A couple weeks ago, we briefly Found Unity in making fun of Senator Ted Cruz for his tepid resuscitation of Trump’s backfired 2017 comments about Paris and Pittsburgh. Since then his clownery has only continued, for example trying to cash in on the Gamestop shenanigans by clout-chasing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which she promptly shut down.
But it wouldn’t be long before Sen. Cruz would provide another opportunity for Twitter to pelt him with avian tomatoes. On Monday Jason Campbell posted a clip from Cruz’s podcast in which the Senator goes from talking about climate policies causing job losses to how “the view of the left is people are a disease” in less than two minutes.
“You should be able to choose your life,” Cruz says, apparently trying to appropriate pro-choice language to jobs extracting climate-warming fossil fuels. But Climate Envoy John Kerry apparently said the word “inevitable” in reference to climate policy, and that was Cruz’s launching point to talk about Avengers: Endgame. Specifically, Cruz trots out the well-worn argument we saw back in 2018, when the movie was still relevant, about how Thanos supposedly represents environmentalists wanting to kill people to save the planet (as opposed to saving people from the consequences of changing the planet).
Cruz then referenced Watchmen, which isn’t actually one of the movies or shows others have pointed to when making Cruz’s point about Hollywood casting environmentalists as villains in a slightly more coherent fashion. That earned him a “literally what the fuck are you talking about” response from the show’s screenwriter, one of many delightful tweets letting the Senator know he’s stupid and his take “doesn’t really make much sense.” If Hollywood writes villains that are motivated by environmentalism, and then the heroes of those movies defeat said villains, wouldn’t that be a rebuke of that point of view? Not an embrace of it?
So not only is Ted Cruz dredging up old denial talking points about evil Hollywood liberals, he’s not even doing it right! He’s so wrapped up in his persecution complex, his vaunted K-to-JD Princeton/Harvard Law intellect can’t even wrap itself around the fact that his version of the Big Hollywood attack is nonsensical.
Not that it ever really made much sense. The idea that Hollywood would use villains to brainwash audiences into buying recycled paper towels or whatever was always pretty far-fetched.
But let’s be honest, the reality is much, much simpler. It’s hard to give villains realistic motivations, and a staple theme of storytelling is that every villain is a hero of their own story. So it doesn’t take a seasoned screenwriter to look at the state of the world today and identify environmentalism as an issue that a lot of people agree with, but could obviously be taken down deadly and high-stakes paths if put through a lens devoid of humanity.
People probably would have been slightly less enthusiastic about Avengers if the movies stuck with Thanos’s original comic motivation: impressing his crush, Lady Death, the silent skeletal yet female physical representation of the Grim Reaper he somehow can’t convince to love him despite all his romantic murdering.
Then again, making an ass of oneself to impress a woman is perhaps something Cruz would identify with, given his tweeting at AOC. Though, if she really wanted him to work with her, maybe she could suggest his dad killed JFK and say his wife is ugly?
Worked for Trump, anyway.
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