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. 

The Post-Truth Era

Author and teacher Ralph Keyes published a book in 2004 called, “The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life.” The “post-truth era” sounds so much better than the liar-liar-pants-on-fire era – but any way you look at it, that’s where we now reside. We don’t expect honesty in any situation anymore, and we’ve cultivated a variety of euphemisms to soften the blow of that reality. We use the term “spin” instead of deceit. We say, “ethically challenged” instead of thief or charlatan. We’ve become so compromised that we can’t even use the word liar.

There is little we can trust in our public lives. In the post truth era, we can pick our own media. We can choose the media sources that give us information that confirm our beliefs or biases. Saint Ronnie told us that gummint is the problem, so we don’t expect anything good or honest to come from our elected officials. We watched as Reagan’s history was rewritten to make him a saint. Everything is fair game these days – even history can be sanitized for our protection. Our presidential primary has become a reality show where big, bold lies are TRUMPeted with no fear of reprisal. The sad truth is this -there are no consequences for lying.

The NH House of Representatives has an internal “all reps” email listserv that is supposed to be used by House members to communicate with one another (and constituents) as they work on The People’s business. Instead, it is frequently used as a means of sending out ideological mendacity. In 2013, State Representative Peter Hansen of Amherst achieved global renown when he sent out an all reps email where he referenced, “children and vagina’s” instead of saying women and children. In 2013 State Rep. Romeo Danais sent out a “joke” over the internal mail system that compared people getting food stamps to wild animals. Danais found it so amusing that he sent it to all of his colleagues twice. In 2013, State Representatives Gary Hopper and Jordan Ulery found it necessary to send out an all reps email with a scantily clad photo of a young woman. The subject matter of the email was the “Democrat’s plan for a 100% gun ban.” In other words, it was fabrication combined with soft-core porn.

 In the weeks since the terrorist attacks in Paris, we’ve seen a near constant barrage of prevarication on just about every level of public discourse. From presidential candidates to NH state legislators, folks are working overtime to spread fables in order to gin up fear.

On November 13, State Representative Dick Marple of Hooksett sent out a real beaut to the all reps listserv:

Coming to a State near you!

“Oh” “Yes” it is coming here too! 1200 to 2,000 a day are coming here. Obama asked for to have 10,000 then it expanded to 100,000 the with in a week it went to 180,000. That is a lot of Diaper heads.

The thing is, these that Obama is bringing in does not have a wife or family with them! This a invasion! Wake up people we are being taken under with out a shot fired! Obama’s pen does the same thing! If this pisses you off! GOOD!

The spelling, sentence structure, and grammar are all Marple’s. The email heading read: “Four wives? Yup n Miochighan.”

Xenophobic? Check. Offensive? Check. Incoherent? Check.
Marple sent this out to all of his colleagues on the official House internal email system. He referred to Syrian refugees – people fleeing for their lives during wartime - as “diaper heads.” These are the words of an adult man, speaking about some of his fellow humans. That’s awful enough, but this is, by the way, a listserv paid for and maintained by our tax dollars. Our tax dollars are subsidizing the spread of lies, fear, and hate. Marple is serving his fourth term, so one assumes that the good people of Hooksett support his incoherence, duplicity, and his xenophobia.

Back in June of 2012, then Speaker Bill O’Brien sent out an email to all reps advising them of a new policy regarding speech on the all reps listserv:

"Electronic media cannot be used for knowingly transmitting, retrieving, or storing any communication that is: 1. Discriminatory or harassing; 2. Derogatory to any individual or group; 3. Obscene, sexually explicit or pornographic; 4. Defamatory or threatening.  In addition, also prohibited are jokes . . . or any other non-legislative work activity that is not allowed on government computers." This new policy was, according to O’Brien, going to be strictly enforced, and violators would lose their email privilege. Clearly it was not strictly enforced, nor has it ever been. Not a single speaker or majority leader (including O’Brien himself) has ever attempted to enforce this rule, no matter how much offensive stuff is sent out on the official House internal email system.

One would think that these guys would be smart enough to send stuff like this out over their own personal email, rather than risk having someone like me make their bigotry, calumny, and bad spelling a matter of public record, but one would be wrong. There are no consequences for lying.

State Representative Max Abramson, Republican, Free Stater and convicted felon, from Seabrook sent out his refugee falsehoods on Twitter. He tweeted, “Shaheen and Obama are still trying to bring 10,000 Syrian refugees to New Hampshire to help the Democrats win a close race in 2016.”

This is complete fabrication. The total of all Syrian refugees approved to come to the United States is 10,000. That is for the entire country, not the state of NH. If Representative Abramson had done even a modicum of research, he would have learned that a refugee coming to the US is not eligible to apply for citizenship for five years after they arrive. They have to be citizens to vote. Abramson didn’t bestir himself to find facts. His intent was to gin up fear and xenophobia for his political party, before an election, so he deliberately sent out misinformation. 

No one has paid any attention to his lies, or those of his colleague Dick Marple. We should want better from our elected officials, but this kind of behavior is exactly what we have become conditioned to expect. There are no consequences for liars in the post-truth era.

“Casual duplicity picks at the thread of our social fabric.” Ralph Keyes

published as an oped in the November 27 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

Out of State Special Interests

We’ve survived the recent round of primary elections. The outcomes provided little in the way of surprise to most anyone save for Lawrence Lessig of the MayDay PAC. Lessig is a professor at Harvard who has worked to reduce legal restrictions on copyrights and trademarks. More recently he’s been active in promoting a Constitutional Convention. This year he initiated the NH Rebellion, a group that took some long walks to bring attention to the need for campaign finance reform. In May he launched the MayDay PAC, which was to be used to help elect candidates to Congress that would pass campaign finance reform.

MayDay PAC picked Senate candidate Jim Rubens to support in the recent primary. Like all single-issue organizations, this was all about campaign finance reform. I understood the initial strategy: vote for Rubens to oust Brown from the primary. I didn’t think it was apt to be successful, but I understood it. That Rubens had repellent views on women and wants to finish building a wall at the southern border didn’t matter to MayDay. It didn’t seem to occur to them that those OTHER views could be problematic.

Then Lessig made the fatal mistake of giving over $100,000 to the Stark 360 PAC. Stark 360 is a PAC created by rabid Republitarian Aaron Day of the Free State Project. On a state level, they’ve lobbied against campaign finance reform. Stark 360 ran some cheesy anti-Scott Brown ads, and had people at the polls with handouts telling folks not to vote for Brown. They were paid to be there, and under questioning, proved completely unable to explain why one should vote for Rubens. Stark 360 also seems to have diverted some of that MayDay cash into ads for Andrew Hemingway and Marilinda Garcia. Stark 360 didn’t have any money till Lessig came along to share his largesse. Many of the folks who donated to Lessig were furious. Giving money to folks who fight against your cause in the naïve hope that they’ll promote your candidate (Stark 360’s website never mentioned Rubens) is not a winning strategy. Rubens lost big. The only reason the liberty crowd supported Rubens was because of guns. They think Scott Brown is wussy on guns – and they oppose campaign finance reform. Lessig has been very cranky about all the criticism he’s recieved, and still doesn’t seem to grasp where and how he went wrong.

Every candidate gets a ton of questionnaires from special interest groups. The rule of thumb has always been, if you want to be on the record with this group fill out the questionnaire. If not – don’t. When I ran for the NH House in 2002, I only filled out a few. Over a decade later there are many, many more questionnaires. Ron Paul’s “Campaign for Liberty” group has a questionnaire. Their website is full of the usual florid libertarian rhetoric about our glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression. They point out that their Constitution is NOT a living document, and it seems likely they’d just as soon eliminate a number of those pesky amendments, notably the 19^th. Their questionnaire is comprised of seven questions. Ron and the Liberty boys oppose any gun regulations, Obamacare, Common Core, and any tax and fee increases. The questionnaire is online, along with the results. It amused me that only two Carroll County candidates (both Democrats!) have answered the survey. Ron Paul supporter Ed Comeau is conspicuously absent, along with the rest of the local liberty crowd.

Another so-called liberty group, liberty.com also has a candidate questionnaire. They’re an offshoot band of Paullowers, and their questionnaire is considerably longer and requires more than yes or no answers. “How should we fight a war on terror?” “Should the US maintain its standing army?” You get the idea. These are issues that will not be decided by the NH state legislature. Free State Project participants (and NH House candidates) Max Abramson of Seabrook and Shem Kellogg of Plaistow have both filled these out. Abramson would like for the US to pull out of all overseas bases and put those troops on the Mexican border. Freedom and liberty only extends so far, it seems. The liberty crowd is quite concerned about immigrants from south of the border. The liberty crowd is comprised, almost entirely, of pale people.

Max Abramson also proudly announces that he’s signed “every taxpayer pledge known to man.” As I’ve said before, signing pledges means never having to think for one’s self. Shem Kellogg’s answer to “What corrective actions could we take right now to improve the economy?” is “you and I could opt out of the state’s system whenever possible.” Ponder that for a few minutes. Then run through the list all of the countries that have successful libertarian economic systems.

It’s never a good idea to elect people who hate government to be the government.

NH badly needs some folks with vision to serve in our state government, not regressives desperate to return to a fictionalized version of the past. We have some very real problems looming, and we’ve done nothing to plan for them. Electing folks whose real concern is getting the US out of the UN and MOAR GUNZ isn’t helpful.

NH is not a big government state. It never has been. The Free Staters come with the intent of taking over and dismantling our state. They are woefully and deliberately ignorant of our state history and traditions. No different, really, than any other out of state special interest group that comes in thinking they know what is best for us.  

© 2014 sbruce 

Published as an op-ed in the September 19 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

Neanderthalenis Seabrookis

Max Abramson is a Republican candidate for the NH state legislature. He's also a member of the Free State Project, the group of armed malcontents moving to NH to take over and dismantle our state government, then threaten to secede. 

His illiterate friend is a real prince, isn't he? 

This is Abramson's sports section from his FB page. Apparently "hot females" are a "sport" in his world. 

I'm so tired of guys like this. The men of the NHGOP are a constant source of shame. 

https://www.facebook.com/max.abramson1?fref=ts