Like Erwin Schrodinger’s eternally tortured cat, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has somehow managed to straddle two diametrically opposed states of being this week, placing himself in the unenviable position of having to both condemn Nazis — what should, by all rights, be a fairly easy lift for a United States senator — while also twisting himself like a Cirque du Soleil contortionist into wholeheartedly defending people who enthusiastically give the Nazis’ iconic “Sieg Heil” salute.
Let’s go back to the halcyon days of, uh, this past Wednesday, when Cruz forcefully defended the “non-violent” protests (if you want to call them that) over masking mandates at various local school board meetings around the country, during a contentious back and forth with Attorney General Merrick Garland over a Justice Department memo outlining responses to the rising tide of threats against school officials. Among those instances of non-violence, Cruz bloviated, “they involve things like insults, they involve things like a Nazi salute.” (Whether giving a Nazi salute is actually non-violent is, itself, a whoooole other issue.)
