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Ted Cruz Quietly Fled To Sunny Cancun While Much Of The State He Serves Freezes Without Power, And People Are Furious

Texas’ current nightmare has made this one hell of a week for Lone Star State residents. The devastating ice storm has ripped the state’s free-standing power grid apart, leaving millions of people without power (electricity, heat, and in. many cases, water) for days. They’re literally freezing (and the death toll is climbing), and that led to the resurfacing of poorly aged tweets from Texas politicians, including the much maligned Senator Ted Cruz, who previously mocked California during its past power outages. Cruz appeared to gain an uncharacteristic slice of humility while tweeting, “I got no defense” and adding several “stay safe!” tweets throughout the day.

Cruz even stopped throwing a tantrum over people laughing at him for falling for a conservative parody story. It was strange! It didn’t feel right for Cruz to roll over and play nice, and as the day wore on, people noticed that the dude was quiet. As Vox’s Aaron Rupar noted on Twitter, “Ted Cruz isn’t shi*posting or trying to own libs on Twitter which strongly suggests something is up.” As it turns out, Cruz wasn’t “sh*tposting” because his phone was probably on airplane mode.

Photos surfaced of a man who looked very much like Ted Cruz flying out of Houston late Wednesday afternoon on a flight to Cancun, Mexico (which is currently sitting at a balmy 80 degrees). This seemed, at once, to be something that Ted Cruz would actually do — flee to a warm and sunny vacation spot while his constituents suffered without being able to warm their families — and something that he’d probably be too smart to actually do during a crisis. Well, people dug into clues (it sure looked like this guy has the same questionable haircut), and as Keith Edwards (a Jon Ossoff staffer) tweeted, “Ok, at first I didn’t think this was ted cruz, but this person has the same mask as the senator.” Screencap times aided the impromptu online investigation.

https://twitter.com/keithedwards/status/1362243291035664385
https://twitter.com/keithedwards/status/1362245746020474880

Journalist David Schuster confirmed the reports of #CancunCruz as truth, and he tweeted, “[H]is family flew to Cancun tonight for a few days at a resort they’ve visited before. Cruz seems to believe there isn’t much for him to do in Texas for the millions of fellow Texans who remain without electricity/water and are literally freezing.”

And Fox News’ Chad Pergram and Paul Steinhauser are here with more confirmation.

Ted Cruz couldn’t have picked a worse look during his state’s emergency. Former Rep. (and almost successful Cruz senatorial challenger) Beto O’Rourke blasted Cruz (who he called a seditionist) for apparently hightailing it to Cancun “when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he’s elected to represent and serve.”

Obviously (and justifiably), people are outraged that Cruz would do this during his state’s widening emergency (and while people are still suffering during a pandemic, too).

This tweet may sum up the situation in the best possible way.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like Cruz (whose full name is Rafael Edward Cruz) is cruising back from Cancun already, and he missed out on an upgrade.