Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [99]
Some people will say, yes, but we don’t need little Johnny hearing any bad words over the radio. My answer is, trust me, there’s nothing little Johnny hasn’t heard already on the street. And you can always turn the dial. If what Howard Stern says offends you, don’t listen. If enough people refuse to listen to Howard’s raunchiness, he’s gone—because he has to bring in advertising dollars.
We just don’t need the government controlling that dial, telling us what we can and can’t listen to. We are free thinking individuals who ought to be able to make our own choices, and if we worry about what our children are hearing, that’s called parenting. Rest assured that, when the government starts raising your kids, before long you’re going to see the kids turning in their parents to the government.
In June 2002, when I went to China with the largest trade delegation ever organized at the state level (roughly a hundred government and business leaders accompanied me), not one TV network in Minnesota covered it. They all claimed “expenses.” That’s the first time I ever heard the media say something was too expensive. I was out there trying to help bring Minnesota into the future by forging a relationship with the country that’s going to be the economic power of the world. This affected everyone in the state in some way, or it would someday.
So what was the front-page headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the day that I returned from China? “People’s House or Party Pad?” it said. Their story was quoting former members of my staff who claimed that my son, Tyrel, and his friends had been abusing the governor’s mansion—supposedly draining statepurchased booze, strewing beer cans and broken glass around, and damaging the furniture.
I think the timing of that story was set up to overshadow what I’d accomplished in China. It was a case of slander and libel against a twenty-two-year-old kid. I knew the main source of the lies. His name was Dan Creed. He’d been executive director of the Governor’s mansion and, in the spring of that year, I’d dismissed him and a few others for leaking stories to the media when I was threatening to close down the mansion as a cost-saving measure. Behind my back, I found out later, he was meeting with the Democrats and Republicans, who were orchestrating what he should do and how. He wanted the funding of the residence changed from the governor’s office to the general fund, meaning people like him would become state employees rather than being employed at the governor’s pleasure. In simple terms, he—not the governor—would then run the governor’s residence and could not be fired. Creed was working on one of those so-called “tell-all books,” which came out the same day that my official portrait was unveiled in the Capitol that November so that he could draw more press attention.
The Minnesota media simply ran with Creed’s accusations against my son. They did no investigating. A lot of times, Tyrel would go out and meet some friends at a nightclub—he was old enough to have a drink—and bring them back to the residence. But these weren’t “underaged drinking parties.” And I don’t know how Dan Creed could possibly have known what was going on at midnight, since he went home every day at five! There wasn’t a single state trooper—and one was inside the governor’s residence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—who ever said one thing about my son misbehaving in that house. In fact, half the time he wasn’t even there because, for virtually my entire term as governor, Tyrel was working for Sean Penn as his personal assistant out in Hollywood or on a film location.
Yet the media went so far as to have investigative teams interviewing Ty’s friends, trying to dig up any dirt they could, wanting to know if he did drugs or hung out with somebody who’d been busted for them. They came up with nothing. It was a choreographed attempt at character assassination. Today I view those media people as equivalent to pedophiles, because they attacked my children on multiple occasions.