Season 3, Episode 2: Confessions of a Ted Cruz Voter

In this episode, I take a look back at the transformation of Ted Cruz over the last six years. It isn't pretty.

https://twitter.com/departied

Links to some of the research for this episode:

The Rise and Fall of the Cruz-Trump Bromance

Cognitive Dissonance and the Peg Turning experiment (correction, in the episode I said this was from 1915. It's actually from 1959)

Let's Go Brandon

"Leave the rest to the Republican congressmen"

Inside Ted Cruz's Last-Ditch Effort to Keep Trump in Power

David French: There is No Remaining Christian Case for Trump

Jonah Goldberg: The Descent of Men

Liz Cheney's slaps away Jim Jordan

Ted Cruz's remarks on Texas seceding from the Union

Transcript

Confessions of a Ted Cruz voter

Hi, my name is Bill and I am a man without a party. Welcome to the Departied podcast. This is a place for those of you who may currently be politically homeless, but who haven’t forgotten your true home. Welcome in.

Season 3, Episode 2: Confessions of a Ted Cruz voter

Part 1: A Thought Experiment

Let’s engage together in a thought experiment. Here’s the scenario:  you have a coworker - let’s call him John. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we’ll call you Ed.  John is fairly new to the company you both work for; he has a background in real estate and sales; he’s a real talker, brash, often crude and egotistical. He’s not your cup of tea.

There is a promotion opportunity in the company for a position you have long dreamed of acquiring. You find out that John is also putting his name in the hat for the position. Magnanimously, you meet with him and wish him luck. He claims to appreciate the outreach, and basically gives you what you gave him - encouragement, “may the best man win”, all that kind of stuff. 

Early on you seem to be making a good impression on the management. But you discover that John has started a whispering campaign against you. He claims that you achieved a win on one of your earlier contracts through fraud. You find out that he has been repeatedly questioning your honesty - in fact, you hear that he told one of the top leaders in the company that you’re the biggest liar he’s ever met. This hurts; you are an evangelical Christian and your reputation for honesty is something that is dear to you. The company you work for has a lot of evangelical Christians in the top ranks, and your reputation as a believer has generally been a help to your career. Before long you discover that every time John talks to anyone about you, he associates the dishonesty slur with your name. You are no longer Ed, you are “Lying Ed”. Soon other people start to refer to you that way. He never really says what you’ve lied about, but “Lying Ed” becomes your new nickname. This seems really bizarre - you haven’t had to deal with dumb nicknames since Junior High. But you figure people will see through his schemes.

Next you hear that he’s made cracks about your ethnicity; your dad is from Cuba and - more bizarrely, John says that this somehow puts your claims of being an evangelical in doubt. “Cuba doesn’t really produce a lot of evangelicals, does it?” he says in an email he sends to your department. You find all this really bizarre, because John doesn’t even go to church and you know he’s had multiple wives and multiple affairs. You figure that there’s no way your company will promote him over you; he’s not their kind of person. But you assume that his antics will end up disqualifying him from gaining any ground in what’s turning out to be a pretty nasty fight for this promotion. Way, way nastier than you expected.

You walk into the office one day and notice there is a crowd gathered around the bulletin board, laughing and snapping pictures. You walk over to see what they are all staring at and your heart sinks; John, or one of his allies, has taped a picture of your wife, who is a very attractive middle aged woman who you love dearly, next to a picture of John’s wife, who previously had a career as a model. Her picture is stunning; it's from a professional shoot, after all. The picture of your wife is not very flattering, it’s just one of those unflattering pictures - it was chosen because of that. OK, that does it. You are now furious at John. You tell him to “stay the hell” away from your wife.  You tell some of your coworkers that John’s behavior absolutely disqualifies him from getting the promotion, but you begin to realize they are actually enjoying the show. It’s weird, in the past, John's behavior wouldn’t have worked. Your company even has, as part of its corporate values, a statement about how important character and virtue is in its leaders. You’re sure the commitment to character that the company has long held will keep John from being promoted. 

Around this time, you find to your horror that some of John’s friends at work start a whispering campaign that you've had multiple affairs with some of the women who work for and with you. This gets the rumor mill really cranking. Another rumor they spread is truly bizarre - it's a rumor about your father, of all people, having a criminal past and possibly even having been involved in the Mob. It’s crazy, but this all seems to be hurting you more than it’s hurting John. In fact , his behavior seems to be helping him. 

Eventually the heat gets to be too much for you; you wave the white flag and withdraw your name from consideration for the promotion. As you stand down John makes sure everyone knows that he kicked your butt, and that he doesn't want your support for getting that promotion, and you think “well, he has some gall! As if I would ever give my support to him!”. You go before the board of directors to point out to them all his bad behavior and how this should really disqualify him from promotion. They need to make sure to vote their principles and their conscience. Their reply to you will stay with you forever.  

“Thanks for your input, Lying Ed, but you see, we like him. He fights!” 

What do you do?

By now I’m sure most of you know who John and Ed are. Though I obscured the circumstances of their rivalry a bit by wrapping it in a fight for a company promotion, I didn’t even work very hard to hide their names. John is Donald John Trump, and Ed is Rafael Edward Cruz, better known as Ted Cruz. These guys were the two front-runners for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

That seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?

None of what I included in the thought experiment scenario is exaggerated. Trump really did do all those things. He questioned Ted Cruz’s evangelical bona-fides, which seems weird since Trump isn’t even a Christian. He also questioned Ted Cruz’s qualifications for the office of Presidency, using the same slur that he launched at Barack Obama, that Cruz wasn’t born a United States citizen. He really did call Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” as often as he talked about him. He really did retweet the photo comparison of Melania Trump and Heidi Cruz. His allies at the National Enquirer really did accuse Cruz of having multiple affairs with women on his staff, and really did . . . really, actually did, accuse Ted Cruz’s father of being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Trump himself repeated that claim, using his well-worn formula when passing on whacky conspiracy theories; “people are saying”.

Trump really did accuse Ted Cruz of rigging the election when Cruz won the Iowa caucus in February 2016. Maybe we all should have been taking notes.

And Cruz really did give a courageous speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention asking people to vote their conscience. I remember being proud of him for doing that, and I felt good about my votes for him in both his first Senate race in 2012 and the Texas Republican Presidential Primary in 2016. I was glad that he was standing up to Trump. 

Look, I know politics ain't beanbag. There have been lots of tough primary fights. But what Trump put Ted Cruz through went beyond Ted Cruz himself; it involved some of his closest relationships: his wife, his father.

My only beef at the time with Ted Cruz was that earlier in the primary season, in late 2015 I believe, he actually joined forces with Donald Trump. He had an agreement with Trump; they were going to help each other. I think Cruz figured that he would eventually beat Trump and take all his delegates. Because no one then believed Donald Trump would win. Ted Cruz certainly didn’t. 

So the opposite happened. Donald Trump beat Ted Cruz. When asked in July of 2016 if he would accept a Ted Cruz endorsement, Trump proclaimed that he had no interest in winning the backing of the man he called Lyin' Ted. “I don't want his endorsement," Trump said. "If he gives it, I will not accept it."

I asked earlier, in our thought experiment, “what would you do?” If you were “Ed”, would you endorse “John” for promotion? What would you do?

Well, what did Ted Cruz do? 

In May, 2016, Ted Cruz said this about Donald Trump: Trump is a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen”. He also pointed out that Trump is “a serial philanderer.” “He is proud of being a serial philanderer”  He went on to declare ““This man is a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies … in a pattern that is straight out of a psychology text book, he accuses everyone of lying,” “Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it … the man is utterly amoral,” and he ended with this: “Donald is a bully … bullies don’t come from strength they come from weakness.”

Straight talk from Ted Cruz.

But, of course, Ted Cruz did finally give Donald Trump his endorsement in September of 2016, and Donald Trump shifted gears in a brief statement after Cruz's announcement and accepted 

“I am greatly honored by the endorsement of Senator Cruz," the statement said. "We have fought the battle and he was a tough and brilliant opponent. I look forward to working with him for many years to come in order to make America great again.”

In Ted Cruz’s statement, he said that he endorsed Donald Trump because we needed to do everything we could to keep Hillary Clinton from the Presidency. “Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president” he said. 

Wait, Ted, didn’t you say that Donald Trump was an amoral, pathological liar? I’ll never understand.

Ted went phone-banking for Donald Trump, and was rewarded with a humiliating picture of himself that went viral. Google “Sad Ted Cruz Phone Banks For Trump”. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Politics ain’t beanbag. But what Donald Trump put Ted Cruz through was abuse. I find myself asking When is something just “politics as usual” and when is it evil? Trump’s expertise at being an abuser didn’t turn off his voters. It won him votes. Even among my tribe, the evangelical Christians. All the good people. 

“Well, you see, Lyin’ Ted, we like him. He fights!”

Bullies don’t just beat you up, they take your dignity.

Part 2: Turning Pegs

It’s weird that the whole 2016 election season, while it lowered my assessment of Donald Trump, lowered my assessment of Ted Cruz even more. It’s none of my business, but I’ve wondered what Heidi Cruz thinks of it? I haven’t googled that because part of me doesn’t want to know. It would be weird to see her enthusiastically boosting Trump at his rallies. But also unsurprising. Nothing surprises me anymore. And abuse is complicated.

What would you do if you were Ted Cruz? What would I do? It can be hard to tell.

In 1959 a pair of researchers, Festinger and Carlsmith, conducted an experiment. Here's how it's described in an article on Cognitive Dissonance in a publication called Simply Psychology.

‘In [Festinger and Carlsmith’s] laboratory experiment, they used 71 male students as participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour).

They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a waiting participant (a confederate) that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all of the participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and persuade the confederate that the boring experiment would be fun.

When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie.”

The experimenters concluded this:

“Being paid only $1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so those who were paid $1 experienced dissonance. They could only overcome that dissonance by coming to believe that the tasks really were interesting and enjoyable. Being paid $20 provides a reason for turning pegs, and there is therefore no dissonance.”

I will ask again what I asked earlier, regarding our thought experiment; what would you do? Would you throw your support behind the person who abused you? 

You know, you might. If you had to convince yourself it was worth it to turn those pegs, to endure that abuse. If you’re like Ted Cruz who styles himself as a constitutional conservative, maybe the prospect of the judges a Republican administration would nominate was worth it. Many of my friends certainly think so. But what was the cost? I talked about that at length in my last episode, and we’ll certainly talk about it some more in this one. 

But one thing we know, we humans are complicated creatures.

I want to state, right now, that I have no psychological training. I am not here to psychoanalyze Ted Cruz. But I am here to observe. Ted Cruz has had to turn a lot of pegs over the past six years for the man who called him a liar, called his wife ugly, accused him of fraud, accused him of marital infidelity, and suggested that his father may have been part of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And you will, today, find few peg turners more enthusiastic for Donald Trump than Ted Cruz. 

Part 3: The Disciple

There is a truism in life: you become like the one who disciples you. For Christians, that is our goal; the whole point of the Christian life is to become a disciple of Jesus and become like him. It is our destiny. Chapter 8 in the Biblical book of Romans puts it this way:

“For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters”

Jesus says in the Gospel of John

John 14:15 “If you love me, you will keep my commands.

That’s what disciples of Jesus are supposed to do; to do what he did, and live as he lived. To become like him. In fact, in the book of 1 John there is this amazing promise:

We know that when he [Jesus] appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. - 1 John 3:2

So we have to be aware of who we’re truly following. Because we will become like the one who disciples us. 

You see the effects of bad discipleship all the time. For example, it was somewhat jarring to hear chants of “Let’s Go Brandon” ringing from the church stage and the church crowd at Cornerstone church, which was hosting a Reawaken America tour rally. Cornerstone church is right down the road from where my parents live in San Antonio. It’s full of people who claim Jesus as Lord. If you don't know, Let's Go Brandon is a euphemism for …. How do I say it? To give you the full definition I'd need to use a word that the classic movie A Christmas Story called the Queen Mother of dirty words. F-dash-dash-dash. “Let’s Go Brandon” means  “F-dash-dash-dash Joe Biden"

Ted Cruz knows what it means. 

But at a February 22 CPAC meeting Ted Cruz said “Change is coming. It is powerful. You want to know how powerful? Find me one person on Planet Earth who doesn’t know what “Let’s Go Brandon” means”. What followed was laughter and wild applause

You may think this is silly, I mean, I think it’s silly. And I’m not someone who wilts at profanity. But as disciples of Jesus, and Ted Cruz claims to be one, as do most of the people at that Cornerstone Church rally, I’m not sure that publicly saying “F the President” is a good witness for Jesus, even if you wrap it in a sophomoric catchphrase. 

Wrapping things in sophomoric catchphrases has always been Trump’s gig. Kind of like “Lyin’ Ted Cruz”. 

In a recent Turning Point USA rally for students, Ted Cruz railed against a current cultural trend. Here’s what he said.

“My name is Ted Cruz and my pronoun is kiss my ass!” 

I apologize for the language, although in my defense I am just quoting Ted Cruz. I remember some years ago I was engaged in a discussion back when the blogosphere was new and growing. Some members of a famous conservative pastor’s staff and followers, his disciples, you might say, were mercilessly, and I mean mercilessly, attacking a fellow blogger because they didn’t like some of his theology. I remember it well. I got carried away in one of my posts about their attacks, and in my frustration I commented that It felt like their merciless attacks on my friend were just playground triumphalism. They were having too much fun destroying him. It was like they were saying, and here’s a direct quote from my post, and I’m not proud of it, it felt like they were saying “I just kicked your A dash dash, now I’m going to crap in your hat”. One of my opponents in that thread, who today still works for that famous conservative pastor, referred to my comment as the most vulgar thing he’d ever read. Verbally abusing a fellow image bearer wasn’t what upset them - I mean it was what they were having so much fun doing - but I had said the “A” word and the “C” word and Christians just shouldn’t to that.

That was in 2004. It was a long time ago. Somehow things have changed in my tribe. We realized that being vulgar and brash wins. I’m not sure if saying "crap" today or A dash dash would get the response it did back then. But one thing hasn’t changed - the guys who were the subject of my inartful blog post were engaged in online abuse back then - the blogger they were attacking sadly passed away of cancer a few years later. I wonder if they ever said they were sorry?

David French said it well in a recent article: "Ted Cruz says his pronouns are “kiss my ass’ not just because he corrupted himself for Trump but because the crowd is corrupt as well. The same analysis goes for Josh Hawley’s refusal to apologize for his fist salute or his election challenge. He is morally corrupt. That cheering crowd is morally corrupt.”

Why? Because they’ve absorbed the lessons Trump taught. Fight the left with profane anger. Never apologize."

French makes the point that Donald Trump has discipled the church far more than the church has discipled Donald Trump.

Jonah Goldberg, in a recent column, put it this way: “For years, I’ve argued that “character is destiny” when it comes to Trump, and I believe I’ve been proven inarguably correct, especially in the wake of January 6. What I didn’t fully appreciate is how so many people would end up agreeing with me by embracing the belief that Trump’s character should be our destiny.

Even by the most generous accounting of the various Christian virtues—both heavenly and capital—Trump qualifies for exactly none of them. The only possible exception is “temperance,” but that only works with the secular definition of avoiding alcohol. The classical understanding of temperance defines it as resisting luxury, arrogance, and rage, so cross that one off the list too. This shouldn’t surprise anybody who has paid attention to the man who said his favorite Bible verse is probably “an eye for an eye.”

It should be noted that Goldberg is not a Christian; he is Jewish, but he absolutely nails it here.

Now politicians have always been prone to dishonesty, and - at least in their private moments - profanity. But the guardrails of responsible rhetoric seem to have moved quite a bit in the last few years. 

Ted Cruz decided that irresponsible hyperbole in the middle of a public health crisis also works. In July 2020 Ted Cruz made this prediction: "If it ends up that Biden wins in November - I hope he doesn’t, I don’t think he will, but if he does -  I guarantee you, the week after the election suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors, will say, 'Everything is magically better. Go back to work, go back to school.' Suddenly, the problems are solved," You won’t even have to wait for Biden to be sworn in. All they’ll need is election day. And suddenly their willingness to just destroy people’s lives and livelihoods . . . they will have accomplished their task. That’s wrong, it’s cynical, and we shouldn’t be a part of it”

I realize that the subject of the proper response to COVID is complicated, controversial, and fraught. There are lots of ways to talk about the response to a public health crisis like COVID. Lots of people have been wrong over time. But as an influential and powerful Senator, continuing to insinuate after hundreds of thousands of deaths that COVID is really just a Democratic ploy to hurt Republicans and their own constituents . . . well, it makes me question: In the midst of a public health crisis, when is something politics as usual and when is something evil?

Of course, the day after the election Democratic governors didn't lift all restrictions. Because that would have been irresponsible in the middle of a public health crisis. And what am I saying "the day after the election" - for guys like Ted Cruz, the election of 2020 is still ongoing.

The transformation of Ted Cruz, or perhaps the unmasking of who he always was, continued apace. Another thing Ted Cruz learned from Donald Trump is that dishonesty and hypocrisy also works. Ted fashions himself as a constitutional scholar. But there have been very few people who have been more enthusiastic peg-turners for Donald Trump’s claim that he really won the 2020 election in a landslide. I spoke about this claim in my last episode. If you are listening and you really think Donald Trump won then you and I are living in two different realities and I am not sure communicating across those dimensions is possible. But my larger point is I don’t think Ted Cruz thinks Donald Trump won the election. I, of course, can’t read the man’s mind, but that’s my best guess. But he certainly went all in on the effort to overturn the election, with dangerous, violent results, both to our representative democracy and to human beings.

Since 2016 Cruz has been a very reliable Trump ally. And since November 2020 he has fully supported Trump's contention that he really won the election, although Cruz likes to engage in more professorial sounding rhetoric about "election integrity". He was the second senator to agree to object to the 2020 election, after Senator Josh Hawley.

A March 22 Texas Tribune article outlines Ted Cruz’s efforts to help Trump overturn the election. 

"The Jan. 6 committee’s investigators have recently focused on [former law professor and lawyer John] Eastman’s efforts to pressure Pence to declare Trump the winner, but there has been little public notice that Cruz and Eastman have known each other since they clerked together 27 years ago for then-U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig. Cruz’s proposal ran on a parallel track to Eastman’s memos.

Luttig told The Post that he believes that Cruz — who once said that Luttig was “like a father to me” — played a paramount role in the events leading to Jan. 6.

“Once Ted Cruz promised to object, January 6 was all but foreordained, because Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen,” Luttig said in a statement to The Post. “He was also the most knowledgeable of the intricacies of both the Electoral Count Act and the Constitution, and the ways to exploit the two.”

It’s ironic to me that one of the things I liked about Ted Cruz as a Ted Cruz voter was that he really knew the Constitution. 

The article goes on to quote Representative Liz Cheney, who said, referring to Ted Cruz’s proposal to halt the certification of the election in  order to hold a ten day audit in the swing states that Trump lost: “It was a very dangerous proposal, and, you know, could very easily have put us into territory where we got to the inauguration and there was not a president . . Honestly. And I think that Senator Cruz knew exactly what he was doing. I think that Senator Cruz is somebody who knows what the Constitution calls for, knows what his duties and obligations are, and was willing, frankly, to set that aside.”

Ted Cruz set aside his devotion to the constitution for what I believe he knew to be a lie. Trump was right - he became "Lying Ted" after all. 

You become like the one who disciples you.

This reminds me of a now infamous episode in the ongoing assault on our democracy: 

"After President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he was told repeatedly by top Justice Department officials that his claims of widespread voter fraud were unfounded — but he repeatedly ignored those facts and steadily ramped up a pressure campaign, arguing that the agency should “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

Leave the rest to the Republican congressmen. When even Attorney General Bill Barr, who had been nothing but loyal to Donald Trump throughout his tenure, called Trump’s theory that he had actually won the election Bull-S-dash-dash-dash, Trump realized he didn’t need evidence. He just needed Barr’s replacement to say the election was sketchy and then they could “leave the rest to the Republican congressmen”. 

Which Republican congressmen, I wonder? 

Well, we don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to go through what happened next in detail. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley committed, along with a whole ton of Republican representatives, to object to the electoral votes on January 6. It’s funny reading articles from the days before that date. In a report in the Texas Tribune from January 2nd we read

"Earlier this week, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, said he would contest the certification of Electoral College votes — a move that’s unlikely to change the election result but would delay the process with floor debates."

Yeah. It could “delay” the process… we all remember the "floor debates" on January 6.

Ted Cruz, in the same article, is quoted as saying “Support of election integrity should not be a partisan issue."

Ted Cruz, a man who says that he fervently believes in federalism and states rights, enthusiastically joined in with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxson’s lawsuit that attempted to overturn the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It attempted to tell those states how to run their own elections, and to disenfranchise millions of voters. 

“Would you be willing to argue the case?” Trump asked Cruz, as the senator later recalled it.

“Sure, I’d be happy to” if the court granted a hearing, Cruz said he responded.

Look, saying you're for election integrity is like saying your for Mom and Apple Pie. Cruz’s rationale for his actions is that a lot of people in the country doubted the integrity of the 2020 election. They doubted it ultimately because of one piece of evidence: the evidence that Donald Trump was absolutely convinced he won. That one piece of evidence spawned an entire industry of election denialism that ran the gamut of conspiracy theories and has done great damage to the American experiment of representative democracy. We don’t know how much damage yet. We’ll know more in the midterm elections, and even more so in the Presidential election of 2024. I’m not optimistic. It’s funny, these are the situations where I expected people like Ted Cruz, with their reverence for the Constitution, to be fighting on the side of good. I was wrong. Quoting again from A Christmas Story, “In our world, you were either a bully, a toady, or one of the nameless rabble of victims.” People doubt that we have election integrity because toadies like Ted Cruz have been telling them that non-stop for a year and a half. People have been victimized by lying politicians - they doubt the election results because Trump and all his disciples have repeatedly told them that the election was rigged, stolen, fishy. Not because they have any evidence. This is why our capital got ransacked, a lot of police officers were injured,  at least one protester died at the site and several others died in the aftermath.

Ted Cruz, when is something just “politics as usual” and when is it evil?

Among my favorite stories about the dark day of January 6th is the response of Senator Mitt Romney and Representative Liz Cheney when the floors of both houses had to be evacuated because the mob, the mob that guys like Ted Cruz instigated, was closing in.

Mitt Romney is reported to have yelled at the Senators who took part in the electoral count objection “this is what you’ve gotten!”

As for Liz Cheney; representative Jim Jordan, a key Trump ally and supporter of Trump’s efforts to stay in power, tried to be chivalrous with her. Her response is awesome.

“I was in the aisle, on the aisle and he [Jordan] came over to me, you know, and basically said, we need to get the ladies away from the aisle. And, you know, I had watched for the months since the election what was going on and the lies that have been told to people,” Cheney told Barbaro.

“And, you know, it was both that I, you know, certainly didn’t need his help, and secondly, I thought clearly that the lie that they had been spreading and telling people had absolutely contributed to what we were living through at that moment,” she added.

“While these maniacs are going through the place, I’m standing in the aisle and he said, ‘We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you.’ I smacked his hand away and told him, ‘Get away from me. You f—ing did this.’ ”

Liz Cheney rocks.

To his credit, on January 7th Ted Cruz correctly assessed what had happened at the capital. He correctly called the capital riot a “violent, terrorist, attack”. He was right. The US Department of Defense definition of Terrorism is as follows:

“The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

I think that describes January 6th to a T. We are very fortunate that it wasn’t a lot worse than it was. 

Prologue: Secession

I intend on dealing with the new secessionist movement in our country in a later episode, but I wanted to leave you with some remarks that Ted Cruz gave at an event at Texas A&M hosted by Young America's Foundation on Oct. 14, 2021.

He was asked if he supported Texas seceding from the United States. Here was his response:

“If the Democrats end the filibuster, if they fundamentally destroy the country, if they pack the Supreme Court, if they make DC a state, if they federalize elections if they massively expand voter fraud there may come a point where it's hopeless, 'We're not there yet, and if there comes a point where it's hopeless, then I think we take NASA, we take the military, we take the oil,”

He said this to wild applause.

Ted Cruz is a smart man. He knows that the federal government owns NASA, and owns the military bases. Pretending like Texas owns them and can just pick them up and leave is dangerous, dangerous nonsense. If he thinks that Texas seceding from the United States would be a fun, painless, own-the-libs kind of event, he’s. . . well, I know he knows better.

I’m going to help Ted Cruz out: What he should have said was this: “Absolutely not. We will never leave the United States, because we’re patriots who love our country. We’ll work within our Constitutional system to keep improving the lives of all of our citizens, and we will work out our disagreements in the legislatures and the ballot box.”

When is something politics as usual, and when is it evil? The secession of any of the so-called Red states from the Union would be an unmitigated disaster. And we are closer to it then I ever thought we would be, thanks to men like Ted Cruz, who shouldn’t be in office.

I entitled this episode “Confessions of a Ted Cruz voter”, because I confess I voted for this guy. I shouldn’t have and I never will again. I’m going to use an old fashioned Bible word: I repent of supporting him and people like him. 

Regarding the subject of repentance, I’d like to close with a word about the final cost of being discipled into Trumpism. Quoting David French again: “The problem with Trumpism is there is no place for repentance, because you can never admit you were wrong. About anything. Ted Cruz is bought into this, and so even as the Christian he is, as a politician he cannot admit he was wrong.” 

I’ve only seen one exception. I mentioned earlier that, to his credit, he called the January 6th riot a “violent, terrorist attack” in the days after the event. To his discredit, a year later he had to humiliate himself on Tucker Carlson’s show and walk back that remark. MAGA means never saying you’re sorry, ever, unless you desecrate MAGA doctrine. Ted Cruz is a MAGA disciple, and MAGA accepts no heresy.

Thanks again for listening to this podcast. It really means a lot that you devote your valuable time to this. This has been a somewhat negative episode, and it wasn’t very much fun putting it together. There are lots of things I like doing more than sitting here and ranking on politicians like Ted Cruz who is, still, my Christian brother. I don’t hate Ted Cruz, and while I’m not very enthused about the way things are going,  I do have hope - One nice thing about confession and repentance is you learn. There have been a lot of hard lessons learned over the past decade or so by a lot of us politically homeless orphans. But politics is not forever - this is all temporary. I haven’t forgotten where my true home lies

I’d like to leave you with a passage I touched on earlier from the book of 1 John. This is 1 John 3:1-3

See what great love the Father has given us that we should be called God’s children—and we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it didn’t know him. 2 Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. 3 And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.

God Bless!