Ted Cruz knows this election isn’t a game. And it isn’t an episode of Family Feud. In refusing to support or endorse Donald Trump, he has not only broken his word but shows stunning indifference to ushering into the White House a criminal and a traitor who has exposed national secrets to our enemies and who will actively destroy the very constitutional principles Cruz claims to idolize.
Cruz’s RNC speech was about reclaiming our freedoms, but he knows that job one for Hillary Clinton is to continue the methodical tear-down of those freedoms. He knows she will triple down on Barack Obama’s attack on our right to own firearms and on our freedom of speech and religion. Even as Cruz insists America has no king or a queen, he knows that Barack Obama has unconstitutionally grabbed imperial power through his executive orders, and that Hillary Clinton has promised to do the same.
Cruz also knows that this radical leftist administration steadily trashes not only our freedoms but even our livelihoods in ways unimaginable a few years ago. Nothing is more basic than the freedom to choose what you do for a living. But Hillary Clinton has promised to accelerate Obama’s psycho crusade against cheap and clean oil, gas and coal which has stolen tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs and turned thriving communities into ghost towns. She tells coal workers not to worry, after destroying their livelihoods the all-powerful government will magnanimously retrain them to insulate homes in towns that have been abandoned. Never mind that they want to keep mining coal. How is this different than the Chinese Communists “reeducating” dissenters by uprooting them and sending them to work at government farms?
The one thing Cruz was right about: our freedoms are at risk, including freedom of thought. Hillary Clinton and a cabal of powerful greenie activists have urged the “Justice Department” to investigate whether oil giant Exxon should be punished for its alleged role in “climate warming.” Refusing to kowtow to the government’s man-made climate myth could cost them millions in fines and lawsuits. “Instead of honoring legitimate academic and scientific inquiry, the far-left has gone to extremes to silence those who disagree,” says Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Columnist George will was more direct, calling it “gangster government.” Ted Cruz knows that government persecution of dissenters will increase under Clinton.
In the arena of religious freedom, if Clinton is elected, gay “rights” will inevitably be advanced through the decisions of a tyrannical Supreme Court whose next two, three or even four new members she will appoint, swinging the court aggressively far left for decades. The assault against Christian morality will escalate from prosecuting cake bakers and floral designers for refusing to participate in same-sex weddings to forcing pastors and priests to perform those weddings against their Christian beliefs. The next “rights” fight will be for polygamous “marriage” because if it’s all about love, the more participants in a marriage the better.
Under the banner of gender confusion known as LGBTQ rights, sexual predators are now allowed into whatever bathroom they choose. Some have already been caught assaulting or filming women and children in the women’s bathroom. Meanwhile, governors from states like Georgia, Virginia, and Indiana are bullied into vetoing religious freedom bills and laws permitting only women in the women’s room, measures passed by their own state legislators.
Clinton voiced her disdain for constitutional religious freedom with a keynote speech at the Women in the World Summit where she lamented that when women are denied access to “reproductive health care” i.e., abortion, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
And they are being changed stealthily, often without headlines. The cultural codes and religious beliefs of the conservative movement are very different than those of the Democrats and secularists. Certainly Ted Cruz is aware that for all the years of the current administration Obama and his useful idiots have been gnawing away at the Judeo-Christian values that have built this nation.
Hostility to Christianity has become institutionalized across the military, especially at the Air Force Academy. In 2013, the Academy made “so help me God” optional in its cadet oath, and since 2014, the Air Force has allowed airmen to omit “so help me God” from enlistment oaths. Legal bulldog group Judicial Watch filed FOIA requests that uncovered the Academy’s “Chapel Tithes and Offering Fund” had been used “to pay for cadets to participate in worship services featuring witchcraft, ‘Faery Magick’ and voodoo.” The records obtained also reveal that “the Air Force Academy paid to send cadets to a Wiccan festival in Denver during May 2014 and a Witches Ball in October of the same year.“ All of this is part of Obama’s fundamentally changing America from a Christian to a non-Christian nation.
And all of this could be reversed if Trump is elected because whatever his flaws, Trump loves America. He is an America first patriot who pledges to strengthen our military, to build a wall to keep dangerous terrorists and illegal immigrants out, and to reclaim our national sovereignty.
In his appalling speech at the RNC Cruz actually supported the wall as well. Does he think it will be built if Hillary Clinton is elected? Clinton promises to import thousands of refugees that even the FBI director says are impossible to vet for terrorist ties. Since terrorists have actually told us they are infiltrating the refugees, Trump wants to pause mass immigration until we know who we’re dealing with.
If Clinton is elected and Trump is denied the opportunity to end Obamacare as he has promised, another of Cruz’s cherished freedoms goes poof; freedom to choose our own health care without government dictates and fines that mean heavy costs killing small business and individuals.
On the RNC stage, Ted Cruz recited all the values dear to conservatives’ hearts: America’s safety and sovereignty, religious freedom, educational freedom, freedom to choose our doctors and healthcare, freedom to keep and bear arms, freedom to speak one’s mind without IRS persecution. And then he turned his back on all those freedoms he pretends to cherish and broke his word to support the Republican nominee.
During the primary my columns focused on advancing Cruz’s candidacy and attacking, yes, attacking Donald Trump. I wanted Cruz to win. But the people didn’t choose him, and the specter of how the monumentally corrupt criminal socialist Hillary Clinton would forever cripple our nation has turned me to Donald Trump.
But not Ted Cruz. Cloaked in his moral superiority, Cruz cares only about exacting revenge for Trump’s transgressions against his wife and his father. He admitted as much in his Q-and-A Thursday morning before the Texas delegation.
Let’s recall that a pro-Cruz PAC started the my-wife’s-prettier-than-yours playground tussle with risqué photos of Melania in her modeling days. Then Trump defended her by slamming Heidi Cruz’s looks, which anyone can see is ridiculous because she’s a beautiful woman. Trump then repeated the preposterous claim emblazoned on the cover of the National Enquirer that Cruz’s Cuban-born father Rafael, now a pastor, was somehow involved in President Kennedy’s assassination. Not only was this nonsense totally unsourced and unsubstantiated in the text, but the paper’s cover photo purporting to show Lee Harvey Oswald and the elder Mr. Cruz together was so outlandishly fuzzy and photo-shopped as to be just plain silly. Virtually nobody thought it was real.
But it was real enough for Cruz to abandon his constitutional values, his defense of freedom and his critical role in bringing his supporters to Trump. Hillary the conscienceless applauded Cruz’s “vote your conscience” because she knows his refusal to endorse Trump makes her victory more likely.
While Cruz lionizes the will of the people he disdains the voters who chose Trump. More important to him than forgiving his enemies as the Bible instructs is not being taken for a “servile puppy dog.” More important to him than saving his country from the predatory Clinton clutches is his ego, his pride, his almighty self.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1