What Beto O’Rourke Won’t Say
I’m friends with Beto O’Rourke, worked like hell for him in both campaigns 2018 and 2022 and still actively support Powered by the People. I’m written about in his book — a book I highly recommend.
He knows the billions being spent to enforce border crossing prohibition is a lot of inhumane money wasted like trying to symptomatically put a poorly made tourniquet on a bleeding patient who needs to be rolled into the operating room.
He knows the border crisis is a complex systemic problem that involves Americans near insatiable desire for drugs (an unpopular issue would be what to do to solve that) made profitable for violent cartels because other Americans have spent trillions over the last 50 years to use violent strong armed tactics in a worse than futile attempt to do military style prohibition of said drugs. The cartels love all the American fear based military style border control and drug prohibition efforts (with no solution for our demand) for a simple reason: It increases profits and reduces competition from suppliers who do get caught.
Why will you never him him say the above? 1) It is a systemic complicated complex problem that takes a long term cooperative cerebral based solution. Americans prefer the Hollywood solution where the good guy kills the bad guy in less than 100 minutes as a clean simple emotionally satisfying solution. 2) It is really unpopular with voters to tell us we are the responsible party and we own the problem and the solution. Saying Tio (uncle) Sam will hand out a solution is a much more popular message. And 3), can you imagine the fuel for fear and associated emotional outrage making adult thoughtful statements would be for Princeton and Harvard trained egomaniac debaters like Ted Cruz?
Nope. There are some things even the most energetic and brave candidates will not say. The truth will set us free but is rarely a popular medicine. As Republicans in Texas know — blame, division, big money, emotionalism, tribalism and ideology wins elections and office power.
