If you search online for articles that are critical of Texas Democratic candidate for Senate, Beto O’Rourke, then you’re going to have a relatively tough time. They’re few and far between, with a few of them populating this site in particular.

What you will find, however, are a load of puff pieces about Ted Cruz’s challenger. You’ll be inundated with stories about how well his fundraising is going, and about how he’s biting at Cruz’s heels in the polls. You’ll see stories about his quest to inject ethics and stand against corruption! He wants equality! You’ll even see YouTube videos of him playing on stage with Willie Nelson!

It’s almost like O’Rourke is just the perfect candidate. He’s not Ted Cruz! He said he’d impeach Trump!

Most interestingly, O’Rourke said he wants to tackle corruption. With the media narrative making him seem pure as the driven snow — except for all the cool rebellious stuff he did when he was younger — it’s easy for O’Rourke to make himself look like a bigger man than Cruz, and by extension, Trump.

The problem here is that all those media outlets that are so busy praising him are not reporting O’Rourke’s corrupt past. He’s had multiple shady dealings during his time in El Paso’s city council, including an odd set of payments to city representative Suzie Byrd’s company Moxie Communications and Consulting, according to Deep Inside El Paso:

For 2015, Open Secrets lists the top expenditure to vendors / recipients, and of those top expenditures, there is an amount for $21,000 divided in to 12 payments, and a seperate amount for $10,500 divided into six payments, for a total of $31,500. The payments are made to Moxie Communications and Consulting, which is owned by Byrd.

This is odd, seeing as how O’Rourke already had a communications director for his primary campaign, and he didn’t really have any challengers for his seat:

The curious thing is why the Congressman needs to pay Byrd so much money when he already had a “Communications Director.” According to The Sunlight Foundation, “John Meza” is listed in this position.

It could be that Byrd is used in his re-election bid, however, O’Rourke had no serious opponent in the last election cycle. In a straight-ticket Democratic-voting district, why would Byrd need to be paid so much money?

This gets stranger when you hear that O’Rourke’s past involves paying his own company money from political contributions to the tune of over $40,000 between 2014 and 2015.

According to Heavy, O’Rourke is a very wealthy man due to multiple investments:

InsideGov.com estimates his net worth at $9.5 million as of 2014. O’Rourke’s net worth is about 8.9 times more than the average member of Congress, and 11 times more than the average Representative.

Which is all well and good, but O’Rourke’s money dealings in the past involved backroom deals and ethics violations that even had members of his own party turning against him.

According to Ken Webster at KPRC, Soon after he was elected to El Paso city council, O’Rourke embraced the practice of eminent domain, which is essentially the legalized theft of private property on behalf of the government. O’Rourke displaced El Pasoans from their homes in order to invest in a revitalization project for El Paso around the early 2000’s. It appeared that the newly minted City Councilman was seizing private land, then handing it over to developers for a cut of the cash. This resulted in Carmen Felix, a Democrat in El Paso, attempting to lead a recall on O’Rourke to get the corruption out.

When confronted with a petition for his recall, O’Rourke seemed to change his tune about his love of eminent domain, but as Webster describes, this was all lip service. O’Rourke was soon at it again:

In September of 2006 a group called the Land Grab Opponents of El Paso filed an ethics complaint against O’Rourke and the Paso del Norte Group, a company who was working with Beto on the development project. The projected reeked of corruption.  It was revealed that O’Rourke’s own company, Stanton Street Technology Group, was providing services to the Paso del Norte Group [where O’Rourke’s father-in-law just so happened to hold a high ranking position].  His father-in-law, his own company and his political allies were all benefiting from this deal.  In case you’re not catching what I’m putting down here, that’s a textbook case of cronyism wrapped up in a nepotism sandwich. Beto allegedly used his political influence as an elected official to try to cut a profit for his own company and another company headed by his wife’s father.  The people of El Paso didn’t like this news and neither should you if you’re considering the possibility of Beto being the new Junior Senator for Texas.

An entire list of times O’Rourke was connected to development groups can be found here at Inside El Paso.

O’Rourke’s political career kicked off with so much shadiness and obvious corruption that it’s a wonder of the world that this hasn’t been brought up by any of the news outlets. If O’Rourke is such a huge fan of statist seizure, and has a willingness to screw over Texans in order to make himself wealthy, then alarms should be going off left and right.

Yet they’re not.

At this time, we only have O’Rourke’s sunny disposition and a penchant for spouting leftist talking points in an eloquent manner.

Instead, making the rounds right now is a video from the clown show known as “Now This” which features O’Rourke going on a long-winded explanation about how kneeling during the anthem isn’t disrespectful, and he can’t think of anything more American. As a side note, I find it odd that O’Rourke’s crowd doesn’t cheer for our troops, but continuously cheers for the NFL kneelers.

We can both agree that players have every right to kneel during the anthem if they want, but I’d say we need to have a serious chat about the validity of millionaires drawing attention to problems that we already are all well aware of and how these protests could be done in a far less disrespectful manner. It bothers me that O’Rourke thinks that just because the kneeling is peaceful, it’s good.

If your father helped me all throughout my life and at one point in time died to protect me, you’d expect me to have a very high regard for him. Yet, at his funeral, when everyone is asked to bow their heads in a moment of silence for him I stand, turn my back on him, then proceed to talk about his faults during a Facebook Live session. You wouldn’t say “well, these are important issues he’s raising.” Rightfully, you’d be disgusted with my behavior and character. You’d denounce me, highlight my ungratefulness, and hope to never see me again. What I did was peaceful, but it wasn’t good. This is the kind of thing O’Rourke thinks is okay, though.

You might not like Ted Cruz or agree with his social stances. I find myself disagreeing with a few myself. Thing is, Cruz at least has a track record of leaving things up to states, instead of tossing things into the federal level, and more or less leaving you alone to live your life as you see fit so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. O’Rourke, however, has taken stances in favor of unnecessary gun control and utilizing your tax dollars for elective medical procedures with no limitations on things like abortion. His immigration stances aren’t at all thought out but sound good when waxing sentimental.

Cruz would rather you be left alone, O’Rourke falls into the old progressive trap of wanting to fix society through government intervention, which has a long history of failure.

We’d all do well to stay away from O’Rourke and let this media created candidate go the way of Wendy Davis.