United States Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is facing backlash on social media for comparing the Left and environmentalists to Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame's Thanos, as well as the seminal comic book story Watchmen."Have you noticed in how many movies how often rabid environmentalists are the bad guys?" Cruz said on Verdict With Ted Cruz. "Whether it's Thanos or go to Watchmen. The view of the Left is people are a disease. 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% of the lifeforms in the universe with one finger-snapping."
Many were quick to criticize Cruz for making a hyperbolic comparison between environmentalists and the Mad Titan Thanos, while others accused the senator of fundamentally misunderstanding Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'Â Watchmen, which strays even further from Cruz's environmentalist argument.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos used the Infinity Gauntlet to wipe out half of the universe's existence in an effort to undo the damage similar to that of his homeworld Titan, which was left uninhabitable due to overpopulation. As for Watchmen, the character of Ozymandias deployed an artificial "alien" squid that killed millions in New York City in order to give the U.S. and the Soviet Union a common enemy, thus defusing the proverbial powder keg and bringing the two nations together.