Ted Cruz announced his pronouns as ‘kiss my ass’ – and everyone made the same joke

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during the America First Agenda Summit, at the Marriott Marquis hotel July 26, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Ted Cruz’s attempts to be funny have flopped once again after he announced his pronouns as “kiss my ass”.

During a talk at the far-right organisation Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, the Texas Republican made an apparent attempt at humour after discussing a conversation he had with a student.

“I talked to a student recently, at one of our woke college campuses, who said she’s required in every class to introduce herself and to give her pronouns,” Cruz said to the boos of the crowd, presumably toward the colleges in question who dared to ask a student to introduce herself.

“Well I’m Ted Cruz and my pronoun is ‘kiss my ass’,” he continued.

The grammatical nightmare of his statement aside, Twitter users across the board found his dig at the “woke” campuses laughable.

“Nobody wants to kiss anything on you,” one user said while linking to a BBC Newsnight tweet that referenced an awkward embrace between him and his daughter. Another said, “Dear God this may actually be the most cringe thing I’ve ever seen,” with a user responding: “The pause for applause is laughable.”

Others have pointed out that, despite growing an entire beard, his attempts at masculine one-liners against the so-called “woke mob” haven’t quite elevated his reputation out of the gutter like he may have hoped, with one user saying: “So, Ted Cruz, in speaking to students, pretended to do some fake machismo, attacking his imaginary enemies by taunting them to ‘kiss my ass’.”

Another claimed he is “one of the most hated people in the United States”.

Speaking to the right-wing crowd during his address, Cruz made the baseless claim that “your classmates, even if they’re scared to say it, are thinking ‘this is nuts’,” presumably in an effort to make their anti-trans rhetoric seem more acceptable.

The Texas senator’s campaign against the “woke” masses, whose criteria margins seemingly grow the more he talks, have included Buzz Lightyear, Coca-Cola, Larry Fink, Yale, and even the US military. His claims dove even lower in May after primarily blaming the Texas Uvalde shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers on doors. Yes, doors.

In an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters on 25 May, he claimed that the victims of the mass shooter would have been better protected if they had “one door into and out of the school” and suggested there should be “armed police officers at that door”.