Author Archives: Selina R. Pinkstaff

Why Libertarians Are (Still) Plotting to Take Over New Hampshire

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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On February 18, hundreds of libertarians will flock to the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire, for the ninth annual Liberty Forum, a four-day conference featuring presentations on topics such as religious freedom, school choice, and “Anarchy: Dressing for Success.” A big draw will be Edward Snowden’s keynote speech, delivered over a live video stream. As the exiled NSA whistleblower speaks, conference goers may mull their own flight from government oppression—not to Russia, but to the haven of New Hampshire.

The Free State Project, which runs the Liberty Forum, has spent 15 years trying to recruit 20,000 libertarian-minded activists to take up residence in the Granite State. By accruing a critical mass of small-government advocates in a state with just 1.3 million people, the project seeks to exert substantial influence on state politics to create a utopia of social liberties and deregulated markets. Those who sign the Free State pledge promise to make the move to New Hampshire once 20,000 participants have signed up. Now, with 19,858 signers, the project’s organizers say they are finally recruiting the last of those volunteers.

However, the organizers readily admit they don’t know how many of the would-be Free Staters will actually come to New Hampshire. “That is the million-dollar question,” says Free State Project president Carla Gericke. “It’s all speculative at this stage.” The most fervent believers are likely already in the state. Free State Project founder Jason Sorens says he expects around a third of the remaining signers to move. The group plans to track down those who may have forgotten and nudge them with direct mail, phone calls, and email reminders about their commitment.

Sorens first published his idea for the Free State Project in 2001, when he was a PhD student in Yale’s political science department. In an article in the Libertarian Enterprise webzine, Soren fantasized about a place where state and local budgets would be slashed and federal highway funds would be rejected. By 2003, a community of several thousand Free State Project pledgers had coalesced online and were debating the relative merits of colonizing Idaho, Wyoming, or Alaska. Then a delegation met with then-New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson, a Republican, who told them, “Come on up. We’d love to have you.”

Since then, 1,909 early movers have settled in New Hampshire, according to organizers. They have started a church, installed Bitcoin ATMs, and protested against an Uber ban. One Free Stater became a school board chairwoman, then used tax money to pay private school tuition for kids in her district. Free Staters in Grafton tried to declare their no-stoplight town a United Nations-free zone. In Keene, libertarian transplants upset old-timers by videotaping and challenging parking officers enforcing “the king’s tariff.”

Influencing state policy remains a major goal for many participants. According to the project, it’s gotten more than 40 “pro-liberty” legislators elected. At least 18 early movers currently hold seats in the State House. The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, a tea party-aligned nonprofit Soren says was “founded by native libertarians in expectation that the Free State Project would be coming,” has become a force in state politics.

Still, it only became obvious recently that the project would hit its 20,000-pledge trigger. Last fall, after years of standing around conferences with clipboards and taking out advertisements in Reason magazine, the project’s organizers turned to Facebook. More than 2,500 new participants signed on during a four-month ad campaign targeting users who “liked” pages for Bitcoin, “voluntarism,” and George Carlin. In recent weeks, the group has ramped up its Facebook ad spending to $500 a day. Nearly 20 early movers have been arriving in New Hampshire each month—even in winter. “I really hope we can build something that’s historic,” Gericke says. “People are coming.”

That’s good news for Mark Warden, owner and lead agent at Porcupine Real Estate in Manchester, which does around 90 percent of its business with early movers. (Libertarians have adopted the porcupine, a peaceful creature that defends itself when attacked, as their mascot.) “A lot of my clients want to be self-sufficient—whether that’s living off the grid and growing their own food, wanting to shoot and hunt on their own property, or being able tor raise pigs and chickens without zoning laws interfering,” says Warden, who shows his properties with a gun on his hip. “We speak the same language.”

Warden also offers advice to aspiring politicians, setting them up in towns where they would have a chance of winning over voters. Warden is a former state legislator whose old campaign website touts an A+ rating from the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. He once argued for decriminalizing simple assault during a committee hearing, later apologizing for claiming that some people may “like being in abusive relationships”.

Some future Free Staters say they’re drawn by the free-market business opportunities. Nelson Aquino, a Boston-based sales executive, plans to move in a matter of weeks. Aquino says he’s looking for a community that understands his opposition to police violence and torture, and he also plans to invest: “The people who are willing to make that type of pledge are people who believe in personal responsibility, people who believe in contracts, people who follow through on their word,” he says. “Those are the people I want to do business with.”

John Bush, who tried to start a Texas version of the project called Lone Star Libertopia, intends to open a New Hampshire branch of his Austin-based bookstore, which sells volumes on homesteading and crypto-anarchism alongside nutritional supplements and water filtration systems. “We intend to build some wealth—properties and wealth,” Bush says. “The early movers are what making it all so sexy and attractive.”

Nineteen-year-old Bradley Hunt, who signed the pledge about a year ago, says he was was bummed out when he heard the project was reaching its target—he’d wanted to be an early mover. He’s unhappy living in Michigan but doesn’t have enough savings to pick up and go. In the meantime, he volunteers for the local Libertarian Party, joins jury nullification protests, and tries to boycott the US dollar. He envisions himself and his girlfriend buying a little property in the northern end of New Hampshire in two or three years.

“The only thing I can see stopping me from moving is if I go to jail for my activism or if I get in a car accident or die or something,” he says. In the Free State, “I would have to start over again—but I’m okay with that.”

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Why Libertarians Are (Still) Plotting to Take Over New Hampshire

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Oddly Enough, Syria Really Is Destroying Its Chemical Weapons

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on October 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest news on the chemical weapons front:

The international chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday that Syria had met an important deadline for “the functional destruction” of all the chemical weapons production and mixing facilities declared to inspectors, “rendering them inoperable” under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States.

….The next phase of the timetable set down by the United Nations foresees Syria destroying its stockpiles of chemical weapons by mid-2014. Those weapons are reported to include mustard gas and sarin, a toxic nerve agent which the Obama administration says was used in the Aug. 21 attack.

I don’t really have any comment about this, except to express a bit of puzzlement. As near as I can tell, Bashar al-Assad is really and truly sincere about destroying his chemical weapons stocks.1 But why? I very much doubt it’s because he fears retaliation from the United States. And given his past behavior, it’s hardly likely that it’s driven by feelings of moral revulsion.

So what’s his motivation? For reasons of his own, he must have decided that he was better off without chemical weapons than with them. Perhaps it has to do with the internal political situation in Syria. Or maybe Russia got fed up for some reason. But it’s a bit of a mystery, and not one that I’ve seen any plausible explanations for.

1So far, anyway. Obviously things might change in the future. At the moment, though, it seems like he’s genuinely being cooperative.

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Oddly Enough, Syria Really Is Destroying Its Chemical Weapons

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What George Orwell Got Wrong About the New Surveillance State

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In an increasingly phantasmagorical world, here’s my present fantasy of choice: someone from General Keith Alexander’s outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wells’s time machine in the attic of an old house in London. Britain’s subservient Government Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where it’s put back in working order. Alexander then revs it up and heads not into the future like Wells to see how our world ends, but into the past to offer a warning to Americans about what’s to come.

He arrives in Washington on October 23, 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day after President Kennedy has addressed the American people on national television to tell them that this planet might not be theirs—or anyone else’s—for long. (“We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.”) Greeted with amazement by the Washington elite, Alexander, too, goes on television and informs the same public that, in 2013, the major enemy of the United States will no longer be the Soviet Union, but an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the headquarters of our country’s preeminent foe will be found somewhere in the rural backlands of… Yemen.

Yes, Yemen, a place most Americans, then and now, would be challenged to find on a world map. I guarantee you one thing: had such an announcement actually been made that day, most Americans would undoubtedly have dropped to their knees and thanked God for His blessings on the American nation. Though even then a nonbeliever, I would undoubtedly have been among them. After all, the 18-year-old Tom Engelhardt, on hearing Kennedy’s address, genuinely feared that he and the few pathetic dreams of a future he had been able to conjure up were toast.

Had Alexander added that, in the face of AQAP and similar minor jihadist enemies scattered in the backlands of parts of the planet, the US had built up its military, intelligence, and surveillance powers beyond anything ever conceived of in the Cold War or possibly in the history of the planet, Americans of that time would undoubtedly have considered him delusional and committed him to an asylum.

Such, however, is our world more than two decades after Eastern Europe was liberated, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War definitively ended, and the Soviet Union disappeared.

Why Orwell Was Wrong

Now, let me mention another fantasy connected to the two-superpower Cold War era: George Orwell’s 1948 vision of the world of 1984 (or thereabouts, since the inhabitants of his novel of that title were unsure just what year they were living in). When the revelations of NSA contractor Edward Snowden began to hit the news and we suddenly found ourselves knee-deep in stories about Prism, XKeyscore, and other Big Brother-ish programs that make up the massive global surveillance network the National Security Agency has been building, I had a brilliant idea—reread 1984.

At a moment when Americans were growing uncomfortably aware of the way their government was staring at them and storing what they had previously imagined as their private data, consider my soaring sense of my own originality a delusion of my later life. It lasted only until I read an essay by NSA expert James Bamford in which he mentioned that, “within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in the Guardian and the Washington Post…, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the ‘Movers & Shakers’ list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day.”

Nonetheless, amid a jostling crowd of worried Americans, I did keep reading that novel and found it at least as touching, disturbing, and riveting as I had when I first came across it sometime before Kennedy went on TV in 1962. Even today, it’s hard not to marvel at the vision of a man living at the beginning of the television age who sensed how a whole society could be viewed, tracked, controlled, and surveiled.

But for all his foresight, Orwell had no more power to peer into the future than the rest of us. So it’s no fault of his that, almost three decades after his year of choice, more than six decades after his death, the shape of our world has played havoc with his vision. Like so many others in his time and after, he couldn’t imagine the disappearance of the Soviet Union or at least of Soviet-like totalitarian states. More than anything else, he couldn’t imagine one fact of our world that, in 1948, wasn’t in the human playbook.

In 1984, Orwell imagined a future from what he knew of the Soviet and American (as well as Nazi, Japanese, and British) imperial systems. In imagining three equally powerful, equally baleful superpowers—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—balanced for an eternity in an unwinnable global struggle, he conjured up a logical extension of what had been developing on this planet for hundreds of years. His future was a version of the world humanity had lived with since the first European power mounted cannons on a wooden ship and set sail, like so many Mongols of the sea, to assault and conquer foreign realms, coastlines first.

From that moment on, the imperial powers of this planet—super, great, prospectively great, and near great—came in contending or warring pairs, if not triplets or quadruplets. Portugal, Spain, and Holland; England, France, and Imperial Russia; the United States, Germany, Japan, and Italy (as well as Great Britain and France), and after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union. Five centuries in which one thing had never occurred, the thing that even George Orwell, with his prodigious political imagination, couldn’t conceive of, the thing that makes 1984 a dated work and his future a past that never was: a one-superpower world. To give birth to such a creature on such a planet—as indeed occurred in 1991—was to be at the end of history, at least as it had long been known.

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What George Orwell Got Wrong About the New Surveillance State

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Does Sen. Jeff Sessions Think Obama is Secretly a "Radical Machiavelli"?

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on June 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Is Barack Obama a “radical Machiavelli” bent on destroying American society so he can shape it into a totalitarian state? In February, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) endorsed a book that makes such a case.

Speaking at a conference run by David Horowitz, the onetime 1960s radical who remade himself as a conservative provocateur, Sessions, the ranking member of the Senate budget committee, opened his remarks with praise for Horowitz and his books:

I really liked A Point in Time. If you haven’t read that, it is a good book, a wise book, well in the tradition of the Western heritage of faith and reason, and gives us some perspective about who we are. And recently reading Radicals, I hit the last chapter lying in bed, and I awakened myself and had an epiphany ’cause he was talking about our president. And I’ve been wrestling with how do we deal, what is this, how has this been working, and how can we do better, and how can we understand better, how to respond to his quite successful tactics politically. So I was so moved. I called Horowitz. He gave me some ideas. He’s written some papers. I passed them around—the draft—a bunch of senators, and shared those thoughts. I know Sen. Ron Johnson—I don’t know if Ron’s still here or not. He and I definitely have discussed what you shared with us, and it will make a difference in how we approach things.

Here’s the video:

On the surface, Sessions’ comments seemed relatively benign. But the senator was embracing a depiction of Obama in which Horowitz presents him as a lying and conniving radical who will do or say anything to amass more power and assert authoritarian control over the United States.

The last chapter of Horowitz’s 2012 book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion—which prompted Sessions’ eureka moment—is entitled, “A Radical Machiavelli,” and it opens with a quote from Obama: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” In this chapter, Horowitz attempts to explain the progressive mindset. The key to understanding these folks and their ultimate aims, Horowitz contends, is Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer. His influence, Horowitz notes, has extended to Obama and “captured the heart of the Democratic Party.”

Horowitz conflates Obama with Alinsky and then proceeds to describe Alinsky in the harshest terms, asserting that his “entire career was devoted to the destruction of America’s social order.” Alinsky’s progressivism, Horowitz huffs, was “a declaration of war on a democracy whose individual freedoms are rooted in the institutions of private property, due process, and limited government, all of which his prescriptions would destroy.” And perhaps worse, Alinksy urged “radicals to infiltrate the Democratic Party and traditional institutions with the goal of subverting them.”

You can see where this is heading: Obama is an Alinskyite who has burrowed his way to the pinnacle of power. This is hardly a surprise, coming from Horowitz. One of his websites bears this slogan: “Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” And in the chapter Sessions hailed, Horowitz describes Alinsky’s disciples in stark terms: “Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power.”

And what do these people want to do with this power? Horowitz has the answer:

to create a new race of men and women who are able to live in harmony and according to the principles of social justice. To be as God. Creating such a race requires the total control—the totalitarian control—of individual behavior.

Horowitz elaborates:

In other words, the system—the American system—should be burned to the ground, but to achieve this goal you must conceal your intentions. Conceal the goal and you can accomplish anything.

Horowitz clearly is saying that the president is a burn-down-the-system nogoodnik masquerading as a pragmatic moderate. There’s even evidence—if you look closely enough. Horowitz points to the speech Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic convention, in which she described her husband’s work as a community organizer: “Barack…spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’ And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.” Believing he has unearthed a damning clue, Horowitz declares, “It was pitch-perfect Alinskyism.” He adds, “There is nothing new in the strategy of appearing moderate in order to disarm your opposition. It was Lenin’s idea, too.”

Having equated the Obamas with Alinsky, Horrowitz goes on to say that Alinsky-style radicals have no scruples. They deceive, they lie, and sometimes they even murder to achieve their goals. They are, he says, in “a permanent war” and do not “worry about the legality or morality” of their actions. Referring to “revolutionaries” like Alinsky and Lenin, Horowitz asserts, “What they offer is a destructive rage against the worlds they inhabit” and “a chaos designed to produce a totalitarian state.”

This is heady stuff. Horowitz paints a picture of radicals who abide by no legal or moral codes and who desire to destroy the current order in order to create a totalitarian state. And Sessions told the assembled that he found this chapter so illuminating that he asked Horowitz for further advice on how to deal with the wily president. (Radicals features a front-cover blurb from former GOP Senator Jon Kyl: “David Horowitz knows more about the Left than anyone in America.”)

But when Mother Jones asked Sessions if he shares the over-the-top, Horowitzian view of Obama, a Sessions aide insisted that the senator does not see the president in such terms and sent this statement:

Senator Sessions has always been respectful in his critiques of the President’s policies. If you listen to the Senator’s address it’s obvious that he’s not saying anything remotely along the lines of what you suggest.

The Senator’s comment was explicitly in reference to the White House’s communications strategy. As he explained in his speech: “President Obama has framed every fiscal issue and his own reelection campaign as a choice between his compassion and Republicans’ uncaring fiscal discipline emphasis. According to this fiction, Republicans are the protectors of the rich, while the President and his party are champions of the poor and the middle class. The Left’s big spending policies are portrayed as expressions of concern for those in need, while conservatives’ desire to achieve financial stability and economic growth are portrayed as heartless and uncaring. To an alarming degree, the President has succeeded in framing the debate around this fundamentally egregious falsehood… We must and will make the moral case for conservative reform, and explain the fundamental truth—that our ideas are the only real way to reduce poverty in America. Truth is always the best defense against slander… We will offer real jobs, real independence and prosperity to the American people. The real measure of compassion, we will explain, is not how much money we spend on poverty, but how many people we help to rise out of poverty.”

Sessions did devote part of his speech to complaining that the left has too often succeeded in defining conservatives as heartless and handmaidens of the well-to-do, a point that he and Horowitz have often been keen to make. (Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.) Yet the book chapter that jazzed Sessions is predominantly Horowitz’s attempt to explain what he fervently considers to be the dark, unprincipled, and inevitably totalitarian mindset of Alinskyites—with whom he associates the Obamas. This chapter is not about how best to frame debates over spending and taxes, and it is certainly no respectful critique of the president. If Sessions does believe, as he told Horowitz and his crowd, that this chapter explains Obama, he has accepted a fundamentally radical and terrifying assessment of the man.

Research assistance provided by James Carter IV.

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Does Sen. Jeff Sessions Think Obama is Secretly a "Radical Machiavelli"?

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Secret Tape: McConnell and Aides Weighed Using Judd’s Mental Health and Religion as Political Ammo

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on April 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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More Mother Jones coverage of Mitch McConnell and the 2014 Kentucky Senate race.


Secret Tape: McConnell and Aides Weighed Using Judd’s Mental Health and Religion as Political Ammo


Full Transcript and Audio of Mitch McConnell Campaign’s Meeting on Ashley Judd


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Mitch McConnell vs. the World


Yes, Potential Senate Candidate Ashley Judd Has Gotten Naked on Screen. So Have These Political Figures.


CPAC: Where Ashley Judd Rape Jokes Happen


Ashley Judd: I’m Not Running

On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to “point out” the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. “They want to fight? We’re ready,” he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader. During this strategy session—a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones—McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views.

Last month, Judd announced she wouldn’t challenge McConnell, whose reelection campaign could become one of the most watched races of the 2014 cycle (if a serious Democratic opponent emerges). But at the February 2 meeting, McConnell and his team were fixated on Judd. McConnell told his aides that at the early stage of the campaign they had to clobber any potential challenger:

I assume most of you have played the, the game Whac-A-Mole?” (Laughter.) This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out.

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Secret Tape: McConnell and Aides Weighed Using Judd’s Mental Health and Religion as Political Ammo

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Mayor Mike Bloomberg Will Spend $12 Million to Push Gun Control Through Congress

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on March 23, 2013

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New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants new gun control legislation so bad that he’s set to spend a staggering $12 million of his own money on ads targeting US senators in a dozen states.

As the New York Times reports, Bloomberg’s new wave of ads, which begin on Monday, support universal background checks for nearly all gun purchases, but do not mention a ban on assault weapons. The ads, run under the auspices of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group funded and co-chaired by Bloomberg, will target Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Patrick Toomey (R-Penn.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).


Gunmakers and the NRA Bet Big on Silencers. What Could Go Wrong?


EXCLUSIVE: Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle


Meet the NRA’s Board of Directors


The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys


How Republicans and the NRA Kneecapped the ATF


Does the NRA Really Have 4 Million Members?


How the NRA and Its Allies Helped Spread a Radical Gun Law Nationwide

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Bloomberg’s $12 million ad buy further cements his position as the main political force challenging the clout of the National Rifle Association. For decades, the NRA has used its money and manpower to oust politicians who support any new regulation of guns in America. The threat of NRA attacks helped stifle any effort at new gun laws, including requiring background checks for most gun purchases and reinstating the ban on assault rifles, which expired in 2004. Now, by pumping money into Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Independence USA, his super-PAC, Bloomberg hopes to counter the might of the NRA, while giving cover to pro-gun-control legislators.

Here’s more from the Times on Bloomberg’s new ad blitz:

In each state, the commercials urge support for the measure to require background checks for nearly all firearms purchases, not just those in gun stores, the most debated element of the legislation and a coveted goal of gun control advocates.

Mr. Bloomberg has singled out Mr. Flake, who already voted against the expansion of background checks in the Senate Judiciary Committee, by producing a special, scolding commercial aimed at Arizona. “Flake’s vote,” the ad declares, equals “no background checks for dangerous criminals.”

The mayor, who over the years has spent tens of millions of dollars to support his favored candidates, holds the power to use his “super-PAC” to wield influence in the midterm Congressional elections next year and beyond. He said he would heavily favor “candidates who will stop people from getting killed.”

“There is an easy measure of how you decide who those are,” he said, noting that gun rights groups rate lawmakers. “The NRA keeps score of it for you. They are public information.”

To those who might fear his financial might, he added: “If they pass sensible gun legislation, there is not an issue.”

Bloomberg has scored a handful of recent gun-related victories. He pumped nearly $10 million into Independence USA in the 2012 elections; the super-PAC went on to spend $3 million to defeat Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.), a pro-gun rights congressman. Independence USA also spent millions last month in the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 2nd congressional district to defeat Debbie Halvorson, who had an “A” rating from the NRA. Democrat Robin Kelly, whom Bloomberg supported, ultimately cruised to victory.

The NRA has said it plans to fire back at Bloomberg with an advertising campaign of its own. And an NRA lobbyist told the Times that it’s confident that many Americans won’t buy into Bloomberg’s message. “What he is going to find out is that Americans don’t want to be told by some elitist billionaire what they can eat, drink and they damn well don’t want to be told how, when and where they can protect their families,” Chris Cox, the NRA’s top lobbyist, said.

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Mayor Mike Bloomberg Will Spend $12 Million to Push Gun Control Through Congress

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The Very Best and also Cheapest Solar Panel Systems – Cost Effective Ways to Produce Your Very Own Energy

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on March 15, 2013

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