The internet teaches Ted Cruz a lesson he so richly deserves

| 9:40 pm EDT August 6, 2019
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The trouble with Republican Ted Cruz isn’t just his far-right extremism. Nor is it merely his dishonesty. It’s that on top of being a dishonest extremist, he also doesn’t seem to understand how some very basic things work. For instance, human emotions. Also, basketball hoops. This evening, Cruz revealed that there’s something else he doesn’t understand – and the internet was quick to teach him all about it.

Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro tweeted out the names and occupations of the San Antonio area residents who donated the maximum to Donald Trump’s campaign. He then blamed these people for funding Trump’s deadly white supremacist agenda. Castro merely posted information that was already publicly available in campaign finance reports filed with the FEC. But don’t tell that to Ted Cruz, who despite having run for Senate multiple times, doesn’t seem to know how campaign financing works.

Ted Cruz pointed to Joaquin Castro’s tweet and insisted that “elected representatives should not be vilifying & doxxing their own constituents.” The thing is, what Castro did is not doxxing. If Castro had given out private information about these people that would have allowed them to be harassed in person, such as their private phone numbers, that would be a different story.

Respondents to Ted Cruz’s tweet were quick to help him out with how things actually work. One of them posted a screen shot of Cruz’s own top donors, taken directly from the fec.gov website, to prove that Joaquin Castro really was merely posting already-public information. Others reminded Cruz that during the 2016 election, Donald Trump doxxed Senator Lindsey Graham by publicly giving out Graham’s private cellphone number. Thus far Cruz has yet to acknowledge his mistake.