Free Keene Celebrates Nine Years of Service!

Originally inspired by the libertarian “Hammer of Truth” blog, which featured multiple authors, I launched Free Keene nine years ago, on December 27th, 2006. At that time, there was exciting civil disobedience and street theatre being performed here in Keene by early Free State Project movers. I wanted there to be a place for area activists to post news, media, and opinion about the fun things happening here.

Prior to this blog, there was already the “Keene Free Press” newspaper edited and distributed by civil disobedience superactivists Russell and Kat Kanning. I moved in 2006 as part of the FSP and brought my nationally syndicated talk radio show, “Free Talk Live“, with me. When Free Keene launched at the end of 2006, liberty media in Keene continued to grow. The first post to the Free Keene blog was the premiere episode of “Free Minds TV“, a show hosted by area natives and produced by several Free State Project early movers.

Various new media efforts and Free Keene blog personalities followed, including several whose personal journeys led them out of New Hampshire eventually, as well as a couple who publicly resigned. Keene in many ways has become an activist Mecca, with some bloggers cutting their teeth here and moving on to other parts of the Shire, like JJ Schlessinger. JJ founded and produced Free Keene TV, which eventually became Shire TV, and now he’s a video professional in Manchester.

The Free Keene blog has become a go-to source for original NH news reporting, in addition to its traditional role of promoting activist media and opinion. Free Keene has long been a Google News source and has been responsible for breaking news (scooping other media) as well as providing video footage for mainstream media reports across New Hampshire. Our site has been privately thanked by multiple mainstream media members for providing them with content.

Free Keene‘s scope has also widened over the years, from originally focusing on Keene-area activism and news to Shire-wide reporting. Free Keene’s bloggers are physically distributed across the southern tier of New Hampshire, including Keene, Manchester, and the Seacoast, and we’ll certainly report on liberty activism and news-of-interest across the Shire.

Feel like taking a trip back in time? Click the archives pulldown menu in the right column of the site to jump back to any month of the past near-decade of coverage here. Or, literally go back in time via Archive.org and experience the site’s previous appearances along with the content of that time. If nothing else, Free Keene is one of the most expansive archives of the history of liberty activism and media across New Hampshire. Now with nearly 4,700 posts, that’s an average of 1.43 posts per day! We’ll keep the content coming.

Thanks for watching and reading over the years. It’s been fun covering a fraction of the activism of Free State Project early movers and NH natives here at Free Keene, and things should get even more interesting once the FSP move is officially triggered when they reach 20,000 signers sometime in 2016! Stay tuned here to Free Keene for the latest.