'EmasculaTED' Trends On Twitter After Cruz Offends 'Woke' US Military

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, caused an uproar on social media Thursday after he responded to a viral TikTok stating that the “woke” U.S. military is emasculated compared to Russian troops.

The controversial senator retweeted the video that showed a Russian man getting ready for war and others doing intense training and jumping out of a plane. The second part of the video tells the animated story of an American girl who fought for LGBTQ+ equality growing up, which eventually led her to fight for her country.

“Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea…,” Cruz commented.

Shortly after tweeting his opinion, veterans and other Americans shared how appalled they were to see a U.S. senator insult his own country's military service members.

The 50-year-old non-veteran even inspired his own hashtag, #emasculaTED. Many even brought up the fact that he was emasculated himself when former President Donald Trump commented negatively about Heidi Cruz’s looks and accused his father, Rafael Cruz, of being involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The original animated video of the U.S. military was posted on YouTube earlier in the month, but it received so much backlash that the Army Enterprise Marketing Office had to turn off the comments on the video.

“The comments violated our social media policy and were not aligned with Army values,” Laura DeFrancisco, a spokeswoman for the Army Enterprise Marketing Office, told Army Times. “Out of respect for the safety and well-being of our soldiers and their families, we have disabled the comments.”

The TikTok video has since been removed from the app, but is now circling on Twitter. It's the latest controversy Cruz has found himself embroiled in via the social media site.

In February, Cruz was spotted by the twitterati boarding a flight to Cancun while his home state was in the grips of a bitter winter storm, and his tweets attempting to explain away the ill-timed getaway fell flat. In 2017, his account infamously "liked" a pornographic video that Cruz labeled "a mistake."