Cruz slams Yale protests in New Haven speech

NEW HAVEN — Talks of a student backlash against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s appearance at Yale University never materialized Monday night, as the conservative Texas senator spoke uninterrupted for nearly 40 minutes with the co-host of his popular podcast.

The speaking event, held in the ballroom of the Omni Hotel, came days after Cruz joined other Republican officials in signing an open letter calling on Yale Law School administrators to crack down on student protesters who disrupted another event featuring a speaker known for her opposition to LGBTQ rights.

Cruz and his co-host, Yale alumnus Michael Knowles, spoke about the incident at length along with their broader concerns about what they said was a culture of censorship and “groupthink” at elite universities.

“What happened at Yale Law School, what’s sad about that is it is not unusual, you see it happening at universities all over the country,” Cruz said. “Instead of doing what one would imagine Yale lawyers would be capable of doing, which is presenting arguments and reasoning, they instead tried to exercise the heckler’s veto and just scream down anyone who disagrees.”

But despite threats of another protest by students, as reported by the Yale Daily News, the scene outside the hotel was calm Monday evening as attendees lined up down the block for a chance to fill some of the unused seats at the reportedly sold-out event.

of those in line, Yale senior Marielena Rodas, held a neon yellow sign with the words “traitor” and an expletive written in Spanish.

“I think it’s pathetic,” Rodas said of the decision to host the senator by the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, which touts its mission as “promoting intellectual diversity.”

Another Yale student with Rodas cited Cruz’s recent questioning of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson that some criticized as an attempt to smear the judge as sympathetic toward sex offenders based on her sentencing records.

During the first part of the event, a roughly 40minute discussion between Knowles and Cruz, the crowd remained unobtrusive and there were no interruptions by jeering or hecklers. Afterward, during a question-and-answer session, Knowles invited attendees with differing viewpoints to come to the front of the line to ask questions.

One attendee who conOne fronted Cruz with a question about his conduct during Jackson’s hearing — calling his treatment of the judge “flagrantly racist” — asked if he could say two positive things regarding Jackson’s nearly decadelong judicial record.

Cruz defended his questioning of Jackson, saying “every single question I asked her had to do with her record,” and not race, though he declined to offer any positive remarks on her judicial rulings. Instead, he said he was “conflicted” over the nomination of Jackson, who was his classmate at Harvard Law School, calling her “smart” and “charming” despite her liberal record.