Cruz Slams Protestors at His Alma Mater Calling Them ‘Pampered Teenagers’

Ted Cruz Thursday ripped into university protestors for “weakening” the United States, calling the students — including those at his alma mater, Princeton — “pampered teenagers.”

“There are many on the left who I think are weakening this country,” Cruz told radio host Adam Corolla. “So you talk about, for example, universities. You see at universities these essentially pampered teenagers, many of them from very wealthy homes, who complain that they don’t want to hear anything that they disagree with.”

Cruz said he considered the protests “a microaggression” and “the most bizarre and anti-academic notion that you can have.”

His comments come as students at universities across the nation are embroiled in a contentious debate about institutionalized racism in higher education. The student movements also ignited a national conversation on freedom of expression.

Cruz said he agrees with English philosopher John Stuart Mills on free speech, arguing, “the best cure for bad speech is more speech.”

“We shouldn’t be raising a generation of young people that are so pampered that they never have heard anything that offends them,” Cruz said. “Well, we don’t have a right not to be offended. We have a moral obligation to speak the truth and to confront evil.”

Cruz also slammed his alma mater, Princeton University, for recent calls to scrub “racist” President Woodrow Wilson from campus, calling the protests “dumb.”

“Let’s take for example my alma mater,” Cruz said. “I went to Princeton University. Now, Princeton is a remarkable institution. A group of students staged a sit-in in recent weeks in the university president’s office demanding that Woodrow Wilson be taken down from campus buildings. Woodrow Wilson used to be president of Princeton, obviously became president of the United States.”

The presidential candidates said that while he’s “not a fan” of Wilson (Cruz noted that the Democrat “did a lot of damage to this country”) he doesn’t agree with removing someone from an institution’s history.

“Listen, was Woodrow Wilson an unabashed racist?” Cruz continued. “Yes. Should we talk about that? Should we condemn it? Yes. But we shouldn’t be engaged in this bizarre process of erasing our history because it offends our ears. And I think this is something that the media pushes but I do think that the American people are fed up with. There is a reservoir of common sense that realizes this is dumb.”

[Image via Shutterstock]

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