AUSTIN — Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s re-election campaign is seizing on a Facebook post by state Sen. Dan Patrick from two years ago in which Patrick praises Dewhurst and defends him against the title of moderate — an online thread that was deleted Monday and then reposted.

The post was written just days before the U.S. Senate primary between Dewhurst and Ted Cruz in 2012 — and Patrick doesn’t endorse either candidate in it but makes clear that “the facts don’t support the charge” that Dewhurst is a moderate.

“No matter how many times they are made,” according to the Patrick post.

Patrick will face Dewhurst in a May 27 runoff to determine the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. He’s cast himself as the “authentic conservative” in the race and has made it common practice to attack Dewhurst’s leadership as Senate president.

Dewhurst’s campaign says it started linking to the post and tweeting quotes from it on Monday, which resulted in Patrick’s team scrubbing it from online existence hours later.

In a statement, Patrick’s camp says the post was “deleted by a member of the campaign staff without permission. The post has since been restored.”

“Dan Patrick supported David Dewhurst in 2012 but decided to run against him for Lt. Governor after the failures of the 2013 session,” said Allen Blakemore, Patrick’s top consultant.

A Dewhurst aide charged Patrick’s campaign with “whitewashing history” and said the lieutenant governor is the “same effective, hardworking, conservative leader that Dan Patrick described in such glowing terms on his Facebook page two years ago.”

A snippet of the Facebook post in question is below. Read the full post here (and here’s a link to a separate post from 2012 in which Patrick praises Dewhurst’s leadership in the Senate).