Opinion: Election 2024: Finally weird enough?

By Thomas L. Knapp

“It never got weird enough for me,” says Hunter S. Thompson — or, rather, Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in 1980s 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 of 1972 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 Sept. 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 U.S. 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 is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.