A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Long after it was no longer practically necessary, killing bears remained popular. Boys grew up eager to shoot a bear as a rite of passage; middle-aged men shot them as an assertion of manliness; old men prowled the woods with guns at the ready to show that, for now at least, they still had the ineffable “it” that could otherwise be expressed only by dropping one’s trousers, ruler at the ready.

“Government isn’t ruining capitalism. Capitalism is ruining government. I think that’s kind of obvious,” he says. “If you take capitalism out of government you get simple public representation. If you take government out of capitalism, you get slavery.” Even though this puts him in diametric opposition to the Free Town libertarians, they are unified by a common cause. Grafton’s emphasis on freedom creates a space, Adam says, that lets the extreme left and the extreme right collaborate on the dismantling of societal norms, with minimal interference from authorities.

People were intensely interested, because dodging municipal property taxes comes with a certain irony: it’s a zero-sum game. Anytime one person successfully avoids paying taxes, others in town must pay more to make up the difference. The system incentivizes people to champion their own reasons for not paying taxes, while attacking the reasons presented by neighbors.

The town told Connell that, if the IRS recognized the Peaceful Assembly Church as a public charity, it would give the town grounds to approve his tax exemption application without opening the floodgates to a tsunami of frivolous claims. Grafton officials were eager to put the matter to rest because by now it seemed that every time the issue was raised in public, two or three people would threaten to declare that their own houses were churches too. But Connell had just one small problem with clearing the low bar that the town set out. To apply for nonprofit status with the IRS, he would have to first correspond with the IRS. And to correspond with the IRS, he would have to accept that the IRS was a legal authority, which he most emphatically did not.

Access to nuggs also explains why all ten of the heaviest bears ever recorded in New Hampshire were spotted (and shot) in 1997 or later. (They each weighed between 493 and 552 pounds.) A 2019 study found that some wild black bears with access to sugary human foods (like doughnuts) are skipping seasonal hibernation; these bears also showed advanced aging at the cellular level.

“You take a toxo-infected rat, and it does some dumbass thing which it should innately be skittish about, which is go right up to cats’ mouths,” he said. “And maybe, you take a toxo-infected human, and they start having the proclivity towards doing a dumbass thing that we should be naturally averse to.”

Libertarianism is entirely built upon the appeal of exercising free choice to own a gun, marry indiscriminately, commit suicide, shoot bears, curse in polite society, or buy unhealthy amounts of soda in New York City. That appeal is decidedly less palpable if those choices are actually the product of a parasite. And it’s likely, Sapolsky notes, that T. gondii is not the only parasite out there. Sapolsky has become a standard-bearer for a theory that free will is more or less something people have made up rather than face the far less satisfying reality that most of our decisions are driven by culture, chemical processes within the brain, bacteria in the gut, and, not least, parasites.

“But!” she says, pausing to make sure I am listening. Her favorite is her “handy-dandy Beretta. Sixteen gauge.” I’m unclear on whether owning three guns makes one feel thrice as safe as one gun, or if gun ownership is, like potato chips and birthdays, subject to diminishing returns. Over the course of years, Beretta began to think seriously about pulling out a gun (I am delighted to learn that, in the model of an Agatha Christie character, she keeps one stored in her umbrella stand) and shooting one of Doughnut Lady’s bears.

Here, I thought, was another irony, in that those who had come to this patch of woods seeking the ultimate freedom were instead barricading themselves into a rudimentary fortress to attain some level of security that was not being provided by the government.