“The longest government shutdown in US history!”

Apart from perfunctory stories about failed congressional votes to end it, that’s really all you’re hearing right now from mainstream media lately about the partial “shutdown” of the US Department of Homeland Security.

Wow! More than two months! Headed for three! It’s starting to sound like auctioneer patter: “Two, three, can I getta four, four, who’s bidding four, I’m looking for four …”

OK, so it’s dragging on. And on. And on.

But is there really anything else to notice about it? Anything that rises to the level of “news?”

Yes and no.

That is, yes, there’s something else newsworthy about it, which is that there’s really not much to notice about it.

For a little while, politicians managed to hype the negative effects of the “shutdown” by annoying air travelers.

Airport “security” gropers and oglers were “forced” to work without pay (scare quotes because they were always free to quit and go find productive jobs in the private sector), instead of getting sent home, permanently, so that airports and airlines could provide cheaper, more effective, and less annoying private-sector “security screening.”

After politicians figured out that taxpayers were even MORE annoyed  by having to wait in line longer to get felt up and hear orders barked at them, US president Donald Trump invented a workaround and the paychecks started arriving again.

Better for air travelers, worse for the claim that the “shutdown” portends apocalypse.

What we HAVEN’T seen is any noticeable uptick in  threats to the “security” of the “homeland.”

No hijackings.

No bombings.

No “national security” related hostage situations.

Just life, as usual, minus paying out big bucks for a useless bureaucracy that we got along just fine without from 1789 through 2002 … and can clearly get along just fine without now.

Even starting a war with Iran wasn’t enough to give DHS anything visibly productive to do. Political and media hysteria over supposed “Iranian sleeper cells” quickly dissipated after it turned out that those cells either don’t exist or didn’t set their alarm clocks.

Any sane policy discussion, at this point, should center around how quickly DHS can be defunded permanently and abolished entirely.

My more politically astute friends tell me that “there just aren’t enough votes in Congress to pass that kind of bill.”

But there aren’t enough votes in Congress to fund DHS either.

I guess that will have to be good enough.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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I don’t care much for politicians and their works. Political government is a stupid and evil way of doing things. It makes us all less happy, less healthy, less prosperous, and less safe than we’d be if we abandoned it for voluntary means of living together.

Nonetheless, I occasionally try to “give credit where credit is due” when a politician departs, for even a moment, from evil and stupidity. At other times I seek the most charitable explanations I can find for that politician’s actions. This is one of those latter times, and the question at hand, as you might expect is:

What is it with Donald Trump?

First, a note: I occasionally receive hate mail and comments opining that I suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and have never levied the same criticisms, for the same types of actions, against other presidents.

That’s not true, and you don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve been writing political commentary since the 1980s, and you can easily find almost all of that commentary from the early 1990s on  with a quick search engine query. I’ve been, on balance, at least as critical of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush,  Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as I’ve ever been of Trump.

I’ve even said some nice things about Trump for, among other things, talking with the North Koreans, feinting toward US withdrawal from Syria, negotiating the US surrender in Afghanistan, advocating for an end to taxing tips, etc. He hasn’t always followed through, but he’s sometimes come up with good ideas.

There’s something those good ideas have in common, and it occurs to me that those things may be of a piece with my “most charitable explanation” for ideas that weren’t as good.

Some commentators look at Trump and the MAGA-dominated Republican Party and conclude that “the chaos is the point.” That is, the purpose of some of the weirder and wilder actions of Trump’s administration is to build an omnipotent totalitarian state by sowing fear, discord, and confusion — to keep their opponents on perpetual tenterhooks, disorganized and unable to effectively respond, as new authoritarian measures roll out.

But what if it’s not that?

In the mid-1990s, Clayton M. Christensen introduced the idea of “disruptive innovation” into the public lexicon. By the early 2000s, nearly every tech start-up touted itself as “disruptive,” in a good way although not usually in precisely the way Christensen seems to have intended.

Around that time, Mark Zuckerberg coined a motto for how Facebook approached building itself as a social media platform. “Move fast and break things.” In other words, if you have an idea that seems like it might produce really good results, pull the trigger and see what happens.

As goes biz buzz, so goes political thinking.  Quoth the late Scott Adams:

“What Trump does is he shakes the box. He just wants to see where the pieces land, because wherever they land is a different situation than the one he’s in.”

Since the 1930s, with their penchant for technocracy, American politicians and bureaucrats have generally been disruption-averse. They prefer to tweak the system, messing around at its edges with minor “improvements.”

Trump prefers “disruptive innovation.” While he’s unwilling to attack the central problem — political government itself — he’s big on “disruptive” experimentation, both in general (consider, for example, the DOGE episode) and when he’s in a situation that seems to call for distraction (“Epstein? Who’s that? Hey, look, Iran!”).

While I’m usually not ecstatic with the results,  “shaking the box” may be a better explanation than “he’s more stupid and evil than previous presidents.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US president Donald Trump is preparing to sign an executive order funding research into the possible benefits of ibogaine, CBS News reports.

It will remain a “Schedule I” drug, forbidden by law for you or me to just go pick up at the local pharmacy, but apparently Trump believes it’s worth looking into for use in treating PTSD and traumatic injury among American veterans.

Good move, and good on Trump. It’s about time. Ibogaine’s been used abroad for decades to treat everything from substance abuse problems to depression.

And therein lies a story.  Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear …

In early 1972, US Senator Ed Muskie’s presidential campaign seemed to be going poorly.

Initially considered the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s nomination, he came out of the Iowa caucuses with a win but with US Senator George McGovern — the eventual nominee — hot on his heels.

In February, the Manchester Union-Leader published a letter (supposedly written by Muskie, but apparently faked by pro-Nixon saboteurs) disparaging French Canadians.

A day later, in another article, the paper effectively called his wife a racist alcoholic.

And the day after THAT, Muskie gave the paper’s editor what for, calling him a “gutless coward” in a speech  outside the Union-Leader‘s headquarters … and, according to the journalists covering the speech, breaking down and crying (he claimed it was just snowflakes melting on his face).

Muskie certainly wasn’t doing himself any favors. But if anything sealed his campaign’s fate, it was probably this, two months later:

“Word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisers called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with ‘some kind of strange drug.'”

The drug, as you might guess, was ibogaine. The writer was “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson.

Muskie denied using ibogaine, of course (who could have blamed him if he had?), and Thompson later admitted he’d made the whole thing up. Why? Well, he supported McGovern, but it seems his bigger concern was how boring he found the campaign.

As a libertarian, I favor completely legalizing the production, sale, purchase, and use of all drugs, whether for medical or recreational use.

But until we get there, every move in that direction is a  positive.

I look forward to the day when ibogaine is freely available to any politician who happens to find himself in the middle of  mental or cognitive collapse.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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