By GARRY RAYNO, InDepthNH.org
First they came for the vaccine and the masks, and then they came for the Trans kids and their healthcare. Then it was public schools, libraries, the interest and dividends tax, and now zoning and land use regulations.
If it resembles decency, kindness, empathy, intelligence or tradition, they have come for that too.
If it clashes with their vision of a free world, it needs to be eliminated, demonized and relegated to the trash heaps they have created nearly overnight on the once pristine lands of New Hampshire.
They want to tear down anything “statist” and replace it with a world without rules or regulations, or a social safety net, or a level playing field for the less fortunate or not like them. The underprivileged don’t deserve it, nor should they touch real power the Free Staters and libertarians contend as they hide behind the trappings of the State House.
The Free Staters and mega libertarians have taken over the Republican Party in New Hampshire leaving little room for those who were once the party’s stalwarts.
Their agenda is leaving a legislative wasteland for the vast majority of people in the state, as they seek to turn the Granite State into one big mobile home park so their cronies can find cheap housing to cram Free Staters into a two-bedroom manufactured home.
The strategy to arrive where we are today in New Hampshire was determined decades ago in the backrooms of first the University of Virginia and then George Mason University as the southern gentry sought to retain their privileges, their money and their power and could see it slipping away as voting rights expanded the electorate and schools were ordered to desegregate.
The unions had put too much of the oligarchs’ money in the hands of the growing middle class who they knew would vote for their own best interests, which would require them to pay more taxes.
They believed and were reassured by economist James Buchanan, a University of Chicago graduate under the tutelage of economist Frank Knight, who also influenced Milton Friedman, that they were the ones who needed to make the decisions, not the general public.
It was the genesis for “school choice” and the “right-to-work” movements and continues today with gerrymandered political districts and money funneled into higher education to create more conservative students.
For a much more complete story, read Nancy MacLean’s book “Democracy in Chains.”
The same money sources flow millions of dollars into New Hampshire to elect Free Staters and their brothers and sisters in arms.
The agenda no longer focuses on New Hampshire, it is national and ideological in ways that once were the antithesis of the foundations under the Granite State.
The Free State Project is a political migration movement founded in 2001 to recruit 20,000 libertarians to move to a low-population state to become a stronghold of libertarian ideas. The group selected New Hampshire in 2003 at the urging of then-Gov. Craig Benson.
To date, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 Free Staters have moved to New Hampshire.
During the pandemic, Executive Council meetings were hijacked by angry men and women who wanted to shut down the state’s COVID vaccine distribution to the most vulnerable. They not only refused to be vaccinated, they sought to block anyone else from the vaccine against the deadly disease.
Executive Council meetings had not seen similar disorder since the days when Seabrook Station was under construction, but those protests came without threats on anyone’s life, unlike the ones over COVID when the Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner and others had to be escorted to their cars for fear of what might happen.
And when former Gov. Chris Sununu instituted a mask mandate later than most other New England governors, the freedom loving folks protested at his Newfields home — some armed — when his wife and children were home and the protesters were threatening.
An unspoken belief had always been a governor’s home or any politician’s home was off limits for demonstrations to allow for a peaceful atmosphere they could enjoy with their families without the harassment of the job.
But all that has changed.
Sununu decided to cancel his outdoor inauguration during the pandemic because of the planned protests and the potential for mayhem with openly armed protestors at an event with hundreds of people.
This new revolution is being fueled by organizations like Young Americans For Liberty, Americans for Prosperity, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and its model legislation driven by the Heritage Foundation, you know the ones who wrote the Project 2025 blueprint being followed in Washington and here in New Hampshire.
In the State House last week, the House passed a bill — also passed by the Senate — to block local government officials from preventing their police departments from working with ICE on immigration and from preventing agreements with county corrections facilities to house detainees.
The bill also would prevent any community from being a “sanctuary city” all of which continued the Free State assault on local control. Both bills were based on models distributed by ALEC.
Much of the local control issue has centered around the state’s zoning regulations under the guise of addressing the state’s housing crisis.
The zoning issue was first raised and driven by Hollis resident Jason Sorens, the architect of the Free State Project, and has as much to do with turning large tracts of land into affordable mobile home parks filled with new Free Staters, some of whom are paid to move here and to run for office, as it does about the state’s housing crisis.
An attempt to fill a large tract of land with mobile homes was attempted recently in the Monadnock region, but was voted down by the town’s planning officials.
The Education Freedom Account program is also being driven by Free Staters including House Majority Leader Jason Osborne whose wife owns a cooperative home school center and benefits whenever the program expands.
Osborne is the architect of a statewide budget cap proposal for school districts, that currently has been removed from the House’s version of the budget, and perhaps was the biggest assault on local control this session.
Friday, the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee held a public hearing on an amendment that would mandate every student in traditional public and charter schools take a course on firearms training.
The amendment which replaces Senate Bill 54, which concerns penalties for refusing to take an alcohol test, states “Beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, firearms safety training shall be taught annually in all public schools as part of the health, physical education, or civics curriculum, with a minimum of one instructional hour per school year dedicated to this purpose. The training shall be mandatory for every public school student unless a student’s parent or legal guardian receives an exception pursuant to RSA 193-L:6 and 186:11, IX-c.”
The two RSA references are to opt out for religious reasons and requirements for record keeping for homeschool students.
This legislature has passed bills to stop any kind of medical procedure or treatment for transgender minors, which up until now had been decided by the child, the parents and the medical provider.
Well, so much for the parental rights touted so loudly by the same group of liberty-minded folks when it comes to schools, but not evidently when it involves the LBGTQ community.
The Free State’s agenda was all over the House approved budget with attempts to defund the state library, to slash state aid to University System of New Hampshire, to trim hundreds of jobs in various agencies including corrections, eliminating the Council on the Arts, the Child Advocate’s office, and the commission on aging, as well as cutting funding for family planning, the student loan payback program to entice nurses and other medical workers to go to the North Country or other rural, poorly served areas, and the opioid abatement program.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were cut from the Department of Health and Human Services, which largely serves the poor and most vulnerable citizens, and from the Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Environmental Services, both agencies that regulate behaviors.
While the state is under an injunction from enforcing its divisive concepts law passed in 2021, two bills that would do almost the same thing passed the House and Senate, as did bills leading to removing books and materials from schools and libraries on the objection of a single parent so other children whose parents do not object to the material will not have easy access to it.
And despite warnings about its dangers, another bill would allow greater access to ivermectin, the favored COVID treatment of the anti-vaxxers.
Where are the Free Staters headed next in their attempts to create their utopia in the Granite State?
Americans for Prosperity, which has funded the Free State Project and poured millions of dollars into state Representative and Senate races over the past few elections, might give an indication with an event held last week to examine the issue of “rising healthcare costs and patient-centered policy solutions, that increase access, lower costs, and put people—not bureaucracy—at the center of care.”
That is what is known as boutique health care which favors the wealthy who can afford to pay for it and they don’t have to wait in line for procedures like you do in today’s very fragile system which some promote as too socialistic.
The next target is your healthcare.
One of the goals of some in the Free State Project is Anarcho-capitalism, or ancap, which is a political philosophy and economic theory that would abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies, where systems of private property are enforced by private agencies.
So police and fire protection should be privatized and schools as well. Is that what the vast majority of the people in New Hampshire want?
I do not believe they do, but fueled by outside money, that is where this group of Free Staters and libertarians are taking us legislatively and they are moving at a rapid pace, hopefully not fast enough for Granite Staters to realize they need to stop it.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.