Free State First Libertarians
What the hell is happening with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire?
“Shut your fucking mouth, Jeremy,” a Libertarian Party lifetime member, Justin O’Donnell, screamed from his seat at the back of a Manchester, New Hampshire American Legion hall.
This was my introduction to the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire’s biennial convention, held a week ago Saturday in a squat brick building in a depressed-looking area of the Granite State’s largest city, flanked by a baseball diamond and a strip mall with a Pizza Express. Around 100 Libertarians sat behind rows of tables facing a podium in a grey-walled room with a drop ceiling and fluorescent lights. It didn’t exude New England charm.
Libertarian Party of New Hampshire’s secretary and firebrand behind the party’s X account, Jeremy Kauffman, stood at the front of the room in a Free State Project t-shirt and blazer, arms raised, debating Robert’s Rules of Order. The argument in that moment was about whether Kauffman would shut up, but it was also about a larger struggle: whether a faction hoping to win control of the party could silence Kauffman further by wresting control of the LPNH X account.
The convention was a battle about the direction of the state party, and the libertarian movement more broadly — one mirrored at the national level. Is it a leftwing movement, a rightwing movement, or none of the above? And what does it even mean to win as a third party?
‘Become Insufferable’
The slogan of the Libertarian Party’s national convention last May was “Become Ungovernable.” They invited several high-profile government officials to speak, including Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The slogan of LPNH’s convention was “Become Insufferable.” I think it’s fair to say, mission accomplished.
“It’s the official position of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire that @nsarwark is a faggot,” LPNH posted to X at the start of the convention, with a picture of the former three-term Libertarian National Committee chairman, Nicholas Sarwark.
Sarwark was one of a group of Libertarians who showed up Saturday to try to elect new leadership to LPNH. A new chairperson, secretary, and other board positions are elected every two years. A paleolibertarian faction has run LPNH since 2021, when the Mises Caucus took over this state party affiliate. The elected leaders decide who holds the keys to the party’s X account, LPNH’s main messaging vehicle.
“It engages in extremely hostile messaging,” a candidate for chairperson, Rachel Danner, told me. Full-figured with purple hair, Danner was the favored candidate of Sarwark and O’Donnell.
“I’m a free speech absolutist,” the candidate endorsed by current leadership, Ben Weir, said. Tattooed like a Brooklyn hipster, Weir is the founder of the LP’s Emo Caucus — slogan: “Live Free or Cry” — and Punks for Liberty. He ran on a ‘New Hampshire first, America second” platform and promised to keep LPNH’s “edgy” messaging.
New Hampshire isn’t the center of much, aside from every four years when politicians and the media descend here for the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. But in the world of Libertarian Party politics and shitposting, the Granite State arguably comes first. A year after the Mises Caucus took over LPNH, the right-leaning faction won every leadership position in the national party at the LP’s convention in Reno, Nevada.
Named for the 20th century Austrian free-market economist, Ludwig von Mises, the caucus promised to take the party in a new direction under the banner of a Ron Paul Revolution 2.0. They stripped the party platform of its pro-choice policy and removed the plank condemning bigotry as “irrational and repugnant,” saying it wasn’t the party’s job to police speech. They promised “bold messaging” — but LPNH took that further than anyone anticipated.
In 2022, LPNH posted a photograph of Meghan McCain crying at her father’s coffin with the words “Happy Holidays.” The post garnered more than 9,000 likes and coverage in the New York Post. LPNH posted "6 million dollar minimum wage or you're antisemitic” in 2022 and then deleted it. The Jerusalem Post covered it.
LPNH has repeatedly attacked a far-left, black former Ohio State Senator, Nina Turner, for her rather inane posts advocating for free healthcare, free college tuition, free insulin, free childcare, and, predictably – and perhaps the only “free’ thing LPNH might agree on — free Palestine. Instead of responding, though, to Turner’s post with a snark line about how nothing is ever really free, LPNH posted, “Nina Turner picking crops should be free.” Again, the press covered it.
Mises Caucus leadership had enough. In 2023, the Mises Caucus attempted another LPNH takeover, but this time to oust its own supposed leadership. “The Mises Caucus conducted a purge because they thought the New Hampshire Mises Caucus was too racist and inflammatory,” O’Donnell told me. Instead of caving to the Mises Caucus, though, LPNH leadership broke away and formed their own caucus, Free State Based.
‘Free State first Libertarians’
It’s impossible to understand the motives of LPNH without talking about the Free State Project, a migration movement whose goal is to attract “liberty lovers” to New Hampshire to influence its politics and create a libertarian homeland. Most of Saturday’s convention attendees were Free Staters or so-called Pre-Staters, meaning they’re libertarian Granite State natives or moved here before the Free State Project was founded in 2001.
Moving to New Hampshire for the Free State Project is in essence a rejection of the Libertarian Party and its stated purpose. In his 2001 essay proposing the creation of a Free State Project, Yale PhD student in political science, Jason Sorens, articulated the “hopelessness” of converting mass numbers of people to libertarianism through education or party politics.
“Libertarian activists need to face a somber reality: nothing's working,” Sorens wrote. “Partisan politics has clearly failed: Libertarian presidential candidates consistently fail to break the one percent barrier.”
Sorens instead proposed a concentration strategy: “establish residence in a small state and take over the state government.” The FSP chose New Hampshire because of its small population —1.4 million today —and its existing liberty ethos — “Live Free or Die.”
There are now between 7 and 10,000 Free Staters in New Hampshire, according to the project’s executive director, Eric Brakey. There are roughly 100 liberty representatives in the state’s 424-person legislature, who ran for office as Republicans. The state’s house majority leader, Jason Osborne, is a Free Stater. Cato consistently ranks New Hampshire as the number one state for freedom.
The Free State Project is a nonprofit and doesn’t involve itself in partisan politics or have any formal association with LPNH. Nevertheless, many in leadership positions of LPNH are Free Staters.
The LPNH X, formerly Twitter, account has nearly 90,000 followers — more than any other state party affiliate. There is a team who posts to the LPNH X account, not just Kauffman, though he is the most high-profile of the group and gets the most flak. LPNH posted this doozy in September, which prompted a visit to Kauffman’s house by two FBI agents. The whole affair went viral.
Lately, LPNH posts about deporting socialists from New Hampshire, race and IQ, race and propensity to commit violence, and low rates of libertarianism among blacks. They post against U.S. aid to Israel and purposely edgelord —some would say facile — things like a picture of Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a Hitler mustache. They also post about liberty wins in New Hampshire and creating a homeland for libertarians in the state.
LPNH endorsed Donald Trump for president, not the LP’s socially liberal, self-described “armed and gay” candidate, Chase Oliver. “We have no problem with gay people. We don’t like Chase Oliver because he’s a faggot, not because he’s gay,” LPNH posted to X in November, garnering 11,000 likes.
“I think the messaging strategy and the campaign strategies run by the Free State Based people causes immense and irreparable damage to the Free State Project, the Free State community, and the push for liberty in New Hampshire,” O’Donnell told me. “People in New Hampshire just see the Libertarian Party tweeting a bunch of racist and exclusionary shit, and they just assume that represents all Libertarians.”
“I would like to have the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire step away from being batshit crazy. We’re alienating voters and I want that to stop,” a lifetime LP member, George Carpenter, who moved to New Hampshire in 1996, before the Free State Project was founded, told me.
“They take what they’re able to do, which is be rude to people on social media to get negative attention, kind of like a child or toddler. If you’re not paying attention to them, they’ll do something bad like poop in their pants and smear it on the walls,” Sarwark told me. “And that’s Jeremy Kauffman. He’s a poop smearer.”
Members of LPNH often tell me they don’t necessarily agree with all the X posts LPNH makes, but they view the account as a recruitment tool to attract “radical, rabid libertarians” to the state. Weir ran for chairman of the party promising not to run Libertarian candidates against liberty Republicans in state house races.
“I don’t expect any political wins from LPNH. I don’t expect any political wins from the Libertarian Party,” a member of LPNH’s executive committee, Bill Barger, told me. “The win under this brand name is that we get more libertarians to move to New Hampshire.”
Kauffman put it to me more succinctly: “I’m a Free State first Libertarian,” he said.
Some members of the Free State Project board loathe LPNH’s social media posts. The board voted in October 2023 to remove Kauffman from his leadership position in the project, mainly over his social media. “We’re kind of at the end of our rope,” Sorens said at that meeting.
Yet the Free State Project is only one organization in a larger Free State movement. There are liberty political and social organizations, annual conferences, clubhouses, a calendar of daily Free State events, and even a Free Stater-owned inn. A co-owner of the inn, Dennis Pratt, often says this about intra-movement conflicts: “Build, don’t bitch.”
Third Party Wins?
The Free State movement learned early on that the best way to achieve libertarian wins for New Hampshire – school choice, nullification of federal gun laws, and keeping the state income and sales tax free – is by electing liberty representatives, party affiliation be damned. This last election cycle, the Libertarian National Committee again followed New Hampshire’s lead.
“Only do that if you want to win,” Trump told Libertarians at their party’s convention last May about voting for him. “If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3 percent every four years.”
The crowd booed, but prominent party members followed Trump’s advice, in large part because he promised to put a libertarian in his cabinet and commute the sentence of Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht. He followed through on the latter promise.
The Libertarian Party’s chairwoman at the time, Angela McArdle, deployed what she called a “kingmaker strategy” to use the party’s spoiler status to extract wins. Sarwark calls Libertarians like McArdle, “MAGA plants.” He says the basis of libertarianism originates on the left, and that the turmoil in the party now between left and right is a reflection of polarization nationally.
“We’re not immune from that reorientation and polarization of the American electorate,” Sarwark told me. “That split is happening within the country but it’s also happening inside the Libertarian Party.”
McArdle resigned from party leadership in January after LNC members filed a lawsuit against her alleging she worked to help elect another party’s candidate, Donald Trump, and mismanaged funds for her own financial gain. It remains to be seen how new party leadership will play their cards, but I think it’s fair to say that libertarians are earning more wins so far out of the Trump administration and DOGE than they likely would have from a Harris administration.
When I first started covering libertarian politics in 2022, everyone I spoke with in the Libertarian Party or at libertarian events said they were for open borders and the free flow of goods and people. That’s a major wedge issue now. Culture war issues like medicalized gender transitions for minors have also sharply divided LP members. Is this simply a political philosophy about the role of the state or a comprehensive one about how to live life? These schisms are happening in the liberty movement in New Hampshire as well.
“Justin O’Donnell and his side, they’re more left libertarians, and they put together this movement to take over LPNH and make it more left leaning,” LPNH member, Bonnie Freeman, told me. “The word Republican triggers them.”
Brakey, who served as a Republican Maine State Senator before moving to New Hampshire to work as the Free State Project’s executive director, joined LPNH to attend Saturday’s convention and vote for Weir. “I voted for Ben primarily because I think that he has expressed willingness to include liberty Republicans in the overall strategy for the Libertarian Party,” he told me.
“I do think that the most effective path to politically advance libertarian ideas right now is through the Republican Party as the vehicle,” Brakey said when I interviewed him in November. On LPNH messaging, he had this to say: “Take them seriously but not literally.”
Memetic Wall
“I think the FSP’s lurch towards leftism and the woke side of things is really unfortunate,” Kauffman told me, referencing the division happening in the Free State movement over messaging and recruitment.
The chairwoman of the FSP, Carla Gericke, says that’s nonsense. She’s run for office as a Republican and says, like most libertarians, her positions on issues could be called right for some and left for others. “@FreeStateNH isn’t waging war on ‘right-wing libertarians’ and there is no ‘drift towards’ anything other than good ole fashioned libertarianism,” she replied on X to a post from LPNH.
Yet LPNH is explicitly staking itself as right wing. “The Free State movement is a right wing libertarian movement,” LPNH posted to X last month.
They rail against Reason magazine for being left libertarian — and not covering their movement more. They lean into their purposefully offensive messaging that’s sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes not. In the LPNH convention booklet, a page is devoted to a reworking of “The 14 Words,” a white supremacist slogan, with a libertarian, pro-natalist twist: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for libertarian children.”
“I tend to find that folks who you might categorize as rightwing libertarians are much more open to be labelled rightwing than the people who others would call leftwing libertarians,” Brakey told me. He said he came to libertarianism through Ron Paul. “The Ron Paul movement is directly built upon Murray Rothbard ideas,” he said. “I think certainly you would find folks at Cato and Reason — I think they tend to have Hayek in a higher regard than Rothbard.”
In a talk at the Free State Project’s annual camping and ideas festival, PorcFest, in 2023, Kauffman cited Hans-Hermann Hoppe as a major influence in his thinking about building a free state. “We are not going to win through our ideas,” he said. “You need to have methods of excluding people who aren’t going to be libertarian.”
Hoppe advocated for “covenant communities,” most controversially ones that could exclude gays or democrats. Kauffman wants this type of locally-controlled, mutual consent society that excludes non-libertarians. Free Staters offer on X to pay for progressives and socialists to move to Massachusetts. LPNH posts that they welcome illegal immigrants so long as they’re libertarian. The goal is to get more libertarians to the Granite State and scare non-libertarians away.
Kauffman talked about how perception can shape reality, and the importance of messaging in achieving that. Illegal border crossings plummeted during Trump’s first term in large part because of his rhetoric that illegal immigration would not be tolerated. The laws didn’t significantly change – the perception did. When Joe Biden was elected, illegal border crossings soared.
“I don’t care if they call us extremists. I don’t care if they call us crazy,” Kauffman said. “Build the memetic wall. Build that reputation for New Hampshire.”
The opposition group that included Sarwark and O’Donnell only managed to attract about 25 party members to Saturday’s convention, despite a concerted effort in the months leading up to it that included launching a website, “Take Back LPNH,” and even a Signal message to me to see if I’d be willing to join the party. I declined.
Kauffman ran for secretary of the party and won. The party elected Weir as chairman. The Free State Based caucus won every leadership position.
“This is the largest convention in party history,” Kauffman told me. “This is a clear rejection of the idea that the messaging that LPNH does is unpopular. The people who don’t like the messaging could get a total of 20 people to show up to oppose it.”
The convention ended with a raffle for a gift basket. The main prize inside was a custom Chase Oliver butt plug.
Homeland
Whenever I go to a libertarian events in New York City and say I live in New Hampshire, the first question I get is, “What the hell is going on with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire?” I’ve also been asked, “Why write about them and give them more attention?”
I moved to New Hampshire in 2020 knowing nothing about the Free State Project or LPNH. I have some libertarian leanings, but I wouldn’t describe myself as wholly libertarian — and certainly not Libertarian. Yet I moved my toddler and infant from New York City to New Hampshire for a better life, and part of that was about liberty. I didn’t want my two-year-old to be forced to mask at nursery school. I didn’t want my children to think about Covid at all.
So while I don’t agree with all the policy positions Free Staters or LPNH push — I send my son to public school, for example — I am invested in the existence of a strong liberty movement in the state. I’ve also become friends with Free Staters on both sides of this left-right divide, some of the people mentioned here.
A LPNH member and Free Stater, Dennis Pratt, suggested I read Jeffrey Tucker’s essay, “Against Libertarian Brutalism.” Written in 2014, before LPNH adopted its “bold messaging” strategy, the essay compares racist, hateful libertarian messaging to brutalist architecture. Brutalism stripped architecture to its core, eschewing the value of ornament and beauty.
“The architects imagined that they were showing us something we would otherwise be reluctant to face. You can only really appreciate the results of brutalism, however, if you have already bought into the theory and believe in it. Otherwise, absent the extremist and fundamentalist ideology, the building comes across as terrify and threatening,” Tucker wrote. “The core truth is there and indisputable, but the application is made raw to push a point.”
At the LPNH convention, the side looking to take over leadership of the party kept arguing that the edgelord messaging was pushing people away from libertarianism. The Free State Based caucus said, where are those people? Are they fair weather libertarians or hardcore enough to pick up their lives, move to the Granite State, and join the party?
If I’d uprooted my life and spent the last two decades building a movement, I too would be angry about newer members taking it in a direction I abhor. I do not have a dog in this fight, but I also don’t want the libertarian movement here to become a stodgy conservative front. I don’t want gays driven out of the movement. I’m a former New York punk rocker; I want edgy Free State art and culture. I like the nudists, Christians, drug legalization advocates, and “breed em for freedom” pro-natalist families sharing the campground at PorcFest in peace.
The problem as I see it is that some people who claim to be porcupines are in fact sheep. The nuance – yes, even the humor – of the messaging is lost on many. They see a facile post about “genocide” in Gaza and suddenly jump on the “free Palestine” bandwagon. They see a post against trans participation in women’s sports and condemn all transgender people. They see a post about race and IQ and think all black people are stupid. Or they see a post and cry “bigot.”
“Freedom is what gives life to the human imagination and enables the working out of love as it extends from our most benevolent and highest longings,” Tucker wrote. “An ideology robbed of its accoutrements, on the other hand, can become an eyesore, just as a large concrete monstrosity built decades ago.”
Pratt says the Free State movement is big enough to include all stripes. I tend to think he’s correct. Otherwise, it will end as so many brutalist buildings have: demolished.
Great article.
Great work! Seems mostly fair to all sides, and very comprehensive.