LISTEN NOW… Twitter is banning political ads, Facebook will drop the ban hammer on a whim, and YouTube has been booting creators left and right in pursuit of a less volatile political brew – but does that mean that free speech is under fire? Dive into the complexities of deplatforming and what it means for the First Amendment with your hosts on this week’s Told You So! LISTEN NOW…
A New Hampshire Democrat Senator recently penned an opinion piece entitled, “Why I’m Not Libertarian.” Since NO ONE would mistake Jeanne Dietsch’s positions, like her desire to implement an income tax or her anti-freedom voting record, for anything other than socialism, it seems like an odd title for an essay, but, then again, maybe she knows libertarianism, the quaint notion that you own yourself, is a hot topic and she wanted to get in on the action?!? For me, every media mention of “libertarianism” is a win, even when someone gets it as wrong as she does. To set the record straight, here are a few rebuttals from people who actually understand what libertarianism is…
…libertarians would never force their will upon others. That would be aggression. I can’t speak for every libertarian, big or small L, but I can say that the principle of non-aggression extends to the limits of the Government. For if I can not use force to extort another, the Government shall not be able to either.
Chris Maidment for Granite Grok
Foremost, it means a limited government. That is not the same as no government. I fully support a smaller government. However, there are many appropriate areas for the government to be involved in. The first might be to protect property rights. Of those property rights, I should own my own body. Slavery, is the complete opposite of a libertarian government…
Dan Hynes for Granite Grok
Dietsch is correct on one point: “Is government always done right? Of course not.” Lets start to right our wrongs, and vote for a smaller government senator, and not a socialist nanny. That’s why I’m not a socialist.
Today’s episode is a feisty one! I call out the Union Leader for their lack of leadership on government- and police accountability issues, we recap the situation one Nashua taxpayer finds herself in after filing Right-to-Know requests and then being issued a “verbal restraining order” by police for her efforts, why “free staters” are just like everyone else (but better :P), why a “ski tax” is a terrible idea, and more!
Dear Editor,
I wrote a snarky response to today’s negative Union Leader editorials calling out “free staters.” I’ll leave it below for you to read, but it occurs to me, I really want the take-away to be different: I want you to acknowledge and understand that “free staters,” people committed to the non-aggression principle and who consistently apply it to all people, including law enforcement, are not the enemy.
The enemies of freedom are the people who are hurting our fellow human beings in ways that would be illegal for any of us to do, and they are getting away with this state-sanctioned harm under the color of the “law,” and under the protection from newspapers like yours, and people like you.
The time has come to understand there is morality and there is legality, and we now live in a system where government officials are doing bad things to people and when we complain, they either punish the people who complain, or they rewrite the laws to make the bad behavior “legal.” It is not right to harm peaceful people for personal behavior. It is not moral to harm peaceful people for personal behavior. I will NEVER stop fighting to end the corruption and perversion of how life is supposed to be for free people living in a free society.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I imagine you must be suffering from some confusion in trying to make sense of this topsy-turvy world. You *want* the police to be the good guys… but they are not. They haven’t been for a long time, and I don’t know how better to convince you than your own lawsuit in which they are trying to KEEP A LIST OF BAD COPS SECRET FROM YOUR NEWSPAPER AND THE PUBLIC. In legalese, that’s called de facto proof of malfeasance.
Dude, wake up and smell the tyranny. Don’t pick the wrong side and lean into the police state just because you don’t like our tactics–what other choice do we have? I know I am going to keep on fighting to keep the “Live free or die” state free, and one day, I hope you will have the decency to thank me.
Yours sincerely,
Carla Gericke
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This article, “City settles with Free Stater arrested at DWI checkpoint,” started the latest discussion.
***
How can you support police who knowingly break the law, who do immoral things like assault children from behind and then find themselves not responsible because they investigated themselves and found themselves not wanting, who institute illegal neighborhood-wide lockdowns, who point loaded rifles at West Side moms’ heads, who encrypt public communications paid for by us, who actively campaign to hide a list of bad cops from the public, and who have had to hire a Minister of Propaganda to “spin” (their word) their actions? I’m not even going to mention the state sanctioned beat-downs and killings, the car crashes, the spousal abuse, the asset forfeiture, the qualified immunity, or the drug and alcohol abuse for which no one is held responsible, or which usually results in a nice comfy lifetime retirement payout while the rest of us can’t afford to ever stop working in order to pay for this Big Gov, Big Bro system we are suffering under.
Today’s Sunday paper has not one, but two editorials mentioning “Free Staters.” An uncharitable but accurate view is the newspaper is desperate for traffic and they surely need eyeballs now that Granite Grok is smoking them ito readership, and that the editor knows mentioning “free staters” is a reliable source of such traffic because, it’s true, liberty activists do like to read and share articles about corrupt cops and fake news, and here we have a twofer!
In “Free Stater follies: Interfering with DWI stops isn’t funny,” the editor exposes his Stockholm Syndrome by both complaining about activists who hold public officials accountable, AND complaining when City Solicitor Rice isn’t forthcoming enough for the editor’s taste. Know what’s actually not funny? Police violating our rights and the newspaper of record picking their side… Every. Damn. Time. Until you stop protecting LEOs who are actively harming people and hiding the truth, I hate to break it to you, but that bad taste in your mouth isn’t going to go away.
Let’s break down the editor’s contentions:
This week, we discuss how Democrats, led by Lou D’Allesandro, tabled $46 MILLION bucks in federal grant money for NH charter schools out of… Why? What could possibly motivate them to do such a thing? Watch to find out what we think, and repeat after me: “My Education, my choice!”
NPR has an article out today: “Experts worry active shooter drills in schools can be traumatic for students.” As someone who has first hand experience under a police state regime that used similar tactics against its children in schools, let me tell you, Yes, it IS traumatic, and parents, children, and teachers should DEMAND that these drills stop IMMEDIATELY, or you should withdraw your children from these schools, and support charter schools, homeschool, or un-school.
Despite high-profile media coverage, school shootings with multiple victims are still rare. The overall number of students killed in shootings at schools is down from the early 1990s to about 0.15 per million in 2014-2015, according to researchers at Northeastern University. One Harvard instructor estimated the likelihood of a public school student being killed by a gun in school at about 1 in 614 million.
Below is my article from 2016 which first appeared on Carla4NHSenate.com. To Granite Staters, I implore you to stop voting for candidates, like Lou D’Allesandro, who support and condone this militarized behavior in our state. Vote these bums out!
02 Aug 2016
Having grown up in South Africa under apartheid, I am no stranger to the dangers of police militarization. In high school in the 80s, I attended an all-girls boarding school in Pretoria. The police would frequently come to our school to warn us “the terrorists are coming.” The “terrorists” were anyone the regime did not like.
One day, unbeknownst to us, the police detonated smoke bombs in our school to simulate a terror attack. We girls truly believed we were under fire. I was eleven or twelve, a volunteer school fire-fighter, and I leopard-crawled upstairs–fighting the smoke, tears and snot streaming down my face, bruises forming on my elbows and knees–to try to save my friends. Needless to say, when I learned the “attack” that terrified us so was orchestrated BY the police, my views about “good guys” and “bad guys” started to evolve.
America is marching lockstep towards a bona fide police state. This is not hyperbole. America incarcerates the most people on the planet. Today, police commit 1 out of 12 of all killings in the United States. In 2015, 41 officers were slain in the line of duty, while police killed 1,207 Americans. You are 8 times (some say 55 times) more likely to die at the hands of the police than a terrorist. Here in Manchester, an entire neighborhood was recently placed under lockdown, a daytime curfew, something you would never expect to see in a free society.
If you believe police militarization is necessary to protect you from the virtually nonexistent threat of terrorism, understand this fear mongering is being pushed on you by politicians and news media outlets who stand to gain from your fear. Scared people are controllable people.
Your children are being trained in school, like I was, to fear. In Manchester in May [2016], schools were locked down 11 times in 3 weeks. Active shooter drills with “simulated injuries” that “may be visible on volunteer participants” take place in New Hampshire routinely, in hospitals, schools, and elsewhere. In other parts of the country, things are worse, e.g. the CIA forgot a bomb on a school bus after a drill. Do you want this to happen here?
And while you are being scared into submission, the police are being armed and trained to see you as the enemy. The police are being given more and more military grade equipment, funded mostly with federal grants, paid for by YOU, the taxpayer. You are literally paying for your own enslavement.
In 2013, while I was president of the FSP, the then police chief of Concord falsely claimed participants of my organization were a “domestic terrorist threat” in a federal grant application to get a $260,000 BEARCAT–a cuddly name for a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck. The kind of vehicle you see in a war zone, not in a town with 2 homicides per decade. If YOU lie on a government form, you can be fined and/or imprisoned. When government officials break the law, they get off scot-free because “accidents happen,” or, when the crimes get Too Big to Jail, they run for president!
Long story short (you can read more here, here, here, and here, which includes links to media coverage), despite more than 1,500 paper petition signatures garnered from Concord residents, the town voted to accept the BEARCAT. The city council flat-out ignored their constituents, siding with the police over the people, something we see all too often in New Hampshire. The police chief kinda, sorta apologized for demonizing peaceful, limited government proponents, and quietly stepped down a few months later.
Even if you think BEARCATs proliferating across the state isn’t a big deal, what about the increasing military tactics being used on our streets, or all the rifles, scopes, and other tactical gear local police are being armed with, even in places like little ole Laconia? Don’t take my word for it, watch what this retired Marine colonel has to say about what is happening:
“We are building a domestic military, because it is unlawful or unconstitutional to use American troops on American soil, so what we are doing is building a military… Homeland Security is pre-staging gear, equipment… What they are trying to do is use standardized vehicles, standardized equipment… Let’s not kid ourselves, what we are doing is building a domestic army because the government is afraid of its own citizens.”
Why? Why are they afraid? Could it be because we are over-taxed, over-policed, and over-incarcerated? That 79.8% of people disapprove of the job congress is doing? Could it be because there was no real economic recovery after the 2000 and 2008 crashes caused by the federal government’s inflationary policies and money printing? Could it be they are worried about the ever-growing $19 TRILLION dollars of debt, a number so unfathomable people gloss over it, unaware this astronomical number excludes unfunded liabilities like social security and pensions?
Perhaps it is the fact that for the first time, thanks to the internet and social media, we can discover the truth for ourselves, and communicate directly with thousands of other people across the state, country, and globe? That they realize they no longer control the narrative, that, as Hillary Clinton put it in 2011 in a bid for more funding for the state department’s propaganda machine: “We are in an information war and we are losing that war.”
Sadly, America loves war. Besides the foreign interventions, at home we have the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on terror. Frankly, none of these “wars” work out as intended, and all of us end up as collateral damage to failed DC policies.
It is imperative that we reverse the militarization of police here in the Granite State.
As your senator, I will not support legislation to increase police militarization and will actively work to reverse this trend. We also need more accountability and transparency regarding these programs, especially those being pushed locally by the federal government. We need more reporting on what equipment is available, how it is being used, and what training is taking place.
Remember, when all one has is a hammer, eventually everything looks like a nail. As I said in this speech during the pro-police accountability rally I organized as a West Manchester homeowner after the lockdown, YOU are the nail.
If we don’t end this trend towards police militarization, one day soon you will find yourself living under tyranny and wonder how we got there. Not on my watch!
This post and photo appeared on November 8, 2018 after I lost my NH Senate race–I received 42% against an eleven term, 82 year old Establishment Elite incumbent with almost half-a-million dollars in his war chest. (I had $25K and a lot of grassroots support.)
Positive reflection: I am very proud of myself for not cheating on my #Keto lifestyle at all during this entire election cycle–well, except for those damn little choccies at AFP once in a while!
I could ignore pizza laden tables at events without ever having that “OMG, I’m going to die, I’m so hungry” feeling. When contemplating how I would like to “reward” myself after the race, I ran down a litany of “naughty food,” (poison) and realized, burger? nope, pizza? nope, cupcake? nope, mac & cheese, well, yes, but I can make a yummy, almost-as-good substitute. I now know fueling your body with the nutrients it deserves can change your life by giving you stamina, focus, and balance.
My sister, Lizette Cloete, who kindly cooked us a volunteer “thank you” meal on Monday night even got “a-talking-to” when she wanted to make a traditional meat and bean chili. “No,” I said, “I am living my principles and that means serving food that I can eat.” She made two separate pots and people could mix and match according to their desires. Thank you!
Other than once over a lunch date with myself at a fancy hotel while waiting on a print run for mailers, I didn’t have any urges to drink alcohol, either. (I ordered a ginormous sparkling water instead because I like that tea and water glow I have now!)
I’m down 65 pounds, and think my weight is probably close to where it wants to be. This morning, Louis and I both had the exact same thought…
Louis: “When we’re in South Africa in December, let’s set a goal to do yoga every day.”
Me: “OMG, I was literally just thinking the same thing!!!”
For me, this journey is about being the best me I can be, and I’m getting there, and then some… Get ready to be amazed! <3 y’all!
LISTEN NOW… Police have gotten more and more involved in people’s everyday lives – whether it’s tackling high schoolers for vaping or taking on the mantle of Halloween Commissar, stories about police keep popping up in the headlines. Can anyone hold them accountable? Dive into the subject of law enforcement overreach with your hosts on this week’s episode of Told You So! LISTEN NOW…
SIGN THE PETITION urging Governor Sununu to restore public trust and release the secret list of bad NH cops.
Remember to Google “botched SWAT raids,” here’s some recent news on asset forfeiture as discussed in the episode, and this resource is pretty interesting if you want to look at what kind of settlements are being paid out in the 20 biggest U.S. cities. It’s truly the worst of all worlds when there is no oversight or accountability, and then afterwards, payments for bad actors are authorized thus punishing the tax payer. I wonder what the stats look like for NH?
Another day, another election passed. Unfortunately, I was not one of the 9 out of 37 people elected to the Manchester School Charter Commission, but THANK YOU to everyone who voted for me! I deeply appreciate your support and know my time will come. Since the future of the Commission itself seems doubtful due to filing date irregularities in an exceptionally poorly drafted bill that only had one sponsor, Pat Long, I will hopefully get another chance to contribute later. I will be keeping a close eye on the legal situation, and will keep you posted. Have a great, state-free day! 😀
In today’s episode, we discuss the legal battle that developed regarding the School Charter Commission (see background HERE), and I get a little feisty about the violent attack by a police officer on a Keene High School student last week. HERE’s more on what I think about this level of violence being condoned in our schools. I also cover this topic in this week’s Told You So podcast, which drops tomorrow.