Contrary to what he and his boosters in some quarters of talk radio would have us think, Ted Cruz is most definitely not a Washington “outsider” or “anti-Establishment” candidate.

For years, until as recently as 2013, Cruz, alongside such insiders as George W. Bush, advocated on behalf of legalizing the country’s millions of illegal immigrants.

And though he and his defenders would have us believe otherwise, most Americans know that legalization, being the first step, as it were, to citizenship, is indeed amnesty.

It is doubtless because Cruz wanted as badly as anyone to bring illegals “out of the shadows” that accounts for why, in spite of his self-styling to the contrary, he left it to Jeff Sessions (who, not incidentally, has endorsed Trump) to lead the fight against the Gang of Eight.

In the early 2000’s, Cruz joined the board of HAPI, an organization comprised of “conservative” Hispanics interested in advancing a “pro-immigration” agenda. HAPI worked closely with the Bush administration. Every proposal included legalization. In fact, among the policies that Cruz and his colleagues at HAPI supported was John McCain’s and Ted Kennedy’s “immigration reform” act of 2006!

Robert De Posada, a former Director of Hispanic Affairs for the RNC and a founder of the “Latino Coalition,” meets Cruz’s current protestations that he never supported legalization in principle, but only as a strategy to derail the Gang of Eight’s plans, with incredulity. “It’s just a flat out lie. Period. There’s just no truth behind it.”

The truth of the matter is that Trump entered the race and revealed to all with ears to hear that Americans generally and GOP voters in particular are outraged over the American Last immigration policy that Democrats and Republicans have been pushing for decades. Amnesty—i.e. any arrangement that, in one way or the other, allows illegals to reap the privileges allotted to those with legal status and citizenship—is woefully unpopular.

Cruz witnessed Trump’s meteoric rise over his stance on this issue and recalibrated accordingly.

The Texas senator had never been the hard-liner against amnesty that he would now have us believe that he is.

Yet support for amnesty is hardly the only position that Cruz has shared in common with his comrades in the neocon-GOP/Democrat-progressive Washington axis. Cruz has been supportive as well of the foreign policy vision of the regime.

For example, Cruz purports to reject “nation-building”—but so too does every other politician, for “nation-building” is to foreign policy what “welfare” is to domestic policy. Remember, even the man who set out to democratize the Middle East called for “a more humble foreign policy” when he campaigned for the presidency in 2000. In reality, Cruz is every bit as much a fan of the idealism of “American Exceptionalism” as is anyone.

As The National Interest notes, Cruz’s speeches on foreign policy are replete with the exactly the kind of abstract idealistic generalities—“human rights,” “fundamental values,” “the hope that every person may have to live in freedom,” etc.—that “conservatives have been fighting for centuries.”

Nor is this just rhetoric, for Cruz would refuse to communicate at all with Iran until it unequivocally affirms “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state”—a standard of which even our Arab allies “expressed rejection.” And he argued for drawing Ukraine into an equal alliance with the Western powers of NATO—even though a country as poor and corrupt as Ukraine couldn’t possible carry its share of the burdens and responsibilities that member states are expected to assume.

Cruz decries “New York values,” which he identifies with support for abortion, “gay marriage,” and “focus on money and the media.” All the while, some of his biggest backers are Wall Street financiers. The chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, which spotted Cruz and his wife a considerable loan, had won an award from the “Human Rights Campaign” for his tireless work in advancing “marriage equality.”

Goldman Sachs, in the words of one left-leaning publication, had been a “driving force on influential Wall Street for LGBT equality.”

Evidently, Cruz’s conscience was no more conflicted over accepting resources from this embodiment of New York values than it was conflicted over accepting resources from two billionaire gay hoteliers—and proponents of marijuana legalization—who held a reception for him last spring. During the event, Cruz not once expressed his opposition to “gay marriage.” Moreover, he borrowed a move from the old tried and true GOP playbook and bucked the issue altogether by invoking “states’ rights:” marriage, he said, is a thing best left to the states to resolve on their own terms.

When word got out about the event, a Cruz aide expressed regret to CBS about the campaign’s choice of venue.

As for abortion, even as Cruz blasts Donald Trump for the latter’s assertion that Planned Parenthood does some good, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Cruz, who has been in the US senate for six years, only began calling for the defunding of Planned Parenthood after it came to light that the country’s largest abortion provider traded in baby parts.

In other words, Cruz said nothing all of this time as the taxpayer was forced to subsidize PP’s abortion services. Yet what’s worse, the trading of the bodily members of deceased human beings or the killing of those humans?

To hear such Cruz boosters as Mark Levin tell it, Cruz is even more despised by the media and “the Establishment” as is Trump. There’s no end to the spin. Perhaps this explains why such neoconservative Republican establishment organs as National Review, which dedicated an entire issue to the end of stopping Trump, not only has done no such thing regarding Cruz; it has actually endorsed Cruz.

So too have such paradigmatic Establishment figures as Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham endorsed Cruz.

It’s also worth noting that NR, Bush, and Graham all gave one and the same reason for their support of Cruz: He’s the best hope of stopping Trump.