Late Monday night, Internet lurkers and Weird Politics Twitter got tipped off to a NSFW video in Sen. Ted Cruz’s “likes” — a low-quality video shared from an account called “Sexuall Posts” [sic]. The two minute video stayed visible in that column of his verified page for about an hour before it was unliked, but it was still more than long enough for the junior senator from Texas to get thoroughly roasted over the slip-up.
Catherine Frazier, Cruz’s press director tweeted early on Tuesday that “The offensive tweet posted on @tedcruz account earlier has been removed by staff and reported to Twitter.”
Later on Monday Politico reported that Cruz said the fave was the fault of a staffer that “inadvertently hit the like button” and nothing more.
“There are a number of people on the team who have access on the account. It appears that someone inadvertently hit the like button,” Cruz said. “When we discovered the post, which was I guess an hour or two later, we pulled it down,” Cruz said. “It was a staffing issue. And it was inadvertent, it was a mistake. It was not a deliberate act. We’re dealing with it internally, but it was a mistake. It was not malicious.”
Meanwhile, the “Sexual Posts” account tweeted a “thanks for watching” to Cruz and changed their bio to promote their page with “Follow for the Same Porn @TedCruz Watches.” Yikes.
While plenty of normal humans watch porn (and don’t deserve to be repeatedly dunked on by the Internet), the case of Sen. Cruz publicly liking this video is an interesting one when you consider his inherently sex negative history of anti-choice legislation, anti-birth control legislation and rhetoric. It’s a bit harder to be a puritanical character legislatively policing the morality of others with porn on your dash, you know?
And, of course, there’s that one time he assisted in a case attempting to ban the sale of sex toys in Texas (no, really.)
As Mother Jones‘ David Corn wrote last year, Ted Cruz actually defended the case to ban “dildos, artificial vaginas, and other obscene devices” and argued that using the aforementioned toys were similar to “hiring a willing prostitute” (uh) before finally concluding that “there is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
While no one ever wants to repeatedly hear about politicians old enough to be their dad and stimulation of any kind, the “Sexuall Posts” tweet gave many of Cruz’s critics the chance to pounce on his apparent hypocrisy and find a little bit of light in the deeply uncomfortable situation before them:
What kind of sick pervert was looking through Ted Cruz’s Likes?
— Brandon Scott Wolf (@BrandonEsWolf) September 12, 2017
Ted Cruz liked the most normal porn possible to cover for how his alt account only likes videos of women eating human hair
— Kate Leth SPX W33 (@kateleth) September 12, 2017
You’re telling me I’m supposed to believe somebody as sanctimonious as Ted Cruz might be a massive hypocrite? That’s quite a stretch.
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) September 12, 2017
If we take anything away from this, let it be this: Your Twitter likes are not private and late-night Twitter has no mercy.