Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 120

Pedophiles
and Marauding
Bears
When libertarians took control
of a small New Hampshire town,
the results were no joke.
By Elizabeth Austin

F

rom his book's very title, it's clear that Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling sees his
story as one great big joke. As he describes it, A Libertarian Walks Into a
Bear tells the "strange-but-true story of Grafton, NH, a small town that became the nexus of a collision between bears, libertarians, guns, doughnuts, parasites, firecrackers, taxes and one angry llama." The book-his first-is based
by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling on a lively article, published in 2018 in The Atavist Magazine, about an attemptPublicAffairs, 288 pp. ed political takeover of the small New Hampshire town by a motley crew of libertarians and survivalists from all across America. Their stated goal was to establish "the boldest social experiment in modern American history: the Free
Town Project."
Their effort was inspired by the Free State Project, a libertarian-adjacent organization founded in 2003 with the goal of taking over New Hampshire and
transforming it into a tiny-government paradise. After more than a decade of
persistence, the project persuaded 20,000 like-minded revolutionaries to sign
its pledge to move to New Hampshire and finally force the state to live up to its
"Live Free or Die" motto. (Despite their pledged support, only about 1,300 signers actually made the move. Another 3,000 were New Hampshire residents to
begin with.) The project's political successes peaked in 2018, when 17 of the 400
members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives identified as Free
Staters-although all but two were registered Republicans.
The affiliated Free Town Project set its sights on Grafton in 2004 because of
both its small size-about 1,200 residents-and its long history as a haven for
tax protesters, eccentrics, and generalized curmudgeons. The Free Town Project
leaders figured that they could engineer a libertarian tipping point by bringing
in a few dozen new true believers and collaborating with the resident soreheads.
Over the next decade or so, Free Towners managed to join forces with some of
the town's most tightfisted taxpayers to pass a 30 percent cut in the town's $1
million budget over three years, slashing unnecessary spending on such municipal frills as streetlights, firefighting, road repairs, and bridge reconstruction.
But eventually, the Free Town leadership splintered and the haphazard movement fizzled out. The municipal budget has since bounced back, to $1.55 million.
But even though the Free Towners' full-scale libertarian takeover of Grafton
never fully materialized, they fanned the flames of a community culture that
prioritized individual freedom above all else-whether the individual sought
the freedom to smoke marijuana or feed daily boxes of donuts to the increasingly

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

120  September/October 2020
Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2020
