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Open Government, Open Season
Rep. Joaquin Castro, Congressman from Texas and Chairman of his twin brother’s floundering presidential campaign, tweeted out the names of 44 of his constituents who gave the maximum amount allowable to President Trump. Many are local business owners, many are simply retirees. Now, they could be targets.
Castro defended himself by pointing out that the list was generated from public records. And it’s true. The Federal Elections Commission requires all Federal campaigns report names, addresses and occupations of every donor no matter how large or small and it’s all entered in a searchable database on the FEC website. The idea is to allow the average citizen to know who ostensibly has the candidate in his pocket. With presidential campaigns now approaching $1B (Hillary Clinton spent a whopping $768M for second place in 2016), the maximum amount any individual can give is a pittance in the grand scheme of things.
Still, Castro and the organization that originated the list aren’t interested in transparency. All they are interested in is intimidating those that disagree with them. They are using the FEC database as a registry to pin their equivalent of a yellow Star of David on President Trump’s supporters. And maybe, just maybe, a target on their backs.
National Review’s David French called it “way out of bounds.” But many on the right, French included, have spent the better part of the last four years demonizing the electorate much more than the elected. He has consistently called Trump voters racists and white nationalists and just a few days ago called for a “war” against them. Now, he just might get his wish.
Many on the right have given this crusade against individual voters a sheen of legitimacy. But there is no legitimacy, only a bastard child come for his own pound of flesh. And the government may well be providing all the information he needs.
Published in Politics
I kept telling all of you that you needed to get smart on NAACP v Alabama.
Turn about is fair play, and the only way to stop this. Name the top 44 contributors to the Castro campaign in Republican strongholds. That is, pit like threat against like threat.
Castro doing this in Texas means there’s likely to be push-back — Joaquin’s action in publicizing the names of Trump’s San Antonio area donors is actually a companion piece to the action of the San Antonio City Council back in March, where six members voted to change the concessionaire at the city’s airport specifically because it would mean the removal of Chick-fil-A from the restaurant food court (it also meant the removal of Starbucks, because the bids were based on restaurant clusters, but that wasn’t the franchise the six woke council members did a victory dance and spiked the football over its ouster).
The public reaction was sharply against the measure, and since the council was stupid enough to do it while the Texas Legislature was in its bi-annual session, GOP members there and Gov. Abbott quickly passed a bill barring cities from discriminating against businesses or individuals on contracts based on religious beliefs (which, unlike the bathroom bill of two years earlier, did not create a public kerfuffle, because in this case, the legislature was being reactive to an in-state attempt at religious discrimination, and not pro-active to something that occurred in North Carolina). Abbott’s not going to call a special session on Castro’s action, but my guess is he and/or state AG Ken Paxton will be looking to see if there are any state laws that can tie what was done to the state computer crime laws on doxxing that already are on the books.
And they expect me to voluntarily disarm?
Interesting that he did this at the same time a mob descended on Mitch McConnell’s home and made horribly violent threats against him and his wife (while Twitter, always ready with the banhammer against anyone who dares suggest a Journo learn to code, decided that highlighting #massmurdermitch as a trending hashtag was perfectly acceptable) makes it a pretty clear call out to his supporters to do the same thing to these private citizens.
There was a lot of pushback yesterday, but crickets from the media. Let’s play the old game of “Imagine if a Republican had done it.”
I think it’s time for an Anonymous Conservative group that hacks news feeds on major news programs and puts up the stuff Dems don’t report.
The mayor says he “stands with” the mob.
Of course he does.
A New Low for Democrats.
But to take that public information, then repackage it in a “Someone ought to do something about these people” tweet might be considered incitement regardless of the wording . . .
Funny how the left keeps insisting that the President is inciting attacks, but so far all the incitement is coming from the left.
There’s one thing Democrats are really good at: projection.
All they want is power.
I don’t understand how people support these guys.
Nothing new here. This is one of the reasons I am a registered money giving Democrat. I know which side I want to be on when this thing is over with. It is not with the Democrat opposition getting put in jails, killed, destroyed, etc.
Angelo Codevilla’s latest.
Claire Berlinski’s latest. She really doesn’t understand the dynamic.
What Castro did was wrong. And someone on Twitter pointed out that he removed the names of several Hispanic donors that gave the maximum to Trump. This was obviously not anything anyone in the public writ large had an interest in knowing. This was clearly meant to intimidate people. I’m just not confident that I trust people like Castro and his supporters to be in power. I’m not sure they have my best interest in mind.
Clarie wrote: “The killer in El Paso scribbled a lunatic alt-right manifesto”
And that is not true. Eco-fascism is leftist, through and through.
I just hope these donors don’t cave. Never, ever apologize to these tyrants.
Is that a mental illness?
I like codevilla’s.
It brings up some interesting ideas for me.
His position is that inconsistent and one-sided law enforcement leads to civil war (our Civil War was an anomaly).
So here we have young, white men, politically of the left, acting out with racial animosity (in quite a few places).
So is the left’s politics within their own party “radicalizing” these young men through their own rhetoric and politics, by promoting minority groups at the expense of their traditional supporters? Do these young men, in some way, feel betrayed by their party’s politics?
If this kind of weaponization of donor records becomes the norm, you can be sure more and more people will simply opt out of the process altogether. I don’t give to politicians as a matter of personal principle/preference, and this kind of abuse only further cements that position. The typical reaction of average Joe Citizen may well be: “You can have my vote, but I’m sorry, you’re not getting my money. It’s not worth the grief or threat to my business/livelihood/family, etc.”
Some will make a different calculation. But I suspect most will just decide to steer clear.
Where that leaves us as a civic-minded nation, I don’t know. Certainly not in a good place, or on any sort of recoverable trajectory.
I doubt she read it. Some liberal journo claims they read it, described it as alt-right, and she took their word for it. She’s been willfully ignorant for some time now.
That’s certainly one of the goals: make it so that conservatives fear donating to candidates. Nobody wants a pre-dawn raid just because they donated to a candidate who Democrats hated, but that’s exactly what went on in Wisconsin a few years ago.
This is the goal. Intimidate conservative donors to dry up funding sources for conservative candidates.
Democrats are evil.
And she attributes it to “Russian propaganda?” Ludicrous.
I ascribe it to alienation — from family, church, community, and country — and I attribute it almost entirely to the Left and its tactic of identity politics. If these young men felt they belonged somewhere, they would not be offing people.
Or just parroting what the European press is saying (no difference). Ignorant – or more likely lazy.
There are SO many problems with Claire’s piece. Russian terrorists had lots of females. Vera Zasulich and Sofia Perovskaia being the most bloody and most prominent.
Russian terrorists were of a distinct class – the nobility – who were opposed to the monarchy because they had been cut out by Catherine and then Alexander I and then Alexander II.
Russian terrorists were highly organized which made them easier to catch. This is probably not true in the US at all.
What is far more terrifying is Codevilla’s article. I hope he is wrong. But the parallels with Spain are frightening. The parallels with Russia are absurd to nonexistent.
It won’t be one-sided for long, though. If there is no significant pushback on this kind of behavior, pushback especially from the center-left and the media, then the conservatives will inevitably follow suit and retaliate, making it the new norm. They would have to approach it differently though, because conservatives don’t “mob” quite like the progressives do.
Your point is well taken. Conservatives are typically shamed into silence or disengagement, progressives – when shamed – treat it as a badge of “honor” at best, or whitewashed or retconned at worst, and just keep going.
I put “honor” above in scare quotes, because honor is a dying concept. Not dead, but not thriving either.
Also . . .
The House Democrats move from one effort to uncover anything negative about any Republican in government to another so fast that it is clear that governing has no place on their agenda. They are sick.
That stuff is just so fevered and irresponsible. I think there are a lot of people in the news who, basically, are what they accuse Trump of being. They were that way before Trump was a thing, and they have now taken Trump as an excuse to just say anything. It’s disappointing really.
In the context of recent days’ commentaries on the “news” media, it is hard to think of any motive for Joaquin Castro’s publication of those names other than to incite negative action against those people.
Mika Brzezinski had to do a lot of unsubstantiated speculation and twisting of Donald Trump’s words and actions to get to her opinion that Donald Trump wants violence. It’s a much shorter and more direct path to conclude that Joaquin Castro wants violence against his constituents with whom he disagrees.
your read it? it is not much of a manifesto. I suspect it has been hidden more so as to allow the fake news to make it much more than it actually is.
One of my stock answers to the question, “Why won’t you consider voting for a Democrat?” is “Democrats are clearly not interested in actual governance.”