The Left only cares about its agenda. They aren’t bright in other regards.
And now a braindead Democrat Congresswoman gets utterly humiliated by this history lesson.
A History Lesson From Congress
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added a new chapter to her ongoing war with factual accuracy this week, telling an audience that the American Revolution was “against the billionaires of their time” — a claim that drew immediate, detailed, and remarkably entertaining rebuttal from historians, commentators, and anyone who has spent thirty minutes reading about the founding era.
The comment came in the context of AOC’s broader argument that accumulated wealth is inherently illegitimate — the same thesis she advanced on a recent podcast when she argued that billionaires “can’t earn” their money and that fortunes are built through “abuse.” The American Revolution framing extended that argument backward in time, implying that the Founders were proto-socialists waging class warfare against the wealthy elite. The problem with this interpretation is that it is, in almost every particular, the opposite of what actually happened.
The American Revolution was not a revolt of the poor against the rich. It was organized, financed, and led by some of the wealthiest men in the colonies. John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, was widely regarded as the richest man in Massachusetts — his fortune built on a vast merchant shipping empire. Robert Morris, who signed the Declaration and is often called the “Financier of the American Revolution,” was the wealthiest person in America in 1776. He ultimately nearly bankrupted himself using his personal fortune, his shipping fleet, and his financial networks to fund the Continental Army. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, another signer, presided over a 10,000-acre Maryland estate. George Washington was arguably the wealthiest president in American history — a distinction he reportedly holds in competition with Donald Trump.
These were the “billionaires of their time.” They didn’t fight against themselves. They pledged, in the Declaration’s famous closing words, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” — and many of them lost all three.
The Revolution They Were Actually Fighting
Senator Mike Lee of Utah put the historical correction plainly: “No, AOC, the American Revolution was NOT ‘against the billionaires of their time.’ It was against a large, distant, overly intrusive government that recognized no limits over its own authority to tax, regulate, and eat out the substance of the citizens it claimed to serve.”
That is, in fact, what the revolution was about. “Taxation without representation” — the animating grievance of the colonial resistance — was a complaint about government overreach, not private wealth. The colonists objected to Parliament imposing taxes on them without their consent, not to wealthy individuals making fortunes. The ideological foundation of the revolution, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and later in the Constitution, was the limitation of government power and the protection of individual rights — including property rights. This is almost precisely the opposite of the democratic socialist framework AOC is trying to retroactively impose on the Founders.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana offered the kind of assessment that requires no elaboration: “I think she’s the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle.”
The Larger Pattern
It would be easier to dismiss this as a casual misstatement if it weren’t so consistent with AOC’s broader pattern of presenting ideologically convenient historical claims with supreme confidence regardless of their accuracy. Thomas Sowell — the economist and social theorist whose analysis of exactly this kind of argument has aged remarkably well — offered the relevant observation, shared widely online in the wake of AOC’s Revolution remarks: “As I listened to her, I was amazed that there seems to be no factual issue as far as she is concerned. She just pronounces things to be so and that’s the end of it.”
The American Revolution was the founding act of a nation built on limited government, individual liberty, and the protection of private property. Its leaders were, by the standards of their time, among the wealthiest people on the continent — and they risked everything to create a constitutional republic, not a redistributive state. AOC’s version of 1776 is not history. It’s a talking point wearing a tricorn hat.
