Vor tids ikke-valgte sherif (OG FEDE BY)

Jacob Haugaards kampagneleder Paul Smith, der bag kulisserne hviskede også YH i øret, har gjort opmærksom på de oplagte ligheder mellem Yahyas Hassans folketings-kampagne og Hunter S. Thompsons kampagne for at blive sherif i Aspen i 1970:

 
 (Freak Power political poster created by artist Tom Benton with Thompson)

His tentative platform set forth six points, including :

• "Rip up all city streets with jackhammers" and "sod the streets at once.... All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force."
• "Change the name 'Aspen', by public referendum, to 'Fat City'. This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name 'Aspen'.... These swine should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land."
• "Drug Sales must be controlled. My first act as Sheriff will be to install, on the courthouse lawn, a bastinado platform and a set of stocks in order to punish dishonest dope dealers in a proper public fashion. Each year these dealers cheat millions of people out of millions of dollars.... it will be the general philosophy of the Sheriff’s office that no drug worth taking should be sold for money."^[1]
• "Hunting and fishing should be forbidden to all non-residents, with the exception of those who can obtain the signed endorsement of a resident- who will then be legally responsible for any violation or abuse committed by the non-resident he has ‘signed for’…. By this approach-making hundreds or even thousands of individuals personally responsible for protecting the animals, fish and birds who live here-we would create a sort of de facto game preserve, without the harsh restrictions that will necessarily be forced on us if these blood-thirsty geeks keep swarming in here each autumn to shoot everything they see."
• "The Sheriff and his Deputies should never be armed in public. Every urban riot, shoot-out and blood-bath (involving guns) in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy."
• "It will be the policy of the Sheriff’s office savagely to harass all those engaged in any form of land-rape."^[2]

Thompson promised to fire the majority of the conservative county officials and bureaucrats, and shaved his head bald, thereby referring to the crew-cut, ex-army, Republican incumbent as "My long-haired opponent."^[3] His campaign distributed Aspen Wall Posters and flyers across the county.
Threats received by Thompson during the campaign included one sent to City Hall following a dynamite theft in the County, insisting that the explosives would only be used if Thompson was elected. This led to Thompson's house and campaign HQ at Woody Creek, Colorado taking on the aspect of an armed camp on election night, with guards patrolling the grounds with guns and flashlights.
Ultimately, the 'Thompson for Sheriff' campaign was also unsuccessful, partly due to a Republican/Democratic agreement not to stand against each other in certain key elections in order to allow all 'Non-Thompson' votes to count towards one candidate and partly due to an article Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone shortly before the election, revealing his strategy.
In a November 1970 letter to the editor of The Nation, which had run an editorial supporting Aspen's Freak Power Uprising, Thompson stated: "What neither The Times nor The National Observer said, incidentally, is that we ran straight at the bastards with an out-front Mescaline platform."^[4] Thompson ultimately took a resigned view of his defeat, telling The New York Times, "If we can't win in Aspen, we can't win anywhere."^[5]