New Hampshire gardeners and outdoor enthusiasts are familiar with highly invasive vines like knotweed and bittersweet. They climb all over power poles and fences, smothering and killing trees and shrubs. These invaders are very much like the plague of outside money and anti-democratic ideology that came to New Hampshire 20 years ago as the Free State Project. It has entwined itself around what once was our Grand Old Party and made alarming progress in pulling down our cherished public institutions.
The FSP isn’t a political party that respects our Constitution or seeks to influence policy as part of our representative government. It’s a movement aimed at destroying government by defunding public institutions and creating what Jason Sorens, its founder, calls an anarcho-capitalist state. In this vision of a “free state,” all goods and services are privately held by a few wealthy people who free themselves from regulation and oversight. Everyone else is on their own.
Several thousand people have migrated from across the United States, bought land, moved in and established themselves as “good neighbors.” Many have used the good neighbor strategy to win elected offices. At the local level, they have changed zoning laws to make it easier to buy up land and undercut environmental and other regulations. They’ve gained control of some school boards and town committees and drastically cut budgets and services. Free Staters and allies in the Liberty Alliance hold majority power in our state legislature, and Jason Osborne, a Free State transplant, is their leader.
These self-described “liberty Republicans” represent the shoots and vines of a nationwide anti-democracy movement. Pull on those, and we unearth the complex root system that feeds them. Billionaire donors like Make Liberty Win and Americans for Prosperity, a big oil-funded super-PAC, contributed over a million dollars to FSP-aligned candidates last year. The NH Liberty Alliance PAC distributed it to over 150 members of our 400-member House of Representatives, which obligingly passed bills that defunded public education, public works, public health, city and county governments and support for small businesses.
This legislation isn’t even written in our state. It’s provided by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a libertarian think tank. Writers draft bills that attack everything from voting rights to Medicaid funding and send them to state leaders to introduce to their legislatures. Major donors to ALEC include big pharma, big tobacco, big insurance, big oil and others whose primary objective is big profits, not the will of the people. These are the same billionaires responsible for Project 2025, whose stated goal is also to defund and privatize every agency and program created for the common good.
New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Accounts are a good example of how the current legislature represents profiteers, not people. Voters testified during legislative hearings by a margin of 10-to-1 against expanding EFA eligibility to wealthy families, but our testimony was ignored. The state education fund is being plundered while taxes rise and public schools struggle. At the same time, we’re denied any say about curricula, standards, practices or outcomes. Is this not taxation without representation?
It’s not just education, either. For a decade, while clear majorities of state voters have called for worker protections; affordable health, housing, and energy; consumer protections; and clean air and water, our efforts have been blocked and vetoed. Now we know why: our state government represents its billionaire donors, not us.
This is a critical moment to stand up for the Granite State. FSP leaders recently told attendees at a training that they plan to “accelerate migration” to New Hampshire this year to achieve their goal of seceding from the Union and forming an independent nation-state powered by unregulated nuclear energy under a crypto-currency economy. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s also urgent that states check the increasingly invasive federal government. As she has shown through her support for EFAs, Gov. Ayotte supports the Trump regime’s practice of hijacking public funds to benefit private entities. And unlike many governors, she failed to fight back when they demanded Medicaid recipients’ records, including confidential health information and Social Security numbers. Who gets access to that information? How will they use it? How will they guarantee that every eligible person continues to have access to these funds? There’s no way to know. We deserve a state government that resists this federal abuse of power.
Elections are next year, and we have a state Constitution and representative government to defend. The Liberty Alliance publishes “liberty ratings,” which assess legislators based on how closely their voting records align with FSP goals. The higher their score, the more they need to be replaced. There are energetic and talented people ready to run for office, uproot anti-democracy forces, reject billionaire-class money and influence and revive a legislature that serves the people and has the courage to check corrupt executive power, both state and federal. We must support them with our dollars, our time, our voices and our votes.
Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.