Astral Codex Ten

Ted Cruz

13 min read

Ted Cruz

Article

Ted Cruz is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 12 times across 12 issues between February 25, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “success stories like … Ted Cruz”; “eager to rally around Ted Cruz”; “For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton’s “New York values"". It most often appears alongside Trump, Joe Biden, Twitter.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 12
  • Issue count: 12
  • First seen: February 25, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"
February 25, 2021 · Original source
It could appeal to blacks and Hispanics. They’re mostly working-class, so they hate the elites as much as anyone else. So far the left has kept them voting Democrat by scaring them with stories about how racist the white working class is, and convincing them that only Democratic elites can keep them safe. Your job is to make the Marxist argument that this is the typical ruling class tactic of using racial animus to keep the working classes divided and powerless. If you do this right, you can get a bunch of minorities on your side without driving away any whites; mutual enemies are the duct tape of political coalitions. The pro-Trump shift among blacks and Hispanics in 2020 proves that minorities are willing to vote Republican once someone frames the conflict in class terms. And success stories like Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley prove that white Republicans are friendly to minorities once they're convinced they share their values. All you need to do is drag both sides to the altar and tie the knot.
Highlights From The Comments On March Links
March 04, 2021 · Original source
As someone who followed his primary campaigns closely in 2016 and 2020 and supported him in both, I can't buy into this thesis. My view is much simpler: Bernie never had a majority of the primary electorate. In 2016 his numbers were puffed up by non-ideological anti-Hillary votes and in 2020 Democratic candidates simply coordinated to stop Bernie in exactly the way Republican candidates failed to do with Trump. The article skewers a straw man by contrapositing its arguments from "if the Democratic party was so desperate to rally around Biden...." They were not, any more than Republicans were eager to rally around Ted Cruz! The difference is they sucked up and did it when the circumstances left it as the only option. This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system.
Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
March 10, 2021 · Original source
I want to tie this back to one of my occasional hobbyhorses - discussion of "dog whistles". This is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton's "New York values". This sounded innocent - sure, people from the Heartland think big cities have a screwed-up moral compass. But various news sources argued it was actually Cruz's way of signaling support for anti-Semitism (because New York = Jews). Since then, almost anything any candidate from any party says has been accused of being a dog-whistle for something terrible - for example, apparently Joe Biden's comments about Black Lives Matter were dog-whistling his support for rioters burning down American cities.
Inline links: one of my occasional hobbyhorses, various, news, sources
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
I don't think we've seen any more of Ted Cruz than anyone expected.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
The Republican Party hasn’t moved on from Trump in any direction. They have stayed exactly at Trump. Ron DeSantis seems personally successful and good at inciting culture war panics, but I don’t think there is a “DeSantis-ism” that offers a particular vision of 21st century conservatism. Ted Cruz remains irrelevant.
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma
January 25, 2024 · Original source
I want to tie this back to one of my occasional hobbyhorses - discussion of "dog whistles". This is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton's "New York values". This sounded innocent - sure, people from the Heartland think big cities have a screwed-up moral compass. But various news sources argued it was actually Cruz's way of signaling support for anti-Semitism (because New York = Jews). Since then, almost anything any candidate from any party says has been accused of being a dog-whistle for something terrible - for example, apparently Joe Biden's comments about Black Lives Matter were dog-whistling his support for rioters burning down American cities.
Inline links: one of my occasional hobbyhorses, various, news, sources
Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
February 14, 2025 · Original source
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.
Realistically this got in because of the last sentence - the one saying that it will do outreach and this might attract underrepresented minorities. But I marked it borderline because maybe, possibly, Ted Cruz thought that studying COVID prevention was “woke”.
A small percent of the grants involved, maybe 10% - 20%, did strike me as extremely dumb, in exactly the way I imagine that Ted Cruz expects woke science to be extremely dumb. Here’s one of the worst offenders (2756):
Open Thread 369
February 16, 2025 · Original source
3: Correction to the Cruz woke science article: I conjectured that unrelated science grants contained a sentence about women and minorities to please the Biden administration, but even that was granting the Trump narrative too much. Commenters pointed out that grants being judged on the “broader impact criteria” - a seven pronged list including outreach and benefit to women/minorities - actually dates back to 1980 and neither Biden nor the current round of wokeness was involved. And not a correction, but a clarification - several people suggested that even 40% of grants being “woke” was bad. The article didn’t intend to claim that 40% of NSF grants were woke - only 40% of the NSF grants that Ted Cruz and the Commerce Department had previously identified as woke. Those in turn are about 5% of all grants, so (assuming Cruz didn’t have false negatives) only about 2% of total grants were woke.
Inline links: the Cruz woke science article, actually dates back to 1980
Open Thread 378
April 21, 2025 · Original source
Ted Cruz and the Commerce Committee are looking for an AI Counsel.
Inline links: Ted Cruz and the Commerce Committee are looking for an AI Counsel.
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
13: Related: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” originally banned states from regulating AI for ten years, but this provision got pushback, including from Republicans whose votes Trump needed. Earlier today, Senator Blackburn, a leading Republican critic, said she struck a compromise with proponent Ted Cruz - the ban would only last five years, and some online privacy and child porn regulation would be exempted. But this evening, the compromise fell apart, and IIUC the Senate has now voted 99-1 to remove the AI regulation ban entirely (X) (though I’m going entirely off this one tweet and it doesn’t seem to have made it into the news yet). The Big Beautiful Bill still cuts Medicaid, lowers taxes (especially on the rich), attacks the solar and clean energy industries, and adds $3 trillion to the national debt. If you have opinions, consider calling your representative, although this is more likely to matter if they’re a Republican.
Inline links: the compromise fell apart, the Senate has now voted 99-1 to remove the AI regulation ban entirely (X), cuts Medicaid, lowers taxes (especially on the rich), attacks the solar and clean energy industries, adds $3 trillion to the national debt
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
40: Dean Ball proposes an AI pre-emption deal. Congressional Republicans worry that if all fifty states pass different AI bills, then there will be so many regulations that it’s near-impossible for AI companies to follow them all. They and Dean (a former White House policy advisor) have proposed federal preemption, where Congress bans states from regulating the industry and instead regulates it directly from DC. Ted Cruz tried to pass an AI preemption bill in June. But many people suspected that Congress would ban states from regulating AI, not regulate AI itself, and leave the field totally unregulated - so a combination of pro-regulation Democrats and anti-big-tech Republicans defeated the bill. If the pre-emptionists try again, their strategy will be to peel off some groups with pet issues from the anti-preemption coalition, promising them concessions (either that Congress will take their pet issue seriously, or that they’ll carve out an exception to the preemption where states can still regulate on their pet issue) to cajole them into switching sides. AI safety is a plausible beneficiary of such bargaining, given that the Republicans’ real enmity is towards other groups with more “woke” concerns. I think this is the context for Dean’s proposal - a potential draft of a preemption bill that tries to peel off AI safety people as a favored bargaining partner. And Anton Leicht argues that safetyists should take Dean’s preemption deal. Miles Brundage says (X) he “would like to see something non-trivially stronger, esp. around third-party auditing...but think his basic line of thinking is good.”
Inline links: Dean Ball proposes an AI pre-emption deal., Anton Leicht argues that safetyists should take Dean’s preemption deal., says (X)
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
In summer 2015, Trump came down his escalator and announced his presidential candidacy. Given his comic status, his beyond-the-pale views, and his competition with a crowded field including Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, traditional media wrote him off. Sure, he immediately led in the polls, but political history was full of weirdos who got brief poll bumps eighteen months before an election only to burn out later. The prediction markets listed his chance of the nomination (not the Presidency!) at 5%.