The Carnival Cruz Ship: The Cuban-Canadian Cuckservative Conman and the Voters Who Love Him

It was a brisk evening that February 1^st in Iowa.

Despite a plethora of dire blizzard warnings throughout the day, a record number of Republicans had turned out to vote in the state caucuses. The man of the hour had eked out a narrow win – but what the hey, a win’s a win, and in this race momentum going forward was crucial. Strutting onto the victor’s stage, with his chin held high and his black and weirdly effeminate eyes aglow (a visage that would prove to be all too familiar in the coming months), he launched into his speech for the night. Mindful that he wasn’t addressing the editorial board of Reason magazine, he was careful to begin with ‘To God be the glory’, and proceeded to lay forth his democratic ‘principles’:

Tonight is a victory for the grassroots. Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives across Iowa and all across this great nation. Tonight, the state of Iowa has spoken. Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media, will not be chosen by the Washington establishment, will not be chosen by the lobbyists but will be chosen by the most incredible powerful force where all sovereignty resides in our nation — by we the people, the American people.¹

A sentiment that tends to put the lie to giving God the glory, you would think, and certain unsavoury rumours that almost immediately began circulating about this win tended to verify that. A key rumour that turned out to be accurate was that the winner’s campaign had spread innuendos that Ben Carson was dropping out of the race in a sleazy attempt to make a cheap grab for his supporters. Little better was a mailer sent out to caucus voters threatening that a vote for another candidate would ruin their ‘voter score’, which is apparently a credit score for those still duped into believing individual votes are sacrosanct among the Powers That Be. Such rumblings soon faded into the background, though, as the winner proceeded to rack up wins in the West, Midwest, even a lone New England outpost in Maine.

Flash forward to April 25^th. The ‘winner’ still fancies himself a Colossus and refuses to admit that he can be toppled by an earthquake of significantly less magnitude than the one that struck Rhodes. Displaying awesome hubris, he enters into a pact with another ‘winner’ with a Slavic name and a terrible haircut to deny the race’s front-runner his laurels. They will each refrain from campaigning in select states in a desperate attempt to grasp at some delegates – not because either one can win, but because they want to hasten the annihilation of the GOP via a brokered convention. This, of course, will ensure that the nominee is chosen by the media, the Washington establishment, and the lobbyists. The American people (whatever that means anymore) can go pound sand.

Please give a warm welcome to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, ladies and gentlemen.

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Earlier in the election season, I pointed out that the GOP was making a feeble attempt to return to its Radical Republican roots through its utilization of Ben Carson. As we now know, that policy met with a resounding belly flop. Particularly galling to Reince Priebus and his fellow latter-day Charles Sumners, upon leaving the race Carson turned around and endorsed the supposed antithesis to their entire scheme, Donald Trump.

Still, as third-rate money market gurus like David Bahnsen delight in telling us, you can never lose by having a balanced portfolio. This campaign season still offered a surprisingly wide variety of historical victim types for them to choose from. There was the feminist Carly Fiorina, whose pinch-mouthed pout let us all know that here was a Strong, Empowered Woman who would be able to Close the Deal. Closeted LGBTs were represented by Lindsey Graham, whose dramatic ‘coming out’ at an opportune time could easily have garnered him re-election in 2020, the way things are progressing. And most important of all, we had the Mambo Kings, Cubans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. All told, this was considered a vast improvement over previous election cycles, where no-name ethnics like Hiram Fong and Ben Fernandez barely made a blip in the mainstream media of their eras.

The Cuban angle was and is considered especially desirable, given that this is the first presidential election to be held since the normalization of US-Cuban relations last year. Long a liberal bugaboo, in the past decade this policy has also become a conservative cause, as the potentialities of an untapped market for McDonald’s and Bass Pro Shops have opened up before their sentimental eyes. Besides this, Republicans have long yearned to be able to lay claim to drafting the first Hispanic nominee for the presidency on a major party ticket. Mexicans are a source of great domestic controversy at the present time, Puerto Ricans are insolvent and hence an unappealing option to head a party of big business, Nicaraguans are Ortegaistas, and South Americans are Bolivarites. Thus, Cubans are the Latino soup du jour.

Of the two, Rubio was the preference of the Republican establishment. Initially elected to the Senate as a rising star of the burgeoning Tea Party movement, he would go on to become a protege of Jeb Bush and Jewish billionaire Paul Singer, professing his love for dance music and tugging on voters’ heartstrings with a harrowing tale of his parents’ escape from Cuba that would prove to have more holes than Che Guevara’s corpse. Who could resist this goy, er, guy? White America, that’s who. In the primary season, Rubio managed to win only the thoroughly cucked state of Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. He was toast, or, if you prefer, Tostidos.

And so it was left to Cruz, the first declared candidate of the election season, to bear the standard for ‘right-thinking’ conservatives everywhere, and the party elites scrambled to throw their wholehearted support behind him. Alas, they quickly realized that this was one turd that would resist any and every attempt to polish him.

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Given how this election is seemingly dominated by the ‘outsider’, it’s easy to see why Cruz thought that his personal biography would resonate with a conservative electorate. Born to a refugee Cuban father and an Irish-American mother from Delaware in Calgary, Alberta, in 1970, the family relocated to Houston three years later, in response to the oil bust of the early 70s. His considerable debating skills were honed at Princeton and then at Harvard Law School, where no less a luminary than Alan Dershowitz described him as ‘off-the-wall brilliant’ and allowed him to found the faculty’s Latino Law Review.² His hustle was taken note of in Washington, and he also had the distinction of serving as Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s first Hispanic clerk.³ In 2003, Cruz won election as the solicitor general of Texas, in which capacity he scored some exceptionally poignant triumphs to a court-obsessed right-wing, according to his Washington Post biography:

In his five years in the post, he wrote 70 briefs to the Supreme Court and argued before the court nine times. He was involved in numerous high-profile cases, including defending the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.⁴

Four years after the end of his tenure, he would use his legal record to win a seat in the Senate, replacing one of that body’s supreme defenders of ‘don’t rock the boat’, Kay Bailey Hutchison. In that position he quickly established a reputation as a ‘maverick’, perfectly willing to antagonize his Republican colleagues in an attempt to win favour with an increasingly influential anti-establishment GOP electorate. This was most famously demonstrated during his early-hours recitation of Green Eggs and Ham during a filibuster to prevent funding of the Affordable Care Act. Social conservatives and libertarians alike proclaimed him one of their own, and his first-out-the-gate announcement that he was seeking the Republican nomination for president in March of 2015 made him an early front-runner, particularly since he managed to steal the thunder of another early-declaring libertarian candidate, Senator Rand Paul. Vindicated by his win in Iowa, he was up and running.

Up and running with his shoelaces tied together, that is. When the Trump campaign proved to have considerably more legs than the hallowed halls of punditry realized, the glaringly obvious faults both as a candidate and as a man that define Cruz entirely almost immediately began to manifest themselves.

One issue that immediately became problematic was his Canadian birth. Despite their seeming animosity towards him, the hallowed halls of punditry scrambled to assure us that Cruz indeed was a ‘natural-born citizen’ on account of the American citizenship of his mother, which she never rescinded. Bully for her. Only problem: that turned out to be completely irrelevant. The ‘legal eagles’ of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, who always seem more in their element hypothesizing about the deaths of black celebrities and analyzing Deflategate, apparently could not be bothered to research the case of Mitt Romney’s father George. During his 1968 presidential run, serious questions arose as to his eligibility based on the fact that both of his Mormon parents fled to Mexico in order to take advantage of that country’s lackadaisical attitude towards polygamy, where they were married and sired their son in a Chihuahua colony. Despite the fact that no evidence existed that neither of his parents ever renounced their citizenship,⁵ serious questions on his eligibility continued to hound Romney, and ended not with a judicial decision either way but died quietly after he withdrew from the race.⁶ The Supreme Court subsequently never felt compelled to hear a case that defined ‘natural-born citizen’ for one and all times, thus leaving the original constitutional interpretation intact and disqualifying Cruz on that basis alone. Leaving aside the constitutional issues, though, the fact that Cruz chose to renounce his dual Canadian citizenship only in 2014 (he supposedly ‘first learned’ about it only nine months previously, but if you believe that I have a Christian bakery in Mecca I’d like to sell you),⁷ despite the fact that he harbored presidential ambitions at least as far back as 2013, tends to suggest that his attitude towards citizenship and immigration in general is decidedly on the ambivalent side.

And boy oh boy, was that ambivalence ever on display in regards to his stance on immigration as a whole! His campaign tried to pretend that he isn’t one who would build bridges with motorized walkways all along the Rio Grande – why, he sponsored bills to require proof of citizenship to vote and whatnot! – but his rhetoric ebbs and flows with the times, typical of any political prostitute. Not surprisingly, his years spent working with the George W. Bush administration (which he mysteriously never discussed on the campaign trail) revealed his true colours. According to The Daily Beast:

But during a CNN debate in December, as Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio clashed over Cruz’s past positions on offering legal status to undocumented immigrants, Cruz said definitively, “I’ve never supported legalization, I do not intend to support it.” . . .

“It’s just a flat out lie. Period,” said Robert De Posada. “There’s just no truth behind it.” De Posada is a former Director of Hispanic Affairs for the RNC and founder of the Latino Coalition, a conservative Latino organization that worked with the Bush administration unsuccessfully to pass immigration reform. . . .

The facts, according to De Posada and several Republicans who worked with Cruz in Washington and Texas, are that in Cruz’s past work for Bush and later as a board member of the Washington-based Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity Institute, Cruz helped craft policies to allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and pursue legal status.

None of those efforts included granting automatic amnesty to undocumented workers, but it is clear in the minds of his former colleagues that finding a way to offer immigrants a way to remain in the United States and gain legal status was central to the work Cruz did.⁸

This was not a grudging role carried on as a mere job by a good GOP team player, either. Other officials quoted in the story describe him as being a ‘“very hands on” professional who never raised objections to the policies.’ and that, furthermore, he ‘wanted to bring immigrants out of the shadows’.⁹ These are not the actions of a man worried that his job might have ramifications against his future political ambitions.

And this position of his did not change when he relocated to Texas to take up his solicitor general gig:

Once in Texas, he joined the board of advisers for HAPI, a group of Latino conservatives that included George P. Bush, former members of Congress, and multiple veterans of the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. . . .

HAPI advocated conservative positions to an array of issues, including its opposition to both climate change legislation and the Affordable Care Act. On immigration, HAPI strongly advocated for a path to legalization, including President Bush’s principles for immigration reform, as well as the 2006 McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill. . . .

Cruz co-chaired a 2005 event featuring Gov. Rick Perry and served as a keynote speaker for two of the group’s events. And because of Cruz’s legal expertise, board members said they relied on him to do the first draft of policy positions, including HAPI’s support for immigration reform. When he ran for Senate in 2012, HAPI hosted a fundraiser to support his candidacy. . . .

“It’s just bull***t,” said a former member of the HAPI when asked about Cruz’s contention that he never supported legalization. “That’s what p***es us all off. Don’t throw us under the bus for legalization and not take on the nativists and the crazies when you wrote the language. Stand for something.”¹⁰

As the last paragraph makes clear, the quoted officials were all pro-amnesty Republicans, documenting that there is little that will unite the right and the left in agreement quite like hypocrisy. Why should Cruz have hoped to garner support from anti-establishment red-staters who jeered at Mitt Romney’s about-faces on abortion when he is guilty of precisely the same sin on the immigration front? While that mystery may never be resolved, another one has been: no wonder he never chose to use this as one of his campaign songs.

Despite all his loud proclamations of fidelity towards walls, documentation, background checks, etc. on the stumpings, Cruz had a tendency to engage in mealy-mouthed terminology that allowed him an escape hatch in the impossible event that he should actually win the big prize and realize that those illegals not active in La Raza represent a docile and grateful voting bloc to ensure his re-election in 2020. One of his quoted positions has been ‘When it comes to immigration: legal, good; illegal, bad’. This might sound like a reasonable compromise to those few still immersed in the fraudulent mythos of Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty inscription, but it falls apart when one considers that a blanket executive declaration of immunity would most certainly qualify as ‘legal’, Cruz’s railings against a ‘path to citizenship’ to the contrary. Perhaps that might prove a touch controversial among ornery nativist whites? No problem. On Face the Nation, he also declared that the immigration problem would ‘solve itself’ – thus, presumably, giving him a free hand to ignore the issue altogether and concentrate on such laudable actions as constructing the much-maligned F-35 fighter plane and funneling federal funds to gay pride organizations in Tel Aviv instead, should that prove expedient. Even his wife Heidi tried to get into the act, proudly proclaiming that her husband is an immigrant in a ham-fisted attempt to woo primary voters in Indiana. The campaign attempted to spin this statement as a misquote, but as it’s a demonstrably true statement it met with little success. Stick to being a strong, empowered womyn at your cushy and sinister gig at Goldman Sachs, Heidi.

The sins of the father could be said to have descended to the son, as well. While Cruz might be loath to trumpet his own foreign birthright, he certainly doesn’t stint on relating his father Rafael’s story every chance he gets. We all know by now that the elder Cruz, after initially supporting Castro’s revolution in his native Cuba, turned against him and was forced to flee for his life to Texas. Making full use of the American Dream, he founded an oil service company with his American wife that eventually brought him to Canada, hence Ted’s birth. Relocating to the US in the mid 70s, he abandoned his Catholicism in favour of a vaguely defined evangelical Christianity, which allowed him to become a minor but nevertheless beloved darling of the likes of the Trinity Broadcasting Network. He embraced the role of ‘spiritual advisor’ to his son with great fervour.

A wonderful story, one tailor-made to appeal to the most credulous of Christians. Too bad, then, that so much of his story has been unable to be verified. He has also been less than vehement in his avowal that his tale is a true one. On his supposed friendship with legendary Castro partisan Frank País – a crucial part of his narrative – the New York Times reported:

“I knew Frank País personally and I saw him 12 hours before he was killed,” Mr. Cruz has said in speeches.

In the interview, he said he was part of a group of young rebels held in reserve, waiting to receive weapons. When the Castro boat did not show, they were told to “scram,” he said.

But veterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.

Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.

Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.

“I don’t remember meeting Rafael Cruz,” said Agustín País, Frank’s brother, who now lives in Miami.

In the March interview, Mr. Cruz — coaxed by his son the candidate — described the Nov. 30 uprising.

“And País was killed there,” Ted Cruz interjected.

“Yes,” said his father.

Told that Mr. País had been executed the next year, in a different place, and that this had been amply documented, Rafael Cruz brushed off the mistake: “I don’t remember where País was killed,” he said.¹¹

Sure, these could be explained away as the befuddled reminiscences of an elderly man – how many armchair warriors were there in 1850s Britain who claimed they had Napoleon in the sights of their muskets? Such a story, however, gave Rev. Cruz his name among the televangelist crowd, allowing him to receive his imprimaturs from the likes of Kenneth Copeland and John Hagee. Even worse, his faux-prodigal son has chronicled these hazy memoirs in his ironically-titled book A Time For Truth and, as the above quote makes clear, is not above publicly prompting his father in a desperate attempt to keep his credibility alive. With such murkiness afloat, it perhaps is appropriate that Trump’s last slam against Cruz was attempting to link the senior Cruz with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Such spectacular dishonesty on immigration has been more than sufficient to justify Trump’s label ‘Lyin’ Ted’ – a moniker that has stuck to Cruz more firmly than that garnered to any other candidate. No man can conceal an unclean spirit among those with eyes to see, and Cruz certainly cannot. Red flags of sociopathy drape him like an Apollyonic cape. One would be hard-pressed to find a man – in any profession – so uniformly and publicly despised by his colleagues. One can hardly imagine a former GOP speaker of the house in past elections calling his party’s supposed conservative champion ‘Lucifer in the flesh’, but that’s precisely what John Boehner did. By all accounts, his demeanour in the Senate has been witheringly contemptuous and condescending towards all those he considers beneath him – namely, everybody. One look at his smarmy mug, with the dead blackened eyes that proclaim ‘I pity you. I matriculated at Hah-vud, and you didn’t’, and this sentiment becomes entirely believable. Consequently, the few endorsements he has received have been tepid at best, and seem more to be endorsements against Trump than anything else. Certainly, the vast majority of his Senate colleagues could be safely classified as pond scum too, and his Judeo-Christian adherents try to portray him as a latter-day Micah despised because he prophesies not good against his party but evil. Yet the sheer lack of respect shown Cruz’s way crumbles this analogy. Paul’s words of admonition reverberate here: ‘Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.’ (Romans 12:17-18)

All these gross moral failings aside, though, it isn’t difficult to comprehend why Cruz believed he had the so-called ‘very conservative’ and very vote-rich evangelical demographic in his pocket. He was smart enough to establish himself as the ‘Christian’ candidate very early on, and given that evangelicals glom onto their Reaganesque idols in perpetuity, such brand identification is vital to GOP success – especially since TradCats, conservative Lutherans, and Calvinists will be sure to hold their noses and vote for said candidate as well. Not to mention that his Zionist credentials are impeccable – the Jerusalem Post recently heralded Cruz as ‘arguably Israel’s most avid defender in the Senate’ due to his taking the lead in opposing the Iranian nuclear agreement and that burning issue of our time: moving the US’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.¹² And with dear old dad rushing about reminding everybody how quickly Cuba is being converted, what could possibly go wrong? Just kick back on primary/caucus nights and wait for the Solid South’s tidal wave of support to overwhelm you!

Except…it didn’t quite come to pass in that fashion. Instead, Trump managed to secure the evangelical vote and wound up sweeping the South outside of Texas.

What on earth happened?

A yeomanry backlash. In virtually every state containing sizable numbers of Hispanic and Arabic immigrants, shrill blacks driven to a frenzy by #BlackLivesMatter agitation, or both, Trump won handily across all demographic profiles – including Christians. Clearly, his nativist positions resonated. Whether he is sincere in these beliefs (I have grave reservations) is beside the point. The anger is there, and Cruz chose to be flippant towards it to his peril.

True, he did manage to win over a sizable number of evangelicals in the West and Midwest. However, those are areas that are still not inundated with ethnics to the degree of other parts of America. And in the few Christian white enclaves remaining, denial of integrationist reality and checking one’s ‘privilege’ are still considered the most cardinal of virtues. It speaks volumes that this meme featuring a toothless pap endorsement from the Cruz family’s own metrosexual-looking pastor is thought worthy enough to be featured in a ‘Christians for Cruz’ Facebook group.

This is by no means a monolithic sentiment in these regions, though, so in order to ensure success out west, the Cruz campaign continued to engage in underhanded tactics in order to win some Pyrrhic victories. Numerous accounts of voter disenfranchisement and backroom deals in favour of Cruz led to his weirdly unanimous or nearly-so winning of delegates in Wyoming, North Dakota, and, most infamously, Colorado. The Denver Post’s reporting of that state’s irregularities serves as a good example of what transpired in the others:

Colorado GOP leaders canceled the party’s presidential straw poll in August to avoid binding its delegates to a candidate who may not survive until the Republican National Convention in July.

Instead, Republicans selected national delegates through the caucus process, a move that put the election of national delegates in the hands of party insiders and activists — leaving roughly 90 percent of the more than 1 million Republican voters on the sidelines.¹³

Initially dismissed as Trumpian sour grapes in a jeering fashion by such neoconservative partisans as the National Review editorial board, the claims were later given great credence when the head of the Boulder County GOP admitted that the state results were tainted to such an extent that a re-vote might have to be granted should it prove necessary. Indeed, these results aroused my own personal suspicions more than in any other state. As a key western economic and transportation hub, Colorado has a significant immigrant problem itself, and thus should have been fertile ground for a Trump victory. The fact that he did not win even a single one of the state’s sizable 34 delegates should have been sufficient to give even novice followers of the electoral process pause.

Why the petty delegate larceny in less-populated western states? In addition to helping to prop up the campaign’s flagging momentum with a series of cheap ‘wins’, such a tactic also helps to keep another myth of the Cruz/Trump rivalry alive: that Ted is the down-home, small-town Western David battling Donald, the big-money, Wall Street wheeler-dealer Eastern Goliath. I suppose this was meant to bring back fond memories of Goldwater vs. Rockefeller in 1964 or Reagan vs. Ford in 1976. Given Cruz’s cultural Marxist presuppositions (which both Goldwater and Reagan also possessed, incidentally), the historically-minded kinist is more likely to be reminded that Big Bill Haywood came from Utah while John Reed came from Oregon. Cruz can prattle away about ‘New York Values’, wear a George Strait-style cowboy shirt and jeans combo, and feature Brooks & Dunn songs at his rallies to his heart’s content, but he cannot deny that one of his primary campaign contributors has been Goldman Sachs. His wife Heidi, of course, is also an executive in the bank’s southwestern division, making any populist sentiment he claims to hold dear doubly laughable.

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I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a predominantly white group that, by and large, seems to have genuinely embraced and vigorously supported Cruz: Mormons.

In the Kingdom of Deseret, if Cruz would not be eligible for the throne, it would seem he would have an excellent chance of being named Secretary of Gentiles, should the need for that cabinet position ever arise. LDS endorsement of Cruz could almost be considered total. He won the Utah caucus with 69.2% of the vote – far and away his highest percentage total in any state. Large Mormon turnouts in southern Idaho were largely responsible for delivering that state to Cruz as well, with considerably larger Trump support to be found in the non-Mormon Panhandle (this, too, before it became clear that the smaller western states overall were going to be Cruz Central). One of the very few enthusiastic endorsements Cruz ever received from his Senate colleagues came from Utah’s Mike Lee, and the sect’s Big Kahuna, Mitt Romney, also actively campaigned for him once it became clear that both Jeb and Marco were yesterday’s news.

Mainstream explanations of this phenomenon, as can be expected, toe the politically correct line. Typical is this Freudian interpretation of repressed Mormon white privilege, buttressed by an underlying tone of hysteria against ‘schismatic persecution’ and penned by the tellingly named Benjamin Hertzberg:

It is deeply mistaken to understand Utah’s decision to support the ultra-nationalistic-religious-liberty-restricting-Muslim-baiting Cruz over the (somewhat) louder and more belligerent ultra-nationalistic-religious-liberty-restricting-Muslim-baiting Trump as motivated by some principled Mormon concern for religious liberty.

What I see instead is the fearful calculus of a minority religious group that has legitimate concerns about the likely implications of the GOP’s increasingly punitive policies toward the religiously different — but does not have the courage to embrace their particularity and leave the party entirely. To do so would be to admit what is obvious to students of Mormonism: They are radically different from the mainstream of American Protestant religiosity. So instead of proclaiming their own difference, they stay, effectively, in the closet: They support the marginally more respectable Cruz over the brash and aggressive Trump.¹⁴

Hogwash. There is nothing tentative or self-abasing about the Mormon love affair with Cruz, which the aforementioned quote would seem to suggest would be a necessity for this scenario to be legitimate. Their support can be summarized in three points.

First, numerous commentators have pointed out that Cruz is seen by many Mormons as being a fulfillment of the ‘White Horse Prophecy’. Paralleling the premillennial interpretation of the Book of Revelation, the prophecy serves as a warning from Joseph Smith as to the persecutions the LDS church will endure in the end times:

Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and they will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two to defend you and throw out the worst parts of the law so they will not hurt you so much. You must continue to petition Congress all the time, but they will treat you like strangers and aliens and they will not give you your rights, but will govern you with strangers and commissioners. You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.¹⁵

While considered an apocryphal account by many Mormon scholars, this tale is enough in accordance with the actual words spoken by Smith regarding the Constitution to have been accepted as fact by such LDS luminaries as Ezra Taft Benson.¹⁶ Further insight as to how this condition is to be remedied is found in this Smith quote, which is widely regarded as accurate:

Even this nation will be on the very verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground, and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin, this people will be the staff upon which the nation shall lean, and they shall bear the Constitution away from the very verge of destruction.¹⁷

‘This people’, of course, refers to Mormons. Ted Cruz is thought of by many Mormons to be a vessel to help in fulfilling this prophecy and allowing their civil-state-as-divine religion to reign triumphant. Except…Cruz isn’t Mormon himself. I dunno. Maybe it’s an Oskar Schindler kind of deal?

Another thing about ‘this people’ – how does an immigrant Latino like Cruz fit into the prophecies of what has been, for all its heresies, a historically Caucasian church with strong traditions of tribalism and robust white families? Well, you see, that was Ezra Taft Benson’s Mormons, not the latter-day Latter-Days. Which brings me to point number two: the Mormon church is as thoroughly enmeshed in the cuckservative matrix as every other American church. Even more so, when one considers its heavy reliance on missionary endeavours. From the official LDS website, we witness this declaration, which would be equally at home as a motto for American Vision or for Chalcedon:

The composition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has changed over time and continues to change every day. Since the 1900s the Church has grown from congregations comprised mainly of northern European immigrants to the United States to a global Church whose members live in 190 countries and speak over 120 languages.

In 1996, the number of members living outside the United States surpassed those residing within it, and by the year 2000 the majority of the membership was non-English speaking…

Just as Paul in the New Testament taught that the Church is a body with each part adding beauty and purpose to the whole, so too does The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints experience strength from its diversity.¹⁸

Yes, the clarion call of ‘diversity’, which has destroyed more than a few Christian ships upon the shoals when the sirens pick up its lilting melodies. And make no mistake about it: Mormons are very, very eager to prove themselves diverse indeed. As an example, take two more of Sen. Cruz’s most ardent backers: Idaho congressman Raul Labrador and Utah congresswoman Mia Love. Both Mormon, both members of the Noble Fellowship of Visible Minorityhood (Labrador a Puerto Rican and Love a black Haitian – thus giving her her very own immigrant cachet for bonus points!)…and both married to white spouses and with a myriad of mixed-race children prominently featured on the Christmas cards both send out to constituents every year. Both, too, are considered young up-and-comers in the Republican party. Assuming that organization lasts until the next election, that is.

Finally, we cannot overlook the influence brought to bear on the Cruz campaign on that clown prince of bogus contumacy, the Mormon Glenn Beck. Welcome back to 2010, kids. Desperately searching about for a hook to resurrect his dying Blaze empire, like the good Elmer Gantry that he is, Beck has embraced the Cruz campaign with an insane fervency that makes one suspect his skeleton in the closet these days is glue-sniffing. The gamut of kooky words and actions he has engaged in boggles the mind. Pushing the White Horse Prophecy bit, he has said that Cruz has been ‘anointed for this time’. He has compared the ‘burdens’ that Cruz has had to bear to those of Moses. During a Cruz rally, he brought a fasting young boy on stage and blatted, ‘THIS IS THE PRIESTHOOD RISING!!!’, thus seemingly channeling the late Jim Morrison. He called for a greatly-derided ‘national fast’ to pray for ‘Ted Cruz, our country and the Nevada caucus‘ after the South Carolina primary, and followed that up with another fast call for Cruz after he withdrew from the race. A stunt involving his coating his face in crushed Cheetos to mock Trump’s skin tone led many to believe he needed to be put on a suicide watch. He warned that God must punish America’s perfidy for hounding Cruz out of the race because God isn’t a ‘bad dad’. You get the picture. The man is certifiable. He also happens to retain a sizable following among his fellow Mormons, among whom worshiping a false Christ is considered par for the course. Beats rodeo clowning any day.

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All bad things must come to an end, and in the first week of May, Ted Cruz’s ignominious campaign ended ignominiously. His vague alliance with John Kasich and his presumptuous picking of a running mate, particularly when said mate turned out to be the risible Carly Fiorina, drew scorn from across the political spectrum. In the run-up to Indiana he became noticeably short-tempered on camera – the kiss of death to any candidacy. Especially damaging was footage of him delivering a sanctimonious lecture to a teenage heckler as he was being escorted away by security. He took to lashing out at Trump, desperately trying to garner some of The Donald’s legendary brashness for his own benefit – but this too did not work, primarily because in trying to make an issue of Trump’s philandering Cruz inadvertently rekindled memories of his own infidelity scandal, which proved to have more life than he was hoping for. And when the Indiana primary results were tabulated and it became clear that Cruz lost the state and lost badly – after proclaiming that this primary was his hill to die on – he haughtily announced that he was suspending his campaign. And the cherry on the sundae? He managed to elbow his wife in the face while reaching to embrace his father. A little bit of petulant revenge because Goldman Sachs didn’t cough up more dough for his run? We’ll probably never know.

But fear not – we have not seen the last of the Judeo-Churchian Castro. His hubris and his grasping ambition have proven themselves limitless, and it’s a very safe bet that he retired off the stage in order to begin crafting a plan to the White House for 2020 or 2024 – not even 46 yet, he has nothing but time on his side. And as this video makes clear, everything young Ted learned about the goals of statesmanship he learned from his obvious mentor, Tony Montana.

And, hey – if that gig doesn’t materialize either, Cruz can always move back to Alberta and take over leadership of that province’s ‘rite’ wing Wildrose Party.

No, who am I kidding? We sure as hell don’t want him back.

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