Ted Cruz mocked over baffling Avengers: Endgame reference in rant about ‘leftist Hollywood’

Ted Cruz has been mocked for appearing to have misunderstood Avengers: Endgame in a rant about “leftist Hollywood”.

During Monday 1 February’s episode of his YouTube show Verdict with Ted Cruz, the US senator appeared to claim that Thanos, the genocidal warlord who serves as the main villain of the Avengers films, was used to convey leftist messaging that “people are a disease”.

“The left loves to virtue-signal, they love to show how virtuous they are by being willing to give away your job,” Cruz declared. 

“If you actually respect people, you say you ought to be able to choose what you want to do with your life … I’m not going to presume to tell you that what you choose to do is somehow illegitimate and should be eliminated.”

Cruz then said that discussing the left’s apparent eagerness to destroy jobs reminded him of Avengers: Endgame.

“Have you noticed in how many movies how often rabid environmentalists are the bad guys?” Cruz asked. “Whether it’s Thanos or Watchmen. Where the view of the left is people are a disease.”

Read more: Seth Rogen dubs Ted Cruz a ‘white supremacist fascist’ in Twitter clash

He continued: “They buy into the Malthusian line that there are too many people in the world, that people are bad and everything would be better if we had fewer people. I mean, Thanos wanted to eliminate 50 percent of the life forms of the universe with one finger snapping.”

In Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, Thanos (Josh Brolin) seeks to destroy half the world’s population in order to bring balance to the universe. Later he amends his plan, determining that the only way to truly restore order is to kill everyone and repopulate the universe with beings that only know servitude to him.

Despite expressing a firm stance on the film’s apparent politics, Cruz seemed to have misunderstood that Thanos was not the hero of the Avengers movies but rather the villain. On Twitter, many mocked Cruz’s apparent confusion.

“So the left is represented by Thanos? But the people who made the movie are liberals who made the villains environmentalists?” asked one viewer.

Another asked: “So Hollywood, which we all know is run by liberals, made the bad guy who gets defeated in The Avengers an environmentalist because it… agrees with his view of humanity?”

“It really is impossible to figure out what the hell his point is,” another person wrote.

Screenwriter Lila Byock, who wrote for the 2019 Watchmen mini-series, also expressed confusion, tweeting: “Hi,@SenTedCruz, Watchmen writer/producer here. Literally what the f*** are you talking about?”

Cruz, whose resignation has been called for by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was last month embroiled in a Twitter clash with actor Seth Rogen.

The Pineapple Express star dubbed Cruz a “white supremacist fascist” after the senator appeared to misunderstand the Paris Climate Agreement while simultaneously urging people to condemn it.