When Boys Rule The World

If you watch Samantha Bee - I do so strictly through Youtube - you might have seen the segment where she sent her friend Alana to a Vape convention, where the small-time peddlers of smokeless tobacco meet to promote their products, promote their common interests but, it would seem mostly to boy-bond with others of their type and the few gals on the bus with the boys.

I bring that up because after reading this account of the recent Libertarian Party convention it is close to an audio-visual of what it might have been like.  Only, I have a feeling the boys of Vape world are the older brothers of the Libertarians.

Just a couple of excerpts.

- It was just a couple of hours before the Libertarian Party’s final presidential debate. C-SPAN cameras were firing up; delegates were filing in. But one debate participant was still on the dance floor adjacent to the convention hall, swaying to techno music with a goblet of beer sloshing in his hand. John McAfee, founder of the eponymous anti-virus software company and a major candidate in the Libertarian race, had apparently eschewed traditional debate prep. Instead he was rocking out, pausing only to deep-tongue-kiss his wife—for what seemed an awkward and unnecessarily prolonged span of time—as his mesmerized constituents grew increasingly disquieted.

A young man in shorts and combat boots, spotting a break in the frenching, scrambled up to McAfee to shake the candidate’s hand and shout, “You’re awesome!” When I pulled this guy aside and asked why he favored McAfee, he began, “My main concern is interstate commerce legislation,” launching a runon sentence that somehow ended, after several minutes and some really surprising detours, with an avowal that “humans will be displaced by A.I. the same way we displaced the whales and the rhinoceroses, and so it’s important to remember that bigotry is better than slavery.” As he reached his conclusion, a woman suddenly towered over us on stilts, wearing 12-foot-wide strap-on butterfly wings and waving a McAfee campaign sign to the beat.

-- Consider: McAfee—who fled his own Central American residential compound while under suspicion by the Belizean government for the murder of his neighbor; who openly admits that said compound featured a harem of teenage Belizean sex workers; who likes to talk about the time a 16-year-old Belizean prostitute tried to shoot him in the head at point blank range; who bounced around the hotel halls wearing a three-piece suit and a pair of Nikes like some kind of Mad Hatter on meth—had regularly polled in third place for the nomination in the lead-up to the convention and even seemed to have a puncher’s chance to win. Further consider: He was barely the weirdest candidate on the scene.

Polling second coming into the convention, just ahead of McAfee, was a guy named Austin Petersen. Petersen’s 35 and looks 14, but question if he’s seasoned enough and he’ll yelp, “Tell that to the Marquis de Lafayette.” His go-to applause line: “I want gay couples to defend their marijuana fields with fully automatic weapons.” Polling fourth, one slot behind McAfee, was a fellow named Darryl W. Perry, who accepts campaign donations only in the form of precious metals and cryptocurrency and who opted to have his nominating speech delivered by an “erotic services provider” who goes by the moniker “Starchild.” Perry’s most animated moment in the debate came when he slammed his fist against his lectern, forehead veins a-popping, as he insisted that 5-year-old children should have the legal right to inject heroin without adult supervision.

And those were the adults in the room, apparently.  So, do go read the article and remember this the next time some total idiot in the media presents the Libertarians as a serious party deserving anything except to have their automatic weapons taken from them and being put into custodial care before they hurt themselves or someone else.

This is the ideal that commercial pop culture has promoted, the world in which spoiled, 12-year-old boys with a life long hormone rush embody the dystopian vision of Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach. Really.  Look at the Vape video for a milder version of that world, it will put you off the kew-el faster than the obese libertarian who addressed the convention in a thong.



 He was a candidate, too.  I'm sure Gary Johnson and Bill Weld must be proud of the people who chose them as the torch bearer of this crowd.  Notice the Iron Cross tat.  Kew-el, no?  I doubt he gets the irony of a libertarian bearing a symbol of German military-authoritarian rule, my guess is he saw it in a biker movie and thought it was kew-el.