In the spring of 2020, when most of the country was going utterly bonkers about the invisible enemy, acting as if a virus had never before vexed a living person so the only thing to do is destroy the social order, most everything shut down.
One event that did not was Porcfest, the annual gathering of thousands in the black mountains of New Hampshire. It went on anyway, much to the shock and horror of the local and national media.
But the people who run this event, an extension of the Free State Project, are rather used to this kind of nonsense. They have been attacked in the media for the better part of 20 years. The line is always the same. This is a movement that is seeking to disrupt the politics of the state with a focus on the liberty of individuals, meaning low taxes, 2nd Amendment rights, personal freedoms, and privacy.
The idea is that if enough people who care about these things come to the state, they can make a difference in the political environment. The strategy just keeps working. As someone told me last night, the stories in the press always backfire and end up being inadvertent advertisements for the event.
Already I can tell that the COVID response is a major topic among the many thousands of attendees. After all, this was the biggest attack on liberty in our lifetimes. We are still trying to figure out what happened, why, and what to do about it. My own speech on Saturday evening will focus on this, with some discussion of how we’ve all been changed. The “before times” seem like a distant memory, and we are all thinking through how our understanding of the world has been rocked.
One of the speakers here is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. All credit to him for coming. The New Hampshire Democratic Party sent out a news blast telling him not to speak here.
“As a candidate for the presidency and a figure who commands considerable public attention, your presence at PorcFest will be seen as an endorsement of the Free State Project and its radical goals,” the party bosses wrote. “Your presence will lend legitimacy to an extremist movement that aggressively works against the interests of New Hampshire residents.”
It went on and on with the usual tripe.
Then he went further, again in his own words:
“This trend of ‘canceling’ anyone who appears at the wrong event or speaks with the wrong person is antithetical to the democratic ideal of debate and the free exchange of ideas.”
You can say that again, a million times over. We are all fed up with being school-marmed and hall-monitored out of exercising our rights and freedoms. I’m certain that not everyone here will agree with RFK but they don’t agree with each other either. What prevails at Porcfest is an old-fashioned idea: when we have freedom and rights, we can all co-exist together in peace and prosperity.
Put that way, the notion does not seem that radical at all. Indeed, the theory is the foundation of the American experiment. Isn’t it simply incredible that it would be a Kennedy who would be called up to remind the country of its core values?
Last week, a major brouhaha broke out when Joe Rogan invited the famed pharma propagandist Peter Hotez on his show to debate RFK. The prize money for Hotez to agree grew from $100K to more than $1M. But even then, Hotez will not do it. He told MSNBC that he would not because science doesn’t debate. Oh.
Hotez further explained that he did not want to give a platform to RFK but this is a bit weird. The latest polls show that RFK is the single most popular politician in the United States, beating out everyone else in both major political parties. If anything, it would be RFK giving a platform to Hotez but that is precisely what worries the supposed scientist. He is willing to face the current discrediting now rather than make it worse by having Kennedy expose him even further.
The attempt to cancel RFK has been going on for years now. Just yesterday, and incredibly, YouTube took down a historic and fascinating interview between Jordan Peterson (arguably the world’s most influential intellectual) and RFK, arguably the world’s most popular politician. Do you see what is happening? The walls are closing in.
Once Kennedy stepped into the political arena with a direct challenge to Biden it got worse, to the point of being absolutely cacophonous. It’s made absolutely no difference. It’s even helped the campaign! At this point, RFK is truly antifragile, the neologism meaning someone or something that gains strength from being attacked. In many ways, this is true of Porcfest and the Free State Project too.
Anyone who these days attempts to live out their lives in peace and freedom is under assault from myriad sources out there. Such are the times in which we live. But what are we to do? Just give in and watch all our liberties slip further and further away? May it never be so. There are many millions of Americans who are determined to be free despite all the attempts to shut freedom down forever. This event is living proof of that.
