Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) channeled his inner Joseph McCarthy during a Fox News appearance on Tuesday, when he claimed many Democratic candidates want to cancel Christmas and Thanksgiving.
“They’re crazy enough, yes, they want to cancel Thanksgiving, they want to cancel Christmas. Look, these communists hate America. They hate capitalism. (Abdul) El-Sayed is also an Islamist, as is (Zohran) Mamdani,” Cruz told host Jesse Watters. “You see the green-red convergence, where the communists and the Islamists, they want sharia law, they hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate capitalism, they hate America.”
Despite the senator’s comments, Mamdani and El-Sayed have made no suggestion of canceling any holidays and are not communists. El-Sayed, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, are both progressives.
Cruz was likely referring to past comments made by Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, who had suggested canceling Thanksgiving due to the holiday’s ties to European colonialism and the genocide of Native Americans. Hong, for her part, has addressed these comments and seemingly tried to dismiss them.
“Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities. And so I think there, I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, but views can evolve,” Hong told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday.
Faced with a possible blue wave in the midterm elections, Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have been painting people on the left as communists.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an authoritarianism expert and professor of history at New York University, explained in a series of social media posts how this move was straight out of the fascist playbook.
“…New party line is to associate Communists with every crime, every offense. Create a sense of Communist threat to justify a rightwing crackdown. Old playbook used with coups and Fascist takeovers,” Ben-Ghiat said in one post.
Watch Cruz’s full interview with Watters here: