Cruz blasts Kerry for 'arrogant' statement that solar power job is 'better choice' for workers

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Ted Cruz blasts John Kerry for 'arrogant' comment about job losses

Texas Republican also tells 'Fox News Primetime' to prepare for massive personal tax increases

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, ripped Biden climate czar and former Secretary of State John Kerry on "Fox News Primetime" Wednesday over what Cruz described as degrading comments about blue-collar workers whose jobs were abruptly cut when President Biden canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline permit.

At a White House press conference earlier Wednesday, Kerry claimed industrial and energy sector workers are victims of a "false narrative" based in Trump-era economic policy.

"They have been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense," Kerry said. "No, it's not. What is happening to them is happening because of other market forces are already taking place."

"It is not a unifying message, and it is not doing the job we should be doing [in] fighting for working men and women in this country," said Cruz.

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Kerry went on to explain that the workers at risk of losing their jobs should have considered more appropriate jobs in areas that are more likely to be helpful to a future green economy.

"You look at the consequences of black lung for a miner, for instance, and measure that against the fastest-growing job in the United States, [which] before COVID was the solar power technician," Kerry said. "The same people can do those jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice."

"What an arrogant, out-of-touch statement for a centimillionaire to say," Cruz shot back. "You know, 'You little people, you know, I don't like the choices you're making,  and so your jobs go away,' as John Kerry said right there. Quelle surprise that the Democratic elites have decided that blue-collar workers, that union members, that men and women with calluses on their hands, they've made the wrong choices, in John Kerry's words."

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Kerry gained much of his wealth after marrying Teresa Heinz, the multi-millionaire widow of ketchup company scion Sen. John Heinz III, R-Pa., who died in a 1991 plane crash near Philadelphia.

"I've asked multiple Biden nominees what they would say to the union workers who just lost their jobs because Joe Biden decided they didn't deserve a job," Cruz told host Maria Bartiromo. "And essentially nominee after nominee after nominee has said, 'Well, tough luck.'"