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The office of Senator Ted Cruz spoke with TheBlaze about an article published by The New Yorker recently. The article dubbed Cruz as “our new McCarthy.” Cruz’s office called the article “curious.”
Despite the ‘curious’ remark, a spokeswoman for Cruz, Catherine Frazier, said that his remarks about Harvard Law School being a home to Communists “was absolutely correct.”
According to the New Yorker, Cruz said in a speech in 2010 that President Barack Obama “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School” because “there were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were 12 who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz was enrolled in the school after Obama.
“It’s curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it ‘news,’” Frazier said in a statement to TheBlaze on Friday. “Regardless, Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.”
The New Yorker was told by Robb London, a spokesman for Harvard Law School, “We are puzzled by the Senator’s assertions, as we are unaware of any basis for them. We applaud the fact that he has pursued public service, as so many of our graduates have done. We are also proud of our longstanding tradition of freedom of speech and the robust range of views and debates on our campus.”
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Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried, said to The New Yorker, “I can right offhand count four “out” Republicans (including myself) and I don’t know how many closeted Republicans when Ted, who was my student and the editor on the Harvard Law Review who helped me with my Supreme Court foreword, was a student here.”
Frazier defended the initial assertion from Cruz, saying, “As two professors explained in the Stanford Law Review in 1984: ‘A large segment of the [critical legal studies] membership forms part of the revisionist wing of Marxism. These members remain faithful to the central premises of Marx’s thought, especially to the view that the material conditions of life are the engine of social history. Their course is defined by the magnetic pull of Marxism.’”
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the following to the New York Times earlier in February that Cruz “was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,’ and, of course, nothing was in the pocket.”
