Although I have not lived in El Paso for over four years, I still have an El Paso, Texas area code so I get calls and texts specific to the area. One of these came in last weekend from Beto O'Rourke's campaign. The text wanted to know whether I was going to vote for O'Rourke or Cruz. I replied with the same message that I gave the young woman who came to my door on a different weekend--I know Beto. I have met him personally. And I wouldn't vote for him for dog catcher.
I am a Ted Cruz supporter. I supported Cruz for president. But for me that is a separate issue than this campaign because for me personally this campaign is more about voting against Beto than voting for Cruz. And since the race is close, and, as an ex-patriot El Pasoan I have a different perspective than most Texans, I am taking this opportunity to share why I would not ever vote for Beto.
To have perspective about Beto's campaign, you have to understand that El Paso is very different ideologically than most of Texas. El Paso has not experienced the "Texas miracle" partly because El Paso does not embrace the mindset that created that miracle. El Paso is a liberal Democrat stronghold with a majority Hispanic population. Ronald Reagan was completely wrong when he said that Hispanics were a natural fit for the Republican party because they shared the social values of that Republicans hold dear. On some social issues individual Hispanics may agree with Republicans, and individual Hispanics are Republicans, but the predominate Hispanic culture leans much more toward the liberal Democrat ideal of powerful, centralized government and high taxation. That is the governing model of Latin American countries, and it is the governing model that El Pasoans prefer. As with many progressive liberals, many of the people in El Paso take an "it's fine for thee but not for me" approach to the repressive policies they advocate for everyone else. In other words, the city favors numerous laws that are selectively enforced and obeyed by other people--not the elites.
Beto's father was county judge Pat O'Rourke, who was found in 1984 to have a bag of "white powder" in his car during a traffic stop. The deputy who found the white powder was ordered to destroy it without any investigation or analysis. O'Rourke served out the rest of his term without prosecution, but the traffic stop and suspicions about O'Rourke's drug use made the local news (and appeared in a New York Times story from the era), and he did not seek re-election when that term ended. Pat O'Rourke was killed in 2001 by a motorist while biking in El Paso.
Beto's mother, Melissa O'Rourke, owns Charlotte's--a high-priced furniture boutique. In 2010 the company pleaded guilty to "restructuring" cash payments to avoid paying taxes to the IRS. Between 2005 and 2006, Charlotte's accepted $631,000 from an unnamed customer. According to news reports, the customer structured the transactions so that each amount was under $10,000--for example one amount of $50,000 was structured as 18 payments under $10,000 each with multiple receipts issued under multiple names. Charlotte's was ordered to pay $250,000 restitution and was put on probation for 5 years. Melissa O'Rourke herself was never charged--according to a news story by KVIA-TV she claimed not to understand that any laws were being broken and, in her case, ignorance of the law proved to be a very adequate excuse.
This family, and the city that rewarded them, gave birth to Beto. His political career began in a place where the population is constantly seeking a patron--a Spanish word which carries the concept of a wealthy landowner who typically dominates and controls those around him while bestowing favors on those he chooses. He understands the class envy and anger over income inequality that the national media is constantly pushing because as a child of El Paso he grew up with this mindset and he knows how to manipulate it for his own benefit. He understands that socialism allows for abusive elites to grab power and monopolize everything for themselves and their own benefit because El Paso has repeatedly embraced leaders who have done exactly that. And he truly understands the socialist progressive policies of the new Democrat party because these principles have been near and dear to the hearts of El Pasoans for a long time.
So before you go cast your ballot for Texas Senator in November, here are a few things you should know about Beto:
- He is not a champion of the people with a grassroots campaign of little folks who are just looking for change. Beto is not only the child of El Paso elites, he is the son-in-law of billionaire developer Bill Sanders. Sanders is originally from El Paso, but he spent time in Chicago with the LaSalle Group. When Sanders did return to El Paso, he set up a number of elite organizations that operated largely in secret with the goal of redeveloping the city using eminent domain.
- As city councilman, Beto supported taking private property (both homes and businesses) to further the plans of his father-in-law's development projects, both through the Paso del Norte Group and the BorderPlex. He argued at the time that there was no conflict of interest in his votes to support seizing private property through eminent domain to turn over to developers (his wife's dad) because neither he nor his family could profit from his activities. (Sanders had promised to donate any profits from his REIT, Paso del Norte Group, to charity.)
- As city councilman, Beto supported bills that were difficult and burdensome to small business owners and private property owners, including a landscape ordinance that increased the cost of property ownership for commercial property owners and an ordinance that fined commercial property owners hundreds of dollars a day for failure to remove a dead tree from their property. On behalf of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce I spoke to City Council personally regarding that last ordinance and the hardship it worked on small business owners, and Beto responded by sneering that he was tired of people getting in the way of the city's progress. Mind you that all of this took place during the Great Recession, when many business owners in El Paso were struggling just to keep the lights on. In a city that constantly beats the drum that both it and its people are poor, Beto helped ram through bills that made it harder for small business people and small property owners to survive and to hang on to whatever they had managed to acquire.
- There is a reason that he brags about having an F score card from the NRA. Again, to understand why this is a point of pride for a Senatorial candidate in Texas, where God and guns are prized, you need to understand El Paso. My sister-in-law was born in Guadelajara, Mexico. Right after she married my brother, she walked into the room where he was cleaning his guns. Instinctively she folded her hands behind her back so that she would not touch the guns because as a child of Mexico she had been taught that, "to touch a gun is to touch the devil." El Paso is sister city of Juarez, Mexico and Mexico has harsh gun control laws. These laws have had the net result of transforming Mexico into a society where the most violent criminals rule the society through guns and intimidation and law-abiding people are unarmed. Nevertheless, anti-gun sentiments are very strong there.
- Although he has benefitted hugely from familial connection to a powerful elitist developer, Beto champions environmentalism, green energy and "smart" development. He took several opportunities to ride his bike to work when he was city councilman to demonstrate to El Pasoans that individual cars are not the best form of transportation. He championed bike paths and biking in general as a tribute to his father who was killed while bicycling down a busy street. This dedication to all things "green" fits nicely into the elitist Agenda 21 mindset of Beto and his wealthy donor friends.
- He really does support open borders. In El Paso, cross-border commerce is essential to the city's economy. The fastest way to start a fight in the city is to stand the heart of downtown and yell "border security." There is NO support in El Paso for anything except a completely porous border that allows anyone who wants to do so to drift in and out of the city at will.
- Beto and his friends have plans for him that go far beyond the Senate. That was actually apparent years ago when he ran against former Congressman Silvestre Reyes. Reyes had been a very popular Democrat Congressman but his reputation was tarnished with corruption charges that he was illegally enriching his own family on the taxpayer dime. Beto ran for Congress and won the seat partly because Reyes was in the middle of a scandal and partly because Reyes did not take him seriously. But even then, anyone paying attention could see that the long-term goal was to run him for president of the United States. That is much more apparent now, as the National Review reports in today's Morning Jolt:
"And that’s apparently all he needs! Peter Hamby is writing in Vanity Fair that O’Rourke should be discussed as a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate: Whether he wins or loses his race — and yes, even if he loses — O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind."
There are a lot of words I could use to describe Beto O'Rourke, but "authentic" certainly isn't one of them. In fact, he is the same mass of contradictions and phoniness that has come to define modern day liberalism--the rich elitist pretending to be one of the poor unwashed masses fighting income inequality and decrying the 1%,
El Paso is forever whining that it is not taken seriously as part of Texas--that Texans don't accept the city or include it and that it does not share in the rest of the state's prosperity. All of this is true, but they don't take any responsibility for the reason why--El Paso has rejected every single idea that has made the rest of Texas prosperous. Individual freedom, limited government, the right to private property, and the right to gun ownership--all are valued through most of the state, but not in El Paso. I can only hope that in November, the rest of the state will once again recognize that Beto O'Rourke is more a child of El Paso than of Texas and that his values and goals are out-of-step with the rest of the state.
