Beto O'Rourke says he's the descendant of slave owners.
How shocked the American public must be to learn that a white dude called Robert Francis O'Rourke had someone in his family who at some point might have been connected with the common practice of slavery.
Unbelievable!
Beto's case is also a serious reach.
One can tell that he wants to be descended from slave owners, so he can virtue signal over it. But the evidence he provides for this is spurious.
Like Elizabeth Warren sought to weaponize a Native American sneezing on one of her ancestors once, Beto is weaponizing his slave-owning family past.
He's the victim, now.
This is a white man whose ancestors owned slaves, using those slaves one more time, for posturing.
He posted to his Medium page this weekend (emphases added):
I was recently given documents showing that both Amy and I are descended from people who owned slaves. Along with other possessions listed in their property log were two human beings, Rose and Eliza.
A paternal great-great-great grandfather of mine, Andrew Cowan Jasper, owned these two women in the 1850s. There are also records showing that a maternal great-great-great grandfather, Frederick Williams, most likely owned slaves in the 1860s (“most likely,” because we are not certain that the Frederick Williams who is my ancestor and the Frederick Williams who owned slaves are the same person, but there’s enough circumstantial data to lead me to conclude that it’s likely).
Records also showed that Amy had an ancestor who owned slaves and another who was a member of the Confederate Army.
In other words, the so-called offenses are so old and so vague that there's almost no reason for Beto to have disclosed this besides utilizing these facts for the furtherance of his own political campaign.
This stuff isn't good enough for opposition research attacks, so this isn't them "getting ahead of the story".
This is a white man whose ancestors owned slaves, using those slaves one more time, for posturing.
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Beto wrote in his they-a culpa: "I benefit from a system that my ancestors built to favor themselves at the expense of others."
In campaigning on the matter, he is still using that favor. He didn't need to say anything. No one cares. No one blames him. No one thinks Beto is pro-slavery, nor do they reckon he might not know the history of slavery in the Western world.
Beto also uses slavery signaling to avoid questions over who he is, and what he has done.
He uses the ghosts of his family's past to mask the ghosts of his.
Beto was a member of a hacking group and admitted to stealing phone numbers. He referred to women as "scene sluts", urging people to report women he didn't like to "Nazi skins" (skinheads), and wrote pro-suicide messages about them.
He urged people to shame "ultra trendy" women by "show[ing] her a picture of what she'd look like without make-up," and has been arrested both for burglary and drunk-driving.
Beto's most recent media grab, on the shoulders of the slaves his great-great grandfather maybe kept, is a Cult of the Dead Cow tactic.
His pseudonym on the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker forum once wrote:
“I fear we will always have a system of government, one way or another, so we would have to use other means other than totally toppling the government (I don’t think the masses would support such a radical move at this time). We (as a people) would have to do it more or less non-violently, for if we use violence, we would never have the support of the masses of people that make up our society.”
These are the things voters should probably know about Beto. Not what some ancestor might've done.
Then again, he's definitely at least honest about one thing. He is clear that he learned a lot from his time in the online collective.
"O’Rourke’s generation of hackers, and the Cult of the Dead Cow in particular, also thought deeply about how to grab media and public attention for a cause or a laugh," reports Hunter Walker for Yahoo! News.
"Group members, for instance, tossed raw meat from a Las Vegas stage, distributed an essay called 'Sex with Satan' and falsely claimed the ability to hack satellites."
Beto's most recent media grab, on the shoulders of the slaves his great-great grandfather maybe kept, is a Cult of the Dead Cow tactic.
Throw the raw meat from the stage. Hack the satellite.
Beto is still using his privilege.
Raheem Kassam is the Global Editor in Chief of Human Events
