Sen. Ted Cruz got a friendly platform on Fox & Friends to whine about the left weaponizing our legal system – as he misrepresented and weaponized a case of sexual assault in Loudoun County, Virginia, with the apparent approval of the three cohosts.
The Fox Friends began the interview by discussing Cruz’s recent appearance on The View where he had been interrupted by hecklers over climate change. Nobody mentioned that Cruz’s own state of Texas had suffered an unusually catastrophic freeze in the winter of 2021, and while his constituents were literally dying from the cold, Cruz jetted off to a luxury vacation in Cancun – which he later blamed on his daughters.
But hey, cohost Ainsley Earhardt’s boyfriend painted #CancunCruz as the victim of the story so it was no surprise she and her colleagues kept their mouths shut about it.
Instead, Earhardt chirped, “Tell us about your book!” after The View discussion ended.
The book is subtitled, “How the Left has Weaponized Our Legal System.” But with unintended irony, the anecdote Cruz quickly cited from the book was a perfect illustration of the right doing exactly that:
CRUZ: It starts with Loudoun County [Virginia] … There was a 14 year old girl who went to school and she was violently sexually assaulted in the bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt, and after that happened you would expect the school district to come down to prosecute the sexual predator. Instead, what they did is they transferred him to another school, they insisted it never happened. They transferred him to another school, and that predator attacked and sexually assaulted another little girl.
At the school board meeting that followed that, the parents of that 14-year-old girl came in and they were upset, they were understandably upset, and then they were infuriated because the school board was so concerned with their political ideology. They said it has never ever, ever happened that a boy dressed as a girl has committed sexual assault. And the father in particular was yelling saying look, my daughter was raped at your school in your care and you’re not doing a thing about it.
While Cruz gave the impression that the sexual assault was the result of a boy who was able to prey on a girl because he was allowed into the girls’ bathroom, the facts show that is not at all what happened.
FACT CHECK: The teenage victim of the assault testified that she and her attacker had agreed to meet in a school bathroom, that she chose the girls’ bathroom because the two had met there before and had had two previous sexual encounters in the school bathroom. As Michelle Goldberg put it, the girl indeed “suffered something atrocious” but it had nothing to do with trans bathroom policies. She had been “a victim of relationship violence.”
In an article titled, “GOP Distorts Virginia Bathroom Sexual Assault Case For Political Gain,” The HuffPost pointed out that the school board did not have a transgender-inclusive bathroom policy in place at the time of the assault.
Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a peep of clarification from the Fox Friends. Instead, they let Cruz continue, uninterrupted, as went on to claim that his book is “all about the FBI going after parents, going after Americans, going after Biden’s political enemies. It also tells the inside story of January 6th, what really happened.”
He didn’t say – and nobody asked - whether that “inside story of January 6th” was the “violent terror attack” Cruz originally called it or the 2022 grovel-to-Tucker-Carlson version.
And speaking of weaponizing our legal system, nobody mentioned how Republicans stole one U.S. Supreme Court seat then ignored their own rationale in order to seize another one, which resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Also, let’s not forget that these four are supporters of Donald Trump, a guy who boasted about sexually assaulting women.
You can watch them weaponize an assault for the sake of perpetuating a right-wing lie below, from the October 25, 2022 Fox & Friends.