Updated at 5:40 p.m. with Shelley Luther’s CPAC appearance.
After weeks of being lambasted by critics for controversial choices — first, his objection to certifying Arizona’s electoral votes and then his trip to Cancun during Texas’ devastating winter storms — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz refuses to be canceled.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida on Friday, Texas’ junior U.S. senator used references to both Star Trek and Star Wars as he argued that he was fighting for liberty. In his animated speech, titled “Bill of Rights, Liberty, and Cancel Culture,” Cruz also sought to reestablish himself as a Republican outsider and supporter of former President Donald Trump.
He spoke at CPAC as President Joe Biden was visiting the senator’s hometown of Houston. Fellow Republican Sen. John Cornyn and GOP Gov. Greg Abbott joined Biden, as did Democratic U.S. Reps. Sylvia Garcia, Sheila Jackson Lee, Al Green and Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, all of Houston.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said “there was neither an invitation or a request” for Cruz to join Biden.
“Orlando is awesome. It’s not as nice as Cancun, but it’s nice,” Cruz joked as he opened his speech. Cruz has spent the last week being roasted by critics for flying to Mexico with his family last week while thousands of Texans remained without power and water. After returning to Texas less than 24 hours later, he acknowledged that the trip was “obviously a mistake.”
In Friday’s CPAC speech, Cruz continued to mock New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recounting of her experience when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol — “She was murdered!” And he jested about the mittens that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders wore to Biden’s inauguration.
Cruz argued that “liberty is under assault.” He urged Republicans to unite against the threat of a Democratic-controlled Congress and presidency, and against the media, which he said “looks at the men and women gathered here and the young people gathered here as dangerous radicals.”
“This is the Rebel Alliance,” Cruz said, alluding to the protagonists in the first Star Wars movies, “and Vader and the Emperor — let’s be clear, they’re not your father — are terrified of the rebels who are here.”
He added that former Star Wars actress and Texan Gina Carano is one of them. Carano will not continue her role as Cara Dune in The Mandalorian because of her controversial social media posts comparing conservatives to people killed in the Holocaust.
Cruz had previously defended Carano on Twitter, saying she “broke barriers in the Star Wars universe,” and accused Disney of canceling her.
Texan Gina Carano broke barriers in the Star Wars universe: not a princess, not a victim, not some emotionally tortured Jedi. She played a woman who kicked ass & who girls looked up to. She was instrumental in making Star Wars fun again. Of course Disney canceled her.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 11, 2021
While Cruz conceded that COVID-19 is “a dangerous virus,” he argued that Democrats in government have been using the pandemic, which has killed more than 500,000 Americans, to restrict freedoms, including orders in some states that temporarily halted church services.
He also questioned mandates that require people to wear a mask when entering a restaurant but let them take their masks off while eating, as well as recommendations that Americans wear more than one mask.
“The left believes in rigid conformity,” Cruz said. “We believe in diversity, free speech — you can say whatever you want no matter how dumb it is. By the way, in Washington, D.C., we test that proposition.”
Cruz has historically represented himself as an outsider to Washington, where then-House Speaker John Boehner, a fellow Republican, called him a “jackass” and “Lucifer in the flesh.”
“Who is John Boehner?” Cruz said, and he argued that the GOP is no longer “the party of just the country clubs” — a fact that he said scares Washington insiders.
“They look at Donald J. Trump and they look at the millions and millions of people inspired who went to battle fighting alongside President Trump, and they’re terrified,” Cruz said. “And they want him to go away. Let me tell you this right now: Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere.”
Cruz, a Harvard Law School graduate whose wife, Heidi, works for Goldman Sachs, argued that the GOP is the party of blue-collar workers in steel, construction and the oil and gas industries, as well as waiters and firefighters — “the men and women with calluses on their hands.”
“Mark my words,” he said before closing with a quote from Mel Gibson’s 1995 movie Braveheart as a battle cry. “2022 is going to be a fantastic election year, and so is 2024, as we stand together and defend liberty, defend the Constitution, defend the Bill of Rights of every American. In the immortal words of William Wallace: ‘FREEDOM!’”
Shelley Luther, the Dallas salon owner who became a conservative darling for defying coronavirus shutdown orders, also attended CPAC. She used the national platform to again criticize the Texas governor’s response to the pandemic. Such attacks were central to her unsuccessful run for state Senate last year.
”We’re not dealing with people that have our best interest in mind, and any government official that wants to take away liberty needs to go fast,” Luther said during a panel about “freedom from confiscation of private property.”
Allie Morris in the Austin bureau contributed to this report.
