Ted Cruz on Monday echoed the same racist rhetoric that has now been used by multiple U.S. mass murderers, including in his home state of Texas in 2019. Cruz falsely claimed during an appearance on the right-wing Mark Levin Show that “it is an invasion we’re seeing” at the southern border.
Cruz made the remark just hours after a racist mass murderer who believed in invasion and “great replacement” conspiracies traveled to Buffalo, New York, to kill Black people. The Texas senator’s remark was no fluke: He posted a clip of his appearance to his personal Twitter account the next day. On Wednesday, Cruz again shared a clip.
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“Just days after a racist killed 10 people in Buffalo warning about a white nationalist conspiracy theory about a migrant ‘invasion,’ @tedcruz echoes that very same racist fiction,” America’s Voice Political Director Zachary Mueller initially noted on Monday. Mueller has steadily tracked racist rhetoric spewed by Congressional Republicans, including Elise Stefanik’s now-infamous advertising echoing racist replacement theory.
This invasion rhetoric was also spewed by the racist mass killer who in 2019 drove to a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, to murder Mexicans. The racist mass killer had complained about a “Hispanic invasion” of a state that was home to Latinos way before it was ever part of the United States.
If Cruz valued decency more than his racist voters, he would have never again led that word slip from between his wormy lips. But Mueller notes that not only was he very intentional in what he said, he doubled down, sharing a clip of his appearance the next day. On Wednesday, he tripled down, again sharing a clip that railed on “illegal immigrants” at the southern border.
The reality is that many are asylum-seekers who are being blocked from their rights under the Stephen Miller-endorsed Title 42 policy. But Cruz would rather have you be afraid of them than the insurrectionists who tried to overthrow our election. He’d also rather have you be afraid of these families when his father, Rafael Cruz, similarly sought asylum, from Cuba. The elder Cruz has previously described how he bribed a Cuban official in order to pursue safety here.
It’s no surprise that Cruz made this racist “invasion” claim. Levin last year claimed that “we're losing red-state America, and they are doing it, they are diabolical, and they are evil, they are doing it through immigration,” Media Matters reported at the time. “People are coming in by the hundreds of thousands, by design,” Levin continued. “Most of the media are not there to report it, by design.”
Right-wing media has been essential in amplifying and mainstreaming racist conspiracy theories. In particular, Tucker Carlson has “amplified the idea that Democratic populations and others want to force demographic change through immigration,” The New York Times has reported. “That’s the heart of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, which is popular among white nationalists and was previously confined to the fringes of U.S. media,” Media Matters continued. It’s now being used by both aspiring and elected GOP officials alike, Mueller noted:
“Do the purveyors of replacement theory bear some responsibility when their revisionism motivates murderers? Of course they do,” The Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote on Monday. “This dispute has become tiresome and pointless. There is no moral world in which those who libel outsiders, justify rage, incite bigotry, and allege that enemies have broken down the outer gate are innocent of the likely influence of their words.”
It’s deadly clear that this anti-immigrant rhetoric kills. Yet Ted Cruz hasn’t stopped. Greg Abbott hasn’t stopped. Elise Stefanik hasn’t stopped. In a truly horrific moment following the Buffalo murders, the insurrectionist former president used “invasion” rhetoric during a rally in support of Senate candidate Mehmet Oz. The racists are not only in control of the party, they are the party. Exactly how many more Black and brown people do they want dead?
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