Unsurprisingly, calling a Republican presidential candidate a “s**thead” has earned Mazin a sizable social-media following. Unfortunately, it has not given him succor. In mid January, he noted: “I have 30k followers now, and all I had to do was be stuck in a room with Ted Cruz for a year. I’m sure you’re all nice, but so not worth it.”

As of this writing, Mazin boasts more than 85,000 Twitter followers — partly thanks to a recent tweet that went massively viral. Following a Mother Jones report that Cruz, during his tenure as solicitor general of Texas, defended a 2004 state law banning the sale of sexual toys, Mazin snarked: “Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to ‘stimulate their genitals.’ I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.” That witticism has been retweeted 44,000 times. Precisely what Ted Cruz’s masturbatory habits — if such ever existed — have to do with the question of substantive due-process rights (the legal question at issue in Reliable Consultants Inc. v. Earle), or with the professional responsibilities of a state solicitor general, Mazin has not addressed — nor did, to choose admirers at random, the Jezebel contributor who penned “F***in’ Craig Mazin: An Appreciation of Ted Cruz’s College Roommate,” an article that provides a fairly strong indication of the type of people think who that Craig Mazin is a teller of important truths or a master wit.

Spending one year in a dorm with someone can be trying. But with due respect to the trials of residential-college life, there are genocide survivors less traumatized than Mazin purports to be.

Meanwhile, no twelve-month roommate situation has ever provided the depths of soul-piercing knowledge that Mazin claims. And, more to the point, even if Ted Cruz was The Worst Roommate Ever™, that was a quarter-century ago. The man currently campaigning for president isn’t 17 years old.