A board meeting at Dearborn Public Schools broke out into open demonstration, with chants of “vote them out” recorded and shared on social media.
The significant influx of Muslim supporters in Dearborn marks a notable shift in the communities advocating censorship of what is perceived as sexualized or taboo subjects in schools, which hereto has been typified by predominantly white Christian conservatives.
In the polarising debate which has surrounded this, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) waded in with what he believed was a cat-call from left-leaning commentators.
The Claim
A tweet posted by Ted Cruz, on October 14, 2022, included a screengrab of what appeared to be an article from The Atlantic with the headline “The Evolution of White Supremacy” alongside a photo of the protest.
The alleged article, accredited to journalist Abby Ohlheiser, included the subhead “In Dearborn Michigan, Muslim parents who oppose teaching pornography to children became the new face of the far right.”
Cruz tweeted “The Left is beyond parody.”
Other prominent accounts on the right have also shared the purported screengrab from the magazine.
The Facts
The fractious debate around the censorship of literature available in American schools has continued to deepen, Dearborn being one of its most recent and widely publicized chapters.
A common topic of the “culture wars,” the conversation about what books should be read, many of which concern LGBTQ topics, has been top of mind for many right wing politicians and commentators.
Some of the chatter, however, has been characterized by misinformation, a trope to which Cruz, here, has fallen victim to.
The since-deleted missive by the Texas senator received a quick response from Twitter users who let him know that The Atlantic “article” was a hoax, posted online to stoke the drama surrounding the Dearborn story.
There was no such article published between the meeting at Dearborn on Monday, October 10, 2022, to when the screengrab that Cruz reposted is thought to have begun circulating.
It’s understood that the image began spreading on Twitter on Wednesday, October 12, 2022, later migrating to Facebook and other social media network.
Newsweek found one example being shared by Russian social media content platform VK, on Thursday, October 13, 2022, the day before Cruz’s tweet. VK has been linked to multiple examples of misinformation on controversial themes, from the the war in Ukraine to the “culture wars” in the U.S.
Journalist Abby Ohlheiser, who was wrongly credited to the piece and no longer works for The Atlantic, wrote on Twitter “are you f***g serious Ted Cruz” and “It’s for sure good and normal to wake up to dms calling you a groomer because some maga stposter photoshopped your byline onto a fake article for a publication you haven’t worked for in a decade.”
The image credits for the article also appear to have been taken from an online edition of a cover article by The Atlantic.
The article written by CNN’s Jake Tapper, about C.J. Rice, a Philadelphia teen imprisoned for attempted murder, which Tapper writes was wrongly convicted because he had “an incompetent lawyer.”
It’s one of a number of instances in which Ted Cruz has made misleading or misinformed statements recently. In August 2022, he tweeted that the White House’s student debt relief program would cost every American $2,100, without mentioning a wide list of caveats to that calculation.
In September, the Texas senator was also mocked by the White House on Twitter for praising a spending bill that he didn’t support.
The Atlantic confirmed to Newsweek that the screenshot is fabricated and it had “published no such thing.”
A spokesperson for Ted Cruz referred to a tweet sent by the senator on October 14, 2022, in which he said that he “Didn’t know it was fake” and that he “deleted the tweet as soon as I found out.”
The Ruling
False.
The article that Ted Cruz posted about Dearborn does not exist. It was not published by The Atlantic and includes a byline for a journalist who no longer works there. Other credits in the article were appropriated from an unrelated story in The Atlantic.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team
