San Antonio's got some former mayor now running for president, a guy whose brother is now specially targeting San Antonio's own citizens for doxxing because they donated to President Trump.

On Monday night, Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro posted the names and employers of 44 San Antonio residents who donated to President Trump’s reelection bid.

Castro, the brother of presidential candidate Julian Castro, wrote in a Twitter post that “Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.'”

Castro chairs his brother’s presidential campaign, which is polling at about 1 percent in the crowded primary field and has been struggling to gain donors and remain eligible for upcoming Democratic presidential primary debates.

Seems Joaquin Castro, brother Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, has "a list." More revolting still, it's people in his own hometown he's going after and they're small fry, not fatcats outside his community. It's as if the locals are the ones he hates the most. Worst of all, he's actually doubling down in the face of flak for this obviously sick act, according to Politico.

Castro responded with a flurry of defensive tweets to Murtaugh and journalists who had criticized him. The graphic didn’t contain “private or personal info — no addresses or phone #, etc," he wrote. "It’s publicly reported info printed in newspapers routinely from the @nyt to the @dcexaminer. You know that.” He also doubled down on the initial sentiment, saying the Trump campaign “has stoked fear of brown-skinned immigrants.” Castro also pointed out that the campaign had used donor money to pay for more than 2,000 ads on Facebook echoing the anti-immigrant language used by the El Paso suspect.

So there's no danger in doxxing, but lots of danger in calling for a secured border for the sake of everyone on both sides of it?

David Harsanyi at the Federalist has an analysis about the essential anti-American nature of this act which cannot be topped:

Many Democrats like Castro have adopted a political zealotry that rationalizes basically any tactic they deem is necessary to fight Trump. This, I guess, now includes intimidation. That’s because the purpose of tweeting these names wasn’t merely to bully those who have already donated to Trump, but to warn anyone in his district thinking about contributing to Trump to consider the potential retaliatory public attacks on their businesses (or worse.) Leftist groups have become quite adept at destroying the lives of those who back causes they dislike.

Harsanyi cites the case of the Mozilla CEO who spoke out of turn and got doxxed, but actually, there's an even more salient example of this dangerous and dirty doxx-the-donors practice, which Harsanyi rightly notes is extremely un-American, pioneered by the Obama administration.

Remember this guy? Back in 2012, the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel had a bead on what happened to him for donating to a Republican:

As Ms. Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama's campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight "less than reputable" Romney donors and a "bitter foe of the gay rights movement." One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states. Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot's home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is "a commercial research firm." Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn't say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a "legitimate" target because of "his record on gay issues."

Fusion GPS? That's a name that stands out. Seems that the same techniques pioneered by Fusion GPS are now being promoted by Joaquin Castro, except that he's now industrializing the practice by going after 44 small fry instead of just one fatcat. Like Joe McCarthy, he's got "a list."

The logic of the Fusion GPS attack in 2012 and Glenn Simpson's own claims about how 'legitimate' it was, is no different from Castro's justification for it. Almost as if he's taking instructions...

Then it gets even more eyebrow-raising when one looks at this: Joaquin Castro is a big defender of Fusion GPS in other contexts -- look at the water-carrying he does for the outfit, in this video of him just recently on Anderson Cooper 360 via Facebook (it doesn't seem to be shareable, so click on the link to hear it). He's a veritable endorser of Fusion GPS's most famous faulty product, which was the scurrilous Steele dossier. It's like Fusion GPS has its own public relations agent in Congress. And coincidence of coincidences, Castro sits on the House intelligence committee, making him a prodigious consumer of its products at a minimum.

There's also this, from Newsweek in January of 2018, speaking of Fusion GPS's famous phony dossier:

When asked whether he has heard testimony that revealed evidence of crimes committed by members of the administration on MSNBC's All In, Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said "yes." "I think many Americans, if they were able to listen to the testimony of Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS would be very troubled about a lot of the things they hear," Castro said.

Seems he's defended and endorsed Fusion GPS time and again. And sure enough, he's now employing Fusion GPS's other faulty product, which is doxxing and smearing donors, something it did with the guy in Idaho.

His brother Julian Castro incidentally also defends Fusion GPS's interests, too. Fusion GPS is something he gets asked about and deflects attention from, as if Fusion GPS were not an issue at all.

Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and Obama administration housing secretary, similarly criticized the Republican argument that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign paid Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research into Trump before the election. Fusion GPS contracted British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who eventually compiled the Trump-Russia dossier. "The question on the table for the president yesterday was, if this kind of information came your way, would you go to the FBI, would you go to our intelligence agencies?" he said. "These situations are just completely different. And what's most important is not what happened in the past. I don't understand why, on this network and in so many conservative circles, people are still talking about Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is not on the ballot."

There are undoubtedly more examples of this, raising questions as to why Castro's doxxing is so similar to Fusion GPS's doxxing in style, and why both Castro brothers are such assiduous defenders of the smear outfit in other contexts. Could candidate Julian Castro and his campaign managing brother Joaquin, also be clients of Fusion GPS?

Yes, a link is tenuous, so far, but there are some fingerprints. At a minimum, they're big fans of Fusion GPS and what it does, the gamier and sleazier, the better.

The whole thing represents repulsive slide in the political dialogue. Will every political contest now be a matter of Fusion GPS-style politics? What if everyone did what they do? No wonder dialogue is no longer possible now that Fusion GPS's techniques are being mainstreamed. Flailing Democrats with unpopular ideas are spearheading the unwelcome shift.

Think Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro has any intention of being U.S. president of "all the people," if, God forbid, he should either win, or else get the vice presidential slot? Not with these tactics. Call it the Fusion GPS-ization of the Democratic Party. It's disgusting.