Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) has concerns about how the influencer economy is impacting elections. And after losing his primary, he sat down with the Sources Say podcast to make the case that it is fundamentally breaking how Americans vote.
"Smear campaigns in the digital era are pretty different" for someone with high name recognition, he told us, adding that he believes once you're clickable enough, it doesn't matter whether the stories being told about you are true.
The Texas Republican said voters walked into the booth believing he'd gotten rich off insider trading, voted for red flag gun laws, and was "running around Mexico with a bottle of tequila, no pants on." He argued that by the time his campaign pushed back, the damage was done. "Our biggest mistake was not focusing entirely on all of these dozens of lies,” he said.
He went on to slam Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), alleging that Cruz donor Robert Marling bankrolled a network of influencers to take him down, with the operation kicking into high gear the same day Marling's ties to Colony Ridge, a controversial Texas development linked to predatory lending and illegal immigration concerns, became public.
"The ties to Cruz are very obvious," he said. He specifically called out Alex Bruesewitz, a conservative influencer with a large following on X, saying Marling's super PAC hired "little maggot influencers like Alex Bruesewitz" to "start this cottage industry of slandering me online, just making crap up if they have to."
Bruesewitz shot back, telling us: "Dan Crenshaw is a dishonest and disgraceful loser. I was never paid a dollar to attack him, I did it out of the love for the sport. I found great enjoyment in his late night X rants. I hope he gets the mental help he so desperately needs."
Crenshaw acknowledged some irony in all of it. "I take some blame for that," he said of the influencer culture he believes he helped inspire, saying his intention was always to use social media to draw people into real policy conversations.
Crenshaw acknowledged some irony in all of it, saying his quick rise on social media and television had unintentionally opened a door he now wishes had stayed closed.
"I take some blame for opening the door for that because people thought they were copying me and I was like, no you're not copying me. I do that stuff for a purpose, because I'm trying to draw people into a serious policy conversation,” he said. “I know I have to do that by marketing and entertaining them. You're just entertaining them to get more clicks for yourself. That's a very different thing and you have no principles that drive you toward it."
