Ted Cruz’s Totally Outrageous “Proof” That the KKK Loves Democrats

Ted Cruz wouldn’t be a conservative if he wasn’t adept at historical revisionism. On Monday, he shared an absurd piece by right-wing tabloid New York Post attempting to align pro-Palestine protests with Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and melting racist gremlin David Duke.

Cruz wrote boastfully on X, “Democrats founded the Klan … and now the Klan is backing the Democrats.”

Cruz’s comment is a tired bit of conservative propaganda that he has repeatedly trotted out which conveniently ignores major facets of American political history. During the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, Democrats were indeed conservative, pro-Confederacy racists. But Cruz would probably dislike it if you learned about the Southern Strategy, a successful effort most famously deployed by the Nixon campaign to pull white racists—including members of the KKK—from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Southern Strategy was essentially a role reversal that stoked racial divisions and fearmongery for the sake of building the Republican Party’s power. To wit, Democrats of yore—then referred to as Dixiecrats—would today find themselves toting America First flags above their MAGA behatted heads while flooding Marjorie Taylor Greene’s replies with praise and drawing up plans to harass a Drag Story Hour event. It’s a tactic Republicans continue to use today.

Cruz’s comment further omits the fact that the Democratic Party has split itself in two over the pro-Palestine movement and calls for a cease-fire, with Democratic leadership consistently in opposition to both movements. Biden’s entire administration, leading Democrats like Schumer, Pelosi, and the Democratic establishment overall have all been aggressively protested against for their refusal to call for a cease-fire for the past nine months, with Pelosi infamously and absurdly decrying protests against her as the work of Russian and Chinese operatives. Duke, moreover, isn’t pro-Palestine. He’s anti-Jew, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, and anti-Muslim—and he took credit for the rise of Donald Trump. His stance is legitimately antisemitic and virulently racist to everyone except for the same white, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual men to whom Cruz also endeavors to appeal.

The Post article is more or less the same as its usual attempts to slander movements and people conservatives dislike. The rag’s targets span from pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter activists to progressive politicians. It ramps up targeted hate against LGBTQ-friendly spaces and often inflames anxieties around crime—especially during election years, a move that bolsters conservative candidates and surely aided Democrats in New York losing several House seats in the midterm elections.

The Post’s incendiary rhetoric has often been cited by far-right activists mobilizing in line with Post outrage bait, most recently resulting in a series of modern-day Klan rallies against housing asylum-seekers, harassing a school briefly sheltering migrant families overnight to avoid floods, outrage over completely fabricated claims of veterans kicked out of hotels to house migrants—even provoking a right-wing dope to fling pizzas over the fence at City Hall in reaction to a bogus article about pizza ovens.

Cruz’s response to the Post’s spin is effectively Cruz acknowledging he’s prone to falling prey to absurdly inflammatory claims from a notoriously disingenuous tabloid that works tirelessly to intensify right-wing fearmongering and division. For one thing, neither Duke nor any far-right extremist or white supremacist is pro-Palestine. Duke is intensely and explicitly antisemitic. And while the Post would never report on it, whenever white supremacists think they can find a safe space in a pro-Palestine protest, they end up forcefully kicked out.

Attempts to pair protests against genocide with people who support the mass extermination of a specific group are just an effort to delegitimize opposition to mass death. It’s nothing new, but it’s always very telling who falls for the ruse. Cruz’s comment, with historical context applied, is ultimately an immense self-own—on himself and the Republican Party, which presently and historically endeavors to charm the most racist people who’ve ever lived.