Sen. Ted Cruz told a Fox News audience Tuesday night that Democratic candidates want to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas, then accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and newly nominated Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of being communists and Islamists engaged in what he called a “green-red convergence.”
Host Jesse Watters set it up by asking whether that was where the energy in the Democratic Party now sits. Cruz nodded and said the party is crazy enough to cancel both holidays, that “these communists hate America,” and that El-Sayed and Mamdani are Islamists who want Sharia law and hate Jews, Christians, capitalism and the country itself. He called the combination a toxic stew. The chyron underneath him read “The battle for the Democrat Party,” and at no point did Watters ask him to name a single candidate who has proposed canceling Christmas.
No one has. There is no bill, no platform plank, no speech and no quote from any Democratic candidate calling for an end to Christmas. Cruz’s claim about Thanksgiving traces to a single person he never mentioned on air.
What one Wisconsin candidate actually said
Francesca Hong is a Wisconsin state representative, a Madison chef and a Democratic Socialists of America member who currently leads the field ahead of the state’s August 11 gubernatorial primary. In November 2020, she posted, and later deleted, a message on X reading “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621,” arguing the country should stop celebrating colonialism and an event she described as having killed Indigenous people.
Pressed on CNN Monday night about whether she still holds that position, Hong did not answer yes or no. She talked about cooking a community Thanksgiving meal at age 16, said the holiday is incredibly painful for many people, and closed with the line that views can evolve. The full exchange with Kaitlan Collins, in which Hong gives a roughly 46-second answer that never lands on a position, is available on video and worth watching in its entirety before deciding what she said.
Her campaign was blunter than she was. Asked directly by Fox News Digital, a Hong spokesperson said she does not want to cancel Thanksgiving. She separately told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the 2020 post was part of a run of jokes she made years ago.
That answer satisfied almost nobody. Democratic strategist David Axelrod and the Cook Political Report’s Jessica Taylor both publicly warned that the response was politically disastrous, and the backlash to her non-answer came from inside her own party as much as from the right.
So there is a real story here about a candidate who will not give a straight answer about a national holiday eleven days before a primary. That is not the story Cruz told.
The leap Cruz made
Cruz took one candidate in one state and turned her into “they.” He added Christmas, which Hong never mentioned. Then he attached the whole thing to two men who had nothing to do with any of it.
Mamdani is the mayor of New York City and a democratic socialist who ran on rent freezes, free buses and city-run child care. El-Sayed is a physician and former Detroit health commissioner who defeated Rep. Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan on Tuesday, overcoming roughly $65 million in outside spending against him. His signature issue is Medicare for All. Neither man has proposed canceling a holiday. Neither is a communist. El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim in the United States Senate if he wins in November, has spent the campaign telling audiences that people see his name and assume he must hate America, and answering that he loves it.
The word Cruz reached for next is the one that matters. Islamist describes a political ideology holding that Islam should govern legal and political systems. It is not a description of anything either man has campaigned on. Applied to two elected Muslims whose platforms are about rent, buses, and health insurance, it converts a religion into an accusation, which is precisely how it landed with viewers, including Fox’s own, who filled social media with complaints about fearmongering.
Cruz was not finished when the segment ended. Within hours he posted on X that this is literally a communist takeover of the Democratic Party, claiming its candidates want to tear up the Constitution and abolish the Senate. The same senator making that argument on television repeated it in writing before the news cycle turned over.
An old playbook with a new coat of paint
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies authoritarian movements, described this pattern in a series of posts as a recognizable party line: associate communists with every crime and every offense, manufacture a sense of communist threat, and then use the manufactured threat to justify a crackdown from the right. She noted it is the old playbook deployed during coups and fascist takeovers, not a new invention.
The American version had a name too, Joseph McCarthy, and he also had a menace, a list, and a broadcast apparatus willing to repeat him without asking for proof. It worked until the country looked long enough.
The war on Christmas is separately a Fox News seasonal product that has run since roughly 2004, usually deployed sometime after Halloween. What is different this year is the calendar. Cruz ran it in August, because the date Republicans are counting down to is not December. Facing a possible blue wave in November and a Michigan nominee they have already begun calling too radical, the party has settled on a campaign that does not mention grocery prices, health premiums, or wages. It says your neighbors are communists, your Muslim neighbors are enemies, and they are coming for your holidays.
That message is not built to persuade anyone. It is built to give permission, to make it acceptable to treat other Americans as foreign and dangerous rather than as fellow citizens who vote differently. Everything that follows from that gets easier once it is accepted.
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