Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a new take on the American Revolution, and it sounds a lot like her old take on everything else.

Speaking Friday at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics alongside Democratic strategist David Axelrod, Ocasio-Cortez declared that the colonists who broke from Britain were really waging a class war. The Founders, in her telling, were not fighting a distant, unaccountable government. They were fighting rich people.

“The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time,” she said.

There is a lot wrong with that sentence, and critics were happy to walk through it. The American colonists revolted against the British Crown and Parliament, not against wealthy individuals. Their chief grievance was taxation without representation, imposed by a government an ocean away that offered them no voice. Many of the Founders themselves were among the wealthiest men in the colonies. George Washington was one of the richest people in America when he led the Continental Army. Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Thomas Jefferson were men of considerable means. The idea that they launched a revolution against people like themselves requires ignoring most of what actually happened.

The New York Post reported on the remarks and the swift backlash:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made the comments during a Friday appearance at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics with Democratic strategist David Axelrod. Ocasio-Cortez said the American Revolution was “against the billionaires of their time” and added that her side was declaring independence from “an extreme marriage of wealth and the state.”

Critics responded that the Revolution was about British government power, taxation without representation, and monarchical control, not a war against wealthy people. The report pointed to founding-era wealth as part of the rebuttal, including George Washington and other Founders who were among the richest figures in the colonies. Senator Mike Lee said the Revolution was not against billionaires but against a distant, overly intrusive government with no limits on its power to tax, regulate, and consume the substance of citizens it claimed to serve. Senator Ted Cruz also responded that a ninth grader writing that answer on a history test would get an F, and that the Revolution was financed in significant part by American free enterprise.

Senator Mike Lee’s response was direct and worth reading in full:

Lee’s framing is the one that actually matches the historical record. The Declaration of Independence lists grievance after grievance against King George III and his government. It says nothing about wealthy colonists being the problem. The entire document is an indictment of state power exercised without consent.

Senator Ted Cruz put a finer point on it, saying that any student who wrote Ocasio-Cortez’s answer on a history exam would receive a failing grade. He noted that the Revolution was a revolt against oppressive government and that American free enterprise helped finance the war effort itself.

But the billionaire remark was not the only thing Ocasio-Cortez said at the University of Chicago. She also laid out a broader economic vision that sounded like a warm-up speech for something bigger.

The Daily Caller reported on the fuller scope of her comments:

Ocasio-Cortez recast the American Revolution as an uprising against the ultra-wealthy rather than against an overreaching crown. During the University of Chicago conversation she argued the country needs to revisit older tax structures because taxation involves “the construction and organization of oligarchy in the economy.” She added the caveat that she was targeting the system rather than individual wealthy people, a familiar rhetorical move that lets the speaker attack wealth while maintaining plausible goodwill toward the wealthy.

The congresswoman has made similar arguments elsewhere. On a recent podcast she declared, “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” claiming that fortunes of that size necessarily come from rule-breaking and labor abuse. Ben Shapiro pushed back, arguing that billionaires become wealthy by innovating, taking risk, and offering better goods and services at prices people choose to pay. Ocasio-Cortez also sidestepped questions about a 2028 presidential run during her sit-down with David Axelrod, saying her ambition was “bigger than that” and that she wanted to change the country through policies such as single-payer health care, living wages, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.

That last detail is the quiet part. “Her ambition was bigger than that” is the language of someone already looking past a House seat from New York. She may dodge the 2028 question for now, but the policy wish list she rattled off reads like a platform, and the revolutionary framing she keeps reaching for tells you exactly how she sees herself in the story.

A longer clip of the remarks confirmed the full context of what she told the Chicago audience:

What Ocasio-Cortez is doing here is not complicated. She is retrofitting the founding of the country to justify a modern progressive economic agenda. If you can convince people that America was born out of a revolt against the rich, then every policy aimed at redistributing wealth becomes patriotic by definition. It is a neat trick, but it requires rewriting the actual history.

The American Revolution was fought against a government that taxed without consent, quartered soldiers in private homes, dissolved colonial legislatures, and denied basic rights to its own subjects. It was a revolt against concentrated state power, not concentrated private wealth. The men who signed the Declaration risked their fortunes, their reputations, and their lives to limit the reach of government. That story does not help Ocasio-Cortez’s argument, so she told a different one.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
 

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