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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

She has her “little Glock” and another “little pocket pistol.” “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.

For example, a slick Free State Project website boasted of New Hampshire’s breathtaking scenic views, numerous hiking opportunities along the Appalachian Trail, and state constitution that “expressly protects citizens’ right to revolution and does not specifically prohibit secession.”

Another oust-worthy Free Stater was Chris Cantwell, who earned a national reputation for his role in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, during which white nationalist demonstrators marched with tiki torches, chanted hateful messages about Jewish people, assaulted people, and, in one case, drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed one of them. Cantwell was dubbed the “Crying Nazi,” because he wept after he drew criminal charges for assaulting demonstrators with pepper gas.

Cantwell had abandoned his libertarian principles and wanted to rule an authoritarian community—which, Freeman noted, would be far too statist.

Though the Free State Project had already attracted thousands to New Hampshire, the Trigger brought fresh life to the movement, and new political allies emerged. One such ally was an independent presidential candidate named Vermin Supreme, who declared soon after the Trigger that he was switching to the Libertarian Party.

“The Libertarian Party is the only party that aligns with my core principles of anti-state, anti-war, and anti-authority,” Supreme declared. His platform consists largely of a mandatory tooth-brushing law, free ponies for every American, time travel research, and zombie apocalypse preparedness. In 2017, in a poll against seven other aspiring Libertarian presidential candidates, Supreme polled in third place, at 8.2 percent.

Though the presidency remains a long shot, the Free Staters have at long last entered the political mainstream in New Hampshire. They have managed to gain power and influence in the state legislature, in many cases running as Democrats or Republicans to make themselves more viable.

With the support of its new Free State lawmakers, the New Hampshire State Legislature did away with licensing requirements to carry loaded, concealed firearms and abolished criminal penalties for small amounts of marijuana or hashish. It also passed measures to deregulate cryptocurrency, legalize home poker games, require police to get a warrant to track cell phones, exempt hair braiding from barber licensing requirements, legalize

fireworks, allow brew pubs to make cider, cut taxes on business profits, and eliminate a staggering 1,600 state regulations, many of which were considered obsolete.

The contrast with bear management in Grafton could not be more stark. A bear’s life in Hanover is threatened, and the state moves heaven and earth to find it and treat it in accordance with the wishes of the public. A bear threatens a woman’s life in Grafton, and the state makes a half-hearted effort to capture it before the incident quickly fades from the public imagination.

In my correspondence with Andy Timmins, he acknowledged that there was nothing built into the state’s bear management system that prioritized cases in which bears actually injured humans or dogs. “We are hesitant to call these ‘bear attacks,’ because we don’t view them as such,” he said. “However, physical contact between a bear and a person is not the norm, and we should probably be putting those events in a file.” He said that, after my inquiries, he intended to create a specific form that would capture “not-attacks” by bears.

Mink’s story demonstrates that, in a place with strong civic engagement, aggressive enforcement of best practices with regard to human food attractants, and political will, even a worst-case scenario of human-habituated bears can be resolved in a way that makes everyone happy. The problem is that state and local officials can’t afford to leverage that kind of effort everywhere. And until they do, bears will be effectively managed only on the doorsteps of the elite.

As a rule, libertarians don’t favor publicly funding libraries, and Clough’s so-called statism virtually ensured that the library’s fortunes would suffer during the Free Town era. When I asked Babiarz about the library, he wrinkled

up his face. “Does the library serve a purpose? Eh, it might,” he said. “But with an internet connection, I can get the world’s knowledge as long as I can type it in. Are you going to spend more on the library than the fire department? I don’t think so. You have to have priorities.”

Though Canaan spends $160,000 on its library each year, and the neighboring town of Enfield spends $180,000, the Grafton library gets only about $10,000 in cash—and an endless litany of complaints.

But anytime library supporters mount an effort to build a proper library or increase funding, they’ve run into stone walls and insults, both from libertarians and from tax-conscious town officials. During one town meeting, when Jeremy Olson was told that state law mandates wages for public library workers, he put forth an apparently serious proposal that the library do an end run around the law by paying its staff $1 an hour. Another library antagonist suggested that its free WiFi was opening the town to legal attacks over copyright infringement.

Clough was hopeful that the library’s prospects would brighten, now that the latest storm had been weathered. The Free Town era, she told me, was at an end. “In the last few years, a lot of them have just disappeared off the face of the Earth,” she said. “It’s like we did with the Moonies back in the ’80s. We chewed them up and spit them out. Grafton has a way of doing that.”

Knocking on doors in Grafton has left me with the nervous reflex of tensing up every time the door opens. You just never know when you’re going to get Friendly Advice.

Though the attack demonstrated the continued effect of Grafton’s laissez-bear attitude toward local bear management, it was pretty small potatoes in a landscape of bizarre bear tales that continued to roll, tidally, across the world, each one held up as a curiosity to delight the public. In the summer of 2020 alone, I read about bears wandering into and out of grocery stores, a bear overdosing on cocaine, a Canadian novel that centered on the sexual relationship between a woman and a bear, a bear punched by a drunken visitor at a Polish zoo, a bear found swimming in a lake with its head stuck in a giant container of Cheez-its, a bear castrated by the Italian government for escaping from its enclosure and eating donkeys. There was a bear illegally tagged with a pro-Trump MAGA sticker, a bear corpse starting a grass fire after being electrocuted by a power line, a bear breaking into a pizza delivery vehicle, bears vying for champion-level portliness during a government-sponsored “Fat Bear Week,” bears tearing the doors off of rental storage units, an elderly bear treated for arthritis with stem cell therapy, a wild bear fed cookies from an idiot’s mouth, and a 22,000-year-old cave bear unearthed by melting permafrost.

A bear is what a bear is. But also, a bear is whatever humans say it is. To a human, a bear might be a comic bumbler, a horror-movie villain, or a noble savage; often, the bear is an emotional crutch, existing largely to reassure the hunter of his own strength, or the environmental activist of their own morality. And when people project their cultural biases onto a bear or a bear population, they invariably cause unintentional changes to the actual animals. Sometimes, as in Grafton, those changes boomerang back onto the people who indulged the most reckless expressions of their own anthropomorphic tendencies. All of which is to say, the bears are not the only ones commanding headlines.

Just 238 years after Grafton’s first ill-fated effort to secede from the United States, Ridley and his allies wanted New Hampshire to declare its independence, cut ties with the federal government, and make its own decisions about things like currency (including cryptocurrency), interstate highways, racial segregation, and the sale of heroin.

“Secession is like surgery,” Ridley would later say. “It’s scary. It’s not something you just want to do for no particular reason. But it’s sometimes necessary, like surgery is.”

The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire broke with the national Libertarian Party by formally adding a secession plank to its official platform, a move that gave the idea both credibility and staying power within the libertarian community. Placed

after clauses that identified tax as theft and sex work as an expression of human rights, the state platform now asserted that “the people of New Hampshire have the sole and exclusive right to govern themselves as sovereign, free, and independent individuals.” The idea was now officially mainstream—within the fringe. It was a start.

But a fellow Free Stater, Keith Ammon, served a term in the New Hampshire statehouse before introducing the “Jetsons Bill.” When it became law in 2019, New Hampshire became the first state in the union to approve flying cars (or, more accurately, small airplanes that can be

easily converted, Transformers-style, into a road-friendly iteration, sort of an aeronautical duckboat). They require no state inspection.

Act 1 took place on November 20. Having just won control of the state legislature, a group of Republicans asserted their commitment to freedom by gathering indoors, mostly maskless, at a ski resort. One of them, a realtor named Dick Hinch, lauded Republicans who refused to wear masks as patriots and the “freedom group.” Admiringly, they asked Hinch to be their leader. He accepted. Act 2 took place on December 1. Hinch, facing fire from Democrats and the press, admitted that “a very small number” of Republicans who had attended the ski resort gathering had come down with COVID-19. The following day Hinch was formally voted in as House Speaker by the full legislature. Act 3 took place on December 9. Having led the House for barely more than a week, Hinch died of COVID-19.

He allowed that the state government in New Hampshire “is a little bit less evil than Google.” But Washington, DC, he said, is worse than the two put together.