October 25, 2024
I think that all of us, at one point or another, have found ourselves in a waiting room so empty and dull that we forgot what it was we were waiting for. Growing up, I used to dread the dentist’s office not for the needles or the drills but for the reception room, which was a frigid, black hole that sucked in youthful joy and crushed it like a cockroach. The walls were grayer than gray, the only thing to read was a technical manual on periodontal probes, and the fish in the tank looked suicidal. By the time I got into the chair, I’d be begging for a root canal just so that I could feel something again.
This is not that kind of waiting room. The walls are pastel pink, and the fish look like they’re on cocaine. There’s reading material everywhere, from the Bible-verse posters (“‘To all those who have, more will be given, and they shall have in abundance’—Matt. 25:29”), to the stack of get-rich-quick books on the table, to the mail-order catalogue selling bubblegum incense and platinum-plated prayer beads. I look down and glimpse the title of the catalogue:
FreedomGear Product Guide, 2024.
If the name of that company rings a bell, it’s probably because someone you know has signed up to hawk its wares. You see, FreedomGear is what you might call a multi-level marketing firm, or MLM. It employs no full-time salespeople; instead, it has more than 200,000 “Freedom Rangers” who buy the product wholesale and try their best to sell it at a profit. The company bills itself as an easy path to riches, yet most of its distributors end up so grindingly broke that they start begging everyone around them for business. If you’re Plaxolinked with a Freedom Ranger (a distant cousin, say, or an old high school friend), chances are they’ve flooded your inbox with frantic, frenzied messages, desperately trying to convince you to spend thirty-eight dollars on an action figure of John the Baptist or a pink, plastic crucifix that doubles as a hairbrush.
My fifth star just so happens to be the CEO of FreedomGear, and his ghostly presence haunts this room. His portrait smolders down from the wall like the hero in a spaghetti Western, complete with leather boots, folded arms, and a manly sprinkling of five o’clock shadow. His drawling, nasally voice rings out from the corner, where a TV plays footage from a speech he gave at a FreedomGear conference last year: “excuses are the currency that allows you not to act!” He shouts. “Stop hanging around people who don’t want to win. Open your heart and find riches in Christ!” Offscreen, a raucous crowd cheers his every word.
I look up at the clock. He must be a very busy man—our appointment was at two, and it’s two-twenty-three. I sigh, lean back, and press my spine into the couch. Tilting my head, I spot a hardcover book sitting on the table beside me. I pick up the book, plunk it into my lap, and stare down at the cover. Time mucks down to the pace of cold molasses as my fingers inch closer and closer to the book, almost against their own will. Finally, I open it up and see the title stamped neatly across the cover page. Faith, Sweat, Tears, Success: The Personal Memoirs of Rafael Edward Cruz.
The memoirist begins with a dramatic account of his birth: “I was born on the prairie one cold, December night with the promise of America beating soundly in my heart.” Never mind that the prairie in question was Canadian (he was born just outside of Calgary). His Cuban father worked in the oil industry, and so the author spent the first few years of his life being whisked back and forth across petroleum-rich corners of North America. It wasn’t until he was four that the family found a permanent home, finally settling down in Houston in 1974.
His childhood was not a jolly one. “Felito,” as the young boy called himself, was lanky and thin with coke-bottle glasses, which led to constant bullying and teasing. “Eventually,” he writes, “I decided I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd.” So, he ditched the glasses, took up sports, and swapped his funny-sounding nickname for the more esteemed and illustrious “Ted”. By high school, he’d been elected class president. “It taught me something incredibly valuable,” Ted writes of the experience: “with hard work, dedication, and an unbreakable faith in Christ, anything and everything is possible.” Between the lines, I spot another little Aesop: change your personality, gain the trust of those around you. Both lessons have served Ted remarkably well across the years.
Glasses or no glasses, young Ted’s brilliance was undeniable. He went from high school straight to Princeton and from there to Harvard Law, where he won medals in debate and honed a purist, conservative worldview shaped by Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Ted graduated in 1995 and took on several prestigious clerkships (including one for then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist) before moving back to Texas to join a law firm rich with political connections. Within two years, he’d gotten in good with every influential Republican in the state, and when then-Governor George W. Bush launched a presidential bid in 1999, Ted was brought on as a senior adviser.
“I advised Governor Bush on all things legal,” Ted writes in Chapter 4. “Immigration, crime, policy reform, all of it was my domain.” If that’s true, I don’t believe it. George W. Bush was a so-called “compassionate conservative” with neither the fire of Rick Santorum nor the brimstone of Mike Huckabee. By later standards, he was downright centrist, expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants and objecting to gay marriage purely on constitutional grounds. It boggles me to think that a moderate like Bush would have taken advice from a firebrand like Ted, but an old colleague who covered the campaign has assured me that it’s the truth (apparently, Ted was so natural in the role of the gray, humorless confidant that the backslapping Bush started calling him “Theodore”).
That stoic, unflappable façade lasted until 2 A.M. on election night, when the race was called for Al Gore. Then, all of a sudden, Ted turned into a pit bull. Within hours, he was live on Fox News, forcefully insisting that Gore’s three-thousand-vote lead in Florida was nothing but a Democrat lie. For the next two weeks, Ted led an aggressive, sweeping charge to overturn the results, filing endless briefs in federal court and appearing on TV night after night to demand a recount. When Bush finally conceded in mid-December, Ted felt completely and utterly betrayed. “Millions of Americans put their trust in Governor Bush,” Ted recalls on page 62, “and he sold us down the river. He promised to be a fighter, but he chickened out the minute things got rough.” While other Bush advisors moved on from the loss, Ted spent weeks ping-ponging back and forth across the right-wing media ecosystem, spouting dubious claims of fraud and scorching the Governor as a weak-willed, spineless turncoat. His fiery words whipped millions of conservative minds into a red-hot, roaring frenzy, and before long, he would wield it to his advantage.
In 2001, President Gore tapped Congressman Chet Edwards, a Democrat from central Texas, to serve as Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs. Edwards promptly resigned from the House, triggering a special election for his seat. Within days, Ted had sold his Austin loft, moved 100 miles away to Waco, and declared himself a candidate for Congress. He had no prior links to the area, and his vendetta against Bush had ruffled many a feather in the state GOP. But Ted’s media blitz had won the hearts of the region’s disaffected conservatives, and he snatched up the nomination and trounced his Democrat opponent in what he spins as a solemn, public service. “I had no choice but to run,” he confesses on page 72. “Since November, I’d met hundreds of faithful, hardworking Texans who felt they no longer had a voice in the affairs of their government. If I’d passed up a chance to give them that voice, I never could have lived with myself.”
In May of 2001, Ted stormed into Congress with the power of celebrity on his side. His youth, passion, and fiery eloquence brought him constant attention from the media, and within months, he was one of the loudest and most salient right-wing voices in America. The following year, Congressman Cruz thundered his way to a full, two-year term, by which point top conservatives were hyping him up as a future governor or senator. He practically volunteered himself for Rising Stars, and he made a natural addition to my list (by that time, even I was starting to realize that strong emotions, not strong ideas, were the wave of the future).
Our interview took place on New Year’s Day 2003 at a pulled pork joint in downtown Waco. Ted showed up in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots and answered all of my questions with his face buried in barbecue sauce. What had pushed him into politics, I asked? “The people of Texas,” he answered with a mouth full of meat, “and prayer. Lots of prayer.” How did he define conservatism? “No handouts, period,” he responded, licking honey mustard off his fingertips, “oh, and God first. God’s always first.” What was the future of the Republican Party? “Less talk, more fight,” he replied, picking gristle out of his teeth with an unclipped fingernail.
In many ways, Ted was years ahead of his time. For the GOP of the early 2000s, his views on conservatism were radical and new, and he did not hesitate to make them known. In the wake of 2/12, for example, most Republicans supported Al Gore’s push for a Department of Science and Technology, believing that it would enhance national security. But Ted became the new agency’s fiercest enemy in Congress, contemptuously tarring its billion-dollar contracts with Silicon Valley as “welfare for big tech babies”. Later on, while nearly every prominent Republican was calling for Saddam Hussein’s head on a plate, Ted went on Fox News to decry the War in Iraq as a worthless, foreign entanglement. He was developing themes that would dominate right-wing discourse in the years to come: isolationism, disdain for bureaucracy both public and private, and a raw, unvarnished hatred of anything that could be called “the establishment”.
But while Ted’s acid tongue was the source of his power, it was also his fatal flaw. He was known to unleash torrents of rage against anyone he disagreed with, even if (especially if) they were members of his party. Ted was so friendless on the Hill, one Republican joked that “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the House, and the trial was in the House, nobody would convict you.”
Still, Ted’s love affair with the right-wing media shielded him from consequence—until, that is, he picked a fight with the wrong guy. Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas had first landed in Washington in 1985 as a radical, bomb-throwing outsider, but after eighteen years in the House, he was a party man through and through, having clawed his way up to senior leadership. Ted loathed DeLay, though sources differ as to why—on page 124, Ted himself makes it a matter of principle, calling DeLay’s resistance to pulling troops from Afghanistan “utterly unconscionable,” but the Washington Post framed it as a simple clash of egos, reporting that the rift had begun when Ted was denied a prized committee assignment.
Either way, by the time Ted returned to Washington in early 2003, Republicans had lost control of the House, and then-Speaker Dennis Hastert had resigned from party leadership. In the ensuing shakeup, Ted adamantly refused to endorse DeLay’s bid for Minority Leader. When asked why in a live Fox interview, Ted exploded into a three-minute spew of bilious, spiteful rage. “I cannot support Tom DeLay,” he declared, “because Tom DeLay is a man with no values, no morals, and no convictions. In the short time I’ve known him, I have never seen him act in anything but his own self-interest. He’d set fire to an orphanage if it brought him more power.”
Instantly, Ted’s rant became the stuff of legend. It saturated the news cycle for weeks, and later that year, when CoffeeShop was first launched, it became the first news clip ever to reach 100,000 sips. Never mind that Ted’s claims were categorically false (Tom DeLay most certainly did have convictions, many of which were in line with Ted’s own). Ted was playing the long game. He could sense that his wing of the party was in the ascendant, and by burning his bridges with the establishment, he’d be a shoo-in for House leadership once the hardliners finally took over. All he’d have to do was hang on to his seat and wait.
And, in a way, Ted was right—within ten years, many of his views would become mainstream planks of the Republican platform. What Ted had failed to foresee was that the Earth would drop out from under him. For Tom DeLay, after all, was a Texan, and his pull in state politics surpassed that of any other federal politician. So Ted had no right to be shocked when, in July of 2003, the state legislature redrew his district to include several sapphire-blue sections of Austin, making it perilous ground for a firebrand like himself. Ted still filed for re-election, but found to his horror that his powerful friends had turned their backs, his big-check donors had stopped answering the phone, and a primary challenger had emerged seemingly out of thin air. Ted had displeased the powers that be, and when primary day rolled around, he lost renomination by more than ten thousand votes.
The loss left Ted demoralized and dejected. “I was as aimless as Hagar wandering the desert,” he writes on page 154, “so I called out for guidance, and God set me straight.” Item one on the divine to-do list: marriage. Ted and his fiancée, Heidi, had put it off for so long that she’d threatened to break off the engagement, so they finally tied the knot in early 2005, just two weeks after his departure from Congress.
Next up was a new job, which Ted found, of all places, in Michigan, at the offices of the multi-level marketing juggernaut Amway. Then as now, Amway was extremely controversial. It promised its distributors an easy path to success, but the only sure way for them to make money was to recruit other distributors. To its enemies, Amway was nothing but a glorified pyramid scheme. For Ted, though, it harkened back to a simpler, purer time in American history, to an age of rugged pioneers and hardy yeoman farmers who survived on nothing else but their own hard work and ingenuity. In a world overrun by corporate tyrants and petty government elites, Ted reckoned, Amway was a swashbuckling hero, turning establishment slaves into rough-riding entrepreneurs and breathing new life into the American Dream.
Amway’s billionaire CEO, Dick DeVos, had been one of Ted’s biggest campaign donors. When Ted lost his seat, DeVos gave him a plum position in the office of Amway’s chief counsel, where the young ex-politician worked wonders. In 2006, the FTC launched an investigation into Amway’s business practices. Instantly, Ted counter-sued and used the media to spread his outrage, loading his words with colorful hyperbole: The federal government, he charged in one appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, was “The Tyrannical Hulk,” while Al Gore was “Godzilla on steroids.” Soon, every talk radio host from Maine to Modesto was parroting Ted’s points. With the help of Ted’s silver tongue, Amway triumphed in court and prevailed on appeal, stoking outrage among liberals. The Supreme Court finally took up the case in 2008, by which point support for Amway and its business model had been woven into the fabric of American conservatism. Not even the Garland Court’s thin, liberal majority could squirm free of Ted’s cunning, legal arguments, and, in one of its most contentious opinions so far this century, the Court ruled five-to-four that multi-level marketing was technically—that is, totally—legal.
Amway v. FTC unleashed an avalanche. Before the ruling, multi-level marketing firms made up only a tiny section of the economy, their product lines mostly confined to nutritional supplements and hair-loss pills. After the ruling, MLMs sprung up like weeds around every conceivable industry. These days, just about anything—books, insurance, sushi, chemotherapy—can be bought from an MLM, and according to the Department of Labor, as many as twelve million Americans work at least part-time as MLM distributors.
Not long after the Court’s decision, Ted left Amway for greener pastures. He could have easily gotten back into politics; Ted’s patron, Dick DeVos, was now the Governor of Michigan, and the stances that had made him a wingnut five years prior had gone mainstream (for one thing, the In-Q-Tel scandal proved that the CIA really had been paying tech firms to pump out new surveillance equipment). But Ted had lost interest in public service. Instead, in 2011, he founded FreedomGear, which quickly blew past its competitors to become one of America’s largest MLMs. Ted’s industry know-how certainly helped, but perhaps even more crucial to FreedomGear’s rise was the religious angle: during his time at Amway, Ted had noticed that the most successful MLMs are those that pluck at their distributors’ spiritual heartstrings. So, instead of makeup kits or summer dresses, FreedomGear deals in trinkets, knick-knacks, doodads, and tchotchkes, all with a light sprinkling of Jesus. Best-selling items include a corkscrew that plays “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and a mug on which is printed the so-called Eleventh Commandment: “THOU SHALT NOT TALK TO ME BEFORE I’VE HAD MY COFFEE.”
Since its founding, FreedomGear has been under near-constant scrutiny. In 2013, an investigation by the Christian Science Monitor revealed that 60% of FreedomGear distributors end up thousands of dollars in debt, and almost none of them succeed in turning a profit. Since 2017, the Feds have sued FreedomGear for everything but its business plan, including tax fraud, wage theft, and lead paint in its children’s toys. Through every scandal, Ted has sought cover in his spirituality. In 2019, when OSHA arrived to shut down a FreedomGear warehouse in Fort Worth, Ted stood in the doorway like a bearded George Wallace and cried out to the skies for a miracle. Last year, when three FreedomGear vice presidents stepped down on charges of embezzlement, Ted tarred the SEC as “King Herod’s agents,” and beseeched the FreedomGear faithful for prayers and donations.
At times, Ted’s piety muddles the line between businessman and preacher. Before, Ted’s Christian faith was but a small part of his brand, like background music to his free-market soliloquies. Now, it’s his entire persona. In his posts on the company Plaxo page, Ted pulls liberally from the Bible (“in the Book of Isaiah, God tells us that he declares new things before they happen. So, here’s a sneak peek at our new line of Ash Wednesday neckties!”). At FreedomGear summits, Ted comes off less like Scott McNealy and more like Joel Osteen (during his keynote address last year, one attendee had to be hauled out on a stretcher after she collapsed to the floor and started speaking in tongues). In the closing chapter of his memoir, Ted reflects on his transformation from hard-nosed lawyer to Evangelical guru: “my faith has enriched my life so deeply, I can’t even fathom who I was before I discovered it. Once, I was obsessed with worldly ambition. I would go to war with other men over the tiniest specks of power. But once you’ve let the light of Christ into your heart, politics feels like patty cake.”
The introspective turn catches me off-guard. A question comes together in my mind: after 223 pages of self-serving bravado, has Ted finally owned up to a personal flaw? In the twenty-two years since we last spoke, did he somehow develop the capacity for self-awareness? I think back to my trip to Napa last month, where I showed up to confront a liar only to find that there were no lies. What if Ted’s story is the same? What if his skyward turn was a genuine journey of faith? What if his endless Jesus talk reflects a true, inner communion with the divine?
Just then, above me, I hear footsteps. I look up at the staircase and see my fifth star in the flesh, descending from on high like an angel. I steal one last glance at my watch: 4:37. Two-and-a-half hours late. I’ve read a whole book in the time it took Ted to show up for our appointment.
He steps off the stairs looking precisely as he does in his portrait, right down to the stubble on his chin. I expect an invitation upstairs; instead, I get a clammy handshake, a mumbled apology, and a nonchalant, easy grin. He plops down across from me, and I pull out my list of questions. I start rattling them off, but his answers float in and out of my mind like wispy cottonwood (after all, I just read his life story from cover to cover—why bother paying attention?)
I watch Ted’s face just closely enough to see that he, too, is utterly disconnected. His pupils are glassy and dull, he leans back into the plush-covered chair like he’s settling down for a nap, and even his whiskers seem saggy and bored. I’m starting to wonder if he even remembers who I am. Then, out of nowhere, he lights up like a halogen bulb. “You know,” Ted says, leaning forward in a sly, don’t-spill-my-secret kind of way, “you strike me as pretty ambitious. How much do you make in a month?”
My jaw falls open. All of my words desert me.
From a hidden pocket, Ted pulls a neat, folded brochure: How to Become a FreedomGear Ranger. “If you distribute for us,” he continues in a soft, fluid drawl, “You can double your income. Maybe triple it. We had this one woman in Idaho. When she started out, she had thirty-four dollars in the bank. Eight months later, she bought a Ferrari.”
The brochure dangles below my nose. An unseen force compels me to grab it, if only to get it out of my sight.
Ted nods his head in approval. “Give it some thought,” he says, rising from his seat with a wide, Texan grin. “When you’re ready…” he smiles, sticks out his thumb and pinkie, and raises them to his ear like a telephone receiver. “You know how to reach me.” Then, he winks, turns, makes his way over to the staircase and ascends to a higher plane, cowboy boots clopping crisply on every step.
The room falls silent. My jaw hangs open like a Christmas nutcracker. The awareness sets in: to Ted, I’m not a journalist, a writer, an interviewer, or anyone of particular importance. I doubt he even remembers my name. To Ted, I’m just another dollar sign, another hapless sucker waiting to be bilked.
I look up once more at the portrait on the wall. Ted’s scruffy mug glowers back, squinting down like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. The cowboy schtick is a paper-thin illusion (if Ted has ever roped a steer or tied a hog in his life, he left it out of his memoir). But his powers of deception are not to be underestimated. Ted’s boundless greed is plain as day, and yet, for one fleeting moment, I truly thought he’d seen the light—or at least enough of it that his love of the Almighty might trump his love of the Almighty dollar. I was completely and utterly fooled.
I rise from my seat and make my way over to the door. The brochure is still in my hand; I raise my arm to flick it into the trash. Mid-toss, however, I pause. After a moment’s reflection, I fold up the brochure and slide it into my back pocket. Now, if I’m ever struck by the sudden urge to piddle away my entire life savings on “GOD IS RAD” T-shirts or manna-flavored protein bars, I’ll know exactly who to call.
