As a contemporary of Ted Cruz at HLS, I simply can’t let the Left get away with its response to now-senator Cruz’s allegedly-McCarthyite 2010 luncheon speech in Austin, Texas. …

To be clear, the people he’s describing — the “crits” or practitioners of “critical legal studies” — were not members of the Communist party. They were, however, Marxist-influenced, highly-authoritarian, radical-redistributionist, anti-capitalists who thoroughly outnumbered conservative faculty and openly loathed America. (I’d say calling them small “c” communists is pretty darn accurate). Even worse from an academic standpoint, many of them were so full of venom and rage that they worked to shut down discourse on campus, and encouraged student followers who shouted down conservatives and even sometimes tried to sabotage conservatives’ future job prospects (radical students organized efforts to call judges and law firms to pressure them to revoke job offers). Protests rocked the campus when “crits” weren’t hired, and students repeatedly stormed the administration building in support of their favorite radical professors. …

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how the Left whitewashes its history. The Left has a shameful recent history at HLS — a history of intolerance, repression, and character assassination. In fact, HLS’s current relative moderation and civility represents a tacit admission from those holdovers from the 1990s that they went too far. Yet rather than deal with this history honestly, the Left describes its instigators as mere “social democrats” (as if we were dealing with François Hollande-on-the-Charles), while Senator Cruz is dangerous for condemning anti-American radicalism.