Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, tells Breitbart News exclusively why he thinks the New York Times is coming after him.
“The New York Times has done a series of three hit pieces in a little over a week, all directed at me, which may suggest that the Times is dismayed to see a strong conservative such as me getting real momentum with grassroots across the country,” Cruz said.
The first thing the Times attacked him with was an editorial from editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, in which he called Cruz’s support for the Second Amendment “strange” in a headline. Cruz fired back in an op-ed for National Review, laying out how the liberals at the newspaper don’t “get” the Second Amendment.
From there, the Times unleashed Jason Horowitz—a reporter who wrote a series of pieces digging into Cruz’s college days and questioning whether he is in fact a great debater. The pieces quoted people who didn’t like Cruz in college.
And the most recent hit piece was about Cruz attending a dinner with openly gay people who support Cruz’s positions on the economy and foreign policy. The piece, as Breitbart News already detailed, found it odd that Cruz would unconditionally love his daughters. It also argues that the conservative firebrand was ambivalent about his opposition to gay marriage. Cruz told Breitbart News that the Times is just flat wrong.
“The latest hit piece they wrote focused on a pro-Israel fundraiser we had in New York—that some of the attendees were gay,” Cruz explained when asked about it by Breitbart News.
The focus of the fundraiser was on foreign policy and standing with Israel, and everyone at the fundraiser was on the same page—which is the Obama-Clinton foreign policy has dramatically weakened our friendship and relationship with the nation of Israel. The Times somehow found it extraordinary that a conservative Republican would be willing to have a conversation about foreign policy with people who are homosexual. It is only in the Times’ strange caricature of conservatism that that is the case. I am happy to bring my conservative message to anybody—conservative or liberal—and not every supporter of a candidate will agree with a candidate on every issue.
I was asked my views on gay marriage and I said the exact same thing I say every other time, which is I stated unambiguously and directly that I oppose gay marriage and that the Constitution leaves the decision of marriage up to the states—so neither the federal government nor unelected federal judges should be striking down traditional marriage laws developed by state legislatures. One individual at the event asked my wife and me a question about what we would do if we found out one of our little girls was gay. Our response without hesitation was we would love her with all our hearts and that our love for our daughters is unconditional. The Times found that apparently quite newsworthy, that conservatives love their children no matter what.
Cruz seems to have a point about how the Times is going after him while he’s gaining traction out there as a candidate. Cruz, as he noted in the earlier published part of this interview, set a record as having raised the most amount of money for his presidential campaign since its launch—$4 million in the first week, which is more than as he said any Republican candidate for the White House in “modern history.”
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