Beto O’Rourke, perhaps the first presidential candidate to fantasize about murdering children and remain a serious contender for the White House, had a little help in his Senate race against incumbent Republican Ted Cruz.
O’Rourke famously and narrowly lost that race, a failure that Democrats think qualified him to run for president. But he might have lost by a much bigger margin had a Reuters reporter, who will soon publish a book about the Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacking group to which O’Rourke belonged, divulged what he learned about the freaky candidate before the election.
In exchange for O’Rourke’s discussing his membership in the group, the reporter offered to withhold the explosive revelation about O’Rourke membership until the book’s publication.
A look at O’Rourke’s web posts for the cult shows why he wanted the Reuters reporter to hold the story. O’Rourke’s drunk-driving record was big enough news. He didn’t need his musings about child murder to appear before his election day battle with Cruz.
Wacky Poetry and Mowing Down Kids
Writing under the name Psychedelic Warlord, O’Rourke published awful poetry and a droll proposal to “abolish money,” an idea that sounds like it might have gurgled out of the cranium of a certain former bartender-turned-congresswoman we all know.
But Psychedelic Warlord, now a major Democratic candidate for president, had something to get off his chest: a fantasy about running over children in a car:
Then one day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street.… As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two…. As I drove home, I envisioned myself committing more of these “acts of love,” and after a while, I had no trouble carrying them out.
Cult members, Reuters reported about Joseph Menn’s big scoop, “protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career.”
The cult is the “most interesting and influential hacking group in history,” Menn said, but “while I was looking into the Cult of the Dead Cow, I found out that they had a member who was sitting in Congress. I didn’t know which one. But I knew that they had a member of Congress.”
Menn learned it was O’Rourke, but cult members “wouldn’t confirm that it was this person unless I promised that I wouldn’t write about it until after the November election. That’s because the member of Congress had decided to run for Senate. Beto O’Rourke is who it was.”
Then Menn promised Psychedelic Warlord he’d keep a lit on his hacking adventures. “I met Beto O’Rourke. I said ‘I’m writing a book about Cult of the Dead Cow, I think it’s really interesting. I know you were in this group. This book is going to publish after November and your Senate race is over. And he said, ‘OK.’”
Defending Himself
Menn withheld the story, he tweeted, because “no one would give me the basic facts. I had nothing I could report.”
Menn averred that “no one in cDc would talk about O’Rourke until I promised not to publish before the 2018 election. That was OK: I wanted the full story for my book, which spans decades, rather than 1 scoop ahead of a state vote. I offered O’Rourke the same terms. He accepted, and we spoke.”
“To be clear,” he continued, “I offered @BetoORourke an embargo because it was for a book I was on leave to write, not for my day job, and because no one else who knew would confirm the facts before the election.”
Menn claimed he had “zero sources.”
Twitter users called BS.
“Don’t say you had no sources when Beto confirmed it,” one wrote. “You made a deal after it was confirmed.”
Wrote another: “You had sources sufficient to lead you to the (correct) belief that the CotDC member in Congress was Beto O’Rourke. Then you entered into an agreement to conceal that information.”
Drunk Driving, Big Money
But O’Rourke’s esoteric maunderings and hacking career aren’t his only problems. In 1998, a very drunk O’Rourke slammed into a truck and was arrested for drunk driving, and he was once arrested on a burglary charge. Neither matter led to jail time.
Despite his child-murder fantasies and drunk-driving exploits, Democratic contributors apparently think, O’Rourke is presidential timber.
After announcing his candidacy, the candidate who has never accomplished anything collected $6,136,736 within 24 hours.
Photo: AP Images
