ANSWER: BECAUSE PHONY BETO-MANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST: How Beto Made Himself into White-Privilege Guy.
In his almost certainly ill-fated pursuit of the 2020 Democratic nomination, O’Rourke is no longer on the warpath to oust the media-loathed incumbent like Ted Cruz. He’s now in a crowded field with other Democrats, many of whom are actual minorities (and one who tried her damnedest). The media no longer view him as the adorable, skateboard-riding, honorary Hispanic who would supplant a creepy religious senator from Texas, but instead a privileged white male standing in the way of some minority candidate poised deliver a symbolic rebuke to Donald Trump (and, by fiat, the no-good-very-bad racists who elected him.)
The Daily Beast writes of “The Unbearable White Privilege of Beto O’Rourke;” CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson said that Beto’s careerism “drips with white male privilege” and insisted that “O’Rourke, tall, handsome, white and male, has this latitude, to be and do anything. His privilege even allows him to turn a loss to the most despised candidate of the cycle into a launching pad for a White House run. Stacey Abrams, a Yale-trained lawyer, couldn’t do this.”
Beto, meet Robert Francis.
O’Rourke soon realized he must drag himself through that tired rubric of public self-flagellation and self-loathing expected of white progressive men who deign to challenge visible minorities for a chance at power. It has, as of this writing, been an abject disaster:
“As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on, or take for granted,” a fallen, emasculated Beto said on Meet the Press, clearly penitent for the accidents of his birth, “I’ve clearly had advantages over the course of my life.” And he is obliged to report that he, and the society that afforded him these ill-gotten gains, are irredeemable to at their very core. He told immigrants and refugees gathered at a campaign in Nashville that “this country was founded on white supremacy, and every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression, even in our democracy.”
Nia-Malika Henderson was right — look at what happened to Stacey Abrams!
Heh. One way or another, it’s only a matter of time before Elizabeth Warren faces a similar reckoning.