The Shire Free Church recently received notice from a debt collector claiming we owed the “City of Keene” $60 for an unpaid parking ticket. I knew this could not be the case since I challenge every ticket on behalf of the Church and demand a trial and every time – these days – they drop the charge rather than go to court over a $10 ticket.
It’s a validation of the activist approach of challenging all tickets. Be such a burden to the system that they have to drop your charges. If only more people would do this, then more charges would be dropped! If you’re in New Hampshire and you receive a ticket for anything at all, try demanding your trial and see what happens!
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Subsequent gatherings at Sununu’s during January were left alone by police, but then on Sunday the 31st peaceful protestors were once again targeted by a phalanx of state police and local cops.
When we arrived around 2pm, there were already a bunch of police cruisers and probably at least a dozen visible masked cops around Sununu’s house. After some speaking and sign-holding, we began to sing COVID Carols. During the second song, several more state police cruisers arrived with a bunch of yellow-jacketed goons complete with zip ties.
They started walking towards us in a line as we continued our songs – the lyrics to which you can download at covid.freekeene.com. The armed thugs then stopped advancing and went back, perhaps aware that arresting people for singing might not look good on video.
After we finished, Nobody and I started to pack up to leave as Frank “Footloose” Sparks from Absolute Defiance approached the police again, demanding he be given a ticket for “picketing”. The police chief from Newfields indicated that he did indeed have a ticket for Footloose, but no one else. The armed man then threatened Footloose with kidnapping if he raised his voice – something Footloose is known to do as a normal state of talking. Then, they arrested him for asking a masked plainclothes state police agent to identify himself. The charge? Cops’ favorite catch-all for peaceful activists they don’t like: “Disorderly Conduct”. Here’s video of the event, which includes the arrest scene:
Footloose was taken to Newmarket PD and released on personal recognizance. His arraignment on the “disorderly” charge is Feb 25th, 8am at Exeter District Court in Brentwood, NH. Sununu continues to hide and run his gang in secret.
Libertarian NH Boogaloo Boys Demonstrate Outside NH State House
American mainstream news media has been reporting this weekend on the massive buildups of armed government goons at state houses across the United States. Expecting massive armed demonstrations of Boogaloo supporters, some of the state gangs locked down their capitol areas completely while others, like New Hampshire, took it easy and only had state troopers parked around and walking the state house property in pairs. By comparison, the New York Times said Massachusetts’ capitol had hundreds of officers wearing helmets and carrying batons.
However, around the country, barely anyone showed up. Some liberty activists said they wouldn’t attend because they believed the events were federal honeypots designed to gather information about freedom-lovers. Others foolishly believed that exercising their right to bear arms would mean their rights would be more likely taken from them. Luckily, in New Hampshire, five Boogaloo Boys showed up with rifles front slung. They were well-spoken and self-described as Libertarian, with one even talking about the Non Aggression Principle to the large number of reporters that were present.
One Boogalooer even educated the media people on gun safety and basics, with the photographers crazily shooting pictures when the Boogaloo Boy showed a magazine loaded with bullets. The news media was informed on the history of the Boogaloo – the name is based on the Eighties breakdancing movie “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, with the members describing their group as a real-life meme. They also explained the origin of their Hawaiian shirt dress code, which came about after social media sites started to crack down on any groups referencing Boogaloo. The social media crackdown on the term forced them to use code words that were similar, like “Big Igloo” or “Big Luau”, which naturally led to the shirts.
Back in mid-December I’d attended the final “stop the steal” rally in Concord to do some secssion outreach. The series of rallies by this time had basically died off, so Concord police decided to show up for the first time ever and targeted the lone man with a rifle. According to the muffled cop, someone – probably from Massachusetts – had called in a report of the man, who was entirely within his rights to bear arms in New Hampshire and the two masked agents of the state responded.
After asking if he could get down from the bench on which he was standing, the man refused their invitation to talk and after confirming he was not being arrested, turned around and wisely ignored the uniformed gang members. Meanwhile I began peppering the lead agent with questions and then Nobody started in as well. Within a minute, they take off. That’s what you call a Cop Block!
With Forums, Chat, and Social Media, Shire Society Shields Users from Big Tech
More than a decade ago, Facebook was still growing into the social media behemoth they are today. If you were around back then, you remember when it was actually useful for reaching friends across the world and keeping-in-touch.
There was a time, for instance, when you could create an event on Facebook and click an “invite all” box to invite all your friends to the event. Super handy! Every friend received an invite in their inbox and could make the choice to attend or not. The previous activist method of organizing – forums – did not have this calendar event feature, and understandably the activists migrated to Facebook as it seemed more useful for making things happen.
That was the first clue that things were not going in a good direction. At the time, you could still download a third-party browser plugin that brought the invite-all option back, but eventually Facebook changed their code so the plugin no longer worked. That was the end of easily being able to organize events on Facebook.
You’re leaving now, right?
Later, Facebook made it so you had to pay them if you wanted all your followers to see your posts. In more recent years we’ve seen anti-state events being taken down entirely and in recent days blanket bans applied to people with certain political views.
With record numbers of people leaving megacorporate state-worshiping sites like Facebook and Twitter for less-big-but-still-centralized communications platforms like Signal and Telegram, it’s finally cool to get off “Big Tech”.
Naturally, your friendly freedom-loving activists here at Free Keene have been encouraging this for more than a decade. It started when we launched the Shire Forum over a decade back. Originally the Free Keene Forum, it transitioned to become the Shire Society Forums after the Shire Society was formed in 2010. As one of the forum’s founders, I never cared for Facebook’s groups and wanted to keep forums alive as they were independents, self-hosted and open source.
Eventually the Shire Society Forums expanded to include other things like cryptocurrency discussion and non-Shire NH activism and media threads, so it was renamed simply “Shire Forum“. For the last few years it’s been running some super-modern forum software called Discourse. If you are a liberty-minded person considering a move to New Hampshire or already living here and you haven’t been on forums in many years – or ever – give the Shire Forum a try.
Join at Matrix.LRN.FM
Keene-area liberty activists have also been on the Telegram platform for chatting for most of the last decade. It’s long been the top-of-class of all centralized chat platforms on the planet. Slick, easy-to-use and great for group chats. However, while the source code for their clients is open-source, it’s not decentralized and so several years back we evaluated the Matrix – a decentralized, federated chat server system – and put its main client, then called “Riot” through the paces. It was good, but not great, and not easy-to-use like Telegram was. After about a year of trying it out, most of us gave up.
However, in 2020 we launched our own Matrix server after the centrally-hosted Discord corporation unceremoniously booted the LRN.FM chat server from its centrally managed platform. We knew it was coming and I’d heard that Matrix had a new client out called “Element” and that it was way better than its original “Riot”, so we launched our own Matrix server at Matrix.LRN.FM. It has been great, and the increase in freedom is palpable. No corporate masters are holding an axe over our heads.
Matrix is open source, self-hosted, and federated, which means that all of the Matrix servers on the planet are by default connected together, so users from one Matrix server can reach the rest of the planet’s Matrix users on other servers. Unless, a server admin disfederates, or blocks another server for whatever reason. Matrix is way more decentralized than Big Tech monsters like Discord. Technically, Matrix is polycentric – with many centers. If you don’t like one Matrix server, you can join another, or start your own. Element is indeed way better than Riot. If you want to try freer chat, join the LRN.FM Matrix server where you can join existing rooms or create and moderate your own, private or public. All freedom lovers are welcome, not just NH people.
Join the “FTL Social” Mastodon
The decentralizing liberty activist communications story doesn’t end there, however. Just this week we also launched our own federated, self-hosted social media platform called “FTL Social“. It’s running the open source Mastodon software which is also federated and polycentric, like Matrix. It’s open to voluntarists, liberty-loving anarchists, and libertarians from around the world who are looking for a place where their posts won’t be subject to the whims of statist Big Tech admins and their snitch users. Please join at social.freetalklive.com and check it out. It’s a killer replacement for Twitter and works great.
Don’t forget one of the most important decentralized change we’ve seen in our lifetimes – cryptocurrency! If you want to contribute to these projects I’ve listed here, please use the cryptocurrency addresses you can see in the right column here at Free Keene. Longtime readers here already know that crypto is the killer decentralized solution for money and can’t be shut down by greedy, evil politicians.
Last, but not least is LBRY. It’s the decentralized blockchain-based media protocol that has been hosting Free Keene’s videos since 2018. They recently launched a cool new video site called Odysee that has seen a big jump in activity in the last week. LBRY is based in Manchester and run by liberty activists.
I hope this article gave you some ideas about better options to protect your communications from the tech giants who hate freedom. See you in the decentralized, open source, polycentric fediverse!
Carl Watner, longtime proponent of voluntaryism, has passed away. He was 72 years young. He will be missed. And his efforts will live on through those of us seeking complete liberty.
an American author and historian of libertarian studies, and a voluntaryist. He has written articles for Reason magazine, the Libertarian Forum, Mises Institute and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Although use of the label “voluntaryist” waned after the death of Auberon Herbert in 1906, its use was renewed in 1982, when George H. Smith, Wendy McElroy, and Carl Watner began publishing The Voluntaryist magazine.
That newsletter, The Voluntaryist, was published continuously since October 1982. For almost four decades Watner, a family man who ran a business in South Carolina, made time to share ideas he believed would foster human flourishing. He also wrote and edited a bevy of books, and is credited with tracking-down and making again accessible the seminal essay by Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes.
Watner excelled at communicating a clear, consistent, strike-the-root message. Indeed, in no uncertain terms, Wendy McElroy wrote on her blog that Watner “was the primary hand in founding the modern Voluntaryist movement in the early 1980s.” She continues:
Carl Watner, longtime proponent of voluntaryism, has passed away. He was 72 years young. He will be missed. And his efforts will live on through those of us seeking complete liberty.
