Brodie Deshaies at the hearing looking guilty while Carla Gericke calls him out for using scare tactics
Representative Brodie Deshaies from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire testified in front of the State-Federal Relations and Veteran Affairs Committee on January 20, 2022 concerning CACR 32. The legislation seeks to let the people of New Hampshire vote to amend the Constitution and become an independent nation, breaking ties with DC. He was the legislator asked by the committee chairman to do the bulk of the research before the hearing.
Looking closely at all the claims Deshaies made about the legality of this bill and the implications concerning lawmakers voting to recommend that the House pass it, it is hard to decide if he is ignorant and easily swayed by empire-loving “constitutional scholars” from DC or if he gave a speech full of lies to sway the vote. He used fear-mongering language directed at the committee, implying that they may be charged by Washington DC if they vote ‘Ought To Pass’ and supported the bill through the legal process. This article is a close-up look at his claims and will look at all the material he references to see if he is really making a constitutional argument against CACR 32.
Deshaies starts off with an acknowledgment of how the public perceives him. “There are some people who are pretty upset with me in the room,” he says. This is already very indicative of his character. He sent Elliot “Alu” Axelman (the editor-in-chief of LibertyBlock.com and the author of multiple books on secession) an email full of misinterpretations of the US and New Hampshire Constitutions a few weeks ago. When Alxelman politely asked if he wished to engage in a public debate on the topic, Deshaies cowered and declined. Without the opportunity to debate Deshaies, and with no legislator agreeing to debate him, Alu published his rebuttal to Deshaies’ anti-independence letter on his website. The article destroys the few arguments that the anti-freedom legislator sought to make in his letter. Instead, Deshaies went on to publish the exact same letter in an op-ed article on NHJournal.com. So, now we know he knows how people feel about his twisting of the facts, but he just goes on to ignore the people and doubles down on his way of thinking. We see from this very first sentence that he isn’t the sort of person who feels he should be in office doing what the people of New Hampshire want. He feels he’s in office to rule over the citizens of New Hampshire with an iron fist.
He goes on to say that after speaking to many “constitutional scholars” such as David Williams, author of “The Mythic Meanings of the Second Amendment”, that he believes this committee was engaged in a “constitutional process” by voting Ought to Pass or Inexpedient to Legislate. Which means every vote cast is “aiding in the constitutional process,” and “approving it at each time along the way”.
Deshaies claims, “Every vote cast has a constitutional ramification judging by amendment fourteen of the US Constitution, section three. Some scholars would argue that this is rebelling, even if it’s peaceful. This very well could be an argument where voting for this, aiding and abetting in that process could very well be unconstitutional.”
So, there it is, folks. Deshaies spoke to a man who wrote a book arguing that the second amendment doesn’t really give all Americans the right to bear arms for advice on what the Constitution says. Then, he came up with a clever way to subtly scare the other members of the committee out of voting Ought to Pass on this bill. He used a mildly veiled threat of ‘insurrection’ and ‘rebellion’ to convince everyone on the committee to vote 21-0 against recommending the bill to be passed. Even the two committee members who told Axelman that they would support the legislation ultimately caved to the fear and voted to kill it. (more…)
HB 1349 is a bill that would decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms sponsored by Amherst Representative Tony Labranche. The bill had its first hearing in the Criminal Justice committee on January 11th, but while all the other bills heard that day got voted on, HB 1349 had a new hearing date scheduled. That means you have another chance to go and show your support for the bill on Thursday, January 20, 2022 in the Legislative Office Building in Concord at 9am. Alternatively, if you can’t make it you can email the committee and tell them to vote Ought To Pass.
The bill is very interesting because it is modeled word for word after the bill that decriminalized marijuana in New Hampshire. What argument does a member of this committee have against this bill? Psilocybin mushrooms are even safer for people and society than marijuana, according to Dr. David Nutt, former chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the UK.
I spoke at the hearing on January 11th and so did 4 others. The only person who spoke against this bill was a police lieutenant. How typical. The only person who didn’t want to see Granite Staters gain more freedom was a person who personally profits from the war on drugs.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court already decided that psilocybin use was constitutionally protected if you’re using it for religious practice or to worship god. My spiritual beliefs include worshiping the god in myself by allowing myself the ability to ascend beyond what and who I am now. Psilocybin is a great tool to do that and more people experiencing this medicine would help heal our community which is in part damaged by the war on drugs.
The former Pope Indigent of The Church of the Invisible Hand, Nobody, is still in jail. He has been meeting other prisoners, listening to their stories and proselytizing while locked up. He started a newsletter called “Spank”, and has been gathering addresses of people both in and out of jail. I, Bonnie, Peace Nun of the Shire Free Church and one of the Priestesses of the Church of the Invisible Hand, have taken on the role of typing up some things he has written in jail and getting them out to subscribers of Spank. Here is the introduction that will be in every newsletter.
Welcome to “Spank”, the newsletter of the Church of the Invisible Hand’s Prison Outreach Ministry.
Here, we will discuss the spirituality and beliefs of the Church, the sources that inspire it, the ideas that inform it, (both as a whole and in individual practice,) and the practices, both universal and individual, by which we express our beliefs and exercise our faith in them.
As we enter into the long predicted Tribulations and the time of Persecutions of our faith, we beg of our newer Brothers and Sisters to views us with an open mind. Our ideas may seem foreign to you. Our ways may seem strange. But if you study them, we believe you will find, as we have, a faith that works for us, both in theory and in practice. We ask nothing of you but your time and thoughts. If our ways are not for you, we will gladly refund your misery.
The Church is, like Discordianism, an open-source religion. If you agree with us for the most part, but find some of our beliefs unacceptable to you, we invite you to discard those parts of our faith that do not work for you and replace them with others that do. There are a few parts of our faith which cannot be changed without rendering your brand of religion alien to, and irreconcilable with ours. If you believe that you have the right to force your ways on unconsenting others, then your ways are not ours. Please reconsider, and if you cannot, go from us in peace. We advise you not to try to impose your ways on us, or on those we love. If you can do even this, you can live in peace with us. If you believe that races are superior to, or inferior to other races, then we have no time for you. There is one race; the human race. All else is nonsense. We will council you if you wish to hear us, but we will never recognize you as being of our faith until you recant this nonsense. Claim no connection to the Church, we excommunicate you.
The invisible hand of Nature, and its antithesis, the Visible Boot of Government, are not entities or deities in the classical sense. They are more similar to the yin and yang of Taoism. Masculine and feminine, light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil. If you feel your understanding of the Tao is so good that you may force it on others, you have no understanding of the Tao. The way which can be spoken is not the true way. The course which can be forced is not the true course.
If you know anyone who you think would enjoy our newsletter, please send us their name and address at the return address included. Soon, we hope to be able to include business reply postcards, but these things take time, and we are but an egg. Or, perhaps, a clutch. Conversely, if you wish to cancel your subscription, just let us know, or pass future copies on to others. If you want our words to be heard by others, send us money and help us amplify, market and promote our message. Five bucks a month will pay for printing and mailing for many.
We look forward to meeting you and knowing you, as we trudge the road to happy destiny. Until then, we leave you with the traditional Blessing of our People: May the Visible Boot of the Government kick not in thy Door, nor thy Teeth, nor Stomp Upon thy Face. Ramen.
If you’re interested in getting on the mailing list, email a mailing address or email to bonnie@freetalklive.com. Or send mail to Nobody at:
Chris in Simpler Times, Acting as Security for the Hallowkeene Dance Party in 2014.
Today a jury at Federal district church in Concord, NH returned two guilty verdicts for “Crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell. He’s facing up to 20 years in prison for felony interstate extortion and threat charges for telling another despicable Nazi over the Telegram chat app that Cantwell was going to fuck his wife in front of their children if the “victim” didn’t cough up information about another white supremacist. No doubt, it’s easy to hate Christopher Cantwell. He himself is a hater. He judges and hates other people for the color of their skin, their belief systems, among other things. He also hates himself. Cantwell is aware of his various faults and failures and he despises himself, punishing himself with drug abuse and distracting himself by hating others. How do I know this about him?
I know Cantwell – I don’t know whether he’d admit it, but I’m basically his minister. I try to minister a message of peace to a man whose name literally speaks to who he is – a man who Can’t-be-Well. He and I have spent countless hours together prior to and since him becoming a racist and Nazi. I have chronicled his story here on this blog from as far back as his early days. Before becoming a racist, he was a controversial cop-hating libertarian comedian that escaped from New York to move here to Keene, New Hampshire.
At one point, Chris admitted that his formula in life for financial success was the more people hated him, the more money he made. At another time, he publicly stated that Christopher Cantwell was a “character”. I’m not sure where the real Chris was in relation to the “character” of Cantwell, but I do know his fall has been tragic and also entirely preventable. The government gang deserves plenty of blame as well, and I’ll get to that, but for now let’s focus on three of Cantwell’s biggest mistakes:
1. Racism is stupid and inhumane. – When Cantwell was a libertarian, he would have judged people by their individual actions and character rather than by their circumstances of birth. Sadly, around 2015 Cantwell started to become a racist as he was following an apparently similar arc by one of his prime influencers, Stefan Molyneux. Cantwell likely believed that he’d be so hated if he became a racist that he’d make way more money than being a less-hated libertarian comedian. He dove in deep to racism, destroying a ton of productive relationships. For instance, I fired him from my radio show, Free Talk Live. Cantwell had been one of our best hosts, before his fall to racism – he was really entertaining on-air. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after he became a racist until Cantwell completely abandoned any semblance of libertarian thought and totally embraced statism. This turn towards statism also left him with the delusional belief that the police could be a helpful tool.
2. Don’t talk to the police! – When he moved here as a cop-hating, crass libertarian comedian, Cantwell was likely being watched by the FBI for his public statements that skirted the line of advocating violence against the police. After he moved back to Keene in 2015, he had an encounter in downtown Keene which altered his views about the police. In the encounter, KPD officers didn’t shoot Cantwell who had drawn his gun to defend a young woman from an attack by a drunken man. While it was good for Cantwell to stop hating and collectivizing the humans behind the inhumane role of “law enforcement officer”, it went bad for him because he went too far and actually started to embrace and trust the police. When he became a racist, he saw them as his future ally and tool of force to use to create his fantasy white paradise.
First they came for the racist assholes…
So, he started talking to them regularly, from a local KPD sergeant to FBI agents including Phil Christiana, the longtime investigator of various libertarian activists in Keene. Ultimately, Cantwell’s habit of chatting with cops led to him being charged and convicted as a political prisoner. Based on testimony I witnessed during a federal bail hearing and further testimony at trial – which was covered in detail by Hilary Sargent – it’s clear Cantwell sunk his own case. First, by admitting to the FBI that he was the person behind the account-in-question on Telegram and then further by using the term “threat” to describe the obviously hyperbolic chat in an email to his “friend” at Keene Police. Without claiming the account in his talks with the FBI, there may have been no way to prove it was Cantwell behind the account. As one agent admitted under oath at the bail hearing, Telegram is not operating servers in the United States and the agents can’t subpoena them for information like IP addresses for its users. Cantwell’s own admissions to police likely were factors that sealed his fate in this case. Speaking to police is a grave danger to your freedom.
3. Don’t make haters your hobby. Ignore them as best you can. – With publicity comes haters, it’s just part of life. Per his life plan, Cantwell relished every opportunity to engage his haters in the hopes they would hate him even more, and spread his product around. At one time his product was a libertarian radio show and various blog posts. He had his haters in his libertarian days, but it wasn’t until after he became a racist that he met haters willing to sink even lower than Cantwell himself. Always a divisive figure, but intelligent and well-spoken, Cantwell quickly rose to prominence in the white nationalist community. True to his form, he got into internet conflict with various racist people and groups including the “Bowl Patrol”, a group of Nazis that were even more detestable in their opinions than Cantwell, if that’s possible. The group took its name from the haircut of Dylan Roof, the mass murderer at a church in South Carolina some years ago. Originally Cantwell fans, their honeymoon with Cantwell ended and they turned on each other. Bowl Patrol raided Cantwell’s phone lines incessantly with awful prank calls during his online radio show, among other online targetings. The point is, Cantwell became obsessed with them, trying to identify who the members were and spending time telling the police all about his issues with them. At one point Cantwell even called Child Protective Services on “CheddarMane” aka Benjamin Lambert, the supposed “victim” in the case in which Cantwell was convicted today. Had Cantwell just ignored and blocked the haters rather than engage them, none of this would ever have happened. (more…)
We figure you were about sixteen-and-a-half when you passed away on Monday. I don’t need to tell you about the immense number of people whose lives you touched over those years. You were there and you had that experience, conscious for every moment, until your final day. What you may not know, is the impact you had on the world – because you were good. I wanted to tell you why you were so special.
Did you know we may never have met if it weren’t for the sad death of a puppy? My partner Jackie and I adopted a very young Pit Bull mix puppy from the Humane Society in Florida, where you’re from as well. She was only a couple of weeks old and surely she’d have been as sweet as you, as being a Pit Bull doesn’t mean she’d have been a bad dog. But tragically she died within a couple of weeks. Turns out her whole litter was missing organs, purportedly due to inbreeding, and she was the last of them to die. It was sad, but that door closing quickly led to you being brought into my life.
I’m not a dog expert. Maybe some dogs are really born bad, but I’d be willing to be that a bad dog is usually thanks to a bad owner. Not necessarily that the owner is purposefully abusive, but perhaps just ignorant, not realizing the consequences their actions or inaction might have on their dog. Perhaps they also underestimate animal intelligence. I always presumed you understood me and that you were smart. You never disappointed me.
Photo from September 2004 – you were about six months old.
When I got you in 2004 I did some research into dog training methods. I came across the “no free lunch” method and it felt right. Dogs need to be in a hierarchy – they are a pack animal. The “no free lunch” method is all about establishing the dog’s position as beneath the humans and rewarding it with love for its good behavior. Unlike independent-minded humans, a dog needs to be able to find its place and be comfortable there. In your case, you were directly beneath humans and on top of the pack of dogs, ever the alpha.
“No Free Lunch” is simple and effective. Anytime you wanted something, you had to give me something first. When you sat, I said “good sit”, and praised you. I gave you love and attention – not food, as some do when attempting to train their dog. So, any opportunity I had, I’d employ “no free lunch”. If you wanted to go outside, I’d ask you to sit first. Same thing when we’d come back inside the house. If we were playing with a toy or something, I might ask you to sit before giving it back to you. We quickly expanded to a multitude of things you could do in order to get what you wanted.
I figured you were smart, so anything you did that I named with “good” in front of it, I presumed you remembered the word and its associated act the very first time I spoke it. I don’t think you ever disappointed that expectation. Of course, just because I said “no free lunch” is simple doesn’t mean its always easy. You definitely pushed the envelope to see what you could get away with. You’d act like you didn’t know what I’d said, doing the wrong thing, on purpose. I remember the times when I’d already successfully taught you several commands and you’d run through your whole inventory of tricks – EXCEPT the one I asked you to do, expecting I was going to give you what you wanted. You were frequently testing me. Training a dog with the “no free lunch” method, in my experience, requires significant discipline on the part of the trainer. You were trying to beat me at the game and I had to hold firm on not giving you the thing you wanted, no matter how adorable you were.
Eventually, you were performing multiple tricks on command in order to do special things, like receive a meal. You could sit, stand, roll over, wait, come, lay down, roll over, bow, give kisses, speak, shake right, shake left, look, back up, and probably some more I don’t recall off the top of my head. At some point, you realized that you were well fed and you weren’t going to run out of food, so we moved to an open bowl where we just kept adding to it daily and you decided how much to eat and when.
Renee Spinella and Jazzy on the UCC Rainbow Bench!
You were indeed quite beautiful. You regularly received compliments from total strangers who frequently commented that you had an unusually expressive face and raved about how pretty you were. You had collected a large number of fans including neighbors, libertarian activists, people in the area lucky enough to encounter you, and even people on the internet who watched you on the Free Talk Live Jazzycam during our nightly radio shows. You mostly slept through the shows, but hey, talk radio’s not for everyone. Free Keene blogger Garret Ean even named you Keene’s #1 Dog Activist and you deserved it. You were regularly my secret weapon to get hundreds of Keene State College students every year to accept CopBlock know-your-rights flyers. You participated in and helped bring attention the United Church of Christ’s rainbow bench situation, were a regular attendee of the Porcupine Freedom Festival and Forkfest, the official greeter at Keenevention, and of course were at my side through countless instances of freedom activism and beyond.
Even more impressive was that bulk of your amazing activism & outreach career came in your senior years, since you didn’t move back in with me until you were 10. When Jackie and I broke up in 2006, after being with you and training you for those first two years, I chose to let you go. They say if you love something, let it go. I love you and I loved her, and I’d always rather a breakup go as smoothly as as possible, so I made the choice to let Jackie have you. As it turned out, she was unable to take care of you immediately, so we got to spend another six months together, until Jackie was finally ready, then I sadly gave you to her. That happened to be right around the time when I moved to New Hampshire as part of the NH Freedom Migration. (more…)
Chris in Simpler Times, Acting as Security for the Hallowkeene Dance Party in 2014.
While Christopher Cantwell still looks like himself on the outside, his beliefs have completely changed in the last few years and become even worse than they previously were. Tuesday night, Johnson Rice, Aria DiMezzo and I had Chris in the LRN.FM studio for a special internet-only, in-depth conversation that exclusively aired on the LRN.FM Twitch channel. If you can stomach the watch, it’s fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way.
In my last article about him, written shortly after his arrest in Charlottesville at a white nationalist hate rally, I explained that despite Chris’ libertarian activism being covered by this blog in the past, he had never been a blogger at Free Keene, nor was he ever invited to be. When he came to Keene in the early part of this decade, he was just crass libertarian comedian Chris Cantwell from Long Island. He wasn’t a racist, but still caused much controversy for his hatred for the police.
Today, Chris has embraced the police as his potential tool of oppression, even though they recently threw him into a jail cell for months in Virginia. As he revealed in our conversation Tuesday night, he literally wants to become the state. Shortly after 2 hours, 22 minutes in he actually says he wants to force his beliefs on others, and then moments later says, “I want to be the government, yeah.”
His dramatic shift to statism isn’t a first for the Free State Project libertarian migration, which was the original reason Chris chose to move to New Hampshire. Early mover to Manchester Amanda Bouldin went from being an anarchist to a hostile-to-libertarians leftist. Conversely, Chris has gone from being an anarchist to a actual NAZI. There’s not a shred of a libertarian left in him. Libertarians, voluntarists, and liberty-loving anarchists believe people should be judged as individuals, by their words and actions. Chris is obsessed with race and admits in the conversation that it’s lazy to judge people based on the group into which they are born, but nonetheless runs with the idea anyway, as he considers the laziness of racism to be an efficient filter for his ideal society.
Previously a libertarian against the war on drugs, he’s now for prohibition.
Further, Chris actually seems to believe he has some chance of becoming the state, by leading some kind of white nationalist takeover of the government. About the only thing we agree on is his support of secession. Politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows. Of course if NH were ever to secede, we’d be at odds again as I support open borders and he supports a closed-border police state.
The conversation we had on the Twitch-only show (though I’ve since exported it to Youtube here) had some particularly bizarre moments including Chris holding the confusing position of having used cannabis while supporting continuing prohibition against it. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth by acknowledging the benefits of harm reduction and decriminalization but refusing to advocate for policy changes in that direction. It’s a perplexing perspective. Despite his own personal knowledge of the ineffectiveness of prohibition and the various studies proving it is an abject failure that creates the opposite of its intended results, he rejects all that on the near-religious belief that outlawing something reduces its use. It’s a belief wholly at odds with how he used to think on the issue.
At one point in the conversation he actually refers to himself as a caricature. What does he really believe? Outside of another total personality shift to a communist, that which he currently hates, or perhaps maybe going transgender, it’s hard to imagine where Chris will go from here.
Speaking of transgender, Chris also had a segment with the Anarchist Shemale, Aria DiMezzo. Aria wrote about it on her blog, and was disappointed she didn’t get more time on-air to fight with Chris. I’d invited her there with the expectation that Johnson wasn’t going to stay through the whole show and that Aria could take his chair later. Turns out, Johnson stayed the whole time. She was also upset that we didn’t go toe-to-toe with Chris on trans issues, which I honestly know next-to-nothing about.
Only advocates of peace are allowed to blog at FreeKeene.com
Others, Aria included, wanted to see more challenges from Johnson and I, and were upset that I laughed at Chris’ sick jokes. I’m the first to admit, I laugh at inappropriate things and I’ve always enjoyed Chris’ sense of humor. But Johnson and I definitely challenged his racist and insane statist beliefs. People will hear what they want to hear, of course, and people are highly emotional when it comes to Chris. They give him way more power and weight than he actually has. Some say we shouldn’t give him a platform, but then widely share the very video they say we shouldn’t have made.
Others, like me, can see the value in giving enough rope to Chris to verbally hang himself. We don’t think that bad ideas should be shut down, but instead they ought to be countered publicly. The answer to ugly speech is more speech, not de-platforming or censorship. If you don’t think I was the best person to counter Chris’ ideas, that’s fine. If you hate me because I’m kind to Chris, that’s fine too. Hate only hurts the hater. That’s ultimately the true irony here, that hating Chris only makes you more like him.
Chris has become what he once hated – an arch statist. He has rejected the libertarian principle of non-aggression and instead embraced coercive, institutionalized violence as his tool. Of course, violence begets violence and he will reap as he sows.
Though Chris is certainly responsible for his horrible beliefs, he’s ultimately a creation of a society that has long embraced the aggression of government as a tool to control their neighbor. If you hate Chris but you support the coercive state, you ought to look in the mirror. People cover their support for state violence by believing in nonsense like the “social contract” and refusing to see the threats of violence that back all government programs. They hold conflicting positions, like supporting the state while believing they themselves support peace. To his credit, at least Chris is honest about his reasons for supporting the state. He knows it’s a tool for the violent to control others and is eager to use it for his purposes. If you support the state, you helped make Chris into a monster.
