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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had some harsh words on Monday in response to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., recent comments on billionaires.
“Well, there’s a village somewhere that’s missing its idiot,” Cruz said on his podcast “Verdict.” “What she is saying there is bizarrely foolish and profoundly ideological.”
Cruz was responding to Ocasio-Cortez claiming that billionaires like Elon Musk didn’t “earn” their wealth without some “abuse” of the system.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced backlash for her comments on billionaires last week. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday. “You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth…you have to create a myth of earning it.”
After receiving pushback, she doubled down on her comments, claiming that the original American Revolution was fought against “the billionaires of their time.”
“I want to talk about how this is in the heritage of our country, because America was founded… you look at Thomas Jefferson writing to Madison in revolt of British aristocracy,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist.”
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Sen. Ted Cruz responded to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on his “Verdict” podcast. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Cruz, who called out her comments on X when they went viral, elaborated on his opinion, explaining that many of the “billionaires” at the time largely helped to fund the Revolutionary War.
“No one had accumulated a billion dollars, but the richest people in America are the people who funded and supported the revolution against government power,” Cruz said. “And like the little Marxist that she is, she takes that story and turns it on its head and says the revolution was against the American free enterprise that actually funded the revolution, and what they were fighting for was giving government more power. She is the King George in this story.”
The Texas senator also accused Ocasio-Cortez of pushing communism by attempting to rewrite history and warned her that communistic nations have delivered devastating results.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her claims after being criticized. (Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“AOC, I’m sure she doesn’t know the facts, but every place her system of government has been implemented, communism, the result is crushing poverty, starvation, suffering, misery, and it’s also in terms of human rights, murder, torture, imprisonment and in China, at least concentration camps. That’s literally what the left is arguing for. And they don’t know enough, and they’re not honest enough to admit it,” Cruz said.
Digital reached out to Ocasio-Cortez’s office for comment.
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After her comments claiming billionaires didn’t “earn” their fortunes received criticism, Ocasio-Cortez defended her claims on X.
“The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers,” she wrote. “Some people get enraged that I draw attention to this. That’s on them. Let them call me shrill, dumb, inexperienced, girly, uneducated — these folks will say anything to distract from or undercut the truth that working people are getting screwed, and giving people a fair shake means we must have a grown conversation about reigning in abuse of power.”
