In 2008, during a "60 Minutes" interview with Antonin Scalia by Leslie Stahl, Justice Scalia recounted his visit to Oxford Union in England:

Sometimes people come up to me and inquire, ‘Justice Scalia, when did you first become an originalist?’ As though it’s some weird affliction, you know, ‘When did you start eating human flesh?’ Scalia told students, who replied with laughter.

There have been a couple of times I felt as though I had succumbed to some weird affliction when people have asked how I ever came to support Ted Cruz. It’s amazing how the left constantly engages in political theater, often with great effect. However when a conservative does so, as for example when freshman Senator Cruz delivered his marathon 21-hour diatribe to warn of the dangers of implementing ObamaCare, that person is branded as a rabid, raving lunatic. For Ted Cruz, that stigma has stuck.

Have too many of us allowed such branding to conjure forth powerful peer pressure that intimidates us into succumbing to the archetypal mindset, to where, at least in polite society, we’re too willing to concur that ‘yes, he’s too conservative’ or ‘everybody hates him’, or ‘he can’t win, he’s finished’? The danger is that we either turn on each other in rancorous, self-devouring attacks, or we quietly shrink into ourselves and ponder what might have been.

If we are not to follow the media pipers up and over the cliff, we must think and act for ourselves, even at the risk of being mildly ridiculed behind our backs.