Because he is friends with someone politically undesirable, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his wife were forbidden from finishing their dinner. Shrieking demonstrators protesting the senator’s support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh chased the couple from a D.C. restaurant Monday night.
Watch it below:
BREAKING. Activists just chased @TedCruz out of a fancy Washington DC restaurant, chanting “We Believe Survivors!”
Cruz has been friends with creep Kavanaugh for 20 years. Now Cruz is on judiciary committee hearing his testimony.
Fascists not welcome! #CancelKavanugh pic.twitter.com/7mx6Tc32za
— Smash Racism DC (@SmashRacismDC) September 25, 2018
One demands to know whether Cruz “believes all survivors.” Others break into chants of “sexist, racist, anti-gay!” Another shouts that Beto O’Rourke, his Democratic challenger, is “way hotter.”
And sure, Beto would be a better looking senator, but Cruz is no fascist. That was the mob, and ironically they didn’t just ruin his dinner. They gave a huge gift to the beleaguered Texas Republican.
By now Cruz has become used to a decent bit of abuse. The senator has not always done the best job making friends in Congress and he has earned the ire of many of his colleagues. But the treatment he and his wife received was beyond what we normally see even in this particularly nasty era of politics. Even Cruz critics on Capitol Hill can’t support the treatment he received.
Imagine how they must feel in Texas where Southern hospitality is still a thing. Martyrdom is politically valuable and Cruz needs some capital right now as O’Rourke closes in on him in the polls.
Plenty of voters will see the flash mob as more evidence that Cruz is standing strong against the swamp. Why else, they might ask, would he become the target of such a rude attack? Because he fights, they will conclude, and because the other side is crazy.
This is a problem for O’Rourke who has branded himself, with plenty of help from fawning feature writers, as a super chill politician bro. He skateboards. He rocks the air drums. He is a cool dude who wouldn’t ruin dinner because he isn’t even capable of harshing anyone’s mellow. All of that might be true of Beto, but none of that is true about the mob that charged Cruz and his unsuspecting wife.
Like so many other conservatives, Cruz has now been baptized in the eyes of the Right and, more importantly, anyone annoyed with pushy social justice types. The senator joins the likes of Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire and Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute to name just two. He shouldn’t waste it. Cruz has an opportunity for more than just free publicity though. He could transform himself from a political figure into a cultural icon.
A backlash has been brewing since the moment the first masked hoodlum chucked a rock on Inauguration Day. It creates a visceral reaction in the belly of anyone who believes in basic decency. Rule-breaking isn’t popular and neither are bullying mobs. If Cruz is smart, and he is, he won’t just run against a progressive. He will make his candidacy a direct response to the obnoxious Left.
