In front of cameras, vulnerable U.S. Senator Ted Cruz mildly tisk-tisked his bff and former 2016 campaign co-chair Steve King, the white supremacist congressman from Iowa, over his most recent embrace of neo-Nazism (yes, there’s been more than one instance). But behind the scenes, King claimed “he got a supportive phone call” from Cruz, Bloomberg reports:
Todd Gillman, the Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News, said on Twitter that Cruz -- whose lead over his Democratic opponent, Representative Beto O’Rourke, has narrowed, according to recent polls -- did not respond when asked about the phone call on Wednesday night.
Disowning neo-Nazism shouldn’t be complicated, but it is for Cruz. In his hunger for the presidency, he anchored himself to King and his white supremacist views, flocking to King’s 2014 Republican presidential summit, hunting with King, and enthusiastically crowning King his 2016 campaign co-chair even after he compared immigrants to dogs.
But the difference is that now both Cruz and King are facing formidable opponents, with one recent poll showing that King is within a hair of getting dethroned by Democratic challenger J.D. Scholten as corporate sponsors, under public pressure over King’s toxic world views, have terminated their donations.
Whatever happens, Cruz can’t erase his ties to King, not after all these years of racist bullshit, and that includes, according to King, tolerating his neo-Nazi ties. “I'm not saying Ted Cruz is a neo-Nazi sympathizer,” tweeted Ezra Levin of Indivisible, “but he literally just called a neo-Nazi to sympathize.”
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