New, Corporate Free State Project Begins Cleaning House

Poor Ian Freeman.

Ian moved to NH in 2006, as part of the Free State Project. He bought a house and set up a studio for his radio show. In no time at all, he became the leader of the subset of the Free State Project cult, known as Free Keene.

He's relentlessly shilled for Free Keene and the Free State Project. He's also been a big embarrassment to the FSP. Any time there was an obnoxious story in the news about the FSP, it originated in Keene. The Free Keeners did a lot of embarrassing stuff. They drew penises on the sidewalks of Keene with chalk. They vandalized the war memorial. They pranced around with cameras, harassing meter readers. They smoked pot in the park every day at 4:20. SO edgy. They had topless protests. They were people with no visible means of support, who fed parking meters downtown and called their activism "work." Some of them kept getting arrested.

They weren't a good image. And Ian - well Ian's image was pretty tarnished. In 2010, on his radio show, he espoused the opinion that there doesn't need to be an age of consent for adults wanting to have sex with children.




There were grumblings about that over the years. I grumbled about it, here at my blog, in 2014.

Then came Kyle Tasker.  State Representative Kyle Tasker was arrested when he went to the meeting place he'd arranged over Facebook, for the purposes of having sex with a 14 year old girl.

Suddenly, sex with children is a topic of discussion in the state of NH. One of the first people to defend Kyle Tasker was Ian Freeman.  And again.

Ian wasn't the only Free Stater to defend Tasker in public. State Representative Max Abramson was quite vocal on social media and in the comment section at the Union Leader.

Meanwhile, the Free State Project has undergone a transformation. They're now officially a 501 (c)(3) non-profit. They were promoting a campaign for the last few years to "trigger the move." When the FSP reached the magic number of 20,000 signers, the trigger would be pulled (an apt analogy for the armed miscreants) and just like that they would suddenly appear.

The Free State Project began in 2001, when Jason Sorens wrote a rant about gathering like minded individuals to move to a state, take over and dismantle the government, then threaten to secede from the rest of the nation.  In 2001 they voted to move to NH.

Since then, the goalposts have shifted numerous times. They were all supposed to be here in 2006. Then they were all supposed to be here by 2010. It's 2016, and there are still fewer  than 2,000 of them here.

But, Trigger the Move was good PR. They got tons of publicity, and one thing Free Staters love is publicity. Even the mainstream media began showing up at their big events like Porcfest and Liberty Forum. President Carla Gericke was a relentless media hound. She sued the town of Weare. She shrieked and sobbed at the City of Concord when they wanted to buy a Bearcat armored vehicle. She was a necessary figurehead for the FSP, given that libertarian groups are populated by mostly men, and those men are of a somewhat misogynistic persuasion. Having a very visible female figure at the helm was a way of eliminating the discussion of libertarian misogyny.

Carla Gericke, former FSP President 

The move was triggered. And suddenly everything changed. Carla was kicked upstairs, and given a position on the board. Her image wasn't right for the new improved FSP. Millionaire businessman and NH-come-lately, Matt Phillips is the new president of the FSP. He moved to NH in 2014. Matt was an intern at the CATO Institute with Jason Sorens. The Koch funded CATO institute. Also on the board are Aaron Day - an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, businessman Rich Goldman, scientist and management consultant Séamas Ó Scalaidhe, and Jason Sorens who is currently on faculty at Dartmouth. He moved to NH in 2013. There are two women on the board: Carla Gericke and Jody Underwood. Mrs. Underwood is a farmer in Croyden, and likes to dance! Carla likes cooking, hiking, and yoga! 

It seems that the FSP is triggering an entirely different sort of move - a move away from scruffy potheads and sidewalk chalkers - a move toward business suit wearing legitimacy. They don't want to be labeled as "fringe" or "cult" any longer. Nope, they're going full on libertarian corporate. The irony is delicious. 

Carla Gericke, Jason Sorens, and Matt Phillips 

Back to Ian Freeman. Adult men advocating sex with children is not respectable or legitimate. The reaction to Kyle Tasker's attempts to solicit sex with 14 year old girls horrified most residents of our state. It happened at the same time the FSP is making their bid toward becoming FSP Inc. Ian's been an embarrassment for years, and suddenly, they have the means to ditch him. The FSP announced that they were severing ties with Ian's media empire, and that he was not welcome to appear at FSP events. He resigned from the FSP shortly thereafter. And right after all that, the FBI raided the Church of the Free Load and took a boatload of computers and electronic devices.  The new story in the media is that Ian was expelled from the FSP, just as his buddy Chris Cantwell was expelled a few years ago. Both of them were victims of political expedience. Cantwell started making noise about how he thought killing police officers was a wonderful thing at the very same time Carla Gericke started shrieking in public about the Concord Bearcat. The Concord police chief called the FSP potential domestic terrorists on his application. The LAST thing they needed was for the media to discover that Cantwell was proving the chief right. So, they made a big public show of expelling him. Ian became a liability long ago - he just provided the FSP with an opportunity at exactly the right time, thanks to Kyle Tasker. I suspect we'll see more FSP house cleaning in the weeks and months ahead. 

I can't help but feel badly for Ian. He's worked hard to put the FSP on the map for the last 10 years. He's been used and very publicly
cast aside by the very people he worked with and trusted. 

NH Republicans in Disarray

We are approximately 10 months away from the NH Primary and the fun has begun. Candidates are visiting the state, some on a fairly consistent basis. They’re confining their energy to the bottom half of the state – as usual. They don’t bother much with the top half until they have to massage us for votes.

The Tea Party sprang into action in 2007. They espoused a sort of glibertarian philosophy; a lot of hard line fringe GOP mixed with some aspects of libertarianism. A lot of this was supported by low information voters who were willing to bellow about taxes, but wanted big gummint to leave their Medicare alone.

Political activists used the Tea Party (and the huge money behind it) to create a schism in the Republican Party, on both the state and national level. The Tea Party has bonded with the liberty crowd. In NH that includes Birchers and Free Staters. We’ve seen the old school Republicans in some areas forced out of office by libertea types. Nowhere is the divide more apparent than in the NH House, where the old school Republicans are in constant conflict with the libertea crowd, led by former Speaker Bill O’Brien. They’ve been a constant and deliberate source of obstruction and delay during House voting sessions. For months the libertea crowd has been carping about how Speaker Shawn Jasper (a conservative Republican) is really a DINO (Democrat in name only) because he was shrewd enough to use Democrats to help him win the speakership. In spite of all the acrimony, somehow Jasper and O’Brien kissed and made up (don’t dwell on the graphics of that) and passed a thoroughly odious budget that reflects the desire of the libertea crowd to “take the state back.” All the way to 1776, it seems.

This weekend, the Republican Party is having the “First in the Nation Leadership Summit” at the Crowne Plaza in Nashua. Both declared candidates, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio will be present. Also expected are likely candidates Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, the Donald, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Lindsey Graham.  Other speakers include John Kasich, Joe Scarborough, Frank Lutz, Scott Brown, Fred Barnes, Betsy McCaughey and Kelly Ayotte.

This is a two-day event that is already sold out. They have a slick website, where one can look at the agenda, the speakers, and the various events, including a focus group with Luntz and a media panel that includes Drew Cline of the Union Leader. There was ever any doubt about the Union Leader’s loyalty to the GOP – but it’s nice to see it there in black and white. 

The NH Young Republicans will be having their somewhat controversial convention during this summit. It seems that all of a sudden, at the last minute, applications for 70 new dues paying members of the NH Young Republicans appeared, funded primarily by GOP operative David Chesley, who is going to be Rand Paul’s NH campaign director. This is all about influencing who will become the next chair of the organization.

The day after this Republican shindig is the Summit of Grassroots Activists by the 603 Alliance. It’s at the same venue, and includes at least one of the same speakers, former NY Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey. McCaughey was the lieutenant governor during George Pataki’s first term. He ditched her when he ran for his second term. There are only two female speakers listed at their event, both imported from out of state, McCaughey and Sharron Angle, failed US Senate candidate from Nevada.

From the 603 Alliance website, “A group of conservative activists joined together to create an organization---a movement---an alliance--- of like-minded constitutionalists and conservatives with the goal of impacting who wins the New Hampshire First in the Nation Primary.” That’s exactly how it is written and punctuated.

It’s the libertea crowd. The names of the Steering Committee are listed, but not much else. There’s a press release promising that this event is going to produce a loud bang, much like the shot heard round the world, on the day of their summit. The loud bang potential isn’t obvious from the website, which is dark, unattractive, and rife with florid rhetoric. Given how many Free Staters claim to be in the IT field, one would think they could have come up with something more appealing.

Their speaker list: Betsy McCaughey, Sharron Angle, Andrew Hemingway (former NH gubernatorial candidate), NH State Rep. Bill O’Brien, Aaron Day, who is Chair of the Republican Liberty Alliance and moved to NH as a member of the Free State Project. He’s also the Chairman of the Atlas Society, a group of folks who never grew out of their adolescent obsession with the fiction of Ayn Rand. NH State Rep. Dan Itse who fancies himself a constitutional expert, libertea blogger Mike Rogers, former NH GOP Chair Jack Kimball – businessman and UN conspiracy theorist, and Jason Sorens the founder of the Free State Project.

The Free State Project announced it was moving to NH in 2003, because NH was such a fine, liberty loving small state. They’ve given many reasons over the years, but all are variations on that tune. The tune was meant to distract, something the FSP is very skilled at. They talk about how peaceful and peace loving they are all the time, to distract us from the fact that they’re armed miscreants, coming to NH with the intention of taking over and dismantling our state government. They’ve told us for years that they aren’t political – when the opposite is so obvious. And yes, they told us they chose NH because it was so free. Horse hockey. They chose NH because of the primary. This is their big bid for influencing the primary process. This is the FSP coming out party.

It will be fascinating to see how the schism works this weekend, and how many of the GOP leadership summit speakers and participants hang around to be part of the 603 Alliance Summit. My money is on Rand Paul.

Published as an op-ed in the April 17 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

October 1, 2003 - Free State Project Wayback Machine

Step into the Wayback Machine with me, and we will travel all the way back to October 1, 2003. It's the day that the Free State Project announced they'd chosen NH as the state they would move to. 





Dr. Sorens tells the media at this press conference that he has every confidence that the FSP will have 20,000 people in NH by 2006. 

They had to move the goal posts. More than once. It's 2014 and they still only have about 1500 people here - and there's some question about that. Do they change the numbers when people move away? Or die?

By far and away my favorite statements were about their funding. Dr. Sorens assures us that the money for the FSP is all from personal donations. No gummint funds, no corporate funds, and no foundation money. Ms. McKinstry, then the VP of the FSP earnestly tells us that their books are open to anyone who contributes a dollar or more to the FSP. 

Is that still true, FSP? A dollar gets us a look at the books?