Unlike some members of the GOP Performance Artist Caucus, Ted Cruz (R-TX) is smart enough to know better. This week, he weighed in on the Olympics.
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A while back, we said that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is the worst kind of demagogue. That’s because, unlike people such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), he is intelligent enough to understand what he is doing when he disseminates lies and misinformation. So, why does he still do it? Given that he still holds presidential ambitions, our best guess is that he believes that, along with kowtowing to Donald Trump, being a propagandist is the best way for him to maybe one day secure the GOP nomination.
After all, he is only (a hard-to-believe) 53 years old.
This week, he was at it again.
After Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won the gold medal in boxing at the Olympic Games in Paris, Cruz responded to a tweet from the far-right group Libs of TikTok.
“BREAKING: Imane Khalif, a male, just won a gold medal in women’s boxing. What a time to be alive,” the group wrote on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
While that is incorrect (and Khelif’s name was misspelled), this has been a common talking point for right-wing agitators during the Olympics.
With few other policies to champion, the GOP likes to focus on fringe “issues” that make for good propaganda but affect very few Americans… like whether trans women should be allowed to compete in women’s athletics.
However, that is not even the question here.
As we have noted, Khelif was identified as a woman at birth and has competed as a woman all her life. According to the rules of the International Olympic Committee, she is a woman, and over the course of her career she has both defeated and also lost to women.
Therefore, this is not a trans issue at all. At the most, it could have triggered a discussion about eligibility requirements in sports and whether the very small number of women born with an Y chromosome should compete with other women.
However, because this is such a complicated issue, it should be adjudicated and decided by experts, not Libs of TikTok… and certainly not Ted Cruz, who jumped into the debate in his trademark odious way.
“Serious Q: Why is it that there are ZERO women, transitioning to men, who are competing in men’s sports?” he wrote on X.
Well, that’s not actually a serious question in this context because we are not talking about anybody transitioning.
In addition, a brief Google search would have informed the senator that there are, in fact, a few trans men who have competed in men’s sports.
But Cruz doesn’t care about any of that. He just wants to pour gasoline on a fire and get people riled up without considering that we are talking about human beings here who end up getting harassed.
Then again, maybe he is the perfect person to weigh in on this.
After all, Rafael Edward Cruz, Jr. knows what it’s like to be born as one thing and then want to be something else.
