It was nearly a year ago when The New York Times profiled Sen. Ron Johnson, describing the Wisconsin Republican as his party’s most brazen “purveyor of misinformation on serious issues.”
It’s hard not to wonder whether Sen. Ted Cruz saw the phrasing as some kind of challenge, effectively daring him to up his game.
The Texas Republican’s misinformation troubles came to mind over the weekend for a reason. The Daily Beast reported:
Fox News contributor Sara Carter has walked back her entirely fictitious claim about a woman dying after being trampled by a Canadian authority on horseback amid ongoing trucker-led protests. While the claim wasn’t accurate, the tweet was red-meat for her over 1.3 million conservative Twitter followers, who quickly amplified the baseless death as evidence of Canadian government wrongdoing.
Among those doing the amplifying was, of course, the junior senator from the Lone Star State, who ultimately walked back his online promotion of the false story — but not before his millions of Twitter followers saw wrong information for 15 hours.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Cruz has a habit of promoting bogus claims first, and then eventually checking to see whether they’re true or not. Last summer, for example, conservatives quickly embraced purported footage of the Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter. It wasn’t true, but Cruz promoted it anyway.
The GOP lawmaker — a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — later backed off, saying the content he promoted “may be inaccurate.”
Two months later, Cruz told his Twitter followers the White House’s “illegal vaccine mandate” led to shortages of pilots and air traffic controllers. This wasn’t true, either. Two months after that, the Texas Republican published a tweet complaining about Covid protections created by the “WA Government” — which he assumed meant officials in the state of Washington. It didn’t. The policies he blamed on “power drunk” Democrats in the United States were actually created by officials in Western Australia. All of which helped set the stage for the senator’s appearance on Fox News yesterday morning, during which Cruz suggested Donald Trump was spied on by nefarious Democrats, days after the claims were discredited. Some politicians with national ambitions go to great lengths to earn a reputation for honesty and reliability. And then there’s Ted Cruz.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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