Ahh, Ted Cruz.
The Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate has been at the center of much of the commentary around the deadly Planned Parenthood attacks, during which Robert Lewis Dear allegedly killed three people and injured nine others before uttering “no more baby parts” while in police custody. Cruz, who has spent a good deal of the election season fanning the flames of false claims against Planned Parenthood, responded early with the bizarre claim that Dear was a transgender leftist activist. Well, Cruz was back at it again on Monday, refuting the claim that anti-abortion rhetoric had any role in the shootings by making the claim that “most violent criminals are Democrats.” According to The Hill:
“Here is the simple and undeniable fact – the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats,” he said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that evening.
“There is a reason why for years the Democrats have been viewed as soft on crime,” Cruz continued. "They go in and appoint to the bench judges who release violent criminals.
“They go in and fight to give the right to vote to convicted felons,” the 2016 GOP presidential candidate added. "Why?
“The Democrats know that convicted felons tend to vote Democrat. The media never reports on any of that. [It] doesn’t want to admit any of that.”
Cruz then argued that the mainstream media often tries linking violent crime with the GOP, even when such ties are nonexistent.
“Every time you have some sort of violent crime or mass killing you can almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the murderer happens to be a Republican so that they can use it to try and paint their political enemies,” he said.
“You can see that every time there’s a terrible crime they’re so excited – ‘come on, please be a Republican so we can try and paint the other side,’” Cruz said. "It is one of the more egregious examples of media bias and something we see over and over again."
Hear the audio below.
Cruz’s statements come in an environment of intense political wrangling over the killings, as GOP lawmakers continue to spout incendiary language about women’s health, minorities, and immigration while distancing themselves from the violent acts that occur using that rhetoric. In this defense, Cruz blew the good old dog whistle, evoking a racialized view of crime and voting to deflect from any responsibility.
There are layers to this, layers that Cruz conveniently ignores. For one, black and Latino people are highly over-represented among those charged with felonies—violent or not and controlling for crime levels—because of their race. The school-to-prison pipeline targeting youths of color has another hidden final destination in many places: Disenfranchisement, which in some cases is effectively permanent disenfranchisement. While it is likely true that a good portion of the people affected by disenfranchisement are members of a Democrat base, it is also true that they are impacted disparately by unequal and inequitable crime and voting laws. It is also true that felon disenfranchisement is in most cases a violation of the basic tenets of American voting and liberty principles.
There is also the fact that mass attacks (domestic terrorism in all but name, in several cases) are highly likely to originate from American Christian religious extremists, the exact kind of fringe supporters that Cruz appeals to with his dog whistle politics. Dear is described as a vigorous Christian fringe online commentator. This shooting came just days after Cruz claimed that there was “no meaningful risk” of Christian terror in the U.S., which probably forced him to push so hard on defending his warped worldview. Of course, Cruz cannot so easily cast off his base, so he has to twist the narrative, connecting Democrats to crime and violence through race.