To expand on this a little more, I just got this email from Tom Woods (great podcast if you're a libertarian or at least receptive to the ideas of liberty). Jacobs is an impressive dude.
This is a big deal -- and could be an even bigger deal down the road.
Glenn Jacobs, the WWE wrestler Kane, was just elected mayor of Knox County (which includes Knoxville), Tennessee.
Jacobs (who has over 7.2 million Facebook likes, by the way) is extremely impressive and very knowledgeable. He can speak intelligently about everything from the Constitution to business cycles, from foreign policy to the nonaggression principle.
Not to mention: he believes in Austrian economics, he supports the Mises Institute, and he's a member of my LibertyClassroom.com.
Now I need to toot my own horn here a bit.
When I last had Glenn on my show, I asked him, with regard to his race for mayor:
"What made you decide to do this all of a sudden?"
His answer:
"A guy named Tom Woods."
Whoa.
He went on:
"The last time I was on your show, you asked me a question that really got me to thinking. It basically was, 'What are you going to do,' or 'Where do you think our movement is going to achieve success?'
"That show was about 2013, right? And I told you I was fed up with politics, especially after what happened with Ron Paul and the RNC in 2012, I think. You know, I wasn't naive enough to think that Ron was going to win, but I felt very slighted that the RNC went to great lengths not to allow him to even speak and not to let the viewpoint of the liberty wing of the Republican Party be represented at their national convention. So I was fed up. I really was.
"And...when I said, 'I'm fed up. I'm done,' you said back to me, 'Well, it's not like you're going to have the majority of Americans suddenly withdraw their consent.' And that got me to thinking. You're exactly right. I think that the political process is still something that those of us who want to see positive change — and what I mean by that is change in the direction of liberty and free markets — we have to do what we can do to cause that to happen, and that includes sometimes being in the political process."
I went back and looked at the transcript from that earlier episode, and he's indeed right. I said: "I’m not totally sure what the theory is according to which we can solve our problems without politics. Can we really imagine that enough people will just withdraw their consent from the system and it simply collapses of its own weight? I understand that politics is not going to solve the problem. Then what? What else is our alternative?"
Well, whatever influenced Glenn's decision to run, the fact is that Knoxville and all of Knox County now has a hardcore libertarian mayor. And for all we know (and I have no inside information here), he has further ambitions.