A celebrity who unleashed a frenzy of media attention with an unexpected attainment of a term in political office, despite being famed more for an outlandish personal style and uninhibited public statements than governmental experience, garnered insufficient ballots to win the 2020 US presidential election.

The slightly over 1,500 votes on the Green Party of Alaska line for former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura may seem a mere footnote to the failed re-election bid of Donald Trump, whose level of support for Ventura’s rerun was much less than the “one hundred percent” promised at WrestleMania in 2004. Yet the success of referendum initiatives for drug decriminalization, two decades after Ventura’s endorsement of such measures was viewed as no less outrageous than his feathered boas, hints that he may have had more to offer than a coincidental foreshadowing of the paths from performance to politics of Trump or Ventura’s movie costar Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In his 1999 book I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, Ventura argued against drug prohibition not only on pragmatic grounds that it would be ineffective and counterproductive, but that “the government has no business telling us what we can and can’t use for pain relief and in matters of our own health.” Despite bragging to Reason magazine that year about how “I’ve taken the libertarian exam and scored perfect on it,” his record in office was less consistent, and he failed to sustain an alliance with libertarians.

However, Ventura was right to note that “we’ve gotten into the bad habit of looking to the government to solve every personal and social crisis that comes along” and that “there are a lot of good causes out there, but they can’t possibly all be served by government.”

Ventura’s proposed remedies, such as legislatures spending one year in four pruning old laws rather than passing new ones, may not have been the most practical ways to achieve that ideal. But such a healthy skepticism of the status quo could boost efforts to rebuild voluntary civil society and mutual aid. And despite his Green Party of Alaska nod being unsought, and at odds with the national party’s backing of longtime Green New Dealer Howie Hawkins, it should inspire the Greens to return to their own roots in proclaimed key values of grassroots democracy and decentralization.

In the 1987 movie The Running Man, Ventura portrayed “America’s own Captain Freedom” as a foe of Schwarzenegger’s freedom fighter. Its tagline predicted that 2019 would be a time when “America’s finest men don’t run for President.” Ironically, the finest ideas of the man who played Captain Freedom in the movies might help the USA of the 2020s escape from the ideological confines of previous decades.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “OPINION: No Body for president? Pay Mind” by Joel Schlosberg, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 11/10/20
• “No Body for President?” by Joel Schlosberg, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, 11/11/20
• “No Body for President? Pay Mind” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, 11/12/20
• “No Body for President? Pay Mind.” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, 11/12/20
• “No Body for President? Pay Mind.” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 11/21/20

This column assumes that Joe Biden has won the 2020 US presidential election. While that SEEMS like a safe assumption — it would take successful legal challenges in several states to change the outcome — it IS an assumption. I could be writing for naught.

But if Joe Biden is locked in as the next president of the United States, Donald Trump has more than two months remaining in office. During that time, there are several steps he can and should take to burnish his legacy and set himself up to be remembered more kindly than his first four years and ten months in office might otherwise merit. Here are two of them.

First: Trump ran on, and has frequently talked about, “ending the forever wars.” He could deliver on a big chunk of that promise by ordering the US armed forces to withdraw all US troops (other than embassy guard) from Afghanistan and Syria by Christmas.

That order should be accompanied by an explicit warning that generals who drag their feet, comment to the press that they don’t think he “really means it,” etc., will be promptly relieved of duty and replaced by generals who enthusiastically tackle the tasks their commander in chief assigns them. We’ve had four years of resistance from the generals and excuses from bureaucrats. It’s time to get the job done.

Second: Trump has the power to pardon. He should use that power in unprecedented fashion, emptying the federal prisons of non-violent drug offenders and other assorted victims of a “justice” system gone haywire.

In particular, he should pardon (in alphabetical order) Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Ross Ulbricht.

Assange and Snowden have been charged, but not yet tried, with telling the American people the truth about their government’s crimes. Manning has been convicted for the same heroic acts. President Obama commuted her sentence, but it’s time to restore her rights and recognize her service to her country.

Ross Ulbricht is serving two life terms without the possibility of parole for the “crime” of running a web site (Silk Road) that saved countless lives by allowing sellers and customers to circumvent the US government’s evil restrictions on the sale and possession of drugs. He’s a political prisoner, full stop. The prosecutors and judge who railroaded him belong in prison. He doesn’t.

President Trump could do a America a huge favor by partially dismantling the war machine and the carceral state with these actions.

Whistleblowers and entrepreneurs should be congratulated, not caged. Non-violent breakers of “victimless crime” laws should be, at a bare minimum, freed. And American troops who signed up to defend America should be withdrawn from places where that’s not what they’re doing and where they have no legitimate business being.

No matter President Trump’s failings, no matter what he may have to answer for, a grateful nation will owe him if he uses his last days in office to leave America freer and more at peace than he found it four years ago.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The conventional wisdom of the last hundred years or so: The US government can and should decide what we may eat, drink, smoke, inject, or otherwise ingest. It can and should kidnap and cage us if we disobey, and if its restrictions kill us with adulterated or unduly strong black market products, it’s our own fault for not doing as we’re told.

Common sense: Unless you’re a six-year-old listening to your mother’s stern “no broccoli, no dessert” lecture, what you choose to eat, drink, smoke, inject, or otherwise ingest is nobody’s business but yours.

November 3 was D-Day in common sense’s war to shatter the conventional wisdom.

“Of nine drug decriminalization or legalization measures on state ballots,” Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports at Reason, “not a single one failed. These were decisive victories, too, not close calls.”

Americans from coast to coast, north to south, in states red and blue, voted by huge margins to nullify federal laws on medical and/or recreational marijuana, psychedelics, even “hard” drugs.

The US government’s war on drugs is going to end sooner or later. Sooner is better for everyone, so let’s start talking about the terms of DC’s surrender.

Given the millions of arrests, imprisonments, overdoses and murders, etc. caused by the war on drugs — numbers exceeding the Armenian genocide beyond a shadow of doubt, and quite possibly competing for pride of place with Hitler’s atrocities — Americans could hardly be blamed for convening a Nuremberg-style tribunal and stretching some drug warrior necks. The longer this nonsense drags on, the more likely that outcome.

On the other hand, the next Congress and the next administration could get to work repealing all federal drug laws, pardoning and releasing all drug war prisoners, abolishing the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, etc.

If the US government gets off the dime, lays down its weapons, and starts removing its troops from the field in an orderly manner, I suspect most Americans would as soon let bygones be bygones.

Yes, some DEA agents and other vicious parasites will have to give up the thug life and seek jobs in the productive sector.

Yes, some politicians will end up with a little less money and power to spread around among the special interest lobbies who fund their campaigns.

Yes, some megalomaniacs will require treatment for the depression that accompanies a lessened ability to order others around.

Unless you’re one of the sociopaths mentioned above, none of that sounds half bad. And even if you are in that category, it probably sounds better than the eventual, inevitable alternative: A gurney and a lethal injection (poetic justice, eh?) at Federal Correctional Institution, Terre Haute.

Let’s get this over with.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY