That said, we aren’t for a moment fooled into thinking that Cruz actually believes any of the stuff he says. He might, in other words, be formally disqualified from having an entry here; yet his own persona is so entangled with nonsense and lunacy that we can’t very well completely skip him either. So just to cover the basics: Cruz is, since 2013, the junior United States senator, representing the Tea Party and whatever clown train serves his agenda, former solicitor general of Texas (2003–2008) under Governor Rick Perry, son of Rafael Cruz, failed 2016 Republican presidential candidate and general villain (former Speaker of the House John Boehner described him as “Lucifer in the Flesh”) who has managed to become enormously influential in the Republican Party. Cruz was also one of six senators who voted to help Trump try to steal the 2020 election. There is a rich array of episodes that each would sum up his general character (“What do you call that thing where a person has neither a moral center nor the social skills to conceal that fact?” was his college roommate’s summary), one of them occurring in early 2021, when Texas was hit with an unusually severe winter storm that left four million people without power and caused multiple severe infrastructure failures: Cruz decided to escape nagging voters by going on vacation to Cancun, Mexico, and when criticized for his decision, promptly blamed his daughters, which turned out to be a lie.
For our purposes, however, Cruz’s most notable trait is his science denialism. And note: Cruz has served as Head of the Senate Subcommittee for Science, Space, and Competitiveness. As what is ultimately the head of NASA, Cruz quickly asserted that NASA should completely forget about climate change or Earth sciences (then-director Charles Bolden had to explain to him why he is an idiot), and focus exclusively on the parts of the solar system that won’t produce data that conflicts with what he likes to believe. And Cruz does not (at least not officially) believe in climate change. He has spent large amounts of tax payer money on circus-show-hearings to question the objectivity of climate science, and has even compared himself to Galileo and climate scientists to Flat Earthers: “Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers. It used to be [that] it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.” Yeah, it’s the Galileo gambit, and no: Cruz does not know who Galileo was, what Galileo claimed or who Galileo was arguing against. And it’s not the only stupid thing Cruz has said about climate science, of course; he has also said that“And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem cause the science doesn’t back them up. And in particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming. None whatsoever.” It’s a surprisingly common claim for one so devoid of foundation in reality.
Cruz has also called net neutrality “Obamacare for the internet”, which is an unusually stupid thing to say for someone (even) in his position.
On a personal level: According to himself, 9/11 made Cruz like country music because, apparently, rock music reacted badly to 9/11. “These are my people,” said Cruz of country artists. They are not his people.
Sorry, but this is as much Ted Cruz as we can stand. We’ll just add that as of 2023, he hasn’t gotten any better. Not by a long shot.
Diagnosis: “I do think in the media there is a tendency to describe conservatives as one of two things: stupid or evil”, said Cruz and promptly devoted himself to showing how to be both.