Give Julian Castro some credit: In a crowded 2020 Democratic field originally featuring cringeworthy candidates such as Beto O’Rourke and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the former housing and urban development secretary still managed to run the most insufferably woke presidential campaign of this cycle.
Thursday morning brought the official end of Castro’s campaign. But it never really got off the ground, and the candidate failed to qualify for the November debate, getting under 2% of the vote in polling averages. Outside of a few fringe Marxist professors and woke liberal activists, Castro’s campaign was so radical that even Democratic primary voters weren’t buying it.
The field for 2020 Democratic nomination just got a little smaller. @JulianCastro has announced he has dropped out of the running to take on @realDonaldTrump for the presidency.https://t.co/XVTxjIBd4b
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 2, 2020
It’s not hard to see why. Castro’s only memorable contributions to the 2020 race are viral moments where he embarrassed himself.
For one, there was his cringey decision to randomly pronounce certain words with a Spanish accent during Democratic debates, despite not actually being a native Spanish speaker. Then there was his call for completely decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and attacks on other, slightly less terrible Democrats who declined to endorse his radical proposal.
Don’t forget the countless shudder-worthy instances where Castro pandered to the woke crowd with fact-free rants about “transgender women of color” being gunned down in the street in a supposed epidemic of anti-transgender hate crimes. Castro ignored the complete lack of evidence for this narrative, instead choosing to stir up bogus outrage for votes. His pandering even included a bizarre call for expanding abortion access to transgender women (aka biological males). Castro was also the first candidate to honor “International Pronouns Day” by putting his preferred pronouns, he and him, in his Twitter profile. This was, of course, a pure virtue-signal: Everyone already knew he was a man.
The candidate also defended what seemed like an absurd and outrageous action by his brother, Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro. The Democratic congressman listed the names of Trump donors from his district in a viral tweet, clearly attempting to target his own constituents for public shaming due to their political beliefs. Many considered this a brazen act unbecoming by a member of Congress, but Castro defended his brother’s actions wholeheartedly.
Add all of this to Castro’s radical platform, which included full-throated support for a government takeover of healthcare through “Medicare for all” and the legalization of late-term abortion. Between his woke pandering and far-left policy proposals, Julian Castro won’t be missed.
