EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Ted Cruz explains how 'people get screwed' when 'party of Santa Claus' gives out 'free stuff' like college

Sen. Ted Cruz sat down with Campus Reform for a wide-ranging interview on the state of higher education in America. 

He lamented the push for free college as a cynical ploy to garner votes, not a viable solution for helping people. He said, “When you look at student loan forgiveness, the party of Santa Claus is always popular giving away free stuff, and they don’t take into account all the people that are getting screwed when you do that.”

[RELATED: Cruz: Defund colleges that don’t support free speech]

Cruz acknowledged that he paid off $100,000 in student loans over a span of two decades. Rather than regretting the debt, he said, “I’m grateful for those loans. They enabled me to access an education that I couldn’t otherwise afford because my parents didn’t have the resources to help me.”

Forgiving loans, he asserted, would be “wildly unfair to the people who worked hard for years to pay off their own loans, and it’s wildly unfair to a lot of folks in our country who didn’t end up going to college at all.” It would, however, curry favor with voters who are finding themselves unable to pay their loans. 

”If you look at the Democratic agenda, buying votes and locking in power is their number one priority,” Cruz said. 

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The U.S. Senator from Texas detailed how campuses have suffered due to cancel culture. 

”I think there’s enormous self-censorship going on...the hard left, they put the ‘total’ in ‘totalitarian.’” Cruz says young Americans should resist this, asking, “What young person in your right mind would want the government controlling what you say, what you think, what you believe, what you do?”

As his daughters get closer to their own college years, Cruz says he’ll encourage achievement and open-mindedness. “I think my advice to my girls will probably be ‘Go to the best school you can get into.’ I do think it opens doors, to go to a really good school,” Cruz said. He continued, “The more you can be an intelligent, questioning, educated thinker, the more effective you’re going to be, both in school and in life.”

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Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AngelaLMorabito