Beto O’Rourke’s Weird, Child-Murdering Fantasies Come Back to Haunt

Are weird, child-murdering fantasies written as a teenager enough to disqualify a man for running for president many years later? You wouldn’t expect such a question to arise, but the fact that it has is just more evidence that our politics have become increasingly unhinged and bizarre in the early years of the 21^st century.

Beto O’Rourke was the subject of a Reuters feature story this weekend, in which it was revealed that he once belonged to an infamous hacker group that called themselves the Cult of the Dead Cow. At that time, O’Rourke apparently wrote a very strange forum post in which he fantasized about hitting a couple of children with his car.

“One day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street,” the teenaged Beto wrote. “They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles. This happiness was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams. 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. I was so fascinated for a moment, that when after I had stopped my vehicle, I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head.”

Um. Okay.

Now look, we’re not going to necessarily hold any adult fully accountable for the weird stuff they did as teenagers, but this is a little much even for a 16-year-old. If this was presented as a piece of fiction, that’s one thing. But as far as we can tell, O’Rourke didn’t write this as a short story. It’s pretty strange to write up a piece of random murder-porn for your hacking buddies.

Not saying O’Rourke needs to be in jail or in an institution…but maybe he also doesn’t need to be the in the White House?

“Stuff I was part of as a teenager is not anything that I’m proud of today,” O’Rourke told reporters. “And I mean, that’s the long and short of it. I hope that as much as we can, we focus on what the really big issues are right now that people in that room care about, that I care about, that caused me and Amy to decide to enter this race.”

O’Rourke seems to have lost a lot of the shine he had when he was running against Ted Cruz, though, with many leftists saying the usual stuff about how he’s too white and male to be the Democratic nominee. We’ll leave those judgements to the Democrats to figure out, but we don’t imagine this kind of revelation is going to do his floundering campaign any favors.