We Have Met the Élites and They Are Ted

 

Ted Cruz's vast kitchen "breakfast area", with a view of the also vast patio, via New York Post.

The shamelessness is overpowering. @SenTedCruz https://t.co/UAiwYHEXCD

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2022

He doesn't actually spend $23K/month for security. Looks like Republican donors do that, with the blessing of the FEC, and not to protect his house but his campaign travel, as he roams the country pretending to be a serious person looking for votes for the—ah, 2024 election, and for all I know he needs the protection, as Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock, both running for 2022 and for different reasons subject to really frightening threats, certainly do, which Kelly's opponent apparently thinks is funny:

When a GOP candidate seeking to run against Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly recently released an ad featuring him in a Wild West shootout with Kelly and other prominent Democrats, members of both parties criticized the spot. 

Kelly’s wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, formed a gun control advocacy group after surviving a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson in which a gunman killed six people. Senate candidate Jim Lamon posed as an old-time sheriff having a shootout with “the DC gang” in the ad, which aired during halftime of the Super Bowl on Tucson’s NBC affiliate. His campaign subsequently said it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

The "DC gang", lol. That's another code for those "élites" we keep hearing about who are totally not country music–loving assault rifle–toting homeboys like Senator Cruz. 

But, just to be clear, his whole neighborhood may not be strictly gated, that's for the neighborhood's lower class, the condo owners, not three-story 4000-square-foot five-bedroom mansions like his own, but the 24/7 private security is definitely there.

River Oaks is a subdivision within the Houston Super Neighborhood #23 and is located in between Uptown and Downtown Houston. River Oaks is said to be one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Texas and the U.S. as a whole. It is two square miles of mansions and exclusive estates, each valued in the millions of dollars. Security for the area is maintained by a private agency called the River Oaks Patrol, which boasts one of the lowest crime rates in the city of Houston.

We don't know how much he pays for it, but we do know it's the kind of personal service–oriented. company that will take care of your dog if a cold snap and massive citywide power failure force your family to flee to Cancún, as we learned when that happened to the Cruz family last year.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this evidence that Ted Cruz knows exactly what "élite" means, which has little to do with tastes in popular music or guns: it means him (along with, no doubt, some people who are less committed to tax cutting for the rich and deregulating capitalist excess, but mostly him).