Carla Gericke (JD, MFA) is an advocate of liberty specializing in localized voluntarism, self-determination, and how responsible human action can lead to peace and prosperity. She is president emeritus of the Free State Project, and lives in New Hampshire with thousands of fellow freedom fighters. In 2014, Carla won a landmark case affirming the 1st Amendment right to film police encounters.
She has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured in GQ and Playboy, been quoted in The Economist, and has discussed libertarianism on the BBC. She has visited more than 40 countries, hiked to the base camp of the 10th highest mountain in the world, lost a shoe in a taxi more than once, had her passport stolen in Goa, got kidnapped in Vietnam, and has noshed on more “mystery meat” street food than she cares to admit.
Carla once spent an entire summer while working as in-house counsel at Logitech eating tuna fish sandwiches with Doug Engelbart (the Mother Of All Demos dude), she worked on Apple’s acquisition of Steve Job’s NeXT, and bought her first Bitcoin for $6. Carla co-hosts the Told You So podcast, and co-chairs Manch Talk TV. She serves on several non-profit boards, follows a Keto lifestyle, practices yoga and shooting, and plays a mean game of Scrabble.
Carla enjoys cooking, gardening, painting, reading, and watching documentary films. She has twice run for New Hampshire Senate, garnering 42% of the vote in 2018 against an 11-term incumbent, and believes in 2020, third time will be the charm! DONATE to her race TODAY!
Carla’s first book, a collection of award-winning short stories, essays, and speeches, The Ecstatic Pessimist is now available on Amazon. Says Nick Gillespie, Editor-at-Large of Reason Magazine: “It is a fantastic package of writings that veer from fiction, to autobiography and memoir, to political polemics. It’s great, mixes stories about substance abuse, lack of focus, historical wrongs and utopian attempts to remake the world as a better place in a very pragmatic way. I highly recommend The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly).”
Resources for today’s show…
- Follow Life With Jack on Instagram
- TSP Facebook Group
- Join the Members Brigade
- Join Our Forum
- TspAz.com
- Move it On Over – George Thororgood and the Destroyers
Carla’s Links
- CarlaGericke.com
- The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly)
- The Told You So Podcast
- Carla For NH Senate
- Carla on Facebook
- Carla on InstaGram
- Carla on Twitter
- Free State Project
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THIS VIDEO IS 7 YEARS OLD AND STILL RINGS TRUE TODAY, MAYBE EVEN MORE SO… Watch to the end!
Ah yes, memberberry when I warned you the state was getting out of control and wasn’t really there to serve YOU but rather themselves?!?
Now, seven years later, they call themselves “essential” and YOU, “nonessential.” They take all the protective gear for themselves first, and lock you down. They tell you all of these unConstitutional precautions for “your own good,” but deep down inside, you no longer believe them because it is clear this is NOT true, that nothing that is happening right now is benefitting you or your business, all it is doing is spreading fear, paranoia, and distrust between friends and neighbors, almost like they want to divide us into two classes–you know, two classes like “essentials” and “nonessentials.”
Perhaps you are starting to wonder why the state is forcing you to do things to your own body against your own will, why they are forcing you to do their bidding when it is clear they are overreacting and the science does not support the destruction to the economy they are creating IN RESPONSE to the virus (it’s NOT the virus itself, it is the government’s response!). Perhaps you are starting to wonder why they are making you, the “nonessentials” enforce their regulations on their behalf, turning YOU into an agent of the state by threatening to take away your livelihood if you don’t comply. Perhaps you are starting to wonder why you should comply with these absurd and slavish rules that violate the trust and relationships you have developed with your customers, friends, and neighbors.
Here’s the reason why: Because they will harm you if you don’t. They will take your business license (permission slip) away. They will fine you. They will lock you down, and, eventually, they will lock you up.
Does this sound like a healthy relationship to you? Or does it sound like, perhaps, you are in an abusive relationship with a bully, and that you need space, and possibly a divorce?
At a minimum, I hope you will vote for me so that YOU can have a voice in the Senate, because if there is one thing that is truly, undoubtably essential, it is… liberty.
As I always say, Freedom is the answer, what’s the question?
You can find the text of this speech, together with 12 other essays about my liberty activism in my first book, The Ecstatic Pessimist, now available on Amazon. BUY YOURS TODAY.
“Sometimes, people have a hard time trying to peg the protest politics of Carla Gericke.
As a Republican candidate for the New Hampshire Senate and a ‘hardcore libertarian,’ she has been an outspoken activist against the stay-at-home orders handed down by Gov. Chris Sununu during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a position many people may equate with Trump-style conservatism.
At the same time, however, Ms. Gericke has also been a longtime activist against what she sees as the troubling militarization of American police forces, and she’s been mostly supportive of Black Lives Matter efforts to defund the police.
‘I am all for taking part of the budget and moving it away from escalating policing, and maybe move it more toward mental health, community development, and that kind of stuff,’ says Ms. Gericke, who has run against the powerful Democratic incumbent in her district for the past three election cycles. ‘That wouldn’t really reduce a line item in terms of the budget and wouldn’t really be shrinking the government, so for me, that isn’t the ideal solution. But I’m willing to say I think that would be a step towards a healthier, more peaceful society.’
She’s gotten hate mail for her efforts from both sides of the political spectrum. But like most libertarians, Ms. Gericke’s principled opposition to what she sees as ever-expanding and far-reaching state powers – especially the lethal power given to police along with their ‘qualified immunities’ from legal accountability – has been a core plank of her political philosophy from the start.
The Republican candidate joined other community activists on the left in 2013 to help lead efforts to keep the city of Concord from purchasing a new Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck, or BEARCAT, which city officials said was necessary because of “frequent demonstrations by officially organized groups which have the potential of becoming volatile.”
It is the kind of language she finds chilling. ‘Concord at the time had had like, two murders in a decade,’ she says. ‘But of course they ended up getting their BEARCAT anyway.’…
“It feels like progress”
As a libertarian activist and president emeritus of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, Ms. Gericke, too, has long fought for transparency and accountability in municipal police forces.
‘I do think there is definitely a lot of overlap with these more liberal groups,’ says Ms. Gericke, who grew up under the apartheid regime in South Africa and thus remains suspicious of government power. ‘And one of the problems all of us see, in part, is this notion of ‘law and order.’ … It is the fearmongering from the war on drugs. And it is, I believe, partly the institutionalized racism inherent in the prison system – the whole school-to-prison pipeline we can so easily see.’
More recently, Ms. Gericke joined with the ACLU and New Hampshire news organizations to demand the public release of the names of police officers who have been accused of misconduct, known as the ‘Laurie List.’ New Hampshire law exempts this list from the state’s existing freedom-of-information laws.
Last year a state judge ordered the release of the list, which includes the names of some 260 cops, but Republican Governor Sununu and law enforcement officials appealed the ruling at the time. In the past month, however, each appears to be rethinking this opposition, and the governor announced the formation of a commission to recommend reforms ‘to enhance transparency, accountability, and community relations in law enforcement.’
As Ms. Gericke woos voters in her district – her campaign slogan is ‘Protecting the smallest minority, the individual … YOU!’ – she has been heartened to see police accountability finally become a national issue supported by an array of political perspectives.
‘As a libertarian and as someone who’s worked against the expanding police state for such a long time, it’s sort of a ‘let’s see if it happens’ kind of thing,” she says. ‘But at least it feels like progress.’”
I joined Josh from Goffstown and Representative Gary Hopper on Wednesday for a discussion about my state senate race, my book The Ecstatic Pessimist, the state of the world and New Hampshire, and ideas about how we can keep NH awesome! (Psst: with less vitriol and more less government! :P)
This week we again end up discussing the virus, the role of masks, how YOU can make certain lifestyle choices, including reducing your social media and TV news time, to improve your own overall health, and more!
This week we lean into some ideas for police reform,and we discuss the Mayor’s tie-breaking vote to deny lower income neighborhoods pool time this summer while still allowing her own children to swim in the private North End pools. That’s not how germs work, amirite?
Have you ever stopped to wonder… Who owns you? If you’re glib, you’ll, of course, say, “No one,” or, perhaps, “Me! I own me.”
Okay, but if you are not “allowed” to do what you want, when you want, based on your own perception and understanding and knowledge of a particular situation, or, even, no knowledge at all, and are forced, BY ORDER of another human being, to NOT DO WHAT YOU WANT to provide for yourself, your family and friends, then… WHO OWNS YOU?
Why do I believe in Liberty above all else? Beside the moral aspect of only *I, myself* am able to decide *for me about my life,* I believe you always get the best outcomes in the shortest amount of time when human freedom flourishes. When you allow people to pick and choose what works best for them, you allow experimentation, which in turn gives us information, which gives us better, faster results.
Free people = better lives.
When you eliminate Liberty, bad things follow. When you subjugate yourself to unelected “experts” and allow their opinions to form the basis of “government orders” against the people of your own state, forcing them into one single approach, **regardless of our differences,** you not only reduce and/or eliminate that experimentation and nimbleness afforded by free people freely deciding how to live their lives, you actually become a slave to someone else’s decision matrixes, you become a slave… To a state government that now claims to have the “authority” to pick who does what when WITH PRIVATE BUSINESSES, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and supposedly FREE HUMAN BEINGS…
Again… who owns you?
Know how you get people to stay inside during a pandemic? THERE’S A PANDEMIC. The governor failed New Hampshire by choosing tyranny over Liberty.
I realize Sununu had difficult choices to make, but he chose wrong out of the gate by not choosing to respect us, me, YOU, his fellow citizens and by ignoring the founding principles of this nation and state. He chose wrong by choosing to DICTATE instead of LEAD.
As is typical for a politician, there was a lot of nudge-nudge wink-winking that happened at the start. Subtle, “don’t worry,” we’re just going to designate everyone as “essential,” and this “order’s enforcement” won’t have “teeth.”
Well, let me tell you a little something about how Liberty vs. tyranny works… When you issue “orders,” you are empowering law enforcement to… enFORCE ORDERS, which is kind of what they like to do… Which means…
It has taken less than a month for the police to start harassing parents on playgrounds. It has taken less than a month for law enforcement to threaten NH surfers. It has taken less than a month for police departments to start issuing policy statements explaining how they will go about arresting people who are outside (e.g. see Weare PD).
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, and the Attorney General of the United States of America agrees with me, telling you to leave the public IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL lawful ORDER and if you are arrested in New Hampshire re this, PLEASE contact me.
(They’ll initially charge you with the catch-all “disobeying an officer” and then drop the charges later, and you’ll have to sue in federal court for violation of your civil rights, but I’m pretty sure–although, of course, no guarantees about anything, you’re reading an opinion on the internet–qualified immunity isn’t going to work for them, and law enforcement may be held *personally liable* too.)
I will be at the rally at Noon today 5/2 at the State House in Concord. I hope you will join me. No matter what your government tells you, WE ARE ALL ESSENTIAL.
Yes, even–nay, ESPECIALLY–us, the hard working, healthy, responsible taxpaying portion of the state… And it might behoove the “order-makers” to remember that!