There’s a bit more than Senator Cruz (R-TX) just making a mistake here:
This weekend, over 2,000 reported Southwest Airlines cancellations brought untold thousands of passengers to their knees. The airline has the boring reason: “weather.” Conservatives have a more thrilling one: a working-class rebellion against President Joe Biden’s vaccination tyranny. So victory against Democrats is weary masses forced to stand in line for hours at dawn, sleep on the floor, and make TikToks, while baggage piles up around the conveyor belt.
Among them, Sen. Ted Cruz is spreading an unverified rumor that pilots staged a massive “sickout” to protest “Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate.” Newsweek’s deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon asked: “Were the canceled flights the result of a ‘sick out’ on the part of pilots refusing to get vaccinated?” and continued, baselessly, to conclude that this represents a “powerful form of collective action” by working-class vaccine-refusers. [Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo]
And he’s refuted:
Southwest Airlines pilots have denied that theory, which seems spun from the fact Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA), a bargaining unit representing over 9,000 pilots, filed a request last Friday asking that a Dallas federal court block the airline from enforcing vaccine mandates.
If Cruz read the motion, he’d likely hate their rationale; SWAPA’s staking out a labor rights stance, arguing that Southwest illegally neglected to bargain with the union over the policy change.
The question is whether this is an unforced error on Cruz’s part, or a deliberate maneuver? I think it’s the latter.
Decades ago, I was invited to attend the test screening of four pilots of situation comedies, or at least so they were represented; they were probably actually to test commercials, judging from the follow up calls. The interesting part was when they got everyone together – maybe a couple of hundred of us – and asked for a show of hands from people who thought the shows were good, which, incidentally or not, were NOT.
First a few hands went up, then you could see people glancing at their neighbors and then putting their hands up, a wave of glances and hands going up, until maybe 3/4s of us had our hands up. (Not me nor my companion.)
I see this as an extension of that phenomenon. Cruz wants folks, many impressionable, to believe there’s a union that has rebelled against vaccine mandates. Cruz knows how this works: first impressions are strong, corrections are weak.
And often people do not discern patterns of mendacity from folks in positions of prestige, like Senator Cruz.
So don’t think this is a simple mistake. This, I think, is a deliberate maneuver by Cruz.
