Ted Cruz - Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System

Justice Corrupted

How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System

Ted Cruz

This book is dedicated to Hon. Edwin Meese, the seventy-fifth attorney general of the United States and the chairman of my national leadership team when I first ran for the Senate.

It is also dedicated to Charles J. Cooper, who served as General Meeses right hand, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who is one of the most talented constitutional litigators alive, who was my first boss, and who taught me how to be a lawyer.

I t was every fathers nightmare. Your fourteen-year-old daughter, your little girl, being sexually assaulted at school. In the girls bathroom. By a boy wearing a skirt.

Horrific. But in any sane environment, the consequences would have been swift. The boy would have been prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. The criminal justice system would have worked, if not as a deterrent, then at least as a punishment.

But Loudoun County, Virginia, was no longer a sane environment. Here, a group of left-wing ideologues had taken over the local public school system, turning their town into the kind of woke experiment that was being replicated in radical school districts across the United States. When the school board got word of this horrible assault, they covered it up, refusing to prosecute the boy. Instead, they transferred him to another school, where, to the surprise of nobody rational, he assaulted yet another young girl.

Why did the system fail? We know why. Because the crime was inconvenient for the prevailing political narrative. That narrativethe one that says gender doesnt exist, and that children can switch between male and female at willwas more important to these zealots than the physical safety of the children in the care of Loudoun County Public Schools. Boys dressed as girls nevernever!commit sexual assaults. And they certainly dont commit them in the girls bathroom, a place that the new leftist elite insisted should be available to anyone who identified as a girl. It didnt matter if the person in question had just begun identifying as a girl yesterday, or even if he still had a beard and male reproductive organs.

The father of the first girl assaulted, a plumber named Scott Smith, was devastated and outraged. You would be, too, if the same thing happened to your daughter or the daughter of someone you love. Shortly after the incident, Smith went to his daughters school to try to make sure justice was served. When he got there, he found out that the schools principal had no intention of taking disciplinary action against the boy or even of calling the police. This, understandably, outraged Smith even further.

By the end of that day, the police were finally called to the school. But not to arrest the boy who had sexually violated Smiths daughter. Rather, the police were called on Scott Smith himself. The schools principal called the police, according to an excellent investigative report on the incident published in the Daily Wire, because he was making a scene about his daughters assault.

As the weeks went on, anger about various policies in Loudoun County grew. Aside from rumors about the sexual assault of Smiths daughter, parents had recently learned that much of what their children were being taught in school was absolute nonsense. During the pandemic, when Loudoun County kids were forced to learn remotely, many of their parents had peered over their shoulders to see lessons on white guilt, systemic racism, and gender studies on the screens of their iPads and laptops. During a few contentious school board meetings, many of these parents had made their concerns known, leading to several high-profile arguments in public. The next meeting, Smith learned, would be held on June 22.

During the meeting, the school board was in full defense mode. The board members knew that parents were concerned about the schools open-door bathroom policy and the potential for sexual assaults that came with it. They also knew that these fears had been realized just a few weeks earlier, when Smiths daughter had been assaulted. But as the concerned parents came to the microphone (more than 250 had signed up to speak that day), the members of the school board lied about the incident time and time again.

When Beth Barts, a school board member who had clashed with Loudoun County parents in the past, had the chance to address these serious concerns, she dismissed them, almost mocking anyone who would be concerned about such things.

Our students do not need to be protected, she said. They are not in danger.

Turning to another member of the school board, she asked whether assaults occurred in bathrooms and locker rooms.

To my knowledge, interjected Scott Ziegler, the superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools, we dont have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.

This was a lie, as Ziegler knew and had admitted in an email to the board members on the day of Smiths daughters assault. Perhaps that is why he quoted Time magazine for the rest of his answer. The magazine had printed a report the previous year claiming that the data was simply not playing out that transgender students were more likely to assault cisgender students in restrooms. Ziegler then went on to say that the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.

Of course, Ziegler knew full well that at least one predatory transgender student did, in fact, exist, and that the school board was protecting him (or her, or them, or xim, or xer). Scott Smith, who sat in the audience that evening with his wife, Jess, knew it too.

For the next hour or so, parents from both sides of the cultural divide took to the microphone and made speeches. Some parents demanded to know exactly how many of these assaults had occurred; others screamed wildly that anyone who raised such concerns was a bigot, a sexist, and a racist, too.

All the while, Scott Smith sat quietly, knowing that if the school board had its way, the story of what had happened to his daughter would soon be buried to serve a dishonest woke narrative. At some point during the commotion, a woman came up to him and said hello. She wore a rainbow t-shirt. Smiths wife said she recognized her, and even believed they were friends. When this woman, who would later turn out to be a fierce left-wing ideologue, asked why the Smiths had come to the meeting, they told her what had happened to their daughter: the assault, the cover-up, and all the details in between.

The woman grew upset, even angry. Through gritted teeth, she said, Thats not what happened.

This, apparently, was the breaking point for Scott Smith, and understandably so. For weeks, hed been hearing that what had happened to his daughter was not only not a big deal, but that it hadnt actually occurred at all. For a moment, Smith raised his voice and grew agitated. The woman looked at his t-shirt, which advertised his plumbing business, and declared that she was going to ruin the business on social media.

Smith argued back at her, although not for long.

Before he knew what was happening, Smith felt his arm being jerked by a police officer whod been watching the exchange from the far side of the room. Alarmed, Smith yanked his hand away, and the officer came at him with his full weight. Soon, they were wrestling on the ground, and the whole thing was being filmed by cameras. Images of Smith, his pants half down and his t-shirt up pulled up over his stomach, would soon go out to millions of people on news networks all over the world. It was just one more in a line of horrible indignities that he had been forced to endure.