Senator Ted Cruz (GQP – Texas) decided to start off his weekend with some good old fashioned Texas race-baiting when he tried to blame spiking Covid19 rates in Texas on migrants.
Of course, there's zero evidence to back up any of Cruz's claims that the spike is due to migrants, and Covid19 infection rates are rising all over the country, with areas that have the lowest vaccination rates seeing the fastest spikes, but as Republicans always say "Why suggest white people should take responsibility for their actions when you can blame it on a brown people?"
In South Texas, we're seeing #COVID positivity rates rising and it's a direct result of illegal aliens being released into communities. pic.twitter.com/VZ67vEdsuj
- Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) July 14, 2021
Cruz's comments also call to mind the book Prophets of Deceit by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. In the beginning of Chapter 2 of that work, the authors write: "…whenever the investigator scans the texts of agitation and, on the basis of his experience in studying other kinds of social movements, tries to discover what is the discontent it articulates, he is consistently disappointed. The difficulty is not that agitation fails to provide him with answers,
but rather that it answers a question he did not ask: whenever he asks
what he is answered as if he had asked who. He finds numerous vituperative and . indignant references to enemies, but nowhere can he find a clearly defined objective condition from which the agitator's audience presumably suffers."
Here we see a classic example of Ted Cruz doing the same. Instead of articulating the fact that many in South Texas suffer from belief in far right conspiracy theories that promote anti-vaxxer beliefs and prompt them to refuse a vaccine, or address the fact of an incompetent Republican State government that has made a minimal investment in distributing the Covid19 vaccine in Texas's majority Hispanic border counties, he blames migrants. Instead of trying to offer potential solutions to problems, Cruz is trying to promote racism and paranoia among his audience.
Republicans are becoming more obvious in their race-baiting in the age of Trump, and as we approach the 2022 election cycle, it is important that this kind of behavior be called out immediately.