Huffington Post reports: A big part of Sen. Ted Cruz’s appeal is that he’s not Donald Trump, the openly bigoted billionaire currently leading the Republican Party’s presidential race.

But the notion that a Cruz presidency would be more palatable to those concerned about Trump’s anti-Muslim stance came into doubt on Thursday, when Cruz unveiled his own team of national security advisers. It includes Frank Gaffney, a man described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes.”

Gaffney, who served in the Reagan-era Defense Department, now heads the Center for Security Policy. It’s a think tank of sorts well known for promoting conspiratorial theories about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the U.S. government at high levels and the Sharia system replacing American democracy. [Continue reading…]