CANE FIELD, IOWA — Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) told reporters at a campaign stop in Iowa this week that he isn’t sure which group of outsiders — Syrian refugees or Mexican immigrants — he should “stoke the most fear over.”
Speaking to the media after a rally in Cane Field, Iowa, Cruz said that he has been “going over the polling” that has been done of Republican primary voters in order to “ascertain the minority group they most want me to attack.” Cruz said that he directly blames ISIS not only for the terrorist attack in Paris last week, but he also blames them for “forcing a pivot away from demagoguing the Mexicans.”
“I’ve spent weeks and months blowing subtle racist dog whistles about Mexican immigrants,” Cruz told reporters, “and I didn’t gin up all that fear over Sanctuary Cities just to have to pivot away from Mexicans to Muslims and I can’t decide who the base wants me to hate more.” Senator Cruz hypothesized that he could “lump all foreigners together in one big, xenophobic pitch to the American people” in the worst case scenario.
Mr. Cruz told rally attendees that he was their “number one choice for a candidate who will not back down to the demands of any special interest group, even if that group is a bunch of people trying to flea their own murder at the hands of barbaric religious fundamentalists.” Cruz insisted that “if it’s a paranoid fear of others that you most value in American life” voters should look to him, and only him for “salvation from the people who look and sound different than you.”
“Some in the liberal media want to paint us haters,” Cruz said to the crowd, “just because we distrust people who have already been thoroughly vetted. They say we’re anti-immigrant just because we think it’s more practical and moral to deport 11 million people and build a massive, expensive wall than it is to work with the Mexican government and create a new system of immigration that benefits all parties. Well, I say poppycock to them. If we true, red-blooded, ammo-hoarding Americans want to stoke an emotionally bankrupt narrative of apathy toward refugees and hostility to those coming here merely to make a better life for themselves and their families then we will do so and no hippy-dippy Obama voter’s gonna stop us!”
Cruz finished his question and answer session with reporters and told them that he would “make a decision sometime in the next few months as to whether to focus more hate on refugees or immigrants,” but that ultimately he doesn’t think voters will punish him too harshly for whichever decision he makes. “As long as I cast aspersions on some group that our voters dislike — gays, uppity minorities, refugees, immigrants, or liberals — they’ll support me,” Cruz said, “I know that. They know that. So why hide it anymore? Cruz out!”
