‘Does Ted Cruz Hate America?’ CNN’s New Day Drags Conservatives Launching ‘Bonkers’ Attack on Big Bird’s Vaccine PSA

CNN’s New Day ripped into Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) during a broad slam on the outrage against Sesame Street encouraging people to protect themselves from the coronavirus.

Cruz was among the most prominent conservatives wailing about “government propaganda” over the weekend after the verified Twitter account for Big Bird announced that the beloved kids’ character was vaccinated for Covid-19. Big Bird’s announcement comes just after the CDC announced their approval for the distribution of Pfizer’s vaccine to kids as young as 5 years old.

CNN’s John Berman tackled all of this on Monday in a segment where he noted that Big Bird has been promoting vaccines for decades. Since Cruz was so outraged about Big Bird’s tweet though, Berman presumed that the senator must also hate Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, the cast of Star Wars, and every other iconic American figure who urged people to get their shots for the good of public health.

“Does Ted Cruz hate America, or just efforts to help kids grow and keep them healthy?” Berman asked.

From there, Berman spoke to John Avlon and Erica Hill, the latter of whom has been working with Sesame Street’s vaccine push for months. Hill spoke of how CNN’s partnership with Sesame Street was important because Big Bird is a character adults and children can connect with while they talk about the facts of Covid and the vaccines.

Avlon brought the conversation back to Cruz though as he lamented “the impulse to make a basic PSA politicized, to call it propaganda, to go so over the top reflexively as these folks did on this fundamentally innocent tweet and special shows just the sickness in our politics and how deep the rot has gone.”

“This is a completely opportunistic dunk…reinforced by so much of the conservative ecosystem that just immediately took the bait to hate, to call this propaganda rather than just an attempt to inform kids and calm parents, answer their questions,” Avlon continued. He also snarked at Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers who went so far as to pronounce Big Bird “a communist.”

Big Bird is a communist.

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) November 7, 2021

“It was this belch from the deepest recesses of McCarthyism,” Avlon said. “It’s so bonkers that I think people should be forced to see and confront it for what it is. There is something palpably unwell about these people who would demonize and politicize Big Bird. It’s bonkers.”

Watch above, via CNN.