Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an expert culture war instigator — and in his famously oil-and-gas rich state Cruz has calculated that the false culture war narrative about gas stove bans is a winning horse to beat, dead or not.
Texas is, to the surprise of many, the top-producing state when it comes to alternative energy, but its Lone Star reputation for iconoclasm and an independent streak makes railing against electric stoves a good electoral business, if Cruz’s persistence is to be read as correct.
[NOTE, as Yale Climate Connections reports: “Texas produces the most renewable energy of any state, but it also generates an outsized amount of electricity from fossil fuels. So renewables only account for 26% of the state’s total electricity production.”]
On Thanksgiving, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, posed in a kitchen smiling and wishing the nation a happy Thanksgiving.
Cruz reacted with outrage and accusations of hypocrisy, pointing out that the VP’s kitchen evidently contained a gas stove, calling it the “same kind Dems want to BAN you from owning.”
There is no ban on gas stoves, there is no federal legislation being proposed to ban gas stoves, nobody has had one taken away, nor has anyone been prevented from buying one, Biden & Harris both have said that they would oppose any ban. pic.twitter.com/DwkiUgkbxS
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 24, 2023
Sharing Cruz’s criticism, commentator Ron Filipkowski wrote: “There is no ban on gas stoves, there is no federal legislation being proposed to ban gas stoves, nobody has had one taken away, nor has anyone been prevented from buying one.”
In January after multiple federal officials confirmed there was no gas stove ban in the works, NPR reporter Lisa Hagen explained how the gas stove story played into the GOP’s incendiary rhetoric of big government overreach, saying:
“The specifics of gas stoves is incidental. The word that resonates is ban. Banning things is about top-down control. It fits nicely into readymade stories about government control or tyranny. The feds are going to come to your house and take something.”
Hagen’s assessment is backed up by Cruz’s choice of using all caps for only one of the words in his tweet — BAN.
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