It was the major question on my mind. I was looking forward to putting the notion on the table. I wanted to canvass a representative cross section of folks who are members and organizers of the Free State Project (http://www.freestateproject.org) and live in the state of New Hampshire. I got the chance to see New Hampshire and mingle with the local FSPers on Friday, August 5th at a barbeque thrown by Margot Keyes, the FSP Welcome Wagon Coordinator. It was wonderful to find myself in the middle of a crowd that valued individual Freedom as much as I do.
These are the kind of people who walk their talk. They”ve pull up their stakes, packed up their families and moved across the country to live in a tiny little burg on the East Coast simply because they hunger to be…FREE! Think about that for a minute – people in America are picking up and moving somewhere else because they want to be FREE!
I know that feeling well.
I”m one of those people that feel the chains of oppression quickly tightening around the throat of Lady Liberty. And I will be moving to New Hampshire in the spring of 2006. I”m in the middle of shifting my livelihood from a military/government based career to a private practice in transpersonal hypnosis.
I”ve been eager to see New Hampshire for a long time now. And in view of everything going on with the acceleration of draconian police powers in this country since 9-11, I”ve been eager to corner the locals here and pop the question. This is what I”ve wanted to know: if “terrorist” nukes go off in this country, the next 9-11, and the White House makes good on its new love affair with coast-to-coast martial law – how will New Hampshire react?
Will the New Hampshire state legislature play ball? Will they march lock-step with all the other state governments down the primrose path to the New World Order? Or will they keep their cools? Will they refuse to recognize the Feds authority to place New Hampshire under martial law?
Which way will this tiny, rascally New England state sway?
Everybody I presented this scenario to didn”t hesitate to offer their opinion on what the outcome of such an event would be.
New Hampshire will tell the Federal Government to go pound sand.
And that was music to my ears.
The words “freedom” and “America” have become an oxymoron when combined together for no longer are the one synonymous with the other. Freedom is a buzzword politicians use to describe a cascading consolidation into collectivist tyranny that more resembles Orwellian doublespeak than accurate communication.
I have spent the last 18 months living in Arlington, Virginia and working in the Pentagon at the Army Operations Center in support of ONE/OIF/OEF. I”ve spent my off time venturing into the District of Corruption to observe the national monuments, take in the Smithsonian and quietly…keep an eye on the emerging Total Surveillance Society.
Honestly, I couldn”t spit in any direction anywhere in this town and not hit some cop in a Darth Vader uniform toting an MP-5 or a surveillance camera or both. I was sitting on the waterfront in Georgetown with friends I work with from Crisis Action Team 4, it was early on a Friday evening in June and the sky was literally swarming overhead with police helicopters — not Bell Jet Rangers, no. These cops are flying military Blackhawk helicopters with “POLICE” in yellow lettering on the tail boom. The establishment we were at was a very popular gathering spot for the Beautiful People in D.C. There were several private yachts tied up to the pier, the money and booze was flowing, the women looked like extremely high-priced call girls or Hollywood actresses — there really isn”t a difference anymore. They were all laughing and laying that plastic phony friendship act on each other and they were all completely oblivious to the obvious.
There are surveillance cameras everywhere watching them.
Military hardware was orbiting overhead manned by cops with gunners standing in the open doors. On the river, extremely high powered speedboats with POLICE painted prominently on both sides of the hull race up and down the waterway with cops and machine guns eying everyone and everything like a target, like raw meat.
And these people on the waterfront, in their trendy clothes and fake tans, were partying.
The Police State is no longer an event that might transpire in the near future. It is here now. The Rubicon has been crossed. America is no longer a free country. America is occupied.
By cops and spies and corporate criminals getting rich off the sellout.
And yet, in the midst of this birthing of the United Police States of America, surrounded on all sides by bastions of Leftist Commie Liberalism sits the tiny red-headed stepchild of the East Coast: New Hampshire.
I have been observing New Hampshire from afar ever since I joined up with the Free State Project as a member right after New Hampshire was chosen as the libertarian migration state of choice out of a ballot numbering 10 states. I was in Colorado at the time and Wyoming was the number two runner up in the vote. The libertarian writer and publisher known as Boston Tea Party (Kenneth Royce) was originally a strong endorser of the Free State Project before the membership put the state to migrate to to a vote. New Hampshire won out by 266 votes over second place holder Wyoming — Kenneth Royce”s ideal spot for libertarian migration.
In the wake of New Hampshire”s win, Royce became a venomous critic of the Free State Project, its leadership, and called into question its voting methods for determining a winner — insinuating that New Hampshire was always the target state of choice and that voting tallies were somehow rigged to guarantee a New Hampshire win.
I have read Royce”s lengthy essay on why Wyoming is the better choice than New Hampshire for the Free State Project and was almost persuaded to see it his way. But then I realized that within the same time frame Royce was pushing his new “novel” about a Free State style revolution that used Wyoming as its base — New Hampshire had beat out Wyoming fair and square in a vote among libertarians.
I monitor Royce”s Free State Wyoming page from time to time and nothing ever seems to change or update there. The home page now sports a new announcement for the month of August, 2005. Prior to that, the last update was some time in early 2004. There is no real news about the project on this page. No head counts. No organization per se — beyond that of the great founder of the movement itself, Boston T. Party and, of course, his ever faithful web mistress, Lady Liberty. The most pressing order of business at the FSW right now is admonishing visitors to buy a Free State Wyoming silver coin! There are only 40 left! And, of course, Molan Labe! — the novel that started it all is now being considered with 12 other libertarian sci-fi novels for the Prometheus Award. This page is all about Boston T. Party. There is no movement beyond the fictional one in his novel. There is no forward momentum. Nothing is moving forward. Wyoming is a dead duck on a motionless pond. With a hell wind blowing through its entire southern region.
Royce exemplifies to a tee what is wrong with libertarian politics on the whole and why libertarians can”t seem to elect the local dog catcher to office let alone a governor or president.
Libertarians are like herding cats. And as long as they insist upon being so darned independent that nothing can get done, the collectivists will continually out flank them.
The libertarians need to learn how to stop endlessly whining about non-issues, figure out what they all have in common, and work as teams in making that happen. Until that happens, libertarians will be the third largest political party in America without even a local dog catcher to show for their efforts.
I know that is a kick in the teeth but, hey, it has to be said.
It”s ironic or maybe its destiny, the tendency for things to come full circle, that the first piece of ground taken and secured again in the name of Liberty is right smack in the middle of where it all began 229 years ago, in the heart of New England — that tiny, rascally independent state of New Hampshire. A place where the peoples” right to revolution is enshrined in the state constitution. A place where the proud tradition of local control in the form of town hall meetings has continued in an unbroken chain since Colonial times to the present. A place where the tax collector gets beat like a gong and run out of the state on a rail. A place where the state legislature is run by civilians, not career politicians — paid a mere $200 a year for their services. That”s a pay scale that needs to be put into effect immediately at the national level.
Just being in New Hampshire was being zapped to another universe, a universe where people come and go as they please, do as they please, where there isn”t a cop everywhere you look and you aren”t under surveillance from every street corner. I stayed in Concord, the state capital, during my quick visit to meet up with members of the FSP. I went to visit the capital building while I was taking in the sites.
Imagine my shock when I walked in the front door of the CAPITAL BUILDING and wasn”t immediately surrounded by black-clad storm troopers with badges, forced to empty my pockets for search, having my body probed with metal detector wands and having my picture taken for computer biometric comparison to known “enemies of the State.” There were NO metal detectors. NO cops. Just an elderly retiree security guard who was eager to tell me about the unique place the state of New Hampshire occupies in Revolutionary American history.
Wow.
I then proceeded to wander around the capital building, touring the chambers of the senate and the representatives – all without once being stopped, questioned, photographed or prevented from proceeding at all. Here, the government is the property of the people! Imagine that! What a subversive idea! I saw the governor”s office and if the man had been in the office at the time, I probably could have walked right in and had a little chit chat with the guy.
Try doing that ANYWHERE outside of New Hampshire. But to do that, you”d have to get into the state capital building first and getting in without being bodily violated by members of law enforcement would be unheard of.
As a writer, a soldier sworn to defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies foreign or domestic, and an American citizen, I am very gravely concerned with the direction this country is taking.
Trust me, if you live outside of New Hampshire, you really don”t know what being free feels like.
The police state isn”t coming. It”s already here.
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