Is Joaquin Castro Trying To Kill You?

Y'all, last night on the internet was WAY dumber than 30-50 feral hogs. It was, like, at least 70-90 feral hogs. Per minute.
But instead of 70-90 feral hogs running into your yard to play with your kids, it was 70-90 feral conservatives losing their goddamned marbles over the fact that Rep. Joaquin Castro, who runs his brother Julián Castro's presidential campaign, tweeted a list of publicly available names of donors from San Antonio (his district) who have already maxed out their contributions to Donald Trump for 2019.
Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump — the owner of @BillMillerBarBQ, owner of… https://t.co/cKAH3IZJYr— Joaquin Castro (@Joaquin Castro) 1565061180.0
The way they're responding, you'd think conservatives had just discovered that when they make a contribution to a candidate, that information is public and searchable on the internet, with exactly the information listed right there in Castro's tweet. Many of them probably have just discovered it for the first time, because conservatives are very stupid people.
A sampling, picked at random:
This is hateful and vindictive... It also has no place in our political discourse. Hello? Where is the outrage from… https://t.co/trR8dDfLvK— Kimberly Guilfoyle (@Kimberly Guilfoyle) 1565123645.0
Like, HELLO! Where is the OUTRAGE? Joaquin Castro got on the internet and, like, WROTE STUFF DOWN!
COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE! Joaquin Castro, Congressman & Chairman of Julian Castro’s 2020 presidential campaign, pos… https://t.co/x50X1rred2— Kayleigh McEnany (@Kayleigh McEnany) 1565116294.0
Private info about where they work! Which is information you include when you donate to a political candidate! Which then gets listed on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website! This is DOXXING, obviously.
For the stupidest of all, it's always a good idea to skip all the other try-hards and go straight to Donald Trump Jr., because nobody in the world except his dad is physically capable of being as stupid as he is:
Holy shit. On Fox & Friends, Donald Trump Jr compares the list Joaquin Castro released of public info about who has… https://t.co/YS1b3Od2G7— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1565183020.0
DOES IT, Junior? Is that what it does?
It should be noted that in the clip above, Fox News blurred out the names of the donors, but don't worry, if you want to go to the FEC website and find them right now, you can uncover the secrets Fox is protecting. Or you can search YOUR city if you want! (You should!) But whatever you do, don't open a Word document and make any kind of categorized list, because that is doxxing and just like a mass shooter's kill list.
The Trump campaign brayed and hollered:
At the very least @Castro4Congress is inviting harassment of these private citizens. At worst, he’s encouraging vio… https://t.co/TmaGmWrx0P— Tim Murtaugh (@Tim Murtaugh) 1565117778.0
Ted Cruz jerked off into an open soup can WITH FEIGNED OUTRAGE:
EVERYONE needs to tone the hateful partisan rhetoric way down. This is WRONG & Castro should retract it. In our con… https://t.co/5o7GZX29Hr— Ted Cruz (@Ted Cruz) 1565127266.0
Even minor dumbasses got in on the action:
1. Joaquin Castro publicly naming and shaming Trump donors is way out of bounds. 2. How about we not quote-tweet h… https://t.co/Cl1RIXC4eC— David French (@David French) 1565129952.0
Odd how he uses that word "shaming," as if perhaps conceding that maxing out your donations to Donald Trump in the year 2019 is an inherently shameful thing to do. (Spoiler: It is.)
And of course, there were the major dumbasses:
Who wants to publish her donor details? https://t.co/Vc39oKGpxA— Erick Erickson (@Erick Erickson) 1565148038.0
DURRRR I DUNNO, ERICK, MAYBE THE FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION?
And then there are the campaign organs, the folks who know exactly how public donor databases work and absolutely could tell Republicans how dumb their fuckin' whining is right now, except for how that would throw cold water on the mutually agreed-upon (and agreeable!) jerkoff ragefest they're all having over this.
Democrat leaders hate @realDonaldTrump’s supporters so much they’re now doxxing them. Imagine the media outrage if… https://t.co/qSAXb4oQ7s— Ronna McDaniel (@Ronna McDaniel) 1565123007.0
This is disgusting. Inciting violence against private citizens for participating in our Democracy is beyond the pal… https://t.co/AM6PwplpER— NRCC (@NRCC) 1565121054.0
OK, that's enough stupid people reacting stupidly. (For now, we'll do some more at the end.)
Let's play a little game called "What is this, ACTUALLY," where we say what this is, actually, and what it decidedly isn't:
WHAT THIS ISN'T: Doxxing. It just isn't. Yes, those FEC databases are very big and take some time to sift through, but public information, even sifted through and filtered, is still public information.
WHAT THIS ISN'T:Inciting violence. We understand that conservatives have agreed to collectively shit the bed in maniacal fear over their imaginary threat of the Antifa that lives underneath each and every one of their beds, but that doesn't mean their fears are valid or that the monsters who populate their wet fever dreams actually exist.
WHAT THIS IS: Well, we do agree that it falls under the category of naming and shaming! And people in San Antonio -- and tourists to that great city! -- are free to vote with their dollars and choose not to patronize places owned by some of the business owners listed above, or choose not to do business with companies led by some of the CEOs above. (Remember, we are talking about donors who have already maxed out to Trump. As much as conservatives would like to act like it is, this is not a case of "Mabel gonna get fired from the Old Navy because now her coworkers know she attended the Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville financially supports a white supremacist who incites violence and inspires mass shootings, and that makes Mabel a bad person." (It does make Mabel a bad person.)
The worst thing that's gonna happen to these people is that people are going to know what they did, and they might lose business or -- God forbid! -- social status because of it. WOMP WOMP.
WHAT THIS IS: It's shameful! No, not what Joaquin Castro did. What he did was downright plucky. As Paul Campos notes over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, this isn't the same as throwing out a list of people who gave five bucks to Trump in 2016, when, even though we already had all the evidence we needed to know that Donald Trump is a garbage white supremacist authoritarian shithole person, we suppose we did not technically know exactly what kind of president he would be. (Some voters are dumb.)
It's shameful that these are 2019 donors. It's shameful to look at the last three years, look at what Donald Trump has done to this country, what he's incited, whose lives he's ruined, and say, "Know what? Sign me up for the MAXIMUM ALLOWED BY LAW."
And we see this in the reaction, if you can wade through all the people shitting the bed over Antifa threats that don't exist, that it's just generally accepted that Castro did this to shame these people, which sort of in and of itself accepts the argument that their financial support for Donald Trump is shameful.
Why aren't they proud of their donations?
Any business that donates to Trump is complicit and endorses the white supremacy he espoused in Charlottesville, wi… https://t.co/rJ29MCfgWJ— Joe Scarborough (@Joe Scarborough) 1565134205.0
If your business funds Trump’s campaign, then you are supporting white supremacy. Full stop. Look at his rallies.… https://t.co/kttuWCIRnl— Joe Scarborough (@Joe Scarborough) 1565137696.0
To donors of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and other Democrats, would you be proud or embarrassed to have people know… https://t.co/2FxEjiVXRi— Joe Scarborough (@Joe Scarborough) 1565183847.0
Sorry about those three tweets from Joe Scarborough, but when he's right, he's right, and also we like him making fun of "dumb DC Trumpists" for acting like public donor information is "the stuff of spy novels."
Our game of "what is this, really?" isn't over yet, though:
WHAT THIS IS: Not only public information but a public service. Joaquin Castro is Hispanic. San Antonio is majority Hispanic. The city of El Paso just experienced a white supremacist terrorist massacre of Hispanic people. Naming and shaming San Antonio people who have paid the maximum legal allegiance to the fucking patron saint of that massacre, whose words inspired the very manifesto the murderer wrote? It's not a fucking hit list. It's a message to people of San Antonio and everywhere else that, in the year 2019, these donors are people you might not be safe around. You might not be safe doing business with them. They might look the other way if they see you being abused or falling victim to crime in front of them. They might not protect you as fellow citizens and human beings. They might call ICE on your tia.
So, you know, maybe don't go to their restaurant.
WHAT THIS ALSO KINDA IS, LOL: A tiny taste of conservatives' own medicine, maybe? Because who has a reputation for ACTUALLY doxxing people? Whose readers and viewers send death threats? We all know the answer to that -- we've experienced it! -- but if you need a refresher, GOP never-Trumper Rick Wilson wrote a thread about what he and his family have endured, and still endure, because he dares to speak ill of President OrangeShithole McDumpStupid Dear Leader.
We promised there'd be more stupids at the end of this post, but really, it's just Maggie Haberman. You know, just in case you were worried that MAYBE there was still something super-awful about what Joaquin Castro did, and you need the reassurance of knowing which side of the issue Haberman is on, so you can choose the opposite.
@DavidMDrucker Don't want to RT this because I don't want to put these people's names in my feed but this is dangerous, by any campaign.— Maggie Haberman (@Maggie Haberman) 1565124190.0
@JoyAnnReid @DavidMDrucker I guess I missed where in the disclosure list in the NYT it had an aspect aimed at ostra… https://t.co/KKX9kxKaIP— Maggie Haberman (@Maggie Haberman) 1565140137.0
Uh oh, Joy Reid from downtown! Because we seem to remember when Haberman's New York Timeswaged an all out war on the Clinton Foundation, smearing the names of their donors -- and publishing them in list form! -- and suggesting something nefarious about their activities, even though the Times's own stories were forced to admit (usually in the 19th graf or so) that there was no "there" there.
But no matter, because Maggie Haberman is the Diviner Of All True Intent, and she says this thing is different from that thing because #reasons, therefore we should all stop wasting our breath telling her she's an idiot and that maybe this isn't the hill she oughta want to die on, because it's not like she's ever learned a fuckin' lesson in her journalistic career so far, dunno why she'd start now.
In short, conservatives are being a bunch of fucking whiners right now, and Maggie Haberman is as usual gloriously incorrect.
Here's Joaquin Castro on "Morning Joe" today:
Rep. Joaquin Castro Wants Trump Donors To 'Think Twice' About Contributions | Morning Joe | MSNBCwww.youtube.com
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