Wow, Ted Cruz's Take on January 6 Sure Has Evolved!

Ted Cruz, the guy who puts Family First unless it's politically inconvenient, has some new thoughts on January 6. Like many Republican members of Congress, the Texas senator was relatively chastened in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. He spent the run-up feeding The Base various fantasies about how the election was stolen from Donald Trump, fanning the paranoid rage for his own political gain. In fact, he was in the middle of baselessly objecting to the certification of Arizona's election results—that is to say, trying to throw out the votes of American citizens—when the building was overrun. But he did change his tune there for a bit. A mob breaking down the doors of the legislature you serve in to try to keep their strongman hero in power will do that to you.

Here's what Cruz said in a statement on January 7, 2021:

He continued to sing from the same song sheet on May 28, 2021, albeit while criticizing the formation of the January 6 commission in the House:

A year later, on January 5, 2022, he was still relatively clear-eyed about what went down—or at least, about the fact that a large number of serious violent crimes were committed. He went further in his characterization than many in the Democratic Party and the Lamestream Liberal Media during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

And then Senator Cancun got some heat from the high priest of right-wing bullshit, the minute-by-minute dispenser of exactly which morsel of hateful crapola The Base wants to hear, Tucker Carlson. The heir to a frozen food fortune born in San Francisco and raised in La Jolla is now d.b.a. the voice of the populist heartland, and he bashed Cruz to the point that The Oleaginous One had to make a pilgrimage to Tucker Carlson Tonight to say 40 Hail Marys and repeatedly call himself a moron. Carlson also helped in the latter regard. Then, having bought his indulgences from the archbishop, Cruz tweeted out his self-flagellatory salvation in the form of the Fox News clip.

By February of this year, when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called January 6 "a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next," Cruz had wised up to the obligations of his lofty office. "The word insurrection is politically charged propaganda," he said. "I think it is a mistake for Republicans to repeat the political propaganda of Democrats and the corporate media."

It was a fitting narrative arc for the guy who sold out his wife and father and everything he putatively believed to make himself a vassal of Donald Trump. Just as continuing to oppose Trump meant political death for a Republican, now speaking the truth about Trump's attempted autogolpe means political death. And nothing is more important to Ted Cruz than clinging to life as a Very Important Person That People Pay Attention To. He has thoroughly received the memo on this stuff now, as he sought to demonstrate in another Fox News hit on Monday night. Speaking to Sean Hannity about the grave dangers of pro-choice activists protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, Cruz found himself a new angle on January 6. Can you guess who the Real Victims are?

No one is saying the people who attended Trump's rage-a-thon at the Ellipse and then went for a pint are insurrectionists. People are concerned about the group that Cruz used to readily recognize: those who sacked the Capitol. But if you watch the whole segment, there is none of Cruz's prior concern about the "violent terrorists." There were, however, some absolutely shameless claims in light of what Cruz previously admitted he very well knows about what happened that day. After characterizing Americans who think abortion should be legal as "Marxists" and "Communists" who "hate faith" and "hate God," he offered the following:

And then, after Sean Hannity characterized Trump's message to his followers on January 6 as telling them to "peacefully, patriotically march to the Capitol so your voices will be heard," we got the crap in the video above:

Jesus Christ. Projection ain't just a river in Texas. Who was it who had a problem calling off his goons for hours and hours on January 6? Even as Republicans begged him to do so?

Cruz went on to suggest Democrats are turning to rule-by-force because their ideas are unpopular, a characterization that is exactly correct if used to describe the conservative movement. Banning abortion is unpopular, which is why Republicans—led by McConnell—seized control of the judiciary so that conservatives could legislate from the bench behind a patina of legal-beagle respectability. (The real priority is dismantling the federal government's ability to regulate powerful corporate interests.) They benefit from a whole host of structural advantages, some baked in from the republic's early days and others created or crowbarred open in modern times, to hold power despite rarely commanding the support of a majority of actual citizens across the country. This culminated with January 6, an attempt to install someone in office who got fewer citizens' votes in both elections he contested. He won the first legitimately through our dumbass system for selecting presidents. He lost the second every which way, including by 7 million votes nationwide, and they were screaming that he should stay in office anyway. Cruz lobbied to throw out the results.

But even putting that aside, Cruz's call to concentrate on the peaceful demonstrators on January 6 remains absurd. Why isn't the media talking about the people who rallied peacefully behind some bullshit fantasies I helped feed them? What about the people who chose not to react violently to our message that their country was being stolen away from them? Why don't we focus less on the people who chanted about hanging the vice president because he wouldn't overturn the election, and more about the people who were just mad at him for not overturning the election? The shamelessness knows no bounds. The envelope will never be un-pushed. There's never a single step back, never a moment's pause. The right-wing victimhood is constant, a self-reinforcing current of nature. Cruz is just one of the nihilist freaks who's sold his soul for power, but it's hard to deny he's special.

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