PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Pro-Doxxing Cyberbully Joaquin Castro Once Praised Passage of a Texas Law Aimed at Preventing… Cyberbulling.

Yes, but that different in Castro’s mind, because, well, something. These days, Castro has “defined danger downward,” a topic that Kevin Williamson discusses in his new book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, which dovetails well with Glenn’s new book, The Social Media Upheaval:

If you go looking for an emergency, you will find one. And if you don’t find one, you can always make one up: That is the political impetus behind the rash of fake hate crimes on college campuses and the politically charged rape hoaxes advanced by such fabulists as Lena Dunham, Rolling Stone, and the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case. The principle at work here is defining danger down. If you wish to suppress certain speech or certain points of view, then all that you have to do is construct a crowded theater around it. For example, we might understand and even acquiesce to the suppression of neo-Nazi political propaganda in Germany on streitbare Demokratie grounds, especially in the immediate postwar era, when the possibility of a revanchist Nazi movement was far from unthinkable. We might, arguendo, accept such censorship in that situation because of the genuine danger that the policy is intended to head off. Likewise, Americans accepted certain kinds of formal and informal censorship during both world wars, and, as Professor Caplan notes, are generally supportive of such measures when they are undertaken in the cause of preventing terrorism. Of course those slopes are slippery—all slopes are. That fact does not liberate us from the necessity of cantering up and down those slopes or relieve us from having to exercise judgment and prudence. The corporate alternatives—such as Facebook’s attempt to replace wisdom with the fanatical application of comically malformed rules of discourse—are the product of hubris compounded with a highly cultivated form of stupidity.

Joaquin Castro — of course — doesn’t want ordinary people cyberbullied — but Trump supporters? Hey, Orange man bad (and dangerous), even if there’s an overlap between Trump supporters and Julian Castro supporters.