Just call him Beto "Psychedelic Warlord" O'Rourke.
Before the Democrat launched his 2020 bid — or even graduated high school — O'Rourke was part of a well-known hacking "supergroup" known as the Cult of the Dead Cow, Reuters learned in an interview with the candidate. While it's unclear if O'Rourke actually hacked anything, he did write a smattering of strange and often disturbing essays for the group back when he was around 16 years old.
O'Rourke's oddball adolescence and young adulthood, full of barnyard onesies and not-habitual pot smoking, has been well documented and even attacked throughout his Senate and now presidential runs. Yet none of it could've predicted what turned up after O'Rourke's Reuters interview: a series of completely bonkers essays and poems written under his admitted pseudonym Psychedelic Warlord for the Cult of the Dead Cow, the first so-called "hacktivist" group in the U.S.
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In one essay, O'Rourke documents a seemingly fictional interview with a neo-Nazi. In another, he describes a dream about running down children with his car. And in one very uncomfortable poem, O'Rourke pleads for a "butt shine" from the cult's namesake cow. There's also what looks like a song you could imagine O'Rourke screaming in a sheep mask, and a forerunner to his Instagram live session at the dentist. Find all of Psychedelic Warlord's writing here, and be warned that pretty much none of it is safe for work.