On Thursday evening, a very large crowd turned out to speak to the city council’s FOP committee on a proposed resolution to make Keene a “sanctuary city”. I’m happy to say that not a single police state xenophobe spoke during the hearing. Every speaker was pro-immigrant. Here’s video of the entire hearing:
Earlier this year, Cheshire County Sheriff Eli Rivera made headlines by announcing his policy to not assist the federal government with immigration enforcement activities targeting peaceful migrants. That made Cheshire county into NH’s only “sanctuary county”.
The resolution is well-intended and everyone in the packed council chambers supported it, but it doesn’t go far enough. First, it allows for Keene police to assist the federal immigration enforcement if they merely have a warrant, which aren’t hard for police to get with rubber-stamp courts. Second, the city’s new manager, Elizabeth Dragon, is claiming the city government can’t tell police what to do, per some state statute. That’s not exactly the whole truth, since the council is able to pass certain ordinances that the police are directed to enforce. While they may not legally be able to tell a police chief what not to enforce, they certainly have the ability to have the city manager fire anti-immigrant police, don’t they? Perhaps there are union protections in place to make that difficult, I don’t know.
MALIC Center Imam Will Coley Speaks to the Committee
According to the Keene Sentinel, new Keene police chief Steven Russo has not specifically commented on the resolution’s proposals, though the group behind the proposal, KIRP, has said they’ve had a positive meeting with him.
At Thursday evening’s FOP meeting, after 100% support from the speakers there and many rounds of applause for those who spoke, the councilors on the committee voted 5-0 to give more time to the issue, specifically asking city staff to meet with KIRP and finalize the language of the proposed resolution.
I’m happy to announce that in the last two weeks not only did we exceed the goal, but also the total number of contributors increased over 40% to over 130. The repairs and upgrades of the house in question that will become the Masjid al Latiff and Interfaith Community Center are ongoing and being covered by both the Shire Free Church and the MALIC Center together. Due to the additional work required, Will has bumped up the goal of his fundraiser to $15,000. While he’ll certainly accept donations in US Dollars, he’s hoping to finish out the fundraiser with cryptocurrencies and become the first mosque in the world to open with half their budget consisting of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Based on our research, it may be the first publicly known bitcoin-accepting mosque in the world. If you know of another, please post in the comments.
Keene’s Bitcoin Community is Front Page News!
“We don’t want to feed the war machine in any way” – Will Coley
Will explained in an interview for Free Keene, that as a peace-oriented religion, using bitcoin is a great way to avoid feeding the violent federal government, since cryptocurrencies decentralize the power of money into the people’s hands. Current bitcoin donations to the fundraiser have gone towards electronics purchases for running live video from the mosque. Soon, bitcoin will be spent on contractors for upcoming improvements to the property. Will describes Keene as a “bitcoin community” and says that he loves how easy it is to spend bitcoin in Keene. (Keene is the as-yet-undisputed number one city in the world for bitcoin-accepting businesses per capita.)
Thus far in the fundraiser Will has received over one bitcoin and some DASH and ether, totaling around $5,000 in cryptocurrencies. Should you wish to give, the bitcoin donation address is 14eFNWDcAhNeT4HPwd7ps2CcAAz7u68ABP
Stay tuned here to Free Keene for more on the MALIC Center’s upcoming launch. There’s no date set at the moment.
After the screening, we gave away one of the few existing DJVCS movie posters to a lucky attendee and then director and star of the movie, Derrick J Freeman and I took a bunch of questions from the audience. We reflected on the last five years, where we are now, and looked to the future of the exciting, growing New Hampshire Freedom Migration.
What a pleasure and an honor it has been to executive produce this movie, working with the amazing talents of Derrick J Freeman and editing pro Beau Davis. I’m especially grateful to all the people who love and share Victimless Crime Spree with their friends and family. The pro-freedom message and spirit of the movie is infectious and fun, despite its ultimately sad ending. It’s an important documentary, and the first to come out of the community of libertarian migrants to the Shire. (In case you haven’t seen it, the second such documentary, also edited by Beau Davis, is “101 Reasons Liberty Lives in New Hampshire“.)
Interesting things are brewing at the Ridley Report! In a recent video, Dave Ridley explains that he’s hired Free Keene blogger Garret Ean to target the NH state house in Concord with ambush interviews!
Ridley’s hiring of Garret marks a first, major expansion to the Ridley Report brand. I’m looking forward to seeing what the video activist duo does next!
