Meet the Libertarian candidate for governor: Rick Stewart

The campaign ad starts with a bit of a jolt, even by today’s political standards.

“What the hell, Kim,” exclaims Rick Stewart, adorned with the “Libertarian” baseball hat that he wears nearly all the time, even on television appearances.

Stewart, of Cedar Rapids, is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for governor of Iowa. And that exclamation that opens his first campaign ad of the cycle refers to Republican incumbent Gov. Kim Reynolds.

In that ad, which aired on TV and streaming services in Iowa, Stewart calls for the legalization of marijuana. And Stewart’s extraordinary statements do not stop after the opening salvo, including when he notes that marijuana grows naturally.

“There’s weed growing in the ditches. God put it there. Why do you think you’re smarter than God, Kim?” Stewart says in the ad.

Stewart is running in alignment with the Libertarian Party’s platform of government deference to individual liberties. He wants to legalize not only marijuana but other drugs in order to end what he calls “the drug war,” slang for government’s attempt to ban and eliminate some drugs. He also believes some psychedelic drugs should be legalized for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

He is opposed to the use of eminent domain — the government’s seizure of private land for public projects — for the three carbon dioxide capture pipelines that have been proposed in Iowa. Two of them are asking regulators for permission. Officials for the other, which includes Linn County, have said they don’t want to use it, but they have not filed a written permit application yet.

Stewart goes even farther than Reynolds’ school choice proposal for education funding; he says parents should have full control where the per-pupil government funding for education goes, and likened his plan to when students attended “one-room schoolhouses.”

He believes abortion beliefs are mostly religious, and thus should not be regulated by the government.

Party-building

Stewart is on the ballot in Iowa’s gubernatorial campaign because he got enough nominating signatures. His next challenge is to receive at least 4 percent of the vote in the Nov. 8 general election, which would give Iowa Libertarians major party status in the next elections, in 2024.

In a recent Mediacom/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, Stewart was right at earning 4 percent support. While that would guarantee major party status in 2024 for Libertarians, it’s also far afield from Reynolds polling at 52 percent and Democrat Deidre DeJear at 35 percent.

Drug regulation

In an interview, Stewart said he has been against government’s war on drugs since the early 1990s, when he read a research paper on its economic toll.

He called for the legalization of MDMA -- often called ecstasy or molly -- a hallucinogen that also has displayed healing properties in veterans with PTSD, even though such a state law would conflict with federal law.

The U.S. Veterans Affairs department is holding clinical trials to test the effectiveness of psychedelic drugs, including MDMA. An early report from the VA said the potential for using psychedelics to treat serious mental health conditions “offers promise.”

Earlier this year, Stewart was arrested in Arlington, Va., while protesting on the issue at the federal Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters.

Stewart said the fact such a law is not already on the books is “inhuman and cruel.”

Nearly 70 veterans from Iowa died by suicide in 2020, the most recent year the data is available, according to federal data.

“They are people that we asked to go and die for us,” Stewart said of military veterans. “They come home and some of them have a debilitating problem called PTSD, and you won’t let them have their medicine. Because why? That’s not a drug war. That’s just being inhuman. That’s being cruel. … I don’t know how you can sleep at night if you’re not working hard to make that a reality.”

Education

Stewart’s plan for public education goes farther even than Reynolds’ call for taxpayer funding for schools to be shifted into private school tuition assistance for lower-income families.

Stewart said his belief in school choice is that parents should be able to choose their child’s teachers and the per-pupil government funding would travel directly to that teacher. And that teacher could be working independently, or collectively with other teachers -- however they choose to operate.

“If you want to argue about how to change the system, the easiest thing to do is go backward. Just do what we used to do. Because that worked, and what we’re doing doesn’t. And what used to work in Iowa was a one-room schoolhouse,” Stewart said. “What I am proposing is that we just go back to the whole idea that when the money is directed by the parents to the teachers, we have no unhappy parents.”

Abortion

Stewart said an individual’s position on abortion is aligned with religious views, and thus the government should not interfere in that belief. In other words, he does not believe the government should ban abortions.

“Abortion has bedeviled the human family for thousands of years. … If you have literally hundreds of answers from the greatest philosophical and spiritual leaders of all time, in the history of humankind, what chances are there that a politician is going to come up with a better one that satisfies everybody,” Stewart said. “So I do not believe that any politician should have any desire to pass any law that has the word ‘abortion.’”

Early voting is underway in Iowa. Election Day is Nov. 8.

Comments: (515) 355-1300, erin.murphy@thegazette.com