Forget Karl Marx. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Thomas Jefferson is her favorite political thinker.

The freshman lawmaker gushed over the American founding father during a Facebook Live video taken while at the Washington D.C. Women’s March in 2017. She was not a public figure at the time and still working as a bartender in Union Square.

“Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite presidents,” AOC says while her and friend Maria Swisher visited the Jefferson Memorial. “I love Thomas Jefferson because [of] his just voracious curiosity about the world.”

“Jefferson was a progressive. Yeah. And that’s like beyond party,” she continues. “Progressive values know no party.”

Ocasio-Cortez praised other presidents, including her political “bae” Abraham Lincoln.

She even had something nice to say about conservative Ted Cruz.

“Sometimes I think Ted Cruz is a little nerdy in how he talks and people point that out. But it’s because, you know, for what it’s worth, Ted Cruz is a constitutionalist. And politics aside, that dude loves the language of documents,” she said.

AOC didn’t have much to say about Jefferson’s other activities, such as fathering children with his slave Sally Hemings.

“I wont make any Jefferson jokes about that. I’ll bite my tongue,” she says, after someone makes a veiled reference.

Additional reporting by Hannah Milic

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