On a business trip to Japan in 2000, I was stunned to discover the Tokyo subway still ran on the honor system. No turnstile jumpers, just trust. Flash-forward to my life here in New Hampshire, and the same principle thrives: roadside farm stalls, unlocked and unmanned, with a coffee can or a Venmo QR code and a simple request—take what you need, leave what you owe. No cameras. No signs warning of prosecution. Just… trust. It’s not just charming—it’s culture. Live free and act right. One more reason I love living in the Free State!
Despite what the haters say, I am a free speech absolutist. You are free to say whatever you want. I am free not to associate with you. That’s how it works.
I just submitted a nomination of the LPNH for the Nackey Loeb First Amendment Award. Herewith:
I am writing to nominate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire (LPNH) for the 2025 Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award, not in spite of their provocations–but because of them.
With their slogan, “Become Insufferable,” LPNH embodies the oldest and most uncomfortable truth of free speech: it isn’t meant to protect what’s popular, polite, or palatable. It’s there for the speech that makes your stomach churn. The kind that earns gasps, not claps. The kind that, historically, gets banned–right before everything else does, too.
Their social media posts–mostly lowbrow, often crass, frequently controversial, and sometimes downright offensive–force an urgent question into the public square: Do we still believe in free speech when it’s speech we abhor?
This is the very principle the ACLU defended in 1977, when they backed the National Socialist Party’s right to march through Skokie, Illinois. A Jewish lawyer, David Goldberger, argued that denying speech to the worst among us imperils speech for the rest of us. The Supreme Court agreed.
Like Skokie, the LPNH case is not about agreement or taste. It’s about whether the First Amendment applies equally to the unpopular, the indecent, the mad. Their July 2025 tweet–calling Martin Luther King a communist and mocking his legacy–was widely condemned, as was their 2024 post suggesting violence against Kamala Harris (later taken down). These are abhorrent messages to many, including to me. But this nomination isn’t about whether I like what they said. It’s about whether they had the right to say it.
LPNH insists they do–and they haven’t backed down. Even under pressure from national leadership, tech platform censorship, FBI inquiries, and widespread public backlash, they’ve doubled down on their core message: free speech must include the offensive, or it means nothing at all.
Legal precedent is on their side. Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) clarified that even incendiary speech is protected unless it is both intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action. LPNH’s posts–though tasteless and provocative–have not crossed that legal threshold. What they have done is spark nationwide debate about the boundaries of protected speech in the digital age, about the line between rhetoric and violence, and about the role of political satire, trolling, and provocation in a polarized country.
Like Nackey Scripps Loeb herself, the LPNH uses its platform to challenge sacred cows and poke the establishment in the eye. You don’t have to agree with them–in fact, it’s better if you don’t. That’s the test. That’s the point.
I urge the committee to consider this nomination not as an endorsement of content, but as a defense of principle. In a world increasingly hostile to dissent, the LPNH’s unapologetic use of their First Amendment rights keeps the flame of free speech burning–messy, chaotic, and vital.
With respect and a deep belief in the power of defending the right to speak one’s mind, so that we may know which fools not to suffer gladly.
Just Because You Can Say It Doesn’t Mean You Should
Let me be very clear: I nominated the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire for a First Amendment award because the principle of free speech matters, not because I like what they’re saying. I don’t. Most days, I think they’re trolling themselves into madness.
Which is why we need to talk about something else entirely: just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should.
In the analogy I used—LPNH playing the part of the National Socialist Party in Skokie—I am, metaphorically, the Jewish lawyer defending their right to march through the neighborhood.
But let’s be honest: no sane person wakes up aspiring to be the Nazis in that story. So why are you—yes, you—trying to play the villain? Why are you trying to be hated?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: speech isn’t neutral. It isn’t inert. Your thoughts become your words, your words become your deeds, and your deeds become your life. The stories you tell shape the world you live in. So if the vibe you’re putting out is cruelty masked as “cleverness,” don’t be surprised when no one wants you in their story.
Let’s ask the harder question: Why are you saying what you’re saying?
Is it truth-seeking or trauma-dumping?
Is it ego or principle?
Is it strategy or dopamine addiction?
If you contradict yourself from day to day, it’s not free speech. It’s noise. If you don’t know the why behind your message, you’re not building a bridge to liberty, you’re building a road to nowhere.
This was never about “mean tweets.” That phrase was a bullshit from the start—an excuse to pretend your behavior isn’t in question. Words shape reality. They turn you into what you are. Your words and actions are the reason you are gross.
Here’s the litmus test: Are your words serving Love or Hate?
And don’t get it twisted. Love is not weakness. Love is not holding hands and singing Kumbaya while tyrants stomp on your face forever. Love is clarity. Love is truth-telling. Love is fierce, and it defends the sacred. It doesn’t humiliate for retweets. It doesn’t mock the dead. It doesn’t bait its community for clout.
Liberty is not license. Free speech is not a dare to be the most grotesque. You don’t win moral authority by being louder, meaner, or “more based.” You win by being principled, consistent, and decent.
Life has taught me this much: you reap what you sow. If you lead with poison, don’t cry when all you find are snakes. If you sow division, don’t expect a harvest of community. If you weaponize words, don’t be shocked when people stop listening—or start fighting back.
In this polarized mess of a world, we don’t need more edge-lords with God complexes. We need courageous individuals who can hold two truths at once:
- You have the right to speak, even when it offends.
- You also have a responsibility to mean something when you do.
Choose wisely. You’re not just yelling into the void. You’re whispering to the future. A future your words create. If you hate, hate will follow. If you love, love will bloom. Choose love.
Carla and Dominic of Porcupine Real Estate sit down to chat about the real estate landscape in New Hampshire. Learn more about median prices by county, how we tailor our searches for our clients, recent press coverage, and more!
Day 197 of My Living Xperiment: A Mad Woman and the Machine https://t.co/VmAYSDTbji
— Carla Gericke, Live Free And Thrive! (@CarlaGericke) July 16, 2025
The Mad Woman and the Machine
Once upon a time—say, 1998—a younger version of me stood in a bar in San Francisco, telling a room full of well-meaning, cool-tee-shirted software engineers that fluoride was poison. That the FDA was a captured agency. That Monsanto was not your friend. That the Rule of Law, if it ever was noble, had been hijacked by the Rule of Money. That maybe—just maybe—the “fringe” was simply a forecast.
They laughed.
Or worse, they proverbially patted me on the head and let it be known, “We got this.”
Fast forward to 2010, in the Free State of New Hampshire, at an off-the-grid farm called Bardo, standing around a roaring bonfire on a crisp fall night, surrounded by hills colored like candy corn.
“Dudes, they’re manipulating the weather!”
“Carla,” someone said, circling a finger beside their temple, “And her chemtrails. Hahahaha!”
And so it went.
In truth, it’s the story of my life.
Me—curious, skeptical, deeply read—offering breadcrumbs of truth while the men in my life followed the System deeper into the woods. A system they were trained to revere: The Writing-Down-of-Things. The Law. The Data. The Code. The Algorithm.
In a word: Statism—that comforting lie that someone else is in charge and doing the right thing. That someone else “has this.” Because outsourcing accountability is the Machine’s most magical of magic tricks.
When no one is to blame for the problems they cause, bad things never get fixed.
And while skeptics like me were watching and warning, The System teased, marginalized, and eventually gaslit me into submission.
Into silence.
When Skeptics became “Conspiracy Theorists,” the unaccountable won.
Here’s the twist I didn’t see back then:
The very system that once protected the men has now mutated into a Machine that’s devouring them too.
The Borg has no loyalty—not even to its benefactors.
It’s gone full autopilot, an organism of fear built from every memo, statute, executive order, risk assessment, modeling scenario, and CYA directive ever etched in ink.
It started innocently, maybe even divinely: observation, recordkeeping, story.
We named things.
We admired—then charted—the stars.
We honored myth and cosmos.
But then we got clever.
And then we let our imaginations run wild.
Then came entertainment.
Profit.
Politics.
And… propaganda.
And somewhere along the way, the Written Word stopped being a prayer and became a prison. A replicable manifestation engine—not of truth—but of fear.
Nightmares spread faster than dreams.
Warnings codified faster than wonders.
And the Universe, always listening, started echoing back exactly what we captured.
And now?
We are drowning in our own ink.
Silver iodide raining from the skies.
Thimerosal in baby bloodstreams.
Fluoride in formula.
Patents on the weather.
Copyright on your consciousness.
A world so anxious about The Future, it is poisoning The Now.
And when I dared—again—to say, “This is madness,” when I pointed to the mask mandates with their upside-down logic (wear it here, not there, not when you eat, but when you walk to the loo), when I warned about the experimental injections, about needing informed consent—not creepy Uncle Sam’s mandates—when I spoke up about the spiritual sickness of government-by-safetyism…
What did the men say?
They said—again—that I was mad.
It’s always the same spell:
Gaslight. Minimize. Discredit.
Accuse the woman of what the system is doing.
Call the truth-teller hysterical while the actual lunacy becomes law.
The hardest part?
It wasn’t the strangers.
It was the men I trusted.
Men in my community.
My community of men.
So many of them. The men.
Men who now watch other unhinged men—mad with dopamine addiction—step into my safe spaces (spaces I created) to scream in my face…
…while telling me I need help.
That I am the problem.
I’m not.
I am the woman who sees.
I am the woman who warned.
I am the woman who knows.
Knows not to condone the gaslighting, the minimizing, the discrediting.
The lies designed to destroy my reputation.
Not again.
I remember when the feminine wasn’t shamed for her knowing.
When wisdom wasn’t mocked for lacking a peer-reviewed source.
When intuition was considered guidance—not a mental illness.
I remember.
And I refuse to forget.
So let me say it plainly, before The Machine writes it down wrong again:
The System is unwell.
The men who support the System are unwell.
The women who support the System are unwell.
United, they are building a Hell.
We need medicine.
Real healing.
Not more toxicity masked as “for your own good” by your Masters.
The solution isn’t to flip the polarity and let a new matriarchy wield the old whip.
It’s not domination we need—it’s restoration.
A cosmic rebalancing.
A return to source.
We need the masculine to listen.
Not to “fix things,” but to hear and understand.
Not performative allyship.
Not “I believe you” while still investing in Pfizer.
We need your reverence.
In return for ours.
We need you to remember that feminine energy is not chaotic—it is creative.
That madness isn’t madness if it’s the truth ahead of its time.
That conscious creation begins with what we choose to speak, to write, to believe.
And that means we must start naming beauty again.
Naming hope.
Naming peace.
Writing down a new dream.
One where we are free.
One where we are whole.
Because if the Universe is echoing our thoughts, then let us be very, very careful what we think next.