This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 15th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Political participation often includes giving money to candidates you like.

But when boycotts and threats of violence accompany publicity

surrounding those contributions, can there be any doubt that the people who want to name and

shame political donors aren't aware of the likely fallout. Walter Olson comments

on the most recent case of Congressman Joaquin Castro and the political donations

that he didn't like. Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro distributed to the public a list of names of people who were

supporting President Donald Trump and it appeared that he was doing so in a way that was meant to shame them. Exactly. These were people who had given the maximum individual contribution to Trump's campaign.

Walking Castro's tweet along with the list said very confrontational things about how they were enabling terrible things.

This was right after the El Paso shooting and listed their names along with their

professions or businesses which in a number of cases were retired or in one case

homemaker but in other cases were the names of businesses in San Antonio.

And along with it, he said some things like what a shame that this barbecue owner and that woman who

sells real estate would be doing these things so very focused on not just

shaming them but also shaming them in a business context of don't

patronize their businesses. Right and so this speaks to an issue in campaign

finance and we need we need to make clear that a lot of that information is public already.

You can get that information.

Exactly.

He was using information that you could get if you wanted to spend a few minutes on the web.

So to the extent that he's highlighting this this information it speaks to an issue in campaign

...