Tag: Free State Project

PorcFest XX in review

Franconia Notch timelapse

I zipped thru Franconia Notch last week descending into the Great North Woods. The weather, scenery, and culture largely change in New Hampshire as you pass thru the Notch. Some would say it’s like entering into Shangri-La. More accurately during the second-to-last week of June, it’s like entering Galt’s Gulch.

Last week marked my second PorcFest, so I was no longer a newbie to this festival. Many of the regulars assumed that I had been more times, which is probably a sign that I’m becoming a familiar face amongst the porcupines in New Hampshire.

For those who don’t know, PorcFest is the Porcupine Freedom Festival at Roger’s Campground in Lancaster, NH. It’s basically Burning Man for liberty-minded people in the White Mountains, or as I’ve also heard it described: “Woodstock for rational people”.

What I like the most about PorcFest is that everyone is pursuing their own ideal experience, which maximizes the amount of happy campers.

Last year, I felt more compelled to stick with the few people that I knew, but this year I felt like I could freewheel and choose more of my own adventure. I ended up meeting more people this way and I never felt alone. Of course I did merge back into my core friend group throughout the course of a day and often at the hub that I was camping at. The beauty of freedom and individuality becomes more apparent when its concentrated in a single village like PorcFest.

David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman)

Other than some of the events hosted at the hub that I camped at, which already received enough publicity in the media, some of my favorite events and speakers were: RFK Jr, David Friedman, Comedy night, Matt and Terry Kibbe’s talk on Georgian wine, and Ian Underwood’s lecture on the Croydon affair.

Radical Expression Dance Party

The festival is very freeform and decentralized, so there are many smaller events that are organized at individual “hubs”, which are campsites. This is the single best organizational feature of the festival. The second best feature is that all the events from all the hubs get put on a giant calendar so that you can prioritize your time.

The festival comes alive at night

All walks of life attend the festival from families to dead-heads and from gay men to evangelical Christians. Despite the stark differences, we overwhelmingly get along peacefully in the closest thing to Galt’s Gulch that has ever existed.

Looking south at the Mt Washington and Presidential Range

It almost brought tears to my eyes seeing the mountains tower above the valley in the distance. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have been born in such a scenic and free place. Roger’s Campground faces right at the north side of the Presidential Range, so you’re staring right at the most prominent peaks in the East. Even while taking an outdoor shower at the PorcShowers you could see amazing views of the mountains. I grew up in the very southern part of New Hampshire, so prior to PorcFest, I never had an excuse to spend significant time in the Great North Woods.

True freedom shouldn’t have to exist for only one week out of the year, but its miles further than what is being achieved (or really just failing) in other locales. Will I be back to PorcFest? That’s an unequivocal yes.

Switzerland or New Hampshire?

Liberty Forum NH native perspective

I had the pleasure of attending Liberty Forum a month ago for the first time. The annual event brings in speakers and liberty activists from across the country together in one roof. It’s also an impressive networking event for the liberty community. While spending my entire childhood in New Hampshire, I have loosely followed the big ambitions of the Free State Project, the organization which sponsors Liberty Forum.

I got a lot out of this event, but the most significant feature was the ability to interact with some of the most well-known and effective activists in New Hampshire politics. The event sponsored many dinner events, which were organized around a subject or a certain activist. On Friday evening of Liberty Forum, I had the pleasure of meeting Carla Gericke and her husband Louis Calitz. Both of them are from South Africa and have a remarkable immigration story, which Carla writes about extensively in her anthology of short stories “The Ecstatic Pessimist”. And no, Carla didn’t pay me to write that, but it’s a good book that I did read.

I’ve seen Carla’s name pop up in the news for many years and have more recently become acquainted with her online personality in social media and on the Free State Live podcast, which is live every Monday night at 8pm. Carla is a hoot, and she is every bit the same in real life as she is on TV. She had stories about clashing interactions with Governor Sununu and with some of the crazies in politics. She and Louis have a lot of fun helping liberate the Free State and I really enjoyed hearing their stories in person. I found it much easier to meet people and mingle in the small dinner settings. So right off the bat, A+ to Liberty Forum for these dinners.

The next evening, I went to the Crypto dinner and met even more young people around my age. And as somewhat of an aside, I think other than the fact that the FSP has been extraordinarily effective, something that royally frosts (bhahaha, that’s a pun because it’s also the political commissar of Dover’s last name) the progressives in New Hampshire politics is the fact that most of the Free Staters are young and will be around for years. They are just getting started. The rest of the political leadership in NH is a herd of fat-fingered dinosaurs.

I met some genuinely amazing people at the crypto dinner and they subsequently invited me back to the Quill, the liberty clubhouse in Manchester, which is place for people who believe in liberty to socialize. If your state doesn’t have liberty clubhouses, it’s doing it all wrong. Prior to observing the NH liberty community in first person, I wouldn’t say this, but there are many bonafide parallels to the FSP and the Zion movement of Utah and more recently that of Israel. Not only is the FSP bringing people to NH, but it is building a robust and decentralized community. Statists are on notice.

There is a big emphasis on agorism within the FSP community and a number of vendors had booths set up in the main room. Coffee, Liber-Tea, spices, goldbacks, realtors, you name it. Another interesting project I later learned about is the Independence Inn in Strafford, NH, where a group of Free Staters are restoring an old inn to be used to help prospective movers discover the state and also rejuvenate the local tavern. There are multiple housing projects, including one to build a large Free State apartment building. The Free Staters have established multiple interwoven networks that help ease housing and job searches so that basically if you want to move to NH in pursuit of liberty there should be no excuses.

Of course there were speakers at Liberty Forum as well, which, other than the networking, was the center piece of the event. Some of the highlights were Vermin Supreme’s lawyer, 3D printing activist Cody Wilson, and NH Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut. Martin Kulldorff, who co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, was an honorable guest.

The event finished with the State of the Free State address by Jeremy Kauffman, who mentioned some of the outstanding achievements of the FSP in the past year both inside and out of the government. There was high moral in the room for the future of liberty in the Free State. As a New Hampshire native, I don’t say this lightly, but this could be a turning point for a new era in New Hampshire.