Ted Cruz is irritated that his idea to send law enforcement in to "secure" Muslim American neighborhoods is not receiving the universal accolades he expected, so he and/or his staff have piped up with a gigantic op-ed screed in the New York Daily News defending it. It's a good reminder of just how off the rails his party has gone.
One of the causes of this horror has been European bureaucrats restraining law enforcement from fully engaging with the Muslim community in “no go” zones.
Again, with the "no go" zones. You could fly Ted Cruz to Europe and plop him down in any one of these alleged zones where the rule of law supposedly does not apply, and he'd still vow up and down that it was a no-go zone even while ordering lunch in a perfectly ordinary cafe. Conservatism is deeply invested in the notion that Muslims (brown people) are taking over Europe (less-brown people), because it provides a nice little conspiracy theory for what will happen to 'Merica if we don't all agree to treat brown people like dirt. To wit:
Many European leaders are now recognizing that passively allowing the Islamist threat to fester was a serious error. We cannot make the same mistakes in America.
In the wake of the Brussels attacks, I called for vigorously guarding against the political correctness that has plagued Europe.
And we're already to "political correctness." If the brown people do take us over, says Cruz, it'll be the fault of the damned tolerance-pushers. You know, The Liberals.
Liberal politicians, including President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mayor de Blasio, all loudly denounced my approach. Indeed, they seemed far more outraged at my calling for us to prevent radical Islamic terrorism then they were at the terrorists who attacked in Brussels.
You may already be imagining Ted Cruz slowly morphing into Joe McCarthy as he types this up. If you weren't, you should do it now. It'll save time.
Islamism is a political and theocratic philosophy that commands its adherents to wage jihad, to murder or forcibly convert the infidels (by which they mean everyone else). Islamism is the enemy, and it must be defeated.
Another universal characteristics of modern hard-right conservatives is that they are all, down to a person, experts on the theological underpinnings of "Islamism."
[O]ver the last seven years, the focus on protecting the homeland has been lost. The Obama administration has even joined Islamist governments in sponsoring a UN resolution that would shred our First Amendment by threatening to make discussion of radical Islamism potentially illegal.
Now, you should imagine Ted Cruz slowly morphing into a Breitbart comment thread. Which isn't hard, because he's already piped up with "no go zones,” "political correctness," the nature of "Islamism,” and now the theory that the seekrit Muslim in charge of us all is going to make conservative rants against Islam ILLEGAL! ILLEGAL I TELL YOU!
He is running for president. Not of the neighborhood association, but of the whole damn country. And he's only losing because the frontrunner is loopier, more conspiracy-minded, and more racist than he is.
Finally we get to the nub of things, which is that Ted Cruz wants to expand the New York Police Department's profiling of Muslim Americans into a nationwide effort, because those profiling efforts were super-duper-successful and not at all a violation of any Amendments and were working great until The Liberals fouled it all up. And that is a fairly clear marker of how a Ted Cruz administration would run things—and is an even better marker of the pervasive conspiracy theorizing that underpins his worldview. Every last sodding thing is because of The Liberals, and every last person who disagrees with him is because of The Liberals.
After the Brussels attacks, I called out the de Blasio administration for its shortsighted capitulation to its liberal allies at the expense of the safety and security of the people of New York. In response, Commissioner Bill Bratton penned an op-ed attacking my policy in this newspaper. [...]
Bratton has a difficult job, and I am grateful for all he does to keep the people of New York safe. I also understand that politically, he has no choice but to implement the de Blasio-Obama liberal agenda. [...]
If we don’t want to become Europe, we need to put aside the political correctness, focus our efforts on stopping radicalization and do what needs to be done to keep America safe.
Do what needs to be done, the man says. Forget political correctness and do what needs to be done. Which is "securing" Muslim American neighborhoods, defined as whichever American neighborhood is a bit too Muslimy for Ted Cruz's tastes, and making sure we—wait, let's go to his own words for this one:
[...] encourage our fellow Muslim citizens to choose a different path.
While we're off imagining Ted Cruz morphing into various American demagogues and paranoia-mongers, let's point at least one other thing out. The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, held views towards "Muslim Americans" that would be non-starters on the Republican campaign trail today. He emphasized the need to differentiate between Muslim-branded terrorism and Islam, one of the world's largest religions, and in particular the dangers of demonizing Muslim Americans or portraying them as dangers to their nation. Today all such talk is deemed by his party to be machinations of The Liberals, and he would get his ass handed to him in the primaries in favor of (1) Donald Trump and (2) Ted Cruz.
If we're going to talk about radicalization, and I think we really ought to, we need to focus on a conservative radicalization that has left the Republican landscape a cratered wasteland of conspiracy theories, bigotries, and scrapped prior beliefs. When one of Donald Trump's campaign chairs is tooling around the country praising the armed overthrow of the American government, maybe—just maybe—we've found a hotbed of terrorist-sympathizing extremism that needs to be looked into.