“It never got weird enough for me,” says Hunter S. Thompson — or, rather, Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in 1980’s kinda sorta Thompson biopic, Where the Buffalo Roam.  “I moved to the country when the boat got too crowded. Then I learned that President Nixon had been eaten by white cannibals on an island near Tijuana for no good reason at all.”

Thompson died by his own hand in 2005, no longer at the top of his gonzo game but still the reigning champion of American non-fiction (very loosely construed) and psychoactive substance ingestion (perhaps not quite as loosely construed).

I woke up this morning thinking about Thompson, wondering if Election 2024 might just possibly have changed his mind on how weird it can get.

More than 50 years ago, Thompson manufactured, and managed with some success to sell, a rumor that Democratic presidential contender Ed Muskie’s erratic public behavior stemmed from a crippling addiction to a psychedelic, ibogaine.

Muskie’s public meltdowns — and, for that matter, the candidacy-ending revelation of1972 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton’s  history of shock treatment — seem downright tame by today’s standards, and today’s politicians and celebrities don’t need Thompson’s assistance on the weirdness front.

On September 10, former and possibly future president Donald Trump indignantly informed the American public, on live television, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there” (actual body count so far, one goose … maybe).

Then Taylor Swift, just maybe the most popular person in the world, endorsed Trump’s opponent, vice-president Kamala Harris, dubbing herself (in response to previous weirdness from Trump’s running mate, faux-hillbilly venture capitalist and US Senator JD Vance) a “childless cat lady.”

But wait! There’s more! The richest man in the world (Trump-supporting Elon Musk) then publicly offered to help Swift ditch the “childless” part. You can fill in the details as to how that might happen yourself, but you might not want to on a full stomach.

The “political junkie” side of me kind of wants to see “serious” policy discussions and debates on “the issues,” not a never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show with the Kardashian family and Ed Muskie’s ibogaine stash as the guests.

The “voracious reader of history” in me recalls a presidential election  in which dueling polemicists described John Adams’s “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman,” and called Thomas Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Perhaps the venom, and the weirdness, aren’t nearly so new as they feel.

My internal “Hunter S. Thompson fan” voice says “hey, bring on the ibogaine and let’s see what happens.”

Thompson possessed strongly held convictions and tried his hardest to call forth “the better angels of our nature.” He didn’t ACTUALLY consider elections inherently devoid of practical value outside their entertainment potential.

But 2024 just might have convinced him.

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

In early September, the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against two employees of RT (formerly Russia Today), alleging that the state media outlet “orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on U.S. soil.”

Separately, DOJ announced its theft (“seizure”) of 32 Internet domains supposedly used to “covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. ”

The victims, per US Attorney Damian Williams? “[T]he American people, who received Russian messaging without knowing it.”

US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland weighed in as well: “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts.”

Oh, really?

Garland, once nominated to serve on the US Supreme Court, surely knows better. There is no “unless the ideas originate with parties I happen to dislike, or include content I disagree with” exception to the First Amendment’s free speech and free press guarantees.

DOJ doesn’t even enjoy the fig leaf of an “in extremis” excuse, such as a state of war existing between the US and Russia or an imminent threat of attack which the indictments and domain thefts might have thwarted.

Does the Russian regime “meddle” in US elections? Of course it does. All powerful regimes meddle in other countries’ elections.

The US regime has a long record of doing so, up to and including sponsoring coup attempts when other countries’ elections don’t go its preferred way.

Even smaller regimes get in on the election meddling game. The Israeli regime, acting through unregistered foreign agents, has openly and unashamedly meddled in US elections for decades, and to the tune of more than $100 million this year alone.

It’s not the Russian regime that Merrick Garland and friends mistrust. It’s you, the American voter.

Part of that mistrust may be simple paternalism: You’re too naive, perhaps too stupid, to sort matters out for yourself. If anyone not aligned with Merrick Garland and friends is permitted to talk to you, they’ll fill your head with nonsense and you’ll vote “the wrong way” in November.

Another part of it is raw, undalderated fear: If you hear things that might be true but that don’t line up with the goals, purposes, and desires of the US regime, you might make up your mind for yourself instead of just doing as you’re told.

The “Russian election interference” narrative is now into its third consecutive presidential election cycle. It slices! It dices! It juliennes!

It was Hillary Clinton’s excuse for running a poor campaign in 2016.

It was the mainstream media’s excuse for burying disclosures from Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.

This year it provides cover for the bipartisan US military misadventure in Ukraine.

Garland and Co. fear your opinion … if it’s formed without censorship on their part.

Ask yourself why.

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

Michael Gallagher considers the relatively low inflation rates of the period “from Reagan’s second term through Trump’s” first to be “America’s amazing capitalism” (Queens Chronicle, September 5), sarcastically suggesting that “for 35 years … the robber barons of industry didn’t realize they could set their prices and gouge more money from the American people,” only getting the notion after the inauguration of noted anti-capitalist Joe Biden.

Gallagher makes no mention of Biden’s vice president, but the candidate Donald Trump dubs “Comrade Kamala Harris” will presumably carry forth such a break from said “amazing capitalism.” Meanwhile, a September 4 USA Today headline crows: “Goldman Sachs says Comrade Kamala is better for economy. She can’t even do communism right!”

By the standards of 2024 mud-slinging, the ranks of Reds could include even Ronald Reagan himself.  When not lauding workers’ “cooperative effort aimed at sharing in the ownership of the new wealth being produced” or being photographed under a towering statue of Vladimir Lenin at Moscow State University, the Gipper occasionally paraphrased a remark by socialist intellectual George Bernard Shaw. “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul” was Shaw’s way of explaining to readers of Everybody’s Political What’s What? how inflationary policies remained popular when inevitably “the return to normal prices rescues pensioners from destitution; but it ruins debtors, making the cure as calamitous as the disease, Paul being now robbed to pay Peter.”

That sounds more like something one might expect to hear from such a free-market advocate as Henry Hazlitt, whose The Conquest of Poverty echoes the Shaw he denounces as “shamelessly ignorant and silly” on economics in pointing out that “practically everybody concede[s] that the State does have a right to seize from Peter to pay Paul, when it levies necessary taxes, say, on Peter, a businessman, to pay Paul, a policeman” rather than asking “whether or not Paul is performing necessary and legitimate services in return for payment.”

One might expect Hazlitt to have reacted to Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons with Gallagher’s snideness, seeing them as unjustly unloved Ubermenschen who instead deserve to be lionized on Ayn Rand book covers.  Instead, Hazlitt’s assessment for The New York Times Book Review found that by reading such surveys “we would understand our country much better than we do” than from what he quotes Progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard as calling the “shadow picture” of conventional histories that offer more on “politicians of minor rank” than business leaders.  Even Rand’s tomes offer a more critical view between their covers of many malevolent magnates, whether archetypal fictional antagonists or all too real, who rely on “the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges.”

A history of actually existing capitalism that ignores the wide valleys between the highest peaks is as incomplete as an account of the Amazin’ Mets which only touches on their 1969 and 1984 World Series wins.  In contrast, an economy of free exchanges between Peter and Paul (or Paulette) is a win-win for everyone involved.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “America’s a maze in capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], September 10, 2024
2. “America is a maze in capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 12, 2024