Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) said during a discussion this week that the political Left uses bigotry of low expectations to create victim groups.

The two Texas Republicans made the remarks during an episode of “Verdict,” a podcast co-hosted by Cruz and Ben Ferguson.

“You’re a Cuban American, and I am a black man,” Hunt said. “And what’s really funny about this is why the Left would absolutely pontificate about how we cannot exist. Here we are sitting here in unison with same, the same conservative values and so different backgrounds from different parts of the Earth.”

“My great-great-grandfather was a slave,” he said. “And here we are having this conversation about conservative values and nobody cares about what we look like. This is the argument that the Left cannot deal with because it does not fit their narrative.”

Cruz said that it was important for people to understand the histories of both political parties because it’s what “the media and the Democrats use to scare minority voters.”

“The Democrat policy agenda is absolutely horrific,” Cruz said. “If you sat down and said, let’s design a policy agenda to devastate the African American community and the Hispanic community, you could not come up with anything more effective than the Democrat agenda.”

Cruz highlighted how Democrats’ policies create crime before noting how their policies have hurt black families.

“You look at the Left-wing assault on the family,” Cruz said. “Go back to the black family in the 1950s in the 1960s where you had strong two-parent households … Look, the Great Society, the Left-wing policies that said, ‘We’re gonna give you welfare payments, we’re going to disincentivize marriage and divide the home.’”

“And they trapped generations of low-income Hispanics and African Americans in dependency,” Cruz added. “And the Democrat agenda has trapped generations in poverty and dependency where you have 1, 2, 3, 4 generations on welfare and unable to get off of it, unable to get the dignity of a job, and then throw on top of that failed schools.”

Hunt said that the Democrat was designed to “create victims.”

“So imagine if my parents raised me, then they told me, ‘You know what? This world is so much against you in America is so bad that you can’t even get an ID. Rely on me and I will give you a check,’” he said. “Imagine if my parents told me that every single day. I certainly wouldn’t be a United States Congressman. And that’s what I mean by the soft bigotry of low expectations. And that’s how they keep people voting for them by promising the very bare minimum.”

WATCH:

A treasure hunter has accused the FBI of a coverup as a dispute over the search for a Civil War-era gold stash continues to play out in court. 

Dennis and Kem Parada, a father-son treasure-hunting duo called “Finders Keepers,” believe that newly released documents and video pertaining to the FBI’s search of Dents Run, Pennsylvania, show that the federal agency has not been completely straightforward about their search for gold. 

“We feel we were double-crossed and lied to,” Dennis Parada told the Associated Press in an interview, though he says he believes that “the truth will come out.” 

The dispute hinges on the Paradas’ belief that gold, part of an 1863 shipment of Union gold intended for the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, ended up buried about 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh after a potential train robbery. The gold, if found, has a current estimated value of $55 million.

After years of research, the Paradas led the FBI to the suspected location of the gold at Dents Run which the agency searched in 2018. The FBI said the dig came up empty though the Parada has remained skeptical. 

“I will stick at this until the end, until I know everything that happened to that gold,” he said. “How much, where it went to, who has it now. I gotta know.”

New videos and images from the search obtained by Parada through a Freedom of Information Act request shed new light on the 2018 search and have raised more questions for Parada. 

“We’ve identified through our investigation a site that we believe has U.S. property, which includes a significant sum of base metal which is valuable … particularly gold, maybe silver,” a Philadelphia-based FBI agent said in the video. 

Parada says he thinks the agency may have dug overnight when the search was supposed to be on hold and moved the gold, though the FBI has said it never dug at night. In 2018, locals told the AP that they had heard digging equipment at work throughout the night and that the hill where the gold was suspected to be was lit up. 

Another question raised by Parada and consultant Warren Getler is about why a photo of a large boulder said to be taken after a snowstorm began had no snow on it. “We have compelling evidence a night dig took place, and that the FBI went to some large effort to cover up that night dig,” Getler, a Civil War gold researcher, said.

A recent legal filing from Parada also alleges a number of other problems with the FBI’s response to his inquiry for more details on its search of Dents Run. The filing says that Finder’s Keepers was not given any video of the dig’s second day, did not provide details on a 30-foot-long trench that is mapped at the site, and claimed that a report given to them on the dig seemed to be missing pages. 

According to Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, the records given to the group “cast doubt on the FBI’s claim to have found nothing and raise serious and troubling questions about the FBI’s conduct during the dig and in this litigation, where it has gone to great lengths to distort critical evidence.”

A judge will determine if the agency will be required to respond to the treasure hunter’s latest request.