Ted Cruz Calls AOC 'Village Idiot' Over Billionaire Wealth Comments

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a village idiot on Monday for her 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 responded to Ocasio-Cortez's Thursday statement that billionaires like Elon Musk did not "earn" their wealth without some "abuse" of the system.

"You can’t earn a billion dollars," Ocasio-Cortez said. "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."

Facing criticism, she stood by her remarks and tied them to the American Revolution.

"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."

Cruz, who first criticized her on X after the comments went viral, said the richest people in America at the time funded 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 accused Ocasio-Cortez of pushing communism by rewriting history. He warned that communistic nations have caused poverty, starvation, suffering, misery, murder, torture, imprisonment and, in China, concentration camps.

"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," Cruz said. "That's literally what the left is arguing for. And they don't know enough, and they're not honest enough to admit it."

Fox News Digital reached out to Ocasio-Cortez's office for comment.

After backlash, Ocasio-Cortez defended her position 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."