Justin loves to talk about decentralization, and the Free State Movement benefits from dozens of different organizations working to expand liberty in NH. Tonight, Kimberly joins the Porcs to talk about her work with the Women’s Defense League in protecting the right to self defense for all Granite Staters!
Learn more about the Free State Project.
Learn more about the Women’s Defense League.
I’ve never spoken about this publicly, because I eschew victim mentality and, at the time, nine years ago, I couldn’t really believe it was going down the way it seemed to be–this was before there was a term for getting rid of people in the workplace whose opinions you didn’t like.
I made the post below on Facebook, set to my “friends” originally, except most of my work colleagues were, I thought at the time at least, “my friends.” Soon after this post, the chair of the NH Writers’ Project board took me out to dinner to chastise me, telling me my opinion was not acceptable. Honestly I don’t remember all of the details of what was said, but I do know I was sobbing at the dinner table, so it was definitely unpleasant and belittling.
Soon after, my then boss left NHWP, telling me that everything was set up and that I would be appointed as interim executive director, and then officially promoted when the board approved the appointment at the next meeting. Thinking I had just landed my ultimate dream job–running the NH Writers’ Project, putting on exciting arts events across New Hampshire, including Writers’ Day, our flagship annual event, which in my five years with the organization I had revamped from a money-losing mess into a record-breaking, money-making success–I took a much needed vacation to recharge. While on vacation in Honduras, I was informed they’d hired someone else as the executive director but that I could stay on for the time being in my current part-time role.
Now that I understand the socialist playbook is all about silencing people you disagree with instead of debating the actual issues raised, I know I was simply a very early victim of cancel culture. So early, it didn’t even have a name yet!
People who know me know I’m an early adopter of good ideas, which means, like most early adopters, you run the danger of being unpopular until your time comes.
My time will come.
In the meantime, I’m batting pretty well about my predictions for the future, including:
1. NH being the best place to live if you value liberty;
2. Bitcoin and crypto being the best hedge against inflation and money creation;
3. We’d all be better off with less government. Every single one of us;
4. Corona-fascism is real and they are trying to implement a global population/movement control system using vaccine passports as an excuse; and
5. Guns are the only thing making America not look more like Australia or Austria right now. Molon labe.
Reflecting during the ride home from yesterday’s freedom rally, I realized several things:
As authoritarianism rises, I am meeting the most amazing, brave, thoughtful people who are taking great risks and making many sacrifices to fight for our liberties, and I am grateful for that;
I am also filled with gratitude that I did the work and regained my health, and through doing so, made myself capable of sharing the love I feel for the world and *everyone* in it with others;
My personal mantra for the past few years has been “Live Free And Thrive!” Yesterday, hundreds of people chanted this with me during my speech and it filled my heart;
We also chanted “Turn it off! Turn it off!” referring to the legacy news and social media that is designed to divide us. Here’s a short clip of the start of my speech. The battery ran out, but the full speech should be forthcoming soon.
It struck me that during the last days of apartheid, one of my favorite protest bands, Johannes Kerkorrel en Die Gereformeerde Blues Band, had a song called “Sit Dit Af!”–literally “Switch It Off,” and for the very same reason: They are polluting your brain. Here is the original song, in case you’re curious.
Dear Honorable Committee Members:
My name is Carla Gericke, former Republican state Senate candidate in District 20. I live in Manchester, NH, am an attorney by training, and serve on several local educational nonprofit boards. I ask you to please SUPPORT CACR-8, and ask my testimony be presented to all committee members and form part of the permanent record for this bill.
Is your time not valuable? How many gun bills do you have to sit through annually? Hearing the same arguments for and against over and over again. For an issue all of us know, despite whatever your personal views about gun ownership may be, is an unequivocal, inalienable US and NH Constitutional right. I’ll go even further, and say it is a natural right to be able to defend yourself, and no one, no man, and not you, has the authority to restrict natural rights.
Article 2 of the NH Constitution says: “All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state.” The US Constitution says: “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”.
It’s a “Right.”
That “SHALL NOT be infringed.”
What part of this is confusing? Can we please stop wasting each other’s time and move on?
Know this: We gun rights folks are. never. ever. going. to. give. up. our. rights. So you have to ask yourself, do you want to continue to behave like crazy people, doing the same thing over and over again ad nauseum, or do you want to pass this proposed Constitutional Amendment and put the matter to rest so that we can focus on issues where bipartisan solutions can be accomplished?
It’s your call, but my recommendation is, support CACR 8, which states: “The Legislature shall enact no law that limits the right of a person to own, carry, or use firearms or firearm accessories in any manner that would create a greater burden than that in federal law. Any federal law that infringes upon rights guaranteed in this New Hampshire constitution shall be unenforceable by New Hampshire law enforcement.”
Let’s do this, and free up all of our time for more productive matters. I have no doubt this proposed Constitutional Amendment will pass with flying colors if brought before Granite Staters–give us all the opportunity to weigh in directly!
Please SUPPORT CACR-8. Thanks for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Carla Gericke
West Manchester
Carla Gericke (JD, MFA) is an advocate of liberty specializing in localized voluntarism, self-determination, and how responsible human action can lead to peace and prosperity. She is president emeritus of the Free State Project, and lives in New Hampshire with thousands of fellow freedom fighters. In 2014, Carla won a landmark case affirming the 1st Amendment right to film police encounters.
She has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured in GQ and Playboy, been quoted in The Economist, and has discussed libertarianism on the BBC. 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. Carla co-hosts the Told You So podcast, and co-chairs Manch Talk TV. She serves on several non-profit boards, follows a Keto lifestyle, practices yoga and shooting, and plays a mean game of Scrabble.
Carla enjoys cooking, gardening, painting, reading, and watching documentary films. She has twice run for New Hampshire Senate, garnering 42% of the vote in 2018 against an 11-term incumbent, and believes in 2020, third time will be the charm! DONATE to her race TODAY!
Carla’s first book, a collection of award-winning short stories, essays, and speeches, The Ecstatic Pessimist is now available on Amazon. Says Nick Gillespie, Editor-at-Large of Reason Magazine: “It is a fantastic package of writings that veer from fiction, to autobiography and memoir, to political polemics. It’s great, mixes stories about substance abuse, lack of focus, historical wrongs and utopian attempts to remake the world as a better place in a very pragmatic way. I highly recommend The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly).”
Resources for today’s show…
Carla’s Links
Sponsors of the Day
THIS VIDEO IS 7 YEARS OLD AND STILL RINGS TRUE TODAY, MAYBE EVEN MORE SO… Watch to the end!
Ah yes, memberberry when I warned you the state was getting out of control and wasn’t really there to serve YOU but rather themselves?!?
Now, seven years later, they call themselves “essential” and YOU, “nonessential.” They take all the protective gear for themselves first, and lock you down. They tell you all of these unConstitutional precautions for “your own good,” but deep down inside, you no longer believe them because it is clear this is NOT true, that nothing that is happening right now is benefitting you or your business, all it is doing is spreading fear, paranoia, and distrust between friends and neighbors, almost like they want to divide us into two classes–you know, two classes like “essentials” and “nonessentials.”
Perhaps you are starting to wonder why the state is forcing you to do things to your own body against your own will, why they are forcing you to do their bidding when it is clear they are overreacting and the science does not support the destruction to the economy they are creating IN RESPONSE to the virus (it’s NOT the virus itself, it is the government’s response!). Perhaps you are starting to wonder why they are making you, the “nonessentials” enforce their regulations on their behalf, turning YOU into an agent of the state by threatening to take away your livelihood if you don’t comply. Perhaps you are starting to wonder why you should comply with these absurd and slavish rules that violate the trust and relationships you have developed with your customers, friends, and neighbors.
Here’s the reason why: Because they will harm you if you don’t. They will take your business license (permission slip) away. They will fine you. They will lock you down, and, eventually, they will lock you up.
Does this sound like a healthy relationship to you? Or does it sound like, perhaps, you are in an abusive relationship with a bully, and that you need space, and possibly a divorce?
At a minimum, I hope you will vote for me so that YOU can have a voice in the Senate, because if there is one thing that is truly, undoubtably essential, it is… liberty.
As I always say, Freedom is the answer, what’s the question?
You can find the text of this speech, together with 12 other essays about my liberty activism in my first book, The Ecstatic Pessimist, now available on Amazon. BUY YOURS TODAY.
Have you ever stopped to wonder… Who owns you? If you’re glib, you’ll, of course, say, “No one,” or, perhaps, “Me! I own me.”
Okay, but if you are not “allowed” to do what you want, when you want, based on your own perception and understanding and knowledge of a particular situation, or, even, no knowledge at all, and are forced, BY ORDER of another human being, to NOT DO WHAT YOU WANT to provide for yourself, your family and friends, then… WHO OWNS YOU?
Why do I believe in Liberty above all else? Beside the moral aspect of only *I, myself* am able to decide *for me about my life,* I believe you always get the best outcomes in the shortest amount of time when human freedom flourishes. When you allow people to pick and choose what works best for them, you allow experimentation, which in turn gives us information, which gives us better, faster results.
Free people = better lives.
When you eliminate Liberty, bad things follow. When you subjugate yourself to unelected “experts” and allow their opinions to form the basis of “government orders” against the people of your own state, forcing them into one single approach, **regardless of our differences,** you not only reduce and/or eliminate that experimentation and nimbleness afforded by free people freely deciding how to live their lives, you actually become a slave to someone else’s decision matrixes, you become a slave… To a state government that now claims to have the “authority” to pick who does what when WITH PRIVATE BUSINESSES, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and supposedly FREE HUMAN BEINGS…
Again… who owns you?
Know how you get people to stay inside during a pandemic? THERE’S A PANDEMIC. The governor failed New Hampshire by choosing tyranny over Liberty.
I realize Sununu had difficult choices to make, but he chose wrong out of the gate by not choosing to respect us, me, YOU, his fellow citizens and by ignoring the founding principles of this nation and state. He chose wrong by choosing to DICTATE instead of LEAD.
As is typical for a politician, there was a lot of nudge-nudge wink-winking that happened at the start. Subtle, “don’t worry,” we’re just going to designate everyone as “essential,” and this “order’s enforcement” won’t have “teeth.”
Well, let me tell you a little something about how Liberty vs. tyranny works… When you issue “orders,” you are empowering law enforcement to… enFORCE ORDERS, which is kind of what they like to do… Which means…
It has taken less than a month for the police to start harassing parents on playgrounds. It has taken less than a month for law enforcement to threaten NH surfers. It has taken less than a month for police departments to start issuing policy statements explaining how they will go about arresting people who are outside (e.g. see Weare PD).
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, and the Attorney General of the United States of America agrees with me, telling you to leave the public IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL lawful ORDER and if you are arrested in New Hampshire re this, PLEASE contact me.
(They’ll initially charge you with the catch-all “disobeying an officer” and then drop the charges later, and you’ll have to sue in federal court for violation of your civil rights, but I’m pretty sure–although, of course, no guarantees about anything, you’re reading an opinion on the internet–qualified immunity isn’t going to work for them, and law enforcement may be held *personally liable* too.)
I will be at the rally at Noon today 5/2 at the State House in Concord. I hope you will join me. No matter what your government tells you, WE ARE ALL ESSENTIAL.
Yes, even–nay, ESPECIALLY–us, the hard working, healthy, responsible taxpaying portion of the state… And it might behoove the “order-makers” to remember that!
I was asked by NH Journal to pen an opinion piece regarding the reopening of New Hampshire, which you can find here, We Are All Essential, It’s Time to Reopen NH, as well as the counterpoint by Senator Jon Morgan, I Want to Get the Hell Out of My House, Too — but We Can’t Rush Reopening.
Here’s my piece in full:
Freedom is the answer, what’s the question?
It is possible to be concerned about the virus, and the economic downturn and the destruction of our civil liberties. I am, which is why I attended the rally on Saturday. I don’t underestimate the virus, but I also don’t underestimate the cost of the shutdown or the dangers of trading liberty for a false sense of security.
Life is about tradeoffs, and when you use faulty data to implement faulty “solutions” — restricting peoples’ natural rights, instituting a lockdown to “flatten the curve,” and dividing Granite Staters into “essential” and “nonessential” groups — bad outcomes must follow.
We are all essential.
It is not the role of government to pick winners and losers. Unemployment leads to societal malaise, to increased suicides, domestic and child abuse, substance abuse, higher crime, lowered standards of living and shortened life spans.
Almost 20 percent of Granite State workers have lost their jobs already. That’s at least 125,000 people, mostly blue-collar workers and small business owners.
That’s the population equivalent of Manchester and Amherst combined. Next time you drive through Manchester, imagine, No one around me has a job anymore. Then drive past the next block, and the next, and the next.
Then consider that state employees are not being furloughed or laid off. Consider that they declared themselves “essential” and YOU, “nonessential.” Consider that union contracts with jaw-dropping benefits and above-market salaries are being ratified in emergency meetings that are not open to public scrutiny.
Consider that despite being told the hospitals would be overrun, another inaccurate prediction, more than 20 percent of N.H. hospital workers have been furloughed or laid off, effectively destroying private/elective healthcare, perhaps forever.
Then consider that your property taxes are going up… Then consider when they say “we are all in this together,” is it really true?
If we don’t have enough data to make good decisions, can we at least stop making bad ones? The original estimates were overstated by more than 30x. That’s soothsaying. What consequences do these unelected “experts” face for being wrong?
Different countries tried different approaches but the fatality rates look similar globally. Ironically, Sweden and South Korea both took less draconian approaches, and their curves look similar to ours, “the land of the freelockdowns.”
What kind of society do we live in when the government can suspend its own rules based on the inaccurate opinions of unelected officials? The First Amendment guarantees our right to peacefully assemble.
“Congress shall make no law” does not include “except when” or “unless this scary thing happens” or even, “under emergency circumstances.” If the government no longer follows the Constitution meant to constrain it, why should we remain law-abiding?
We can always protect our most vulnerable without losing our freedoms. We can ask people to stay at home voluntarily. We can accept that individuals have different appetites for risk, as is the case in a free society. We can remember that free people move freely, and that the government does not own you.
But alas, we are giving in to fear over freedom, we are walking away from our founding principles, and because of this, we will suffer under a government-manufactured economic crisis, and New Hampshire will never be the same.
Carla Gericke is the Republican candidate for State Senate in District 20. Learn more at CarlaGericke.com. She wrote this for NHJournal.