The Free State Project Got It Backwards

Exit & Build - What the FSP did right and what it did wrong

Apr 01, 2026

In 2001, a Yale grad student named Jason Sorens published an essay with a bold premise: libertarians were too spread out to win anything. His solution? Get 20,000 of them to move to one small state, take over the legislature, and shrink the government from the inside.

Twenty-five years and roughly 6,000 movers later, the Free State Project has produced the most libertarian-friendly state legislature in America. About 150 representatives rated A- or above. The House Majority Leader is a Free Stater. Constitutional carry, school choice, no income tax, the first state Bitcoin reserve in the country.

On paper, it’s a libertarian dream. Then COVID happened, and the dream ran into the wall that political strategies always run into.

The Test That Mattered

On March 26, 2020, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu issued Emergency Order #17: a stay-at-home order closing all nonessential businesses, effective midnight. On November 20, 2020, he imposed a statewide mask mandate. Violations carried $1,000 fines. Over the next 15 months, Sununu issued 74 emergency orders. The state of emergency lasted until June 11, 2021.

This was the state with the most libertarian legislature in America. Thousands of liberty activists had spent nearly two decades concentrating there specifically to prevent this kind of thing.

And the governor did it anyway. Unilaterally.

The legislature watched. The NH Attorney General ruled the legislature wasn’t bound by the mask mandate, but that didn’t matter for the 1.4 million residents who were. The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire called Sununu a “tyrant” and demanded he retract the mandate. He didn’t.

They protested outside his house. He made it illegal to protest outside his house.

After the emergency ended, the legislature passed reforms: prohibiting suspension of civil liberties during states of emergency (2022), vaccine mandate nullification (2022). Reactive measures. Locking the barn door after the horse had bolted. My guess? Next time, the same thing will happen anyway.

If 6,000+ libertarians concentrating in one state, building the most liberty-friendly legislature in the country, can’t prevent stay-at-home orders and mask mandates when it actually counts, what does that tell you about the political approach?

The Locals Noticed

The FSP’s core pitch has always been explicit: move to New Hampshire, win elections, change the laws. That honesty created a problem the project never fully solved.

When you announce you’re moving somewhere to take over its politics, the people already living there tend to notice. And they tend not to like it.

In March 2026, about 100 protesters gathered at the State House during the FSP’s Liberty Forum. The Kent Street Coalition, joined by groups like Granite State Matters and Southern NH Indivisible, rallied against what they called the FSP’s “dangerous and destructive agenda.” Coalition co-founder Louise Spencer told InDepthNH the project’s goals “do not comport with the values of the majority of Granite Staters.”

This isn’t new friction. It’s baked in. The Concord police department once applied for a DHS grant listing “Free Staters” alongside Sovereign Citizens as groups that “are active and present daily challenges.” A counter-movement called Stop Free Keene formed after FSP activists followed parking officers around town, videotaping them and feeding expired meters. Two parking officers quit, citing harassment. The city sued the activists.

That’s not to say that the FSP activists did anything wrong, but their approach made just as many enemies as friends.

In Croydon in 2022, a Free Stater’s motion slashed the school budget from $1.7 million to $800,000 at a low-turnout town meeting (the vote was 20 to 14). The cut would have effectively abolished in-person education. The community revolted and overturned it at a special meeting.

On Reddit, native New Hampshirites don’t mince words. “Delusional carpetbaggers almost universally detested.” “We really hate carpetbaggers from coming out of state and trying to change NH.”

There’s irony here. The FSP picked New Hampshire partly because it already had a libertarian culture. Then it alienated the locals by showing up with a megaphone announcing it was there to change things. You don’t build community by telling your new neighbors you’ve arrived to fix them.

What Actually Worked

Here’s the twist: the Free State Project did produce something genuinely remarkable. It just wasn’t what they planned.

The political strategy brought thousands of liberty-minded people to one place. And those people, once concentrated, started doing what people with shared values naturally do. They built things. Not legislation. Infrastructure.

PorcFest (the Porcupine Freedom Festival) has run since 2004 at a campground in Lancaster. By 2024, it was selling 2,500 tickets, its biggest year ever. The festival features “Agora Valley,” a marketplace where vendors trade in Bitcoin, silver, and gold. No permission slips. No sales tax collectors. Just voluntary exchange.

That agorist energy didn’t stay at the campground. In Portsmouth, the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe opened as what it called “America’s first crypto-only retail shop.” The surrounding area became known as “Bitcoin Village,” with 16+ businesses accepting crypto in one small town. New Hampshire now claims the highest per-capita Bitcoin usage in the country and the longest-running crypto meetup in the world.

In Manchester, a 2014 account from a new mover describes the scene: agorist businesses operating without state licenses (co-ops, taxi services, fitness training, food services), community spaces like Area 23 and The Quill, and an agorist diner where you pay for your meal in Bitcoin. “Fr33 Aid“ became the world’s first charity to accept only Bitcoin, providing medical services outside the regulated system.

The mover, who came from a place with “a handful of Ron Paul supporters,” found hundreds of liberty-minded people in a city of 110,000. “The free voluntary society that we are all passionate about is literally being created,” he wrote.

Even FSP Executive Director Eric Brakey acknowledges this reality. He told InDepthNH that many participants “build businesses, homeschool networks, and community centers” rather than running for office, and that “culture building is equally important.”

Equally important? It’s the whole game. The homeschool co-ops don’t need legislative approval. The Bitcoin economy doesn’t care who’s governor. The agorist businesses operate whether the liberty caucus wins or loses in November. These parallel systems function outside of and in spite of political power. That’s exit and build.

And politics is downstream of culture anyway.

The Lesson the FSP Accidentally Taught

The Free State Project’s pitch was political: concentrate libertarians, win elections, change laws. That’s not exit and build. That’s “enter and reform” with a U-Haul.

The political wins look impressive on a slide deck. But the COVID test exposed the core flaw: when the state decides to act, all those legislative seats don’t amount to a veto. The governor issued 74 emergency orders. The “most libertarian legislature in America” couldn’t stop a single one in real time.

The wins that stuck had nothing to do with the legislature. A Bitcoin economy that routes around the banking system. Agorist businesses that operate without asking permission. Homeschool networks that make government schools irrelevant. Mutual aid systems built on voluntary association instead of tax revenue. Community spaces where people meet, trade, and build relationships face to face.

The political strategy was the pitch. The community was the product.

That distinction matters for anyone thinking about what “exit and build” actually means. Concentrating liberty-minded people in one geographic area has real, proven value. The density creates network effects: you can find a like-minded business partner, a homeschool co-op, a neighbor who gets it. You can build a parallel economy that reaches critical mass.

But none of that requires winning elections. The people building Bitcoin Village in Portsmouth don’t need a seat on the city council. Fr33 Aid didn’t need the legislature to greenlight medical charity. The families homeschooling together in Manchester didn’t wait for universal school choice to pass.

The FSP got one thing exactly right: leave where you are and go where the people are. But the lesson isn’t “move somewhere to take over its politics.” The lesson is: move somewhere to build alongside people who share your values. The concentration is the strategy. The politics are a distraction.

Don’t move to govern. Move to build.

Sources:

- Free State Project (Wikipedia) | FSP.org | FSP History | Why NH

- NHPR: Free Staters at Liberty Forum (Mar 2026)

- InDepthNH: Protesters Rally Against FSP (Mar 2026)

- Concord Monitor: Liberty Forum (Mar 2026)

- CNBC: NH Stay-at-Home Order (Mar 2020)

- WMUR: NH Mask Mandate (Nov 2020)

- Wikipedia: COVID-19 Pandemic in NH

- Citizens Count: NH COVID Policies

- NH Bulletin: End of State of Emergency

- InDepthNH: AG on Mask Mandate