Tuesday, Omar called for freeing ICE detainees and other prisoners amid the pandemic. Later, de Blasio said New York City’s Rikers Island prison would release 300 inmates.
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