It needed to be said…

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) rocked the room at the Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference last week, ripping universities and colleges for “trying really hard to raise a generation of pansies.”

Cruz’s biting remarks were triggered by the first question after his speech, when he conducted a Q&A. A student from Binghamton University got the ball rolling. He stated:

Hi, Senator Cruz. It’s a pleasure to meet you. … I compete in parliamentary debates. However, in tournaments, well-intentioned but misguided policies about political correctness have been quashing freedom of speech and our free expression of ideas. It is incredibly frustrating, but it seems to be a microcosm of what’s going on in our national dialogue. Do you have any prescription of how we can improve our level of discourse at the local and national level to restore the meaningful and important conversations that have been combining to make our democracy as great as it is?

Cruz replied, “Elaborate a little bit on how political correctness is impacting college debate.”

The student answered, “I’d love to. So at the beginning of every round, for us to write our gender pronouns on the board. It gets a little bit worse; if our cases are a little bit edgy, we have to ‘trigger-warn’ before each round; if we say something —”

At this point Cruz bent over and put his head in his hands, eliciting laughter.

The student continued, “If we say something a little bit too offensive, we can get equity-called and then kicked out of the tournament and shunned by the league. And then also, they have ‘gender-minority’ tournaments, where men are just banned from competing entirely.”

Cruz then provoked hilarity, shaking his head sadly and intoning, “We’re all gonna die.” After the laughter and applause subsided, he continued, “One of the saddest things we’re seeing is our colleges and universities are trying really hard to raise a generation of pansies. What is this sense that you have a right not to be offended? You have a right not to hear ideas that are scary? Look, the entire purpose of university is to hear ideas that are scary.”

That prompted another ovation.

Cruz continued, “I talked about being a happy warrior, not a daisy-wearing daffodil priest. It really is not that frightening; when I went to college, when I went to law school I was surrounded by leftists; I took classes from Marxists, and by the way, I don’t find Marxism just sort of cute and chic. A guy down the hall from me sophomore year in college had a poster of Che Guevara; I remember going into his dorm room and saying, “Hey man, that’s really cool; that’s so awesome. Have you thought about maybe putting a Hitler next to it? Maybe Mao? Stalin? Listen, if you’re gonna celebrate evil torturing murdering, sons-of –bitches, really, Che was an amateur. There are much worse guys to pick from.”

That brought the house down.

Video below:

Src: The Daily Wire