Megan Vaz
On Monday night, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas visited Yale to record an episode of “Verdict with Ted Cruz” before a crowd of liberal students presumably bent on stifling his right to free speech by exercising their own rights to free speech. Since the nation struggles with a desperate shortage of masochistic men who host podcasts, the senator provided Yale with a special opportunity to reach intellectual enlightenment.
Liz Wheeler introduced the event to a crowd of 500 people by referring to recent protests over a conservative group at Yale Law School as “violent,” citing all zero pieces of evidence there was any violence at all. In another entirely substantiated claim, she noted that Yale does not care about the conservative donor base it alienates because it is “underwritten by the Chinese Communists.” The audience shouldn’t mind the $150 million that Stephen Schwarzman — an ally of President Trump who has given over $34 million to the Republican Party, Republican candidates and conservative PACs since the start of 2020 — donated to the University to create the eponymous Schwarzman Center. Would Wheeler have been more pleased if they made us watch “Ben Shapiro OWNS the SJW libs” compilations every time we ate in Commons?
Preceding their complaints against college professors and teachers for spreading leftist perspectives, Knowles and Cruz chastised liberal students for complaining about the spread of conservative viewpoints. Notably, the 51-year-old senator blasted “Yale’s very own Peter Parker” Ely Altman ’25 — an undergraduate who is one-third of his age — for writing that he and Knowles are “chipping away at democracy.” Naturally, being compared to the world’s most popular superhero is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you.
Altman was mistaken in his Op-ed in the News. There is nothing more democratic than, in Cruz’s own words, “leading the charge” to stop the certification of an election with no evidence of systemic voter fraud. Or conspiring to delay states’ certification of the 2020 presidential election results through a “minor violation” of the law — each effort of which over 90 other U.S. senators foolishly shut down. Or supporting the Texas attorney general as he filed a case asking a federal court to toss out the election results in four different states, which his own chief of staff called “a dangerous violation of federalism.”
Of course, the Jan. 6 “patriots” and “peaceful protestors” deserve Sen. Cruz’s support — unlike the Yale Law protestors that he demanded disciplinary action against, these QAnoners have absolutely no experience engaging in “groupthink” or “[screaming] down anyone who disagrees.”
During his talk, Sen. Cruz immediately jumped into the most urgent crisis facing the nation — white parents having no choice but to pay over $70,000 for their adult children to discover racism. The Senator also touched on the intellectual terrorism waged against white schoolchildren, like the babies apparently being labelled racist in “Antiracist Baby.” In tune with the blown-up pages from the book he presented during the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings, he subsequently displayed excerpts from another damning piece of left-wing propaganda — “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” He blasted the titular caterpillar and the book’s setting in a “welfare state,” both of which teach children to freeload off of hard-workers — the butterfly class — to unfairly be handed baseline subsistence.
As Cruz and Knowles repeatedly argued, lessons that acknowledge critical race theory and the existence of gay people have absolutely no place in children’s classrooms. Sen. Cruz claimed that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill rightfully protects children from learning the specific mechanics of gay sex by making sure gay people are not acknowledged overall. As a resident of Florida’s “gay capital,” Fort Lauderdale, I could not agree more. I can attest that when I developed my first crush on a girl in third grade after learning people could have two moms, all I could think about was scissoring.
Speaking of sex, Knowles made clear that he had none of it during his own time at Yale. He spoke of his “worst memory” from college as the day Barack Obama was elected president. Over 3,000 liberal students gathered outside to celebrate in a haze of marijuana clouds while Knowles and the six other conservatives he knew allegedly found some courtyard to sit in and throw back shots of vodka. Coincidentally, that is what each Saturday night looked like for Knowles after he unsuccessfully tried to sneak into frat parties.
As a guest of the Buckley Program, Knowles zeroed in on the importance of intellectual diversity and civil debate by calling Ketanji Brown Jackson “stupid.” Cruz even invited guests who disagreed with him to the front of the Q&A line to prove his commitment to a free exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, since Senator Cruz answered a simple request to say two nice things about Jackson with a rant on her sentencing record that lasted several minutes, some of us did not have the opportunity to listen to him skirt around our questions. I am sure the audience member who asked whether he believed Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 presidential election was thrilled when Cruz answered that Joe Biden is the current president.
Alternatively, Cruz lamented conservative students’ silence on cultural issues in order to “protect the job at Goldman Sachs.” Luckily, anyone who has taken a history, global affairs or political science course can tell you otherwise — I myself encountered a riveting criticism of anti-colonialism movements as “I don’t know, they sound pessimistic” by one such conservative student during class. We also all know Goldman Sachs, which recently resumed donations to lawmakers who opposed certifying the 2020 election, to be a staunch bastion of cultural leftism — Sen. Cruz’s own wife has worked as a managing director at the firm for ten years!
The largest chunk of the event was dedicated to blasting liberals over their Supreme Court nominee — a staunch supporter of critical race theory and apparently pedophiles, according to Cruz and Knowles. Sen. Cruz claimed that leftist media outlets went silent over his attack on Jackson’s sentencing record on child pornography cases and instead chose to cast it as a “QAnon conspiracy.” He may have missed this Washington Post article, this ABC article, this New York Times article, this CNN article or this AP article evaluating her past sentencing practices as mainstream. Maybe this Wall Street Journal article would work instead, since the outlet is more palatable?
Sen. Cruz lamented how he is unable to criticize someone who is a minority, like Jackson, without being “held up as the modern day Klansman.” Although his later declaration of support for Nazis’ free speech did not exactly negate that title, he claimed that even saying “good morning” to a Black woman would earn him the labels of “sexist” and “racist.” As a woman of color myself, I would like Sen. Cruz to consider that many minorities might look offended after hearing a “good morning” from him because he might just be a generally unpleasant person. Since fellow prominent conservatives have dubbed him a “miserable son of a bitch” and said that “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” I wonder what their reactions to that “good morning” would be.
Sen. Cruz did hit back at these Republican detractors for not “taking on the orthodox” by refusing to ask Jackson hard-hitting questions, like whether babies can be racist or what a woman is. I suppose taking on the orthodox is only unacceptable when it comes to teaching critical race theory or considering the oxymoronic “false thesis” of the 1619 project, but it’s clear that Cruz’s colleagues left him in the dust this month.
“Where were the conservatives?” Knowles asked Cruz during their discussion of Jackson’s nomination.
My best guess? The trials for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists started two weeks before the Supreme Court hearings, so probably at the defendant’s table in some courtroom.
Author’s note: Unfortunately, the only thing in this article that did not actually happen at this event was the exhibition of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”