Sowell is not immune from watching which side his bread is buttered on. It tells me that he is more in tuned to the GOPe as a foundation of his followership than the Tea Party.
He was also probably aware that his statements about Cruz would get a lot of attention, and then people would also be reading his comments about Nazi Germany.
I don’t think of him as being that devious, but that’s kind of what happened. All the attention went to the Cruz remarks but deep in the convoluted human brains of those who read his column is the rest of the stuff.