What was the point of Ted Cruz tweeting that fake news story anyway?

Nine years ago, I worked for a website called the Wire, which had recently been rebranded from the Atlantic Wire. It served as a sort of breaking-news blog that sat alongside the Atlantic magazine, and when the Wire eventually folded, its archives were moved under the broader Atlantic branding.

This, I assume, is why one of my former colleagues at the Wire — having departed that institution themselves a bit under a decade ago — suddenly appeared as the author on a screenshot of a fake Atlantic article that made the rounds in the conservative social media universe this week.

A weird series of job changes and branding shuffles resulted in someone who was looking to cast the media as a bunch of woke liberal losers seizing upon that name and the Atlantic’s logo as the conduit for their misinformation. They probably didn’t care who the author actually was; they probably cared only slightly more about using the Atlantic as their foil. All they really cared about was ginning up outrage at one of the right’s myriad enemies — the media — and if my colleague, my friend, took some heat, so be it.

After all, it worked. The screenshot got broad pickup — including by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Despite being entirely and quickly provably fake.

I reached out to my friend after seeing Cruz tweet out the fake story — which he did with an ironic declaration that “the Left is beyond parody.” I’m not naming my friend here because, first, you can easily find the fake news article for yourself with a quick search and because, second, they’ve been the focus of enough negative attention in the past 30 hours or so.

“I woke up very early on Thursday and had more DMs than usual, including ones calling me a ‘groomer’ or other slurs,” they wrote in an email in response to my asking how they learned they were the unwitting “author” of the fake story. “I was a bit confused, because the story I’d just published — a big feature for our magazine on whole body donation research and education — was not necessarily the sort of thing I expected to get these sorts of abusive messages for.” Note the qualifier there, one that’s probably familiar to anyone who writes about politics-adjacent subjects: You expect abuse, but within certain boundaries. An old hand at all of this, my friend poked around and figured out how they’d been selected for the dubious honor of being the Media Punching Bag of the Day.

“As the day went on and the image spread around, I started getting more explicitly antisemitic harassment and tweets,” they told me. “I was hoping it would die down this morning so I could lift the watch, and then Cruz tweeted out the screenshot.”

“Post-Cruz,” they added, “my mentions exploded.”

So let’s stop and consider this for a moment. The fake article — purportedly a cover story for the magazine, which was not generally the purview of Wire writers — was titled “The Evolution of White Supremacy.” A sub-headline explained the purported thesis: “In Dearborn Michigan, Muslim parents who oppose teaching pornography to children become the new face of the far right.” Setting aside questions of punctuation and framing, the concept makes little sense. Someone is “teaching pornography”? That’s an evolution from when I was in school, certainly.

But Cruz, who has a robust track record of sharing incorrect information online, couldn’t resist the implication. Here was another lefty media loser trying to conflate white supremacy and the far right! Cruz was exactly the sort of person for whom the fake article was meant as bait, and he bit.

That he thinks this is useful is a phenomenon on its own. A large segment of the political right in the United States sees memes and online chaff as part of the political debate. It’s a space in which cultural supremacy is still evolving — or, really, that’s big enough that one can perceive broad success even if you’re carving out only an objectively small portion of the conversation. The left can’t meme, the rallying cry goes, and the expectation is that the right can. That the most-effective voices are the ones that can play in the social media space.

Cruz is always eager to prove his position to the right and so engages eagerly in the social media conversation. It doesn’t always work out — for him or, certainly, for those unwittingly involved in his effort to curry the GOP base’s favor.

When his mistake became obvious (after it was pointed out to him, it seems, not after he decided to actually see if the article was too good to be true), he deleted the tweet. And then he rationalized having shared it in the most cliched way possible.

“Didn’t know it was fake,” he wrote in a subsequent tweet, as though he should not be expected, as a U.S. senator, to verify information before he shares with his 5 million Twitter followers. And then: “You guys are so insane, it could easily have been real.”

And there it is. The “it’s not my fault I believed it, given what I already believe about you” defense. A defense that is itself a subject of a famous-in-some-circles social media post. His office had no immediate comment Friday.

In the abstract, this is embarrassing for Cruz, as it should be. He’ll recover. But he’s not the victim.

A victim in this case is my friend, who got sucked into this idiotic flurry of nonsense through a long-dormant connection to a former employer. It was they who became the face of the ludicrous, drywall-is-woke-now liberal media.

This is an underrecognized component of the rush to elevate the media for criticism. The right has long pushed back against perceived bias by trying to make it painful for reporters to cover the right critically. It’s a “working the referees” strategy. With the advent of sites like Twitchy, though, and then with social media, that has evolved. Now there’s a rush not only to embarrass reporters but to harass and abuse them. Some of this is public, its own competition for attention with the most aggressive denunciation. Much of it — often the worst of it — is private. Reflecting the broader tonal shift in the public debate, this feedback is not just “Your coverage is flawed” but “You are evil.”

All of this is more acute in part because the target this time is my friend. But their experience is informative. My friend has been attacked because people think my friend did something my friend didn’t do and because they, like Cruz, want to believe that someone like my friend would do something like that.

That’s our final lesson here. It seems to be the case that, in this particular moment, the purported actions don’t even need to have occurred to be hailed as emblematic. Residents of Martha’s Vineyard can respond with near-universal hospitality to the unexpected arrival of a planeload of immigrants but still be portrayed by Fox News as horrified and triggered liberals.

After all, the left is so crazy that that could have happened, right? And that’s good enough.