Larry Flynt For President

*In Flynt’s words, the campaign would be “an act of satire and rebellion against Reagan’s America.” The joke of it is that Flynt, a shrewd megalomaniac, literally thought he could win.*

On March 6, 1978, during a legal battle in Georgia over obscenity charges, Larry Flynt, the owner and publisher of Hustler magazine, was shot on the sidewalk, an assassination attempt that left him partially paralyzed. It didn’t take long for him to become an iconic figure in his gold wheelchair, but the shooting devastated him. It kicked-off a five-year descent into drugs, overeating, and a paranoid withdrawal from the world.

By 1983, Flynt had pulled himself out of the swamp of despair, and one of the inspirations to do so is that he now had a cause. He convinced himself that either the CIA or the FBI was behind the assassination attempt. After years of legal fights over Hustler, Flynt already saw the U.S. government as his adversary; now he was convinced that it had become his mortal enemy, from President Reagan on down. He was going to get his revenge. How? By running for president, of course… read more >