Citation Needed - The Free Town Project

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

The Free Town Project was a project that sought to move to a very small town and advocate for legal changes there. Two towns were involved: Grafton, New Hampshire and Mentone, Texas. It was active in Grafton from 2004 to sometime in 2016.[58] Grafton's appeal as a favorable destination was due to its absence of zoning laws and a very low property tax rate.[59] Additionally, John Babiarz lived there already, and had an unsuccessful run for Governor of New Hampshire under the Libertarian Party.[60]

I'm just asking if Bucky's arm is used during sex, is it warm or cool? No one wonders the things that you do. Everyone wonders the things that I do. They're just afraid. Save them. No, no they don't. Then why? What is happening? Well, it's got to be Iua.

No, I was part of the pop culture reference thing at the beginning. But the fuck, hey, how the hell is this me? It's supposed to be somebody. Howdy, fellas! Oh, Jesus Christ. Wow! Come on! See, so sit on clothes.

Please. I do have clothes on. Oh, those tiny shorts are the color of your body here. I missed that. I did. Oh, right. Okay, so what's with the dance music and- And why are you in hot pants?

Well, today's that's things about libertarian bears and while I definitely lean a lot more to laugh than that, I was the Harry and Sky on the cast. So I figured it was just the topic is not that kind of bear. It's not? No. You naturally have a crop circle of hair on your chest. I'm sorry. It's just so yeah It looks like the doomsday clock with the hand at four minutes to midnight. Oh, that is I don't like to read into it that much guys But if it's not about those kind of bears, I don't own a football uniform. The best thing happens like a cup of jersey It's about just regular wild bears. Oh

Okay, my bed. Well, do you guys just want to podcast anyone? Great. Yeah, yeah. And can you maybe put some real pants on? Thank you. Sorry, sorry. I call my nether region the market and it's got to be free. Cecil, fantastic.

Did you set up all this so you could do that pun? I did. I did set it all up. Totally worth it! And low and welcome! The citation needed the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet. That's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I am being detained, but I'm not alone.

A guy who, like myself, cringely thought and ran, had some good points in his life. Heat and right. I'm a cis-hat white guy, it's not my fault, it is my fault. It's my fault. We're genetically predisposed to be predisposed to be a false test. We're the best. We're the worst. All right, that got rid of anyone who was trying the podcast for the first time. So also joining us tonight, three men who never bought into that nonsense,

but mostly because they don't read books that long Cecil Noah and Tom Who wants to read it when I can listen to the audible version narrated by Laura Probably real just want to say that I read more books this fucking year that you have your adult life Who don't count was with dragons and I, but sure for the sake of this joke, we're going to pretend that the guy who misspelled nonsense in that sentence is a literate one. That's so mean. And Eli, I have an actual degree in literature and spark notes.

You know, get that built in minor with that premise thoroughly destroyed, tell us, he's what person plays thing concept phenomenon or event. We'll be talking about today. We're going to be talking about libertarians getting attacked by free market bears. That's the greatest story. That's the greatest story ever told. It's so good. The greatest story. And by the way, the story is originally told by Matthew Hangolt's Hettling in his amazing book, a libertarian It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great. It's so great into a bear. Yeah, first of all, if you read this book, Mr. Reads more than me, because I, I'm pretty sure actually I would recommend it. He's, hey, he's, he's the last time Eli recommended a book he didn't have a fucking dragon.

There's your, there's your opening question right here. That's actually a great question. Tom, I think we should leave. Wow. I'm gonna have a slap fight any minute. You're just gonna have a slap fight and I want to watch. Oh, you know what, Eli pretends he read all of proofs. And he told me that was good.

So, just that. I do pretend that that's true. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. So, it's fine. I pretend I read all of Heidegger too.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Every philosophy student pretends they read all of Heidegger too. Right. So, it goes. All right. So, this is the story of what happens when a town chooses to have its organizing principle, the disorganization, a group of libertarian idiots who cover the town of Grafton, New Hampshire in the early 2000s. And the only rule was there are no rules. And thanks to their experiment, we learned that the real-life result

of unfettered libertarianism is everyone gets mauled by bears. That's what happens. Yes, it is. And it's like science that that's what happens. No, maybe they should have figured out that libertarianism is a scam when the town was literally named graft. Like that's just.

We're part of that. We or aparting that when they applied logic to the, yeah, don't know too. Yeah, these guys are crazy about bear arms, so all this makes sense. Yeah. All right. So before we get to the Libertarian coup,

I'll give you a little background on graft and New Hampshire. Since they first incorporated in 1778, graft and has had exactly two defining characteristics, tax evasion and hating bears. European settlers were mostly farmers who made their living by raising sheep and pigs and by growing corn and apples. And those just happened to be exactly the stuff

that hungry bears like to eat. The farmers also raised a lot of kids, same problem. So the large population of bears loved it. The farmers do their best to guard their stuff, but it turns out that bears, they just do whatever they want. You can't really tell them what to do. If you shoot them with a musket,

they often just say, ow, what the fuck, why did you shoot them with a musket and they keep eating your apples and your child? So, wrapped in and the entire region has a long standing feud with bears. It's time to move when a bear is in your kitchen temperature testing porridge. Is it really just time to go? Is it move or play dead? I keep forgetting. Whenever I sense danger, I take a nap. I've been hibernating since 2015. I just see a reasonable, never wake up sweet child. Okay. Heath, to be fair to the bears, they were there first, right? If a bunch of racist bags

of Cheetos moved into your house, you'd eat at least a few of them, right? The government of the newly founded United States heard about this bear problem, but they didn't wanna order people to kill bears for fear of seeming like the monarchy they'd just broken away from. And they didn't wanna start a publicly funded bear killing squad, because that would mean taxes.

The only thing everyone hated more than bears. So they landed on a market solution. They put a generous bounty on bears and Everyone became a professional bear hunter almost overnight. This went Very badly. For example, one popular method was to strap a loaded gun who a tree with a law String attached to the trigger, huh? And they'd run the string across the edge of their cornfield. So if a bear walked into the string,

the bear would get shot. The design flaw didn't become clear until a bunch of people got shot in the face. I'm so much bigger than bears. Steve, don't be distracted by the bandages. Do we have any bear hunting methods we didn't steal from McColle Culkin? No, we don't. No. So another technique that turned out to be a mistake

was taking a sexual angle at bare hunting. Oh, cool. Oh, cool. And learn this lesson the hard way, when a local politician tried to win reelection by impressing everyone with his bare hunting manliness and he proposed to kill a notorious bear known as old slippery skin. So he slathered himself with female bare pheromones and went out into the woods.

Noah seems to already know how this is going to be a problem. He goes into the woods and then almost immediately he comes sprinting back out of the woods, being chased by a giant bear with its stick out. He lost that election, by the way. Did it last more than four hours, though? Oh, it's gone, sir. Jesus, no, it feels to me like he just, he just got caught during his morning bear fuck, right? He's like, yeah, I failed hunting plan. Do I look silly now? Guess I can't be mayor. I want this bear. I think slippery skin. That's not good old honey dick. All right. Here's a quick background on Grafton's proud tradition of tax evasion. That's their other thing besides

Hayden Bears. This goes back even further than the American Revolution. In 1772, England told New Hampshire to save all its white pine trees to make shipmasts for the British Navy. And that's when the people of Grafton responded with the pine tree riots. They got a mob together, they beat up the royalist sheriff and his deputies with tree branches, and they sent him back to the Capitol on horses that they had shaved and de-eared. Why, by the way, it didn't get better after the revolution.

In 1777, Grafton wrote the earliest surviving tax evasion document in American history. They demanded that the newly formed state of New Hampshire, which they spelled wrong, their own state, should use their town a full tax exemption because go fuck yourself. When that didn't work, they seceded from the country, as it's known. Except that's not how it works. No, men in 1781, they thought about joining Vermont, which was still an independent republic. But right while that was in the works,

Vermont started raising a royalist militia and a New Hampshire leader, NARC, and told George Washington what they were trying to do. And Washington said, he wrote a letter that said, I will stop fighting the British right fucking now, and I'll take the entire continental army up to Vermont and destroy you. In the end, Grafton got stuck being part of New Hampshire

and having taxes, which they tried to pay in grain. That did not work. They wouldn't take a grain check. That's crazy. Oh, no. So that's the birthplace of failed American tax protesting and failed American bear stuff. Graften was destined for a tragic Libertarian fantasy project.

Fast forward to 2004. A van with four Li libertarian idiots is driving around New Hampshire looking for the perfect town to steal. Their plan is called the Free Town Project. They want to move hundreds of like-minded free thinkers into a town, hijacked the existing infrastructure, and set up a local government with no governing. And after a bunch of searching, they found Grafton. It had a whole bunch of libertarians already. Everyone hated taxes, and they had less than 800 registered voters, so it wouldn't be difficult to hack the local elections with a small migration of co-conspirators. So they set it on Grafton as the target of the

free-town project. You know, when when your brilliant political movement relies on four guys driving around in a van, you do not have a brilliant political movement. No, you don't. That's correct. But you do have the start of a kidnapping. So yeah, all right, let's meet the cast. We have a marine veteran turned anarchy lawyer activist and Barry Goldwater Huckle A. What? His name is Tim Connelly.

We have Bob Hull, a businessman from New Jersey who wears nothing but 70s disco stuff. We have Tony Leakus, a software engineer from Chicago whose dream is to eventually break into the firearms instruction business that's his dream. Wow. Finally, we have Larry and Darvus, aka Zach Bass. Why would he have an alias? Great fucking question. First of all, and Darvus got convicted of 129 counts of child porn in Florida. Jesus, that was a lot.

But he got acquitted because the prosecutor submitted a document to the jury that made the word introvert look like the word hervert, and that was unfair. Pandarvus also created a Filipino mail order bride company, he ended up being wanted by the authorities in Texas, and he was eventually arrested in the Philippines for human trafficking type stuff, not surprisingly. So that's the brain trust behind the free town project in the grad.

Damn, that shit is awful. 70s disco stuff all the time, he? Well, it's not. All the time. Okay, so we've got Tim, Bob, Tony, and Larry the pervert. Yeah. These days they would have just started a podcast. So you are part of the same fight against.

The same fight against. Yeah. So, according to the website for the free town project, they wanted to create a libertarian paradise that would preserve all the important freedoms that modern society takes away For example in order to be in paradise to them Everyone needs the right to have more than two junk cars on their Rule about that is a problem to them ruins paradise Everybody also needs the right to provide kids with no education. That's important.

They also need the right to be a drug dealer and the right to inset. That's Larry's idea. 100%. That's just, oh yes it is. Yes. Larry Pandarvus, Zach Bass, he also insisted that graph the Knights would have the right to traffic organs hold. Hold.

Hold. Of fans, maybe knives. I don't know. Hold any kind of duels that he wants. organs, okay, hold the of fans, maybe knives, I don't know, hold any kind of duels that you want. Great beers. Also practice cannibalism. And

how else are you going to get a organized legal bum fights? What the hell? To have paradise. Hey man, since we're allowing all kinds of weird shit, can you make sure we can keep shaving

horses? Is that going to be allowed? Okay, I'm pretty sure Larry stole his list from my pre-show shenanigans. I really Can you make sure we can keep shaving horses? Is that gonna be allowed? Okay, I'm pretty sure. So I'm a book Larry stole his list from my pre-show shenanigans. I really speak to my lawyer, Larry. So I open our podcast, Larry.

So to start things off, the free town brain trust started by buying up as much land as they could in Grafton. And they started recruiting their, and they started recruiting their squad from all over the country and having people slowly move in. Nobody really noticed what was happening until a long time graph the night found their website and told everyone in town about the scheme. And this led to

a big town meeting where the free towners tried to explain all the benefits of their project. But despite the libertarian leading of the town, this did not go well. Mostly because Pandarvus, aka Zach Bass, said way too many honest opinions out loud at that meeting. So the town was very much united in opposing the hijack. That's so weird, because you know, small town libertarians are usually so welcoming dials. Right.

They're knowing for that. So the free towners left the meeting and had their own little talk, which mostly consisted of, hey, that bass kind of thought we agreed to focus on lower taxes and zoning law stuff. You went super hard on the bum farts and the organ trafficking,

kind of like, you want to tone it down next time? I've gotten that topic too. I can't. You get it. You like that's it. But,? I've gotten that talking to you. Yeah, you get it. You like that, it's it. But despite the bad first impression they made, they all agreed that the majority of residents

did not show up to the town meeting, and those were probably allies, and it turns out they were right about that. So they kept going with the plan, and pretty soon there were hundreds of anarchist immigrants moving in, renting land from those original four, and doing a whole bunch of freedom stuff, whatever freedom people are.

Well, there's just like a lot of people in New Hampshire with extra organs, they've just been waiting to sublet. What? How is this in Python? Right? What's a weird problem to highlight? Yes. Tom, if you live in New Hampshire,

most of your organs are extra by definition. Right? Well, look, I've got a spare a spleen that I'd like to go for the right price. They get to use that that app that heath invented organ grinder to find other people. So people are moving in and the bears are loving it. More people meant more barbecue grills with fat drippings and more bird feeders and more pies on windows. It's also important to remember

that bears are basically superheroes. Yep. And that definitely includes the black bears you find in New Hampshire. They have super strength enough to bend a car door in half apparently. They have much better eyesight than humans, including night vision. Their ears are about twice as sensitive. They can smell a body from about 20 miles away.

That's seven times better than a bloodhound. And despite weighing up to about 500 pounds, they are impossibly fast. The average black bear could give Usain Bolt a 25 meter head start and still catch him well before the finish line of his world record 100 meter down. And then that bear could murder Usain. And according to some local residents, some of these bears also figured out a way to skip the winter hibernation and they also figured out how to avoid car headlights like they were playing a siren's breed. Okay, claim they saw bears being like, um, um, um, I'm just like sneaking away. I love that these people were being attacked by 500 pounds super strong killing machines, but they had to lie also. No, man, no, trust me, our bears are ninjas true.

They're ninjas, because they can, they can dance. It might be real though. I'm not sure. It's not clear. Somebody actually claimed they're like, yeah, I saw them. There's car headlights and they snuck into the dark. Couldn't find them. They know capo bear.

That's pretty good. That was pretty good. No, it was good. It was good. It's a Brazilian dance fighting discipline. It's wrestling. It's wrestling because of the bear hug, though. I think that's what I think.

It's a big population of giant super ninjas sending from the forest and a town that's defunding everything. At first, the free towners got blocked in their efforts to do all that stuff. They tried to remove grafting from the regional school district. They tried to defund the public library. And they tried to condemn the communist manifesto. Oh, that didn't work. That was their first order of business right there. That bill with those three things. But they were able to cut the town's budget by 30 percent and pack the planning board with libertarians until it basically didn't exist, which meant that all these neckbeard idiots with no money would show up and just

set up yurts with fire barrels and steam pump trailers all around the woods with no rules about basic safety. And this part is extremely important. The free towners also defunded trash. What? So the bear population had random piles of garbage everywhere, and they showed up in bigger and bigger numbers. Also worth mentioning,

Graften has a pretty big population of ridiculous animals that you wouldn't expect to find in New Hampshire. That includes big horn sheep, Russian wild boar, elk, and moose. And that's because an eccentric millionaire named Austin Corbin started an exotic game preserve right near Crafton in 1890. And a hurricane eventually smashed up his whole stockade fence and hundreds of animals escaped and started reading populations that still exist. They've recently found woolly, tossed boars that weigh up to 700 pounds. Holy shand, behemoth moose that weigh double that. Occasionally, those behemoth moose trample

people to death. Even before the woods got full of garbage piles and freedom. Free to use. Free to use. A libertarian's only tread on me weakness is a freedom loving moose the size of the view. Right. They're only weakness. I don't want to zoom out too wide, but one of the most beautiful things about this story

is the way it demonstrates what a knife's edge humanity's dominance is really. Right. Like four assholes don't show up for the second half of their econ 101 class and suddenly you lose civilization to a petting. Yeah, that's not scary. So before we get into more bear stuff, it's important to point out that bears weren't the only problem. Everything about the free-town project was failing, and that's because their entire philosophy is based on Atlas Shrugged, which is a fictional book of fiction. It's about a supergenious libertarian mastermind named John Galt, who invents a cold fusion machine to power

his secret valley of capitalism, and every problem is solved by the free market. Plus cold fusion and invisibility magic. But none of that market solution stuff happened in grafting. For example, they defunded the fire department, but the private sector or fire department could barely stop any fires. Because first of all, you pay for a private fire firm with the same dollar-y stuff that you pay taxes with. So people didn't want to buy it. But also, a subscription to the fire firm isn't that helpful if the house next to you

doesn't have an individual mandate to also not be on fire. Point being, people are stupid. So they demand the wrong amount of certain stuff, like not being on fire. You might have learned that in the second half of your Econ 101 class. They also demand pretty much zero in terms of roads that don't destroy your car or bridges that don't collapse. So their cars got destroyed and their bridges fell apart

and they were on fire. All right, well, we learned that the social safety net is the only thing keeping us from living inside the second act of a Michael Bay movie. So I'm gonna go blow a librarian, but we'll be back after a little ditty we like to call Apropos of nothing. Mr. Gold, yes, Johnson, what is it? It's about your cold fusion machine, sir.

Brilliant, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I just... I just want to make sure I had your plan correct. You're gonna take your machine and go live in a secret valley with no responsibilities or social obligations. Yes, I am, Fred, so. Great man, my stand alone. Yeah, right.

You really like that quote, but you're not. I do. You're not alone, right? What? I don't understand. Well, you learn how to make your machine with your free public education. Just drove to your factory on public roads,

and you got rich because of money you earned as part of a larger social construct. You just, you don't get to tap on a society just as soon as it benefits you. Well, I'm afraid society has given me no choice. A great man must stand alone. Yeah, okay. Must stand alone.

Yeah. What's with the machete? Oh, I'm going to cut you up and eat you. What? Don't do that. Yeah, sorry, sir, but if you think about it, it is the ultimate free market solution. What? No, no, it's not.

No, it is. It is. The market demands that you share your cold fusion machine and I'm gonna fill that demand by cutting you up and eating you with cheese. Come on, there's gotta be a better solution for that, right? Well, I mean, you could share your inventions, but we'll give you money.

And then as a society, we'll use that money to make stuff work and then I don't cut you up into pieces and dip you into Gruyere. Okay. Gruyere, I really don't like how specific the plan is. But fine, here is the plan for my cold fusion machine. Yeah, this is a napkin with a drawing of two ice cubes on it. That's so... Yeah, you got to squeeze them?

Like, like hard. You got to squeeze them pretty hard. Yeah, I'm going to cut you up and eat you. Totally not. Don't do that. Oh yeah. Please don't. I warmed up the gray hair.

I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go.

I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. And we're back. When we left off, we were laughing at an undereducated group of white people.

We think the solution to all of America's problems was a political ideology they don't understand. Luckily, the left never does that. What did those buck-toothed hillbillies do next? Wow. He just said something mean about the left. I'm not sure exactly what he's trying to say, but it's something. It was sense again.

It was not as woke as he pretends. say, but it's something. It was something, as well as the British. The people I was talking about don't go. Obviously, a big part of the problem was the libertarian philosophy that refuses to have pretty much any central planning. But we can't ignore another important facet of libertarian stupid. The idea that you're allowed to do whatever you want

on your land. And that brings us to the greatest character in this story. Agreed. Donut lady. So yes. Donut lady saw some bears on her property and noticed they were looking thin, which was probably the reason they were coming out of the woods. So she started dumping bird seed in the yard so they'd fatten up a little and stop. But the bird seed didn't seem like enough and more bears started coming. So she started feeding them big servings of grain to make them go away. What? This spiraled out of control, as you might guess, until she was buying literal truckloads of bare food that she couldn't afford,

putting out giant piles of grain for them, and topping it with a pile of powdered doughnuts. She did this twice a day. What? Get out of here, bears! Or I'll feed you, Edmunds. This doesn't seem so much a failure of libertarianism as it does of her understanding of cause. Yes, she seems like maybe a relative of the swallow of the fly lady or swallowing a horse. My sister's in need. So she kept doing this during the winter too in New Hampshire, despite her yard completely icing over.

The bears would gather around in the yard, she'd walk outside and yell, go away. They'd take a few steps back and give her a run to put out the food. When asked if she worried about slipping on the ice and falling down next to a mob of hungry bears, she responded, that's I fall all the time. They're cool. Author got from her. And apparently her donut parties got so popular that bears gave up on hibernation and just eight donuts all winter. That actually, and according to a local zoologist, this unhealthy habit led to

advanced aging in the bears and made those local zoologist, this unhealthy habit led to advanced aging in the bears and made those local donut bears more anxious, more desperate, and more. Which those are the exact words used by a zoologist. A very real. But donut lady did not care. And neither did the libertarians, because bears on your land are your property. And you're allowed to give them twitchy dementia if you damn well, please. So eventually the word spread about the crazy lady who has donut parties for bears.

And people were showing up to what? There's this twitchy anxious bear crushing donuts into a pipe and so we can have it there. Okay, guys, today we're going to cover ourselves in honey crushing donuts into a pipe and Okay guys today we're gonna cover ourselves in honey before we watch the deranged starving bear Z So now it's time to check in with the Yurt people. Oh, yeah, and this is where we meet Adam Franz, the fact-to-leader of Tent City, their anti-community commune, hence in the woods. So Franz meets up with the author here, and Franz gives this long, confused explanation about their camp with no awareness of how stupid he's being at every moment.

It's amazing. He starts with saying, OK, so I want us to make money by selling artisanal wood furniture, but nobody knows how to do that. I want to get all our food by foraging. Nobody knows how to do that. Anyway, here's our crowning achievement, the orb. It has our generator.

And this is when the author says to himself, it looks like somebody hammered it together out of an old carport and some siding. Brands continues, we hammered it together out of an old carport. In terms of transport, my car runs on fry grease. We had three big drums of it saved up, but the the bears took them and Then they took a giant unhealthy shit in the middle of our camp I mean I would argue that's a pretty healthy reaction either This conversation started with like a so how's it going or maybe like a so where to that 55 gallon pile of bear diary Either way, friends kept talking he continued so we put up a sign on the trash bins that said no bears allowed

That didn't work. Then we got fireworks. Oh God no. We got fireworks for our city of fabric houses when we're all fired. Yeah. So when a bear shows up, we set off the fireworks and we yell, go away. And that kind of works. But they really just, you know, walk away a little bit and then stop and then kind of look at us and wait like something's about to happen. And yes, donut lady lives right near Tent City. Almost guaranteed that Tent City was dealing with some of the same bears that learned, go away means please step back for a minute and then start eating free donuts. But I'm gonna give you. Yeah, to be fair, restaurants in Chicago have the same system for even time. We don't know how to do that.

Who takes similar shit, something 55 gallon peride? It's okay. So you gotta stop looking at my shit, Noah. It's getting weird. So the book is full of ridiculous characters, but we don't have time for all of them. I'll give you one more little than yet. This is the story of John Cunnell, a libertarian factory worker who sadly got severe brain damage

from a chemical fire, got born again, Christian, became a free towner, and spent all his life savings on buying the old church in Grafton. He never should have been able to buy the property, but it was made possible because the town had a ridiculous history that was very much religious about Jesus, but even more religious about avoiding taxes. At one point, the town was so mad about having to put any tax money into upkeep of the building

that they literally split the church in half, like a sitcom with a line of tape for real. And they had to pay, and they had the town pay for their half, and the church pay for it. And then the town got hired of paying for their half, and it became fully owned by the church. But then a bunch of libertarian lunatics moved into town like we were talking about. So the church decided to leave.

They offered to sell the property to the town for a super low price, but the town refused. Then they offered to just give it to the town for free. But again, the town refused. The town didn't wanna spend any tax money to have this property and building appraised to see if it was worth more than $0. So, at that point, Connell jumped in and bought it for almost nothing compared to what it

was worth. Wow! When tax-free providers of nothing leave your town because they're getting a raw deal of things of bad. So eventually, Connell racked up about $14,000 in unpaid taxes. After refusing to do the paperwork with the IRS, he become a 501C3. His sincerely held belief was that sending mail to the IRS would acknowledge their existence as a slaveholder. And while the step was growing, the building continued falling apart because he had no money and he turned the church into a basically just a rickety warehouse for his quarter collection of random dry wood and oily rags that was seriously most of his. There were no rules against that either because of course there were no rules and Then the building lit on fire with Connolly inside and just like New Hampshire motto

He lived free or died one of those two You know, I gotta say as you topias go this one has a lot more fire than I would have initially Yeah, yeah, so now we fast forward the 2012 this one has a lot more fire than I would have initially. A lot of fires. Yeah. Yeah. So now we fast forward to 2012 and the bear situation is getting so much worse, especially when Grafton had a big drought in the spring, all the plants that bears normally eat were dying. Bears are just pouring out of the woods looking for other sources of food.

And that includes an army veteran in a wheelchair who couldn't get the VA to make her house safe and accessible, because of course the free towners had defunded everything. It also includes just about everybody else in town, even people with houses that were not made of cloth. Bears were shown up all over town. And as this was all happening, donut lady hepteating the bears because quote, there was a drought. And the bears needed the food more than ever. I think the founders of our nation had a donut t-shirt gun in mind when they run the car. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, I fucking hope so you can't get more American than donut T shirt gun with a right to

a point. Yeah. So we got a shooting unarmed black child. So one of the obvious answers to any problem in a town of libertarians is shooting the problem with guns. So yes, the author was constantly trying to figure out what was going on with that. He's trying to ask people about illegal bear hunting, which there were rumors about. And he finally got some answers from a resident named Tim Bowen. This guy definitely agrees that

game wardens are bullshit. He's a libertarian, but he still doesn't like people shooting bears illegally. According to Bowen, quote, it's like being a German in Nazi Germany and not wanting to kill the Jewish people. And the exact quote about himself. Well, because the Nazis should have gotten permits first, is that what the reason behind that is? But he said that out loud to a reporter who was writing a book.

Yeah. And just like everyone else that got interviewed, Bowen vaguely hints about this secret cabal of vigilante bear hunters. And it turns out that's exactly what happened. A bear posse got together in the winter of 2013. They raided what they believed to be all the bear dens in grafting, five dens, and killed what they believed to be all the bears in grafting.

Thirteen bears. Turns out they believed wrong, they did not get those numbers correct. Also, not only is killing, hibernating bears illegal and extremely unethical, they very clearly did not solve the bear problem because those weren't the numbers. Much like they didn't solve the anything else problem, but on fact, there are a few rules about killing a bear in New Hampshire. It has to be in season. You need a hunting permit, and you can't use chocolate in any way. Oh my God, they tried to poison the donuts, didn't they? Oh my God.

And that brings us to the beginning of the end for the free town project. In February of 2016, the free state project announced their official debut. And that is exactly what it sounds like from the title. The free state project had been building up recruits to take over New Hampshire and make it a libertarian anti-state. Well, because things were going so well on the scale. Right. Build it up.

Yeah. So just to be clear, they centrally planned the Anarchy project, big, Anarchy conventions. That's what happened. And they'd finally reached the trigger at this moment. That was their code word for reaching 20,000 signatures from libertarians who were ready to move in. Apparently, 20,000 people was the threshold for taking over New Hampshire in their head. Just like in Grafton, on the town level, the free stators started taking over the state government. This led to some very important legislation that includes a whole bunch of tax cuts, deregulation of cryptocurrency, deregulation of citer production at brew pubs. That was a big problem.

Oh, fine. So removing all the red tapes surrounding hair braiding, that's a real thing that happened. What? Yep. And the elimination of 1600 other laws that were stifling freedom in New Hampshire. Yeah. If you go back and read that petition, now you'll notice that up to 20,000 signatures, at least 19,000 of them were bare names. They're just bare names. So pop it had dripped an A. So many bear

puns that were really obvious and you had gone through it. So, you have to have as many baron signs trying to move into this place. It's not. It's not even how it's spelled, stupid, and otherwise. So, pretty much immediately following the trigger, All the problems in grafting became problems for the entire state, especially the bears. And just for comparison, Vermont is about the same size as New Hampshire and has about the same bear population. But over the last five years since

the trigger in 2016, New Hampshire had about double the number of bear-related incidents. And that means double the chance of a bear trying to attack a daycare center. Oh my God. That happened in New Hampshire. It also is like double the chances of say a 71 year old woman getting mauled by a bear in her home. She also happened in New Hampshire. No, a bear just walked in. Eight all her food, took a giant shit, not in the woods like it's what I'm talking about.

And then tore half her face off. See, I was telling the truth only half her face. No, that's retracted, retracted. In response to all that, an official from the Fish and Game Department said, quote, bear attacks are extremely rare. It's not really fair to call this a bear attack. He was talking about the woman having half her face torn off and getting caught by a bear, just to be clear.

That if he was talking about the woman having half her face left on by a bear. Whatever was left of the local government in Grafton announced some new regulations for bear safety, like no leaving food and garbage outside without locking it up. Unfortunately, nobody heard that because regulations are slavery. Instead, libertarians responded by exercising their natural rights of vigilante bear hunting and vigilante bear feeding to course. Yeah, right. because if you can't solve it with guns or large portion sizes, America can't solve it. That's right. And then the rest of the state started getting attacked by bears.

One example that perfectly illustrates the value of governments, you know, doing stuff was in Hanover, New Hampshire. It started with one particular bear named Ming. And as usual, it involved donuts. This time it was Donut Man of Hannah and Romantic comedy. And this by the way is the rich part of New Hampshire, right? By Dartmouth.

So it was actually maple glazed crullers from a fancy bakery. It wasn't regular powdered donuts, some endons. But don't that man died in 2016 and Mink started raiding the town for food after getting used to human food. At one point, Mink sat underneath a zip line at Hanover High School watching kids ride before.

Oh my god. Occasionally just reaching up like playing like a giant size It's like the bearer version of those sushi places that have I just love the kids kept getting on Fucking law Ninja bear jumps 40 feet in the air That's me, we know, man. Ninja Bear jumps 40 feet in the air. He's a kid. He just, that whole thing disappeared before he came down.

He's just trying to like jump past it like salmon. This is dangerous. So, unlike Grafton, the local government of Hanover decided to do a thing to solve a problem as governments sometimes do. After a big argument about killing bears in the government of Hanover, they agreed to capture her, give her a long series of lessons about relearning how to eat as a wild bear again, and then relocate her. And that's what happened, and Mink was moved to a remote town about 120 miles north. And then about a year later, Mink showed up again in Hanover. And this time, they caught Mink, gave her a radio tracking collar,

and made extra rules about outdoor food and trash, including hefty fines for breaking those rules. This all helped, but they eventually decided to catch her one more time, and take her even further away about 200 miles this time and then about a year later Mink made it back to Hanover again They tracked her color and they found that she took a long winding path of about a thousand miles to get back to Hanover, which was 200 miles away total But after all that time in wild, she was back to eating mostly acorns instead

of donuts. And there were a whole bunch of rules about bear safety, including no fucking donuts or crullers or binyes or whatever you'd love. Bottom line, preventing attacks by yoked up forest ninjas works out way better when there's an organized community of not libertarians. Also, it's super helpful if you're rich, like Ann over was. But even relatively poor towns did much better than Grafton, New Hampshire. So the free town project in Grafton was failing for so many reasons. But the final nail in the coffin, ironically, was the Free State project. All the libertarians found much better towns than grafting

all over the state of New Hampshire. For example, he knew Hampshire was a big draw, even though it had way more taxes than grafting. And the reason it was such a big draw was all the really good stuff they had because of their taxes that were high. So whatever was left of graft and completely dried up, here's how the author described it.

Quote, in the newfound quiet, survivors of America's first free town were left to assess the damage as if they'd woken up after a smashing house party only to remember with growing horror that it took place in their own home. And record player spinning with a half remember with growing horror that it took place in their own home. And record player spinning with a half-eaten bear donut on the ground. Just for the record, it wasn't just an extreme example like Grafton that failed. Any significant push to remove public services and save a

little bit of tax money is almost guaranteed to be stupid. A research team at Baylor University did a study on this back in 2019 to check, and they found that if you compare similar towns, one with decent public funding and the other with Libertarian D funding, the first one is measurably happier, just literally more units of happy if you do that. This holds regardless of geographic location, wealth, education, marital status, age, and health. Yes, the people have graphed in a couple hundred dollars off their property tax bill, but their car was broken and their house was on fire and they got mulled by a bull.

The author's admitted, the author's from this bailer study, they admitted that correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. And in the greatest passive-aggressive concession statement ever, they pointed out that instead of lower taxes causing sadness in places like grafting, it also could have been that miserable people caused lower taxes. All right, we want to be fair here. This could be because libertarian ideas suck or libertarian people could suck as human beings. Or both. Or both. Yeah, right. That's not really the way they go. Yeah, absolutely. So to close it out, the author describes driving through graph and to see how it all

worked out in the end. The answer was very, very badly. Just about every house was for sale. Hardly, any businesses were open anymore, and all the roads were falling apart. And then the author went to check on the tent city. And he learned about just how badly the bear problem was and how it led to the inevitable demise of the bremen of the Yerts. So after the fireworks and the strongly worded yelling didn't work out and didn't get the bears to go away,

the Yerts people decided to build a Trump wall. They put up a makeshift stockade around all their tents. But apparently that didn't really help. First of all, their giant collection of lawn chairs and buckets and tarps and pieces of cars was all sitting outside the stockade. What? Why would they do that? All the people were gone.

They showed up looking for freedom and they ended up walled inside their sad little fence with bears enjoying all their stupid toys. It turns out that the saying freedom isn't free was an accurate motto, but not like anyone meant it. You have to pay a little bit of taxes for trash pickup to buy all that freedom. In the end, the only thing left in Grafton of any value

was the public library. The few people left in Grafton were using it as a vital community hub. Just like they said, was very important in that study from Baylor University. All right, Keith, if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? Okay, so baritacks on humans are extremely rare overall.

According to the book, you're more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be injured by a baritack. But not in grafting, so here's where I learned in one sentence. A sentient vat of murderous corn that tries to fly up and suffocate you is a better resident of your town than a staunch libertarian. And are you ready for the quiz? I'm ready.

All right. I got one for you here. What should graft in the city motto have been? Egg. All the freedom you can bear. Come for the clown bakes. Stay for the reconstructive surgery. See a storms abruin or D versus shrugged.

A storm is abruin. I was real excited about, but ursus shrugged this fucking herb. Yeah, and that is correct. Well done, sir. And what's gonna be Er sign post up ahead, but you guys said Erses shrugged with better soil. It will be. Okay. All right, Heath, why did this experiment really fail? A, they barely gave it a chance. B, oh, bear, barely, barely.

B ignored all the grizzly details. C, libertarianism is the polar opposite of good governance. What do you, Panda Express? Panda Express, Panda Express, we're gonna have to go everything, but we're gonna have to go to the pandemic. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, fantastic. Okay, it's fucking gross.

Keith, one more for you. What's the best profession in a libertarian town run by bears? A, a highwayman or a foot pattington. G, pattington's a bear. A whole bearer. Yeah. See a panda handler or D, a yo-girl. I like a yo-girl.

Okay. I gotta get, I love all of them. I'm going with B, hallbearer. Is that's just Yeah, it's the diamond in the world. It's the true one, but no you'd be wrong at a foot Adding to the one doing okay. Yeah, all right. Well that means Cecil you are this week's winner All right, well, let's get Tom in there. Yes. All right. Well for Cecil Noah Tom and he'll be live Bosnick Thank you for hanging out with us today.

Well, we'll be back next week, and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to all our podcasts on all the podcast places. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com, slash citation pod, or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com.