The Town That Went Feral

10/15/2020 The Town That Went Feral | The New Republic
The Town That Went Feral

When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local
government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
ILLUSTRATION BY JIM STOTEN
Patrick Blanch eld / October 13, 2020
0:00 / 23:36
Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
In its public education campaigns, the U.S. National Park Service stresses an
important distinction: If you find yourself being attacked by a brown or grizzly
bear, YES, DO PLAY DEAD. Spread your arms and legs and cling to the ground
with all your might, facing downward; after a few attempts to flip you over (no one
said this would be easy), the bear will, most likely, leave. By contrast, if you find
yourself being attacked by a black bear, NO, DO NOT PLAY DEAD. You must either
flee or, if that’s not an option, fight it off, curved claws and 700 psi-jaws and all.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project 1/11

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some
Bears)
by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Buy on Bookshop
PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $28.00
But don’t worry—it almost never comes to this. As one park service PSA noted this
summer, bears “usually just want to be left alone. Don’t we all?” In other words, if
you encounter a black bear, try to look big, back slowly away, and trust in the
creature’s inner libertarian. Unless, that is, the bear in question hails from certain
wilds of western New Hampshire. Because, as Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s new
book suggests, that unfortunate animal may have a far more aggressive
disposition, and relate to libertarianism first and foremost as a flavor of human
cuisine.
Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer

nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The
Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing
rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange,
episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture
wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New
Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—
part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New
Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting
manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards.
While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain
beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of
ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government
interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed,
free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,”
“reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction
(Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-
nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.
None of those micro-nations, it should be observed,
panned out, and things in
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well either—especially when thetoday.
humans collide with
a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own
utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is
simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once
described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise
product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to
“indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the
other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics
that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a
recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once.
In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless
corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny
New Hampshire town are stark indeed.
“In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence,” Hongoltz-
Hetling observes, “New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest.” New
Hampshire is, after all, the Live Free or Die state, imposing neither an income nor
a sales tax, and boasting, among other things, the highest per capita rate of
machine gun ownership. In the case of Grafton, the history of Living Free—so to
speak—has deep roots. The town’s Colonial-era settlers started out by ignoring
“centuries of traditional Abenaki law by purchasing land from founding father
John Hancock and other speculators.” Next, they ran off Royalist law
enforcement, come to collect lumber for the king, and soon discovered their most
enduring pursuit: the avoidance of taxes. As early as 1777, Grafton’s citizens were
asking their government to be spared taxes and, when they were not, just stopped
paying them.
Nearly two and a half centuries later, Grafton has become something of a magnet
for seekers and quirky types, from adherents of the Unification Church of the
Reverend Sun Myung Moon to hippie burnouts and more. Particularly important
for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown
laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to
homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie.
Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had
driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when
freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life
for themselves, with John eventually Subscribe
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department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for

governor on the libertarian ticket.
Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed,
and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists.
Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic
participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on
Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800
registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a
committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance
of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians
expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced
the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving
citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions
flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of
the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry
Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to
“traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right
to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the
“victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,”
observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)
While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and
dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free
Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that,
evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually
enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it
not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as
Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating
under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be
rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s
population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents,
overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns.
The town’s population swelled with 200 new residents,

overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and
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Hongoltz-Hetling profiles many newcomers, all of them larger-than-life, yet quite

real. The people who joined the Free Town Project in its first five years were, as he
describes, “free radicals”—men with “either too much money or not enough,”
with either capital to burn or nothing to lose. There’s John Connell of
Massachusetts, who arrived on a mission from God, liquidated his savings, and
bought the historic Grafton Center Meetinghouse, transforming it into the
“Peaceful Assembly Church,” an endeavor that mixed garish folk art, strange rants
from its new pastor (Connell himself), and a quixotic quest to secure tax
exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it.
There’s Adam Franz, a self-described anti-capitalist who set up a tent city to serve
as “a planned community of survivalists,” even though no one who joined it had
any real bushcraft skills. There’s Richard Angell, an anti-circumcision activist
known as “Dick Angel.” And so on. As Hongoltz-Hetling makes clear,
libertarianism can indeed have a certain big-tent character, especially when the
scene is a new landscape of freedom-lovers making “homes out of yurts and RVs,
trailers and tents, geodesic domes and shipping containers.”
If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is
bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free
Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover
and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm
for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of
$1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case,
and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube
hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as
its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic
disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going
without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes,
“a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.”
Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.”
Enter the bears, stage right.
Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of
North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average,
there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears
and humans increasingly come into contact inSubscribe
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trails. But Must readson
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capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed

something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears.
Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad
daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of
Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming
rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her
kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them,
and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and
trying to enter homes.
Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-

Hetling’s portrayal of the bears moves from comical if foreboding to downright
terrifying. These are animals that can scent food seven times farther than a
trained bloodhound, that can flip 300-pound stones with ease, and that can, when
necessary, run in bursts of speed rivaling a deer’s. When the bears finally start
mauling humans—attacking two women in their homes—Hongoltz-Hetling’s
relation of the scenes is nightmarish. “If you look at their eyes, you understand,”
one survivor tells him, “that they are completely alien to us.”
What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the
question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have
become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid.
Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the
reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins?
Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and
emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet
waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these
questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in
Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were
finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract
medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”
Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the
arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do
anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to
feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who
prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,”
revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her
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with sugared today. If those same
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bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t
her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages
sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are
the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of
being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one
way of framing the problem.
Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free
Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was
living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one
another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they
could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their
homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber
handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot
more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal,
merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.
Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic

and quiet. A real estate development venture known as Grafton Gulch, in homage
to the dissident enclave in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, went belly-up. After losing
a last-ditch effort to secure tax exemption, a financially ruined Connell found
himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal
winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire. Franz quit his survivalist
commune, which soon walled itself off into a prisonlike compound, the better to
enjoy freedom. And John Babiarz, the erstwhile inaugurator of the Project,
became the target of relentless vilification by his former ideological cohorts, who
did not appreciate his refusal to let them enjoy unsecured blazes on high-wildfire–
risk afternoons. When another, higher-profile libertarian social engineering
enterprise, the Free State Project, received national attention by promoting a mass
influx to New Hampshire in general (as opposed to just Grafton), the Free Town
Project’s fate was sealed. Grafton became “just another town in a state with many
options,” options that did not have the same problem with bears.
Or at least—not yet. Statewide, a perverse synergy between conservationist and

austerity impulses in New Hampshire governance has translated into an approach
to “bear management” policy TNRthat could accurately
Newsletters. be described as laissez-faire.
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When Graftonites sought help 7from
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a week.
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received little more than reminders that killing bears without a license is illegal,
and plenty of highly dubious victim-blaming to boot. Had not the woman savaged
by a bear been cooking a pot roast at the time? No? Well, nevertheless. Even when
the state has tried to rein in the population with culls, it has been too late.
Between 1998 and 2013, the number of bears doubled in the wildlife management
region that includes Grafton. “Something’s Bruin in New Hampshire—Learn to
Live with Bears,” the state’s literature advises.
No one wants bears in their backyard, but no one wants

to invest in institutions doing the unglamorous work to
keep them out either.
The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian
cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and
mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire
taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources
to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income
from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no
one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest
sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either.
Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal
prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end
result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply.
Their prosperity also appears to be linked to man-made disasters that have played
out on a national and global scale—patterns of unsustainable construction and
land use, and the climate crisis. More than once, Hongoltz-Hetling flags the fact
that upticks in bear activity unfold alongside apparently ever more frequent
droughts. Drier summers may well be robbing bears of traditional plant and
animal sources of food, even as hotter winters are disrupting or even ending their
capacity to hibernate. Meanwhile, human garbage, replete with high-calorie
artificial ingredients, piles up, offering especially enticing treats, even in the dead
of winter—particularly in places with zoning and waste management practices as
chaotic as those in Grafton, but also in areas where suburban sprawl is reaching
farther into the habitats of wild animals. The result may be a new kind of bear, one
“torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—
they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy
than the bear that nature produced.” Ever-hungry for new frontiers in personal
autonomy and market emancipation, human beings have altered the
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environment with the unintended result of empowering newly ravenous bears to

boot.
Ignoring institutional failure and mounting crises does not make them go away.
But some may take refuge in confidence that, when the metaphorical chickens (or,
rather, bears) finally come home to roost, the effects are never felt equally. When
bears show up in higher-income communities like Hanover (home to Dartmouth
College), Hongoltz-Hetling notes, they get parody Twitter accounts and are
promptly evacuated to wildernesses in the north; poorer rural locales are left to
fend for themselves, and the residents blamed for doing what they can. In other
words, the “unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive
alongside modern humans” is unfolding along with competition among human
beings amid failing infrastructure and scarce resources, a struggle with Social
Darwinist dynamics of its own.
The distinction between a municipality of eccentric libertarians and a state whose

response to crisis is, in so many words, “Learn to Live With It” may well be a
matter of degree rather than kind. Whether it be assaults by bears, imperceptible
toxoplasmosis parasites, or a way of life where the freedom of markets ultimately
trumps individual freedom, even the most cocksure of Grafton’s inhabitants must
inevitably face something beyond and bigger than them. In that, they are hardly
alone. Clearly, when it comes to certain kinds of problems, the response must be
collective, supported by public effort, and dominated by something other than
too-tidy-by-half invocations of market rationality and the maximization of
individual personal freedom. If not, well, then we had all best get some practice in
learning when and how to play dead, and hope for the best.
Patrick Blanch eld @PatBlanch eld
Patrick Blanch eld’s rst book, Gunpower, is forthcoming from Verso.
Read More: Magazine, November 2020, Books & The Arts, Culture, Books, Critical Mass,
Politics, Libertarians, Libertarianism, Climate Change, Utopianism, Black Bears, New
Hampshire, Small Government, Bears

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10/15/2020 The Town That Went Feral | The New Republic

ILLUSTRATION BY JIM STOTEN

Patrick Blanch eld / October 13, 2020

TNR Newsletters. Subscribe

TNR Newsletters. Subscribe

Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer

department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for

The town’s population swelled with 200 new residents,

Hongoltz-Hetling profiles many newcomers, all of them larger-than-life, yet quite

capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed

Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-

Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic

Or at least—not yet. Statewide, a perverse synergy between conservationist and

No one wants bears in their backyard, but no one wants

environment with the unintended result of empowering newly ravenous bears to

The distinction between a municipality of eccentric libertarians and a state whose

Patrick Blanch eld @PatBlanch eld

Patrick Blanch eld’s rst book, Gunpower, is forthcoming from Verso.

TNR Newsletters. Subscribe

What Richard Hofstadter Got Wrong

Look Back in Anger

TNR Newsletters. Subscribe

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