My friends, porcupines, seekers of truth and liberty—Free Staters of New Hampshire!
It is with a full and open heart that I welcome you to this historic moment. Because today, under
these ancient pine trees of New Hampshire, something extraordinary is happening.
We are gathered to witness the return of a man who became a symbol—a symbol of principled
defiance, of visionary thinking, and of the crushing cost of standing against the empire.
Today, we welcome Ross Ulbricht, not as a prisoner, not as a martyr, but as a free man.
Ross was sentenced in 2015 to two life terms plus 40 years—no parole—for building a
website, a peaceful marketplace grounded in the non-aggression principle and voluntary
exchange. A website that dared to challenge the State’s monopoly on permission. A website
that said, you don’t need to be afraid to be free.
They threw everything at him. But he never gave up. His family never gave up. His mother never gave up. Free staters never gave up. YOU never gave up.
And then… in January with President Trump’s return to office, justice was finally done. Ross received a full and unconditional pardon, and he walked out of prison into
the sunlight… holding a plant.
That image hit me like lightning. You see, when I was ten years old, I was sent to boarding
school in apartheid South Africa. On the day I left home, my father gave me a potted plant—a
symbol of something to nurture, something alive, something that would outlast the pain of
separation. When I immigrated to America at 26, I gave that plant back to my father. He planted
it in his garden before he, too, eventually immigrated here.
That cycle—of planting, growing, handing off, starting anew—that is what we are doing here.
That is what Ross represents. He is a living seed of freedom, rooted in radical love for liberty,
passed from hand to hand across time and injustice, and now… finally replanted in free soil.
So please, give the warmest, wildest, most thunderous Free Stater welcome to our brother in
liberty, our digital dissident, our gardener of hope—
Ross Ulbricht!