Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke participated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything Thursday and likely began regretting that decision almost immediately.
When the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate took to Reddit to answer users' questions, things spiraled out of control right away, with his very first answer getting absolutely pummeled with downvotes and currently sitting at negative 2,700 points. On Reddit, users can either upvote a comment to give it positive karma or downvote a comment to give it negative karma. This first response was to a question about how O'Rourke intends to "confiscate the millions of AR-15s;" O'Rourke wrote that "Americans will comply with the law."
The reception on Reddit wasn't much friendlier from there, with the second highest-voted question in the entire thread being, "Why aren't you running for Senate?" O'Rourke's reply, in which he says he's running to be "the leader that we need and are missing right now," currently has negative 1,200 points, and that score just keeps dropping.
Another one of the top questions was, "Do you still drink alcohol following your drunk driving incident?" O'Rourke, who was arrested for drunk driving in 1998 when he was 26, said "I don't drive if I've had a drink."
O'Rourke was also massively downvoted after deleting and re-posting an answer about ex-convicts to remove a reference to restoring voting rights. He later edited his new comment to say he "made a mistake" and "didn't realize you could edit." O'Rourke chose not to reply to numerous brutal questions that received hundreds of upvotes, including one asking why his "policies changed dramatically" since his "failed Senate run." Some of his replies were received more positively, but four currently have scores with negative karma.
Eventually, O'Rourke just went off to go take questions on the Beto2020 subreddit while thanking users who participated in the main thread for "engaging with me." Boy, did they ever.