Senator Cruz: Avid Bearing Drift Reader?

There was a portion of Senator Ted Cruz’s speech last night that struck me because it sounded so familiar:

That was the power of freedom. Our party, the Republican party, was founded to defeat slavery.  Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  Together we passed the Civil Rights Act, and together we fought to eliminate Jim Crow Laws.  That’s our collective legacy, although the media will never share it with you. Those were fights for freedom, and so is this.

How familiar was it?  Well, there are two op-eds written for this publication where I used very similar language.  Back in February 2014 with the now-famous polemic against nativism:

A small history lesson — the Republican Party is the party that ended slavery, that fought Jim Crow, that passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1950s and ushered in the civil rights era.  The Republican Party is the party that is fighting against welfare, fighting against the entitlement system, fighting for individual freedom.  The Republican Party is the party that embraces the single-largest non-violent civil rights protest in our nation’s history — the pro-life movement.  The Republican Party is the party that destroyed Soviet Communism.  The Republican Party is the party that fought for free goods and free trade.  On the right side of history, you will find the GOP at every turn.

…and a more recent op-ed explaining why I will neither support nor vote for Donald Trump in response to an open letter:

Before Donald Trump, the saw used against Democrats was very simple.  The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, the party who refused to fight the Civil War, the party of Jim Crow, the party of segregation, the party of massive resistance, the party who wanted to accommodate the Soviet Empire, the party who inflicted welfare and abortion on our inner cities.  Show me once where the Democratic Party was on the right side of history?  “My friends,” I’d argue, “your hearts are in the right places, but the free market has liberated more people than the progressive left ever has.  There’s no way Republicans harbor any of that nativist crap.”

Borrowed thoughts or “great minds thinking alike” be damned.  Maybe it is coincidence that two of Bearing Drift’s most well read op-eds were borrowed?  Maybe they had their intended effect in influencing the public debate (in an almost verbatim sort of way).  How cool is that?

Of course, the greater problem for me is whether the Republican Party has turned its back on this legacy of freedom in a move entirely inconsistent with our founding DNA.  That’s really what ought to concern conservatives at the moment.  Clearly this is something that bothers Senator Cruz.

Yet as a writer?  I couldn’t be happier to hear my own thoughts echoed in the public square.

Well played.