Richard Linklater Directed This Great Anti-Ted Cruz Ad

Richard Linklater—proud Texan, big fan of the pinball machine Fireball, and director of such movies as Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Boyhood—isn’t a fan of Ted Cruz. (That shouldn’t really surprise anybody even remotely familiar with Linklater or his work.) That’s why the Oscar-nominated filmmaker directed this short but forceful ad against Cruz’s reelection, striking in the most hurtful way possible for any Texas Senator: by assailing Cruz’s Texanness. Nothing matters to Texans as much as how they embody Texas’s mythical properties of strength, toughness and independence, and Linklater’s ad wastes no time highlighting Cruz’s subservience to Donald Trump, a man who mercilessly insulted Cruz, his wife and his family during the 2016 campaign. Sonny Carl Davis, the old Texan who repeatedly mocks Cruz’s chosen nickname of “Ted” (and who Linklater fans might recognize from the great movie Bernie—which, no, is not about Bernie Sanders), clearly disagrees with Cruz’s reelection slogan, “Tough as Texas.” The ad, paid for by the Fire Ted Cruz PAC, never mentions Beto O’Rourke, Cruz’s opponent, but in its disgust over Ted Cruz it’s about as obvious an endorsement as one can make without actually uttering a man’s name. Cruz leads O’Rourke in pretty much every poll right now, so Texans like Linklater are facing an uphill battle. Perhaps ads like this will drive Texans into the arms of Cruz’s younger and more charismatic opponent, though.