There’s a reason national politics feels like performance art for people with untreated personality disorders.
Because it is.
Every election cycle, Americans get herded into the same emotional cattle chute: rage, hope, outrage, fear, repeat. Red team, blue team, endless doomscrolling, endless hot takes, endless “this is the most important election of our lifetime” hysteria from people who can’t even keep their own garages clean.
Meanwhile, your actual life?
Your body.
Your marriage.
Your finances.
Your street.
Your backyard.
Neglected.
That’s the inversion. That’s the scam.
We are encouraged to obsess over systems so large we can never meaningfully control them while simultaneously abandoning the only places where liberty can actually be practiced in real time: the self, the home, the neighborhood, the owned square footage where your choices still matter.
Which is why I keep coming back to this idea:
Backyard First
Forget “America First;” they lied. Forget “NH First;” it’s been co-opted by the clowns. But “Backyard First”? That’s got a solid ring to it. Not as a slogan. Not as a campaign. Not as another reason for purity spirals and public meltdowns on X.
But as a return to first principles.
Your property.
Your rules.
Your responsibility.
That’s it.
Because libertarianism, if it means anything at all, must begin at the smallest possible scale: the individual human being with agency over their own life.
Not Washington.
Not Concord.
Not political parties.
Not “the movement.”
Not “the free state.”
You.
Your body first.
Then your home.
Then your backyard.
Then maybe—maybe—your town.
That’s the actual New Hampshire model anyway.
Not giant master plans.
Not central committees.
A thousand stubborn people doing weird independent things on their own land and mostly leaving each other alone.
One mom raises chickens.
One family homeschools.
Someone else runs an ecstatic dance business out of a barn.
Some hippie grows mushrooms in the woods outside Keene.
A software engineer mines Bitcoin up North.
Your neighbor taps maple trees, plows his own driveway, and likes vanilla ice cream.
That’s the texture of liberty.
Messy. Human. Local.
And importantly: real.
Americans love abstraction because abstraction lets you avoid accountability.
It’s easier to yell about “saving the country” than to admit you’re eating like shit, drowning in debt, addicted to outrage, and letting algorithms train your nervous system like a Skinner box rat pressing the lever for another pellet of cortisol.
“You can’t control what you don’t own.”
And the brutal truth is this:
Most people do not even own themselves.
Not really.
They are tenants in their own bodies.
Squatters in their own minds.
Leased out to impulse, addiction, distraction, insecurity, social approval, pharmaceutical dependency, or the endless dopamine slot machine in their pocket.
The guy screaming about freedom while chain-vaping at 2 a.m. and rage-posting himself into a cortisol coma? He doesn’t own his life.
The woman blaming “society” for every failed relationship while refusing to develop discipline, boundaries, or self-awareness? Same thing.
Low-agency people outsource control.
The economy did it.
Their ex did it.
The media did it.
Capitalism did it.
Communism did it.
The government did it.
Their trauma did it.
Listen, terrible things happen. Some people absolutely get dealt brutal hands. I know this personally. But at some point—and this is where adulthood begins—you either reclaim authorship over your own life or you become a permanent plaintiff in the courtroom of existence.
And that is not liberty.
That is dependency wearing a tricorn hat.
Backyard First starts with radical self-ownership.
Own your body.
Impulse control is not oppression. It is civilization.
A person who cannot govern themselves will always eventually demand governance from others. If Kauffman’s antics have taught me one thing: Assholes who cannot restrain themselves are the reason we get more paperwork.
That’s why so much modern political discourse feels like unresolved childhood psychology projected onto institutions. People want a parent. A rescuer. A manager. Someone to regulate their emotions for them because they never learned how.
But freedom without self-regulation collapses into chaos.
You see this everywhere now: people who want the aesthetics of liberty without the burden of responsibility.
They want to “fight the system” while simultaneously being unable to wake up on time, hold a job, stop drinking, stop scrolling, save money, finish projects, or control their own tempers.
That’s not rebellion.
That’s dysregulation.
And I say this with love because I had to learn it myself.
Sobriety taught me something uncomfortable: freedom is not the absence of limits. Freedom is the ability to choose consciously instead of compulsively.
That’s a very different thing.
Real self-ownership means your mind belongs to you.
Not algos.
Not advertisers.
Not propagandists.
Not outrage merchants.
Not every passing emotional impulse.
High-agency people curate inputs the same way they protect property lines.
Keep the trash out.
Cultivate what produces value.
Protect your peace like it’s acreage.
Because attention is territory now. Maybe the most valuable territory of all.
And once you begin reclaiming ownership internally, something interesting happens: you naturally start extending that order outward.
You care more about your home.
Your land.
Your food.
Your neighbors.
Your skills.
Your local networks.
You stop fantasizing about controlling giant abstract systems and start creating tangible value in the environments you actually touch.
This is where Backyard First becomes politically powerful without even trying to be.
Because every regulation that prevents people from using their own property freely is an attack on human agency itself.
Zoning.
Permits.
Property taxes.
Variances… have you filed yours?
Endless bureaucratic friction designed to make ordinary people feel helpless on land they supposedly “own.”
Fight there.
Fight locally.
Fight where victories are possible and measurable.
In New Hampshire, you actually can.
You can walk into town hall. Did you?
You can stand up at a school board meeting. Have you?
You can know your state rep personally because there’s a decent chance he lives ten minutes away and buys the same eggs you do at the “honor system” farm stand down the road.
That accessibility matters.
Smallness matters.
Human scale matters.
Your backyard is the first part of the laboratory of freedom we are building. First, you. Then your home. Then your town. Then the state. Then… our own country! So…
Build the ADU.
Raise the chickens.
Plant the garden.
Homeschool the kids.
Host the meetup.
Start the side hustle.
Create the mutual aid network.
Teach yoga in the barn.
Smoke cigars by the firepit with your weird genius friends and talk about Bitcoin and mushrooms and God and whether consciousness is fundamental or whether or our robot overlords will eventually end it all.
That’s culture.
That’s civilization.
Not whatever DISTRACTION is being manufactured in D.C. this week.
And here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud:
People are desperate for environments that feel sane again.
High-trust environments.
Places where people keep their word.
Where neighbors know each other.
Where beauty exists.
Where adults act like adults.
Where children are safe enough to ride bikes around the neighborhood until the streetlights come on.
Where competence matters.
Where ownership still means something.
That future is not going to arrive through national elections.
It is going to emerge through pockets of coherence.
Backyards first.
Neighborhoods second.
Towns third.
Scale through demonstration, not domination.
That’s the libertarian insight everybody forgot while they were busy fighting online.
You do not build freedom from the top down.
You build it from the property line outward.
Voluntarily.
Incrementally.
Like mycelium under a pine forest quietly creating an entirely new ecosystem while the empire overhead rots from its own complexity.
And yes, this also means being honest about what’s currently poisoning parts of the liberty movement itself.
The endless edgelordism.
The perpetual grievance theater.
The dopamine addiction to conflict and social annihilation masquerading as “truth telling.”
Serious people do not want to build around chaos.
Families don’t migrate to New Hampshire for dysfunction.
Builders don’t invest in instability.
Professionals do not uproot their lives to move to the Free State because they dream of joining a digital food fight between emotionally incontinent narcissists with untreated personality disorders.
Sorry, but somebody has to say it.
If you cannot govern your own impulses, why should anyone trust you with greater freedom?
Backyard First acts as a filter.
It attracts builders.
Repels renters.
And I mean renters spiritually more than financially. (You have to start somewhere. Moving to NH is the first step. I can help with the rest.)
People renting identities.
Renting ideologies.
Renting outrage.
Renting purpose from movements because they never developed an internal center of gravity.
But ownership changes people.
When you own your body, your mind, your time, your land, your word—you stand differently.
You become harder to manipulate.
Harder to scare.
Harder to govern.
That’s why genuine self-ownership is so threatening to centralized systems.
A regulated, competent, locally rooted human being with strong relationships and useful skills is almost impossible to control.
They can survive uncertainty.
They can cooperate voluntarily.
They can think independently.
They do not require constant management.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
Liberty does not live in Congress.
It does not live in slogans.
It does not live in online arguments.
It lives where reality touches the ground.
Your body.
Your home.
Your backyard.
Secure your self first.
Secure your perimeter second.
Then—and only then—can freedom scale outward in any meaningful way.
Because you cannot control what you do not own.
So stop owning people online, and start owning yourself harder.