Progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) think they must “destroy American conservatism” by “destroying” the legacy of former President Ronald Reagan in order to win back the White House in 2020, presidential historian and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley said Monday night on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

The Democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is one of the Left’s fastest rising stars. She went after Reagan during an event at the South By Southwest event in Austin, Texas, over the weekend.

The congresswoman somehow decided to claim that Reagan’s policies “pitted” white, working-class Americans against African-Americans and Hispanics.

“So you think about this image of welfare queens and what [Reagan] was really trying to talk about was … this, like, really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, that were ‘sucks’ on our country,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“It gives people a logical reason, a ‘logical’ reason to say, ‘Oh yeah, no, toss out the whole social safety net,'” Ocasio-Cortez added.

Related: AOC Says FDR’s New Deal Was Racist and Reagan Aimed to ‘Screw Over All Working-Class Americans’

Shirley and Ocasio-Cortez got into a Twitter spat as the historian defended Reagan and his policies on Monday.

“There is no evidence that @AOC ever picked up a book on President Reagan, so she would not know he received over 43 percent of the Hispanic vote in 1980,” Shirley tweeted on Monday. “There is no evidence that @AOC ever picked up a book on President Ronald Reagan, so she would not know the @washingtonpost and the @NYT wrote lengthy articles exposing the massive corruption of the Welfare Queen of Chicago, Linda Taylor, to whom Reagan was referring.”

“There is no evidence that @AOC ever picked up a book on President Ronald Reagan. So she would not know that Reagan’s economic policies did more for African-Americans and Hispanics than any other president in U.S. history,” Shirley added, along with several other tweets.

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The congresswoman replied to Shirley on Twitter.

“Ok great, now talk about Reagan and: Iran-Contra + The gutting of our mental health system + The explosion of homelessness under his watch + The crack epidemic … Maybe instead of insinuating I’ve never read a book, be open to the idea that we’ve read different ones,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

Shirley told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Democrats understand “that for them to win, they need to destroy American conservatism.”

Related: Ocasio-Cortez Says American Society Forces Women to ‘Act Like White Men’

“And that means destroying Ronald Reagan’s legacy. So she knows what she’s doing,” Shirley said of Ocasio-Cortez.

Shirley accused the Democratic socialist of uttering “a panoply of so many just wrong-headed things” about Reagan and conservatism.

“The real point is to knock off conservative heroes, right?” Ingraham said. “And it’s part of the tradition, the DNA of conservatism, correct? So when you want to remake a country, remake a history, rip down statues,” then you “look at everything in today’s context.”

Democrats want “a total transformation of our country,” including “the remaking of our history,” Ingraham warned.

And Ocasio-Cortez spoke “with such gratuitous meanness about one of the most beloved presidents of the past 50 years.”

“There is a concerted, across-the-board effort in the Democrat Party to demonize the entire American experience and the American tradition by degrading anyone and anything that doesn’t pass their own radical muster,” Ingraham added.

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