About

Carla Gericke: Author, Activist, Attorney

After winning the Green Card lottery, Carla Gericke left the plains of Africa for a better life in America. Before then, she finished boarding school when she was sixteen years old, and law school when she was 21, working as an attorney in South Africa and California.

Carla is author of The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly), now available on Amazon. Says Nick Gillespie, Editor-at-Large of Reason Magazine: “It’s a fantastic package of writings that veer from fiction to autobiography and memoir to political polemics…. I highly recommend The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly).”

Carla has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured in GQ, Playboy, The New Yorker, been quoted in The Economist, and has discussed libertarianism on the BBC more than once. She has visited more than 40 countries, hiked to the base camp of the 10th highest mountain in the world, lost a shoe in a taxi more than once, had her passport stolen in Goa, got kidnapped in Vietnam, and has noshed on more “mystery meat” street food than she cares to admit. Carla once spent an entire summer while working as in-house counsel at Logitech eating tuna fish sandwiches with Doug Engelbart (the Mother Of All Demos dude), she worked on Apple’s acquisition of Steve Job’s NeXT, and bought her first Bitcoin for $6.

In 2010, Carla was arrested and charged with felony wiretapping for filming police officers during a late night traffic stop. She fought back, and four years later, Carla won a landmark First Circuit case affirming the First Amendment right to do so. Afterwards, NH Magazine named her one of 2014’s “Game Changing Remarkable Women.”

During her time in the Free State of New Hampshire, Carla has been instrumental in a variety of pro-freedom activism. She’s worked with the ACLU-NH on surveillance issues, she’s worked with First Amendment activists on releasing the “Laurie’s List” of bad cops, she’s testified on pro-independence bills, and she has lead many protests, rallies, and celebrations in support of liberty and individual rights.

Carla has been and continues to be an outspoken critic of Covidmania, the government’s hysterical response to a virus. As early as April 2020, she was pointing out the government was wrong and that we are all “essential.” She spoke at several ReOpen NH rallies, criticizing un-Constitutional emergency orders, mask “mandates,” and the shutting down of private enterprise by decree.

In June 2020, despite “orders” to the contrary, Carla successfully hosted the 17th Annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, NH. This PorcFest, which Carla described as a “First and Second Amendment protected assembly,” was one of the only events worldwide to proceed as scheduled. More than a thousand individuals gathered for a week-long celebration of life and liberty, with no negative health outcomes.