"Ted Cruz’s Sophisticated Bigotry - This is how you bash Muslims while pretending to be principled"

[Attorney in Texas]

Link to the great analysis from The Slate; excerpt:

Sen. Ted Cruz ... is repositioning himself, accordingly, as a statesmanlike alternative to Donald Trump. The tricky part is tapping into the same resentments Trump exploits—anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, anti-black—without doing it quite so crudely.

There’s a fine art to this sort of manipulation. You have to touch the right nerves—fear of a black president, indignation at bilingualism, hunger for retaliation against Muslims—while cloaking your demagoguery in the language of terrorism, sovereignty, and the rule of law. Cruz, a skilled lawyer and wordsmith, is demonstrating this technique in his current campaign against Muslim immigrants....

Unlike other Republican hotheads, Cruz is careful to frame his anti-Muslim rhetoric in the language of radicalism and terrorism.
Then came the attacks in Paris. An anti-Muslim backlash swelled on the right. Standing against terrorism wasn’t good enough anymore. To stay on the cutting edge, Cruz needed a broader target. So he coined a new menace: “Syrian Muslim refugees.”...The new message serves three purposes. It conveys vigilance. It appeals to popular anger at Muslims. And it positions Cruz as a defender of Christians. Winning the religious right is a pillar of Cruz’s campaign strategy. That’s why, in one appearance after another, he has emphasized that his segregation of Muslim from non-Muslim immigrants is designed to protect Christians. As he explained to Beck:

Christians are being crucified right now, Glenn. They’re being beheaded. And the president says it’s offensive and un-American to want to provide safe haven. Just three percent of the Syrians that this administration has let in are Christians. He’s ignoring the [genocide] directed at Middle Eastern Christians.

... There’s no principled reason to accept Syrian Christians but not Syrian Shiites. Shiites, broadly defined, are more numerous than Christians in Syria, yet they’re less likely to be admitted to the United States as refugees. Cruz says it’s outrageous that only 3 percent of the refugees we’ve accepted from Syria are Christian. But we’ve accepted four times as many Christians as Shiites. Why doesn’t Cruz speak up for Shiites? Because they’re not a powerful constituency in Republican primaries. Under his policy, Syrian Shiites would be denied entry to the United States—and instead resettled, at their peril, in “majority Muslim countries.”... Unlike Trump, Mike Huckabee, and other hotheads, he’s careful to frame his anti-Muslim rhetoric in the language of radicalism and terrorism. But occasionally, the mask slips. For Crowder’s Webcam interview, the senator, looking tired after arriving home at the end of a busy day, shed his jacket and tie. He listened as Crowder outlined “four winning issues for Republicans.” The host didn’t mince words: “Islam, now, is a winning issue: calling it out for what it is.” Cruz nodded vigorously and responded, “Yep.”