"He came in with his right hand raised and basically kept it raised the entire semester," said Alan Dershowitz about Ted Cruz.

"Every year you see two or three [Harvard Law] students who you know are natural leaders. Everybody saw that with Barack Obama . . . Everybody saw that with Elena Kagan. There are students who come in with charismatic qualities who other people follow. He was one of them."

But how much easier to be the leader at Harvard when you are voicing liberal opinions!

He... enjoyed antagonizing liberal classmates. Late nights at the Law Review were the scene of fierce debates....

“Some topic would come up and it was a free for all,” said Dean Newton, a fellow conservative on the Law Review. “All you’d have to do is say something remotely conservative and it would catch people’s hair on fire. It was fun to goad them.”

Do you have to be the sort of person who finds it "fun" to make your peers mad to emerge as a leader when you are conservative? I'm sure others had some conservative urges but kept silence because they cared about being liked.

I suspect that this is part of a deep structural problem in conservatism today — why the GOP ends up with so many characters who rub women (and sensitive men) the wrong way.

A quote from Cruz:

“There is a depressing tendency in modern political life to disparage those who disagree with you as either stupid or evil.... They’re either too dumb to know the right answer or, even worse, they’re smart enough and yet they wish suffering on others and are just downright evil.’ The truth of the matter, most people are neither.”

A 332-page book about Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in Abrams.

Reviewed here by Alan Dershowitz, who says:

In “The Great Dissent,” Thomas Healy, a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School... postulates that a chance encounter with Learned Hand — then a district court judge — on the train between New York and Boston planted the seed that eventually blossomed into Holmes’s full-blown defense of free speech. Hand attempted to convince the 77-year-old justice that tolerance of dissenting, even obnoxious and dangerous, views was essential to democratic governance, but his effort seemed at first to fall on deaf ears: Holmes insisted that the state could legitimately enforce what a majority accepted as the truth, which he defined as “the majority vote of that nation that can lick all the others.” He accused his younger judicial colleague of striking “at the sacred right to kill the other fellow when he disagrees,” and he later invoked an absurd analogy between the power of the state to vaccinate those who might spread dangerous diseases and to imprison those who might spread dangerous ideas.

"People fight to the end because they know that losers in such wars get killed or ‘ethnically cleansed.’"

Said Fareed Zakaria, quoted by Alan Dershowitz in "Syria crisis shows why Israel must remain strong."