anon_ruce said in #5565 3h ago:
I knew the woke era was over when I arrived in New Hampshire in mid 2024. The libertarian Free State Project had taken over half the republican party and was well organized, debating how to clean up crime and homelessness, develop economic infrastructure, and deport liberals to Massachusetts. They were building serious social and party machinery, and even further developing their ideology with input from neoreactionary, fascist, and race realist ideas. Libertarianism had come a long way from the bizarre antisocial internet posture we might otherwise be familiar with, and was maturing into a serious revolutionary ideology. Clearly, someone was asleep over at the NYT.
If you don't know, the Free State Project was a pledge signed by 20k libertarians to move to NH and take over to create a free society if over 10k signed. It seems to have worked.
They had guys reading all the legislation and watching all the politicians like a hawk, producing freedom scores, empirically characterizing exactly which politicians were on-side, and thereby shaping the factional dynamics. They had social clubs and ambitions to build a serious "1930s-style" party apparatus. They even sent a bunch of us intellectuals to the countryside for a day of hard labor.
Most of all though, they had characters. I met a guy who was legally a woman (just to mess with the bureaucrats), transacted only in Monero, and split his time between freelance construction contracting and free state think tank work. I met a conspiracy theorist homesteader who didn't want "government food" and lived in a geodesic dome. I met aggressively libertarian moms who were really into guns and their sovereign right to use slurs. The kids were wild, longhaired, barefoot, and always climbing or play-fighting. When parents scolded them, it was about "property rights" and the "non-aggression principle".
Jeremy Kauffman, the apparent leader of the more radical faction, was in a class of his own. He plays up the aggressively offensive antics online to attract the right kind of people and repel the wrong kind of people. This includes getting into a filmed confrontation with the FBI about his right to call for assassinations of politicians *in general* (too specific and it becomes a legally actionable threat). He and congressman Travis Cocoran occasionally make waves by saying that it's morally permissible to assassinate anyone who proposes new taxes, on the grounds that it's a violation of the NAP.
Apparently the filtering strategy is working. He told me how at first, the libertarian scene was all those bleeding heart left-libertarians and the antisocials we know from the internet. But once things were in person, the well adjusted right libertarians proved dominant in actually setting up institutions and doing the work. The lefties flamed out and the antisocials marginalized themselves. The remainder all had volunteer t-shirts from the "porcfest" conference with little lego bricks on them with a sign "works well with others, but don't tread on me".
On race, they aren't pulling punches. Not all white people have the libertarian personality, but pretty much everyone who does is white, so Jeremy was pretty open about curating for that kind of racial personality, and deporting anyone who doesn't fit to Massachusetts.
In our circles, we wring our hands a bit sometimes about needing a real ideology that people actually believe in enough to fight politically and get organized. Believe it or not, the NH libertarians have it. They are fierce and highly ideological, constantly debating and making decisions on the finer points of libertarianism. It was crazy to see, but very heartening and enlightening. I'm glad it exists. If you want a window into another world, go see the free state project in NH. If you're "based" and just want a friendly place to live, go to NH.
Otherwise, NH was a paradise. It's New England, but not woke. We visited some more normal folks like Simon Sarris too, which was quite nice. 10/10 would recommend.
If you don't know, the Free State Project was a pledge signed by 20k libertarians to move to NH and take over to create a free society if over 10k signed. It seems to have worked.
They had guys reading all the legislation and watching all the politicians like a hawk, producing freedom scores, empirically characterizing exactly which politicians were on-side, and thereby shaping the factional dynamics. They had social clubs and ambitions to build a serious "1930s-style" party apparatus. They even sent a bunch of us intellectuals to the countryside for a day of hard labor.
Most of all though, they had characters. I met a guy who was legally a woman (just to mess with the bureaucrats), transacted only in Monero, and split his time between freelance construction contracting and free state think tank work. I met a conspiracy theorist homesteader who didn't want "government food" and lived in a geodesic dome. I met aggressively libertarian moms who were really into guns and their sovereign right to use slurs. The kids were wild, longhaired, barefoot, and always climbing or play-fighting. When parents scolded them, it was about "property rights" and the "non-aggression principle".
Jeremy Kauffman, the apparent leader of the more radical faction, was in a class of his own. He plays up the aggressively offensive antics online to attract the right kind of people and repel the wrong kind of people. This includes getting into a filmed confrontation with the FBI about his right to call for assassinations of politicians *in general* (too specific and it becomes a legally actionable threat). He and congressman Travis Cocoran occasionally make waves by saying that it's morally permissible to assassinate anyone who proposes new taxes, on the grounds that it's a violation of the NAP.
Apparently the filtering strategy is working. He told me how at first, the libertarian scene was all those bleeding heart left-libertarians and the antisocials we know from the internet. But once things were in person, the well adjusted right libertarians proved dominant in actually setting up institutions and doing the work. The lefties flamed out and the antisocials marginalized themselves. The remainder all had volunteer t-shirts from the "porcfest" conference with little lego bricks on them with a sign "works well with others, but don't tread on me".
On race, they aren't pulling punches. Not all white people have the libertarian personality, but pretty much everyone who does is white, so Jeremy was pretty open about curating for that kind of racial personality, and deporting anyone who doesn't fit to Massachusetts.
In our circles, we wring our hands a bit sometimes about needing a real ideology that people actually believe in enough to fight politically and get organized. Believe it or not, the NH libertarians have it. They are fierce and highly ideological, constantly debating and making decisions on the finer points of libertarianism. It was crazy to see, but very heartening and enlightening. I'm glad it exists. If you want a window into another world, go see the free state project in NH. If you're "based" and just want a friendly place to live, go to NH.
Otherwise, NH was a paradise. It's New England, but not woke. We visited some more normal folks like Simon Sarris too, which was quite nice. 10/10 would recommend.
I knew the woke era