08/09/13 – Carla Gericke – The Scott Horton Show

All right, kiddos, welcome back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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All right.
So our first guest on the show today is Carla Garrick.
I hope I'm saying that right.
Hi, Carla.
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Did I say your last name right?
You did.
10 points.
No one gets it right.
Okay.
Right on.
Well, it was the Google voice thing tipped me off to it.
I was going to say it wrong, but the Google voice thing let me know.
So you're the queen bee of the Free State Project.
Is that right?
That is correct.
Yes.
And what the hell is the Free State Project?
And what does it mean that you're the queen of it?
Sure.
The Free State Project is a movement to try and attract 20,000 liberty lovers to the state of New Hampshire up here in the northeast.
And we've been around for about 10 years now.
We have almost 15,000 people who've signed up.
And we have about 1,200 people who have moved to the state already.
So the way it works is we need to get to 20,000 before we technically trigger the move, which would give everyone a five-year period to move here.
But in sort of typical herding cat style, a lot of us just decided we weren't going to wait.
So we've had people really doing sort of an exodus or a migration here for more freedom since some people started moving early in 2003 or so.
But I would say we've really gained momentum since 2008.
And it looks like we'll be triggering the move in the next year and a half, two years.
And then we can really start to rock and roll in the live-free or die state.
Hopefully not the last part.
Right, yeah, the live-free state.
Let's just leave it at that.
Right.
Cool.
So yeah, this is a great thing.
And once upon a time, I pledged that I would move there once you get to the 20,000 thing.
So I guess it's on you to herd them cats and then hold me to it and see whether I'm really willing to leave Texas or not.
Well, you know, we'd love to have you here.
In fact, I just posted on Facebook and said I'd be on the show.
And immediately people were like, get him to move to New Hampshire.
So, I mean, we'd love to have you.
We have a really strong independent media movement here.
You know, FTL, Free Talk Live's out here.
And we just need more and more voices because, you know, we have the right ideas.
Good ideas are bulletproof.
And we just need to spread them more effectively.
Yeah, right on.
Well, so now let's talk about some of the news here.
You guys have, well, you made, you got nationwide coverage here because maybe, I'm not sure exactly which town is it, that may be the only town in America where the people have stood up and said, no, no armored personnel carrier for you, cops.
Exactly.
And, you know, and that's something I really want to emphasize.
You know, this is happening in New Hampshire.
But the reason why there's a stink and sort of this national interest in it is because we have such a strong liberty community here that is able to sort of rally together and to say, no, we're not going to stand for this.
We don't want a ballistically engineered armored response counterattack vehicle, which, you know, you're welcome to call a bearcat.
That sounds nice and fuzzy.
But we all know that is, you know, it's not a warm and fuzzy.
And if it is, and if it's a rescue vehicle, then if the town gets it, you know, we'd love to see them painted pink, maybe.
Yeah, there you go.
You know, I think that that's probably the right color for the SWAT cops who have to dress up like Delta Force soldiers in order to arrest a little old lady.
Exactly.
And so, I mean, the tiny little cowards.
The big scandal that really sort of escalated all of this is, you know, like you said, this is a national problem.
The militarization of the police and the ACLU started a program back in March just talking about, you know, doing FOIA requests and public record requests from several cities across the nation.
And here in New Hampshire, the Concord police chief in the city actually responded to the request.
Many of the other towns haven't yet.
And when we got the grant application and started taking a look at that, we realized that they had cited the Free State Project together with Occupy and Sovereign Citizens as a domestic terrorist threat.
Now, we're a peaceful movement.
We think our ideas are better than theirs are.
And, you know, I've been making, quite frankly, a hellacious stink about this.
Right.
There's a big, big.
Everybody knows nobody's ever thought for a minute, other than, you know, a lying cop who wants a free tank, no one has ever thought that the Free State Project was about assembling an army or some kind of, you know, get everybody from the Michigan militia to move there and then we'll all go to war against the capital city or some fantasy like they accused the Davidians or whatever.
This whole thing from the very beginning has been let's get a bunch of libertarian activists up here in New Hampshire so that we can win at the ballot box so that we can make some real progress under our Democratic Republican form of government thing here that we've got and then show the rest of the country, by example, that liberty works.
So.
Well, and that's exactly the case.
And not only at the ballot box, you know, we're voters and we have people who run for office and we've had up to 15 state reps elected to the state house.
But, you know, there's also the whole free market aspect of this.
So, you know, I like to call it let's create the Yankee Hong Kong.
We could make it Yankee Switzerland.
You know, you could put in whatever your other country is that you would want there.
But let's bring the free markets here.
Let's bring businesses.
Let's start startups.
I like that semi-autonomous New Hampshire.
Exactly.
Well, so what is the Pentagon that says, hey, protesting is low level terrorism.
Right.
So I guess that's and there's no difference between the Pentagon and local sheriff's department anymore.
So that must be where they got their ideas from the same place they're getting their armored personnel carrier from.
Well, and, you know, that's exactly the case.
It's ironic that the the Concord mayor bully, I believe, is how you say his name, but I don't have my Google thing to tell me, you know, he's sort of claiming that no one except the residents of the city of Concord have any standing to have an opinion about this.
And, you know, I'm like, this money is federal money.
It's coming from somewhere other than Bernanke's helicopter.
And, you know, if it's federal money, then strictly speaking, every taxpayer in this country could come and testify and should be outraged.
And, you know, we're talking about two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
What are other things that we could do with that money that would be better for a community?
And, you know, your listeners need to understand New Hampshire is the safest state in America.
It you know, it's a really nice place to live.
There have only been two homicides in Concord in the past 10 years.
There have only been five officer related shootings in the past 34 years, of which several of them were when they were doing training and shot each other.
Yeah, well, you know, what are they supposed to do with this thing?
Just drive it around off road for fun all day?
Are they going to find some Free State Project people to use it against as soon as they've really got it up and going, right?
Well, that's a great question, because according to the police chief Duvall, who you know, we did a little NPR NHPR thing yesterday and they only gave me about 89 seconds to talk on an hour show.
But he did say in the show, you know, that, well, you know, we kind of need this vehicle for for for protests because we're the capital city and people come to protest.
So he's on record pretty much saying, yeah, you know, we want to bear cat so that we can suppress First Amendment free speech activities.
And, you know, this this is a really, really serious issue.
You know, we're going to file a complaint.
We gave them until noon today, sort of high noon.
Bum, bum, bum.
We gave them until noon today to do the right thing, to issue a, you know, apology, to give us an itemized list of the daily challenges that we present to the Concord PD.
And then we told them retract and amend the the application because it's fraudulent, misleading and false.
And they haven't done that.
I believe some free staters at their own initiative have actually filed complaints already.
We're going to follow up with that and hopefully we can get them to at least lose the grant for the next year.
I mean, certainly for, you know, just us mere mundane, we you know, if you lie in your tax forms or if you lie on a grant and you get caught, there are serious repercussions.
So, you know, what's good for the geese is kind of good for the gander.
Yeah, well, let's see if we can if the law can be applied equally.
I'm not so sure.
But, you know, I'm just happy to see any pushback on this subject whatsoever.
I mean, the militarization of police in America has gotten so far out of control.
And, you know, Radley Balco has done so much great work at really bringing this from changing this from a subject that libertarians talk about with each other in our living rooms, you know, to something that's really become kind of a mainstream debate.
And I think, you know, this part of the story is.
Well, it's like like we were talking about, it's getting national coverage.
I think it's fitting into that narrative that Balco has really succeeded in bringing to the mainstream.
And, you know, I think liberals and conservatives and regular folks, even if they don't like libertarians or even know what a libertarian is, or even, you know, people who don't like the idea of the Free State Project or whatever, they can still see that.
Well, this isn't right.
I mean, what are we talking about here?
They're they're citing an avowedly peaceful political movement as a reason that they need an armored personnel carrier.
They don't have any better excuse than that.
I mean, you would think, like you said, he said on the radio the other day, well, these people show up and protest.
Well, geez, why didn't he say, well, some of them smoke pot.
And so we have to do no knock SWAT entries to their house to prevent them from, you know, getting high or whatever other crappy excuse every other cop in America uses.
They're outright citing, as you said, the First First Amendment protected assembly and speech as a reason that they need to militarize like this.
You know, I mean, it's it's it's something that can basically make your head explode because it's right there.
Like, you know, it's it's so Orwellian.
It's shocking because it's like, you know, these rules that we apply to the state are there to protect us, not you, you know, bad guys, meaning, you know, the system in the state.
But I think your point about these messages sort of starting to go across the board, I think we're going to see a lot more of that because, you know, not to overstate it, but I think, you know, we are on this sort of path towards tyranny, towards a police state.
It's becoming a reality, you know, when you move beyond the raids on raw milk dispensers and you start to get to this stage where, you know, people in secret are making allegations about domestic terrorism to get what they actually themselves call a tank and a toy.
Then, you know, we're down that path.
And I see it with my friends.
You know, I see it with food freedom.
People are starting to really think about, hey, what am I putting in my body?
And then they sort of can come around to the ideas of, you know, more freedom, less state, less government.
People with little kids who have to fly, who have to, you know, explain to their children why the guy, you know, at the TSA gate with the blue gloves, you know, hands two by two blue, you know, the whole thing, why that's okay.
But when other strangers do it, you know, so I see with a lot of my, I would say, more less leaning friends who used to, you know, in 2008, when I discovered Ron Paul were like, you're crazy are now like, you know what?
I wish I'd listened to you back then because you were right then and you're right now.
Right.
Yeah.
It's funny, you know, I think they'd be able to get away with us a little bit easier if they didn't still have all those leftover slogans about freedom and liberty and justice for all and whatever, because even just regular non-ideological people, they have trouble, I think, adjusting sometimes to the cognitive dissonance here.
Like, well, wait a minute.
You treat us like we're all your slaves and you can kill us whenever you want.
You can do whatever you want to us.
You can take all our money.
You can destroy our businesses.
You can shoot us in the back of the head and you have all your police union thugs will prevent you from ever even from the grand jury, even here in the damn thing.
And then, but wait, I'm still supposed to cry and put my hand over my heart.
And as I pray to your flag and whatever, forget it.
It's one or the other.
You know, I can either have my liberty or or you guys.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but you do.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I just think that, you know, that cognitive dissonance is getting to a stage where, you know, some people are waking up.
Other people are just burrowing further down the hole.
But, you know, you open the show with the reference to Gupta and his sort of coming out and being like, oh, mea culpa.
I was wrong on this.
And if we could see more of that, where people are willing to admit they're wrong, because I think one of the challenges that we do see with something like the government is, you know, or the FDA.
Let's take that as an example.
And Mary Ruhart talks about this a lot, you know, like how how destructive it really, truly is and how it is murdering, you know, hundreds of thousands of people through bad policy.
And they, you know, they they're kind of stuck in, you know, a rock and a hard place between a rock and a hard place because they they have to retract.
So they have to say, oh, you know what?
Sorry, you know, status, we the God of your universe, you know, the benevolent state that will provide, you know, from cradle to grave.
We were wrong.
And, you know, people don't like admitting they're wrong.
And the minute they start to admit they're wrong, it's like, well, what else are you wrong on?
And, you know, so they know sort of doing the right thing, chips away at ideas and chips away at their power in giant air quotes.
Right.
Over us.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, there's an article today on on Lou Rockwell dot com.
I think it's today only Rockwell dot com about.
Yeah, I was a right wing conservative warmonger type.
And then I realized the folly of the drug war.
I mean, hey, a prohibition of alcohol didn't work.
And that's 100 percent unanimous.
It did not work.
It could not have worked.
Well, geez, doesn't that same logic apply to the drug war?
I guess it does.
And look what the drug war is doing to my society that I love so much and whatever.
And then once he finally broke through that mold, that was it.
Now he was able to question the Pentagon and whether their wars on terror and whatever else they claim around the world are worthwhile or could even possibly be effective at achieving their stated goals, et cetera.
And there you go.
You just got to break through.
And he became a peacenik from then on.
He just got to break through that that fog once.
And then the whole thing, the whole edifice falls apart, you know.
Well, and I also think, you know, we're fortunate to live in the technological era that we live in because, you know, as Hillary said way back, you know, we're losing the information war.
And I'm like, yes, yes, you are, because, you know, you can only control so much through propaganda.
And when there are voices of truth like yours out in the world, people can really start to find what they're looking for.
You know, I was, you know, I was up very late last night trying to, you know, kind of summarize this whole bearcat situation.
And people can go to Free State Project dot org if they want to read more about it.
But, you know, they, you know, I sort of had a heartened moment where I was like, this is really cool because I could copy and paste all the, you know, emails they sent me.
And I can, you know, we stand, obviously, for transparency and accountability.
So I can be like, well, here are the things they've said, you know, instead of them being the people giving the message, we're the people giving the message.
And, you know, most normal, non-sociopathic people respond to truth and, you know, are able to make up their own mind if they're given the right amount of information.
So, you know, they can go look.
And certainly in New Hampshire, I think it's one of these issues with the bearcat is where there's that simpatico between people moving in for more freedom and the people who are here who already believe in more freedom, which is why we chose the state of New Hampshire to sort of make it our little, you know, place for our project.
And, you know, we can go to the farmers markets and talk to people and be like, hey, really?
Do you guys think they need?
And we should add, do they need another bearcat?
There are already something like seven or eight in the state, if you count the ones with the National Guard.
So, you know, it's like, no, no, we don't need this.
And let's at least push back on this one thing so that they start to understand, you know, we're going to hold them accountable.
I think the police chief has made sort of claims where he's like, oh, we're anti-cop.
And I'm like, no, I'm pro-freedom and I'm pro-accountability.
And if those things, you know, sort of shine a light on you, that's your problem, not mine.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, quit violating my rights and I won't have anything against you anymore.
OK, now this sounds ridiculous, but what about running Ian Freeman or somebody for sheriff and just refusing to go along with any of this stuff?
Well, you know, I mean, I think they have talked about that out in that area.
I think Ian is running for some kind of office that might not be sheriff right now.
You know, I mean, politics is always an interesting game.
You know, there are all these rules and you got to be on your ball and, you know, there's got to have money to do it.
All of those things that we know are challenges.
I certainly, you know, I love seeing Ian cruise around Keene and his secondhand cop car.
That's something that puts a smile on my face.
And I mean, we are trying to work within the system or use the system to effect change.
And, you know, we it's it's it's baby steps, but we have accomplished way more than we expected with just over a thousand people who have moved here, you know, and the term activist means something, you know, and for some people, the act of moving is their activism.
But for a lot of us, it's our lives, you know, or a big chunk of our lives.
And if we can trigger this move, get people like you to move out, you know, I think we could have a really, really, really interesting time.
I mean, I think it'll be fascinating to see.
And I think if we can get more, you know, we all know peace and, you know, these ideas of more liberty create more prosperity and all of those things.
So, you know, I'm hoping in like five years time, we'll see the knock on effect and people will start to say, hey, you know, maybe I should, you know, go start my first restaurant in New Hampshire because it's cheaper.
And, you know, we can sort of mesh that idea of tourism with foodism with, you know, just creating a, you know, vibrant, intense and fun place to live.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, and setting the example for people who just will never live in New Hampshire because it's too damn cold up there or whatever that, you know what?
Hey, man, I heard about there were some people who took on their local police and won on the armored personnel carry issue.
They didn't get the thing thrown in the trash or turned back over to the military.
They got it painted pink and it says, you know, cops or sissies on the door or whatever kind of thing like, you know, that could be a great example for people to just you can fight back and at times when, you know.
Right.
And, you know, and I'm happy to see our actions here and the participants.
And, you know, there's just an incredible team and of amazing people.
I mean, the community really is like, I mean, it's worth moving and it's worth the cold.
And I'm from Africa, so I get to say this.
It's worth the cold for the community.
That really should be a non-issue in the way like down where you guys are.
You run from air con to air con.
So for four months, we have to run from heater to heater.
It's not such a big deal.
Yeah, the high today in Austin is going to be 107.
So the snow doesn't sound too bad to me today.
You know, so if we can be an inspiration, that's great.
But there is also a reason and a reasoning behind the Free State Project, which is that it doesn't work when we have these ideas and we're scattered all over the place.
The fact that we have to concentrate together is the key to this entire thing, because if we get enough people here and we're physically together, that is what's going to make the difference.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I guess in the last three and a half, four minutes here, just tell us everything that you can about how people can find out about the Free State Project, the different aspects to it, different towns where you guys are heavily concentrated.
I know Keene is a big deal, but not only Keene, that kind of thing.
All right.
Just get us interested.
Give us your best pitch.
Give us your best pitch.
Community is the best pitch, but we're all over.
People can find out more by going to our website or find us on Facebook.
We're pretty active there as well.
Of course, on Twitter.
Come to our outreach events.
We do Liberty Forum in the winter.
We do Pork Fest, the Porcupine Freedom Festival in the summer.
We have a slew of speakers.
We have just fascinating people.
We'd love to have you come out for something.
Come to Pork Fest or Liberty Forum.
That's usually where we turn you, because you get to meet the actual people in the community and see what it's about.
Don't give up, but take us seriously.
Sign up.
If you are interested in these ideas and you even have an inkling that this is something you might want to do in the next five years, sign up.
It's not like we're going to rendition anyone if you change your mind.
People change their minds.
Their life situations change.
But if you're willing to make the commitment to the pledge to say that, hey, if 20,000 other people do this, I'll do this too.
And come visit.
If you come and it's not during one of our events, let us know and we will set up meetups.
We will drive you around.
We have our own realtors.
You can pay anything you want in Bitcoin.
If you are a small business owner, check us out and consider bringing your business here.
Right on.
Well, it sure sounds good.
I know I was up there to give a speech a couple of years back at the university, and they said there's no sales tax or income tax here.
And I thought, wow, really?
And actually, you know, your listeners should go check out on our shiny new website the 101 reasons to move.
People will be surprised.
Yeah.
So, of course, no sales tax, no income tax.
We do have a slightly higher property tax, but when you actually figure it out across the board, it means you're still saving money.
We had a new mover who came from Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, and he calculated that just this year he was going to save $7,500 over Connecticut because of the tax savings in New Hampshire.
So there are lots and lots and lots of compelling reasons to come.
They're all well thought out and well reasoned on the website.
But really, at the heart of it, it's about building a community and just having like-minded people around you who understand the economic, fiscal, and social issues and have a plan.
We have a plan.
Everyone else has the theoretical, and I say this all the time when I'm on the road.
I read a lot.
I got my Rothbard stripes.
The whole works.
But in the end, we're an intellectual movement of people who really have thought these things through and are like, all right, how do we make this happen in our lifetimes?
Our slogan is liberty in our lifetimes, and that's what we are going to achieve.
OK, 20 seconds.
When is your next big event for people who want to just come and dip their foot in the water and see?
So the next event will be Liberty Forum, and that is in February, the third week in February.
I think it's the 20th to the 23rd.
I don't have it up in front of me right now.
That is a hotel conference.
It's down in Nashua.
They're direct flights into Manchester.
I don't recommend anyone go to Boston.
Why would you go to that state?
So yeah, come check us out.
OK, right on.
Well, thank you so much for your time on the show today, Carla.
I really appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Carla Garrick from the Free State Project.
That's freestateproject.org.
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