To acquire knowledge, one must study;
but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
Marilyn vos Savant
Jacob Hornberger, Libertarian Candidate For President, Biography
I have a bit of personal interest here because I know Laredo well; I used to deliver papers for The Laredo Times on (the now defunct USAF) base. (I just discovered the newspaper ceased publication in 1982, succeeded by the The Laredo Morning Times. The Times was published on Sunday morning and weekday afternoons.) In this clip, he doesn't talk his family beyond his lawyer/rancher dad. I found him on Facebook, and apparently went to Nixon High School, one of the two main high schools in Laredo, along with Martin (I took English IV at Martin during the summer when I had decided to compress high school to 3 years on advice from the school counselor; I had impulsively decided to register for English IV vs English III at the last minute and absolutely loved Mrs. Fierros' class, listening to Shakespeare off LP's, learning to write poetry, etc.) I had attended Laredo United, a suburban high school formed from 3 consolidated suburban school districts that initially opened in the early 60's, first graduation in 1965.)Technically Jacob would have been young enough to attend Laredo United, and I knew a lot of area ranch kids who attended United. I believe I've written about playing touch football in high school gym; this lean 6-foot rancher kid nicknamed "Boner" (don't ask) broke past scrimmage; I normally played on the line, but was playing deep to catch my breath. So I was the only one between him and the end zone. He charged straight at me; I was waiting for him to break left or right so I could intercept him on the angle. Wrong. He thought we were playing a game of chicken, and he ran into me at full speed. I literally flew in the air from impact and landed on my left wrist, severely spraining it (familiar readers know I'm a southpaw). Boner was out cold; I saw his eyes roll back into their sockets. My high school gym teacher, the head football coach, was very impressed and wanted me on the football team; I wasn't really that tough; I just misread the situation. I didn't have the size or speed to attract college recruiters, and I needed the meager savings from my paper route for college (I roughly cleared a dollar a day). The coaches responded to my decision not to stick it out (I never got to the point of team workouts) by blackballing me from the National Honor Society. (My Spanish II teacher was a coach and one day said, in front of the whole class, "You want to know why you're not in the National Honor Society? You didn't go out for football. Football teaches teamwork. You just think about yourself." I protested that I represented the school in UIL science and number sense competitions, and he dismissed it saying, "You're just doing that for yourself." So I was literally shocked when all of a sudden I was named, a few weeks before graduation, having earned valedictorian honors.
The reason I mention this is I attended high school, initially same year as Charles Hornberger, the point guard on our never-defeated-in-district (during my high school years) basketball team and the star on our debate team. It's possible that they are related; I found a 1961 newspaper clipping mentioned 3 children to Jacob G. Hornberger Sr., including 5-year-old Charles and Jacob Jr. Apparently the wife/mother is Latina (I found that on a Wikipedia biography page). That would put him at roughly high school age when I attended. I didn't see Charles listed on Jacob's Facebook friends list, but then my own little brothers aren't on Facebook. I tried briefly doing a Google search on Charles. There is a San Antonio lawyer by that name who graduated from UT law school in 1980, which would dovetail with a 1973 high school graduation and 7 years of undergraduate and law school.
One of the interesting tidbits of the clip is when he speaks about working in the summer on the ranch with Mexican migrant workers. He started out his political journey as a liberal Democrat (like me), although he didn't go through an interim conservative phase. His migration to a libertarian perspective started with 3 books published by FEE. Mine, on the other hand, really started with a Woodward book on how Bush Jr. fucked up the Iraq occupation and continued with his "saving the free enterprise system" via TARP and other government interventions.
I had always been pro-immigration and free trade, was never really happy with the GOP but considered them to be the lesser of evils. But there were other things that drove me crazy, like the Bridge to Nowhere nonsense and an Alaskan GOP senator threatening to resign if he didn't get his pork barrel appropriation. And Obama and the 111th Congress finally pushed me over the edge; I went from being a practical, pragmatic libertarian-conservative to a more consistent one. I had flirted with supporting Ron Paul in 2012, although I found a lot of his conspiracy talking points (e.g., blowbacks) a little too extreme and eventually concluded Romney was the most viable alternative to Obama's reelection. (Romney ran an incompetent campaign; I thought his obvious strategy was to run against both Obama and Bush.) The end was the 2016 primary. My preference was Rand Paul, who withdrew before I had a chance to vote for him in South Carolina. I was part of the Anyone But Trump coalition, briefly supporting Ted Cruz, but he was alienating me with bullshit soundbites like bombing the Middle East until the sand glowed. But the Trump hostile takeover wore down the competition to two candidates by the end of the conservative Southern campaign (Cruz and Kasich) as the campaign shifted to RINO country (the Northeast) where Cruz had no, and Kasich only nominal, support. At that point, Trump had the lead and momentum. I left the GOP when Trump clinched the nomination. As distasteful as the prospect of President Hillary Clinton was, I could not compromise my principles by supporting Trump.
I haven't found any delegate counts online for the Libertarian Party, but Reason lists Hornberger as the front runner after Super Tuesday. Vermin Supreme seems to be his strongest rival.
