There’s been a lot of talk over the last six months about how similar Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler seem to be. It looks as if Republican senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz has been wanting some of that neoNazi publicity, though, if his statement about a terrorist attack in Belgium is any indication.
Here’s what Cruz had to say about the violence in Belgium:
“Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods. We will do what we can to help them fight this scourge, and redouble our efforts to make sure it does not happen here. We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence. We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration. And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS. The days of the United States voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to show how progressive and enlightened we can be are at an end. Our country is at stake.”
There’s a whole lot that doesn’t make sense in this statement, with furious leaps of logic such as using a terrorist attack by people who legally entered Belgium as an excuse to seal off the southern border of the United States of America thousands and thousands of miles away, even though there isn’t a single known case of any terrorist attack ever being conducted by any person who crossed into the United States from Mexico illegally. Given that there is no terrorist infiltration from Mexico into the United States, this Cruz rant just doesn’t make any sense.
What seems to have happened is that Ted Cruz has grasped that it doesn’t matter if his tirade makes no sense. What matters is that he makes a tirade. Cruz senses that now is the time for anger, and the time for vulnerable minorities within the United States to suffer… because Belgium… because making minorities in the United States suffer makes right wing voters feel secure and happy.
What Ted Cruz proposed today is nothing short of turning Muslim communities in the United States into persecuted ghettoes. He wants the police to target Muslim Americans for investigation and restriction even though there is absolutely zero indication that American Muslims had anything at all to do with the attacks this morning in Belgium. All Cruz sees is that Republican voters want Muslims to be separated out for special suffering, and if that makes his constituency happy, Cruz is all too happy to do it.
It’s an unconstitutional thing to do, to use the power of the federal government to target entire communities of people for persecution by police on the basis of nothing more than their religious identity, but Ted Cruz doesn’t care if he tears the First Amendment to shreds. Cruz will happily trash the Bill of Rights in order to satisfy American rage…
… not that Americans are suffering from terrorist attacks by Muslims.
There hasn’t been a single fatal Muslim terrorist attack in the United States this year.
Ted Cruz knows that, thanks to MSNBC and CNN and FOX, Belgium today feels as close as Peoria, Illinois to Americans today. He doesn’t care about maintaining American democracy, because he knows that tube-tied Americans feel as if the entire world is on the verge of breaking through their front doors, and a security state is the only cure..
All Ted Cruz wants is power for himself, so he’s happy to join Donald Trump’s efforts to whip up extremist right wing zealots into a hateful stampede to crush the civil liberties of American citizens. Cruz proved today that, like Donald Trump, he will eagerly convert the United States of America into a hotbed of violent nationalism, in the tradition of Adolf Hitler…
…because Belgium.
Ted Cruz doesn’t even need an excuse as flimsy as the Reichstag fire.
All he needs is one bad day in Belgium, and Ted Cruz throws Lady Liberty under the bus.
Progress and enlightenment must be at an end in the United States, says Ted Cruz…
…because Belgium.
Belgium.