Paul Bass Photos
Libertarian Spike Cohen pitches veep candidacy at Westville stop.
Spike Cohen may be this year’s only candidate for national office to attend Black Lives Matter, gun rights, and anti-lockdown rallies.
He supports all three movements.
Cohen explained why in an interview stop in Westville, en route to an event at Ogies Trailer Park in Providence, on an East Coast swing in his campaign for vice-president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
He and Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgenson will have their names on all 50 states’ ballots on Nov. 3. Plus D.C.’s and Guam’s.
Reflecting the libertarian creed’s tendency to defy conventional categorizations of left and right, Cohen said he supports the BLM, Second Amendment, and anti-lockdown causes for the same reason.
“Government is imposing itself upon all of us, especially the most marginalized among us, and making our lives harder for no good reason,” he argued. “When we end police brutality, when we end the war on guns, when we end the war on drugs, and when we allow the American people to be empowered to do the things they want to do, we live better lives. We live more prosperous lives. We live more equitable lives. We do that by getting the government and their cronies out of lives and taking our power back.”
“The problems we are facing because the Republicans and the Democrats, in their exclusive control of every lever of power in government for the last 160 years, have used that power to take your power and your freedom and your wealth from you. It has made your life increasingly difficult. It has made your life increasingly expensive,” Cohen argued. “It has made it harder for everyday Americans to do the things they need to get by.”
The answer to many of society’s most pressing challenges, he argued, lies in the advancement of personal liberty, from government overreach and intervention.
Specifically, Cohen and the Libertarian ticket are calling for:
• an end to all wars abroad.
• an end to the drug war (“It’s none of the government’s business what you decide to put in your body”), including full legalization, with cartels and drug gangs replaced by state-run dispensaries, if states choose to sell weed and cocaine that way.
• an end to police brutality.
• an end to government restrictions on gun ownership (“Common-sense gun control is the American people armed with whatever weapons they want — and deciding what weapons the government has”).
• an end to the national debt, an issue that no longer meaningfully divides national Democrats and Republicans.
He supports judges for seats on the Supreme Court who rule based on the literal meaning of laws and the Constitution, Cohen said. He said he doesn’t know whether President Trump’s current nominee for the Court fits that bill. He did say he opposes any outlawing of abortion: Besides interfering with a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, he argued, such a ban would lead the country down a slippery slope by defining a fetus as a person and deciding that life begins at conception.
Under such a regime, he said, he probably wouldn’t have been born. His mother had at least seven miscarriages before giving birth to him. With the government defining life as beginning at inception, he posited, it would bar people like his mother from conceiving again after several miscarriages.
Libertarian Take On Covid-19
Cohen with his campaign body man, LaQuinn Mims, during interview.
Accompanied by campaign “body man” LaQuinn Mims (who’s a professional salsa dancer whe n he’s not ferrying Libertarian vice-presidential candidates to campaign stops), Cohen, a 36-year pescatarian who owns a Prius, came to the Westville interview Sunday dressed in a suit and tie, without a mask. He did an elbow-bump rather than extend a hand hello.
That mix reflects his approach to campaigning in a pandemic, as well as to his take on how we as a society should respond to the coronavirus.
He is holding events mostly outside, handing out masks, he said. Respecting people’s concerns about their own safety while trusting them to make decisions. But not, he said, allowing fear of the coronavirus to prevent him from staying locked up at home.
“We need to be smart. We need to live our lives,” he argued.
“The mindset that the we should react to this is cocoon ourselves until further notice — it hasn’t worked,” he argued. It has made people “edgy.” Meanwhile, government orders have caused “unnecessary suffering” ranging from ruined businesses to the inability for some people to get cancer screenings, he argued.
What about the argument that government should require people to wear masks not primarily to protect themselves, but to protect others? To protect the health and personal liberty of people who don’t want to catch Covid-19?
Cohen noted that the government has given conflicting advice over time, including about the importance of wearing masks. It has gotten in the way of letting scientists do their jobs and spread good information on which citizens can act on, he argued. He argued as well as that we can trust people to make good decisions based on solid information.
Cohen has particular reason to try to avoid contracting Covid-19: He has multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease.
He first realized he had MS in 2014. That changed the course of his life — and led to his new career as a candidate for national office.
He was more interested in business than in politics when he was a teenager growing up in South Carolina. After doing landscaping and retail odd jobs, he realized he wanted to work for himself. So at 17 he started a web design business, cold-calling his first potential clients to offer them free sites.
He never ended up going to college. He didn’t need to, he said. His business flowered.
So much so that when he learned in his 30s that he had MS, he could afford to retire and pursue other passions.
His doctor told him the goal of his treatment would be to slow the disease enough so that Cohen’s life would last as long as it would have naturally. The doctor meant it as encouraging news. But the news “hit me like a ton of bricks” with the reality of impending mortality. “I knew academically, we are all dying,” he recalled, but this put him in a “completely different head space” from focusing so much on making money.
“I won’t be here in 100 years,” he recalled thinking. “What will I have left behind? … What will I have done for people around me?
So he plunged into activism with the Libertarian Party, spreading the gospel of “human liberty” as the best route to fixing society’s problems. He accepted an invitation to launch Muddied Waters Media, which produces Libertarian podcasts. His own podcast, “My Fellow Americans,” is on hold during the campaign, but he’s still co-hosting “The Muddied Waters of Freedom.”
Then he took up friends’ urging to put his hat in the ring for the vice-presidential nomination at this year’s Libertarian national convention. And he won.
Now he’s enjoying traveling the country not just to preach to the converted, but to address — and listen to — “everyday people” about the challenges facing the country.
Voting By Color
Like many parties, the Libertarians can be an argumentative lot. Cohen notes that while members agree on “85 to 90 percent” of issues, they can sometimes fight pretty hard among themselves about the rest.
In fact, in 2016, he didn’t even vote for the Libertarians in the presidential race. He did support the presidential candidate, Gary Johnson. But, he said, he couldn’t stomach Johnson’s running mate, William Weld. Not a true Libertarian.
So Cohen brought a box of crayons to the polling place in hopes of casting a color-in vote. For Harambe.
His plot was foiled: “They didn’t have paper ballots, so I had to leave.”
It wasn’t too big a loss. “Thankfully,” he said, he’d bought the box of crayons at a dollar store. “So I only lost a dollar.”