As Cruz Eagerly Pushes White Nationalist Conspiracy, Campaign Runs Ads in Spanish in Cynical Effort to Win Votes in Texas

Plus new analysis on Tim Walz’s Record On Immigration

Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz plans to spend more than $4 million to reach out to Latino voters in the state, including Spanish-language ads in nearly two dozen markets and bilingual texts set to target the Rio Grande Valley region, Axios reports. “The first such ad adopts the format of a traditional Mexican ballad, called a ‘corrido,’” and ends with a short Spanish-language message from Cruz. It’s an effort that comes after Cruz has spent the last several years mainstreaming the very same conspiracy theory that inspired a white nationalist to murder 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, believing he was fighting a “Hispanic invasion.”   

This effort can only mean that Cruz again faces a tough competitor in the general election. While some polling has put him ahead of Democratic Rep. Colin Allred by double-digits, one recent survey shows him leading Allred by just three points. It could be enough to strike some fear in the shriveled little heart of Cruz, who in 2018 was reelected to his seat by the slimmest majority in a U.S. Senate race in Texas in decades. Why else would he try to make inroads into communities he’s repeatedly voted against and endangered through his use of white nationalist rhetoric? 

CRUZ HELPED TRUMP PULL THE GOP TO THE RIGHT ON IMMIGRATION

In his 2016 presidential campaign kickoff video, Cruz proudly introduced himself as the “son of an immigrant father, who fled oppression in Cuba and came to this country with just $100 to his name.” It’s a remarkable immigrant story, yet Cruz’s record has been defined by Trump-like hostility to today’s immigrants and immigration policy. This includes fighting to end protections for Dreamers and leaving them vulnerable to deportation (several years before Trump tried as president), trying and failing to gut the path to citizenship provision from the popular Senate comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed in 2013, and defending the Trump administration’s abhorrent and traumatic family separation policy in 2018. 

On the issue of mass deportation during the 2016 race, Cruz initially tried to hedge on Trump’s proposal, claiming that he was against sending “jackboots to knock on your door and every door in America.” But he eventually went all-in, telling then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that “of course you would” go look for them. "We have law enforcement that looks for people who are violating the laws, that apprehends them and deports them.” 

While Cruz was specifically referring to ICE, noted white nationalist and Project 2025 ally Stephen Miller is calling for a red state army of National Guard troops and local police to go door to door to separate families – including in some of the most populous cities in Texas. The state is home to the second-largest undocumented population in the nation, at 1.6 million, as well as the second-largest population of Dreamers in the nation. Cruz is fully on board with Trump sending troops in Humvees and armored personnel carriers to the neighborhoods of communities in Houston and Fort Worth to round up anyone who the deportation force thinks is undocumented.

CRUZ HAS ALLIED WITH NOTORIOUS RACISTS IN HIS PURSUIT OF POLITICAL POWER

In addition to allying himself with Trump’s mass deportation views, Cruz has bragged about being influenced by some of the most noxious figures of the anti-immigrant movement, including former Trump Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and former Iowa Congressman Steve King. Even as King finally faced pushback from fellow Republicans over white supremacy beginning in 2018, Cruz stood by his man, stating that he gave him a “personal call” in support. 

A partial list of King’s worst greatest hits, as noted by America’s Voice Senior Research Director Zachary Mueller in 2018:

• In 2013, King made a false and offensive claim about Dreamers, saying they had “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

• In 2014, King said that undocumented immigrants who served the nation in the military should be deported.

• In 2016, on MSNBC outside of the Republican National Convention, King questioned what non-white people have ever done for civilization. 

• “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” King wrote in a tweet in 2017 in support of an extreme anti-immigrant Dutch politician, Geert Wilders. Also in 2017, King tweeted, “diversity is not our strength,” with an article that quoted Hungary’s prime minister as saying cultures should not be mixed. 

• On at least two separate occasions in 2018, King retweeted known white supremacists. King also felt it necessary to prop up a fringe candidate in Toronto’s mayoral election. King endorsed Faith Goldy after she appeared on a podcast for the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer and repeated the “14 words” — a white supremacist slogan. And he made trips to Austria to meet with a Nazi-linked group, saying “they would be Republicans” if they were in America.

Mueller said that not only did Cruz fail to condemn King's words and actions unequivocally, but he continually embraced him, even naming King the national co-chair of his failed presidential bid. 

Cruz also publicly groveled to one of the leading peddlers of white nationalist and antisemitic replacement conspiracy theory. During a Senate hearing in 2022, Cruz called the Jan. 6 insurrection a “violent terrorist attack.”. But that wording infuriated then-Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson, who has argued that this conspiracy theory is real. Just hours after making his Senate remarks, Cruz appeared on Tucker’s program with his tail between his legs, claiming that his speech the day before was “sloppy” and “frankly dumb.”

But that wasn’t good enough for the conspiracy theory pusher. “Carlson continued to berate Cruz: ‘I do not believe that you used that accidentally,’” The Wrap noted at the time. Having received his orders from his bosses at Fox News, Cruz fell in line, as evident in subsequent speeches.

CRUZ’S RHETORIC CONTINUES TO ENDANGER COMMUNITIES IN EL PASO AND BEYOND

Five years ago this month, a man from Texas radicalized by these white nationalist conspiracy theories drove hundreds of miles to murder 23 people and injure 26 more who were shopping at a Walmart in El Paso. In her blog, America’s Voice Research Associate Yuna Oh wrote that he’d been obsessed with the great replacement conspiracy theory and was motivated to carry out his white nationalist violence over a false “Hispanic invasion” of Texas. 

Immediately following the shooting, Cruz invoked his family’s immigrant story and claimed that he was “deeply horrified by the hateful anti-Hispanic bigotry” in the gunman’s manifesto, calling the shooting a "heinous act of terrorism and white supremacy."

But in a slap to the face of survivors and the El Paso community just two weeks shy of the fifth anniversary, Cruz echoed the mass gunman’s deadly rhetoric during his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, falsely claiming that “we are facing an invasion on our southern border. Not figuratively. A literal invasion.” Not only did Cruz sound disturbingly similar to the shooter, he encapsulated the evening and the GOP’s fervent embrace of a once-fringe conspiracy theory formerly confined to neo-Nazi and other white supremacist websites.

“Despite the deadly violence it has inspired, in the five years since the attack in El Paso, Republicans have completely embraced the white nationalist conspiracy as their own,” Oh wrote, identifying “165 members of this Congress who have amplified the replacement conspiracy theory and invasion rhetoric. In the first seven months of this year, they have pushed this conspiracy over 650 times in their official capacity on their social media accounts.” 

Among the most fervent of that list is Cruz, who continues to endanger his home state of Texas, body count be damned.

“In El Paso, we already know the realities of what can happen when anti-immigrant shooters are inspired by violent rhetoric,” Mario Carrillo, Campaigns Director of America’s Voice and an El Paso native, said this past week. “We must demand that the very least our elected leaders can do is not actively encourage more deadly violence against our communities with their rhetoric and actions.”

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a bit of palate-cleanser after reading about Cruz, Walz with a piglet

I also wrote about Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz’s record on immigration this week.

As governor of Minnesota, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has helped usher in a progressive agenda that benefits all working Minnesota families and a style of governance that rejects the right-wing lie that pro-immigrant policies come at the detriment of U.S.-born Americans. As a member of Congress from a rural, red-leaning congressional district, Walz was always a stalwart defender of immigrants and never tempered his criticism of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. The former football coach knew how to stay on offense.

Please go check out the full piece HERE.