Hypocritical Free State Project Invites John McAfee to Headline Porcfest 2017

A few weeks after winning a lifetime achievement award popularly voted on by Free State Project members, the FSP's unelected board of directors banned me and my talk radio show, from attending FSP events like Porcfest. (An event I helped sponsor and promote for many years.)

As a result, while I did tender my resignation from the FSP, I still encouraged people to attend Porcfest both on my radio show and via a blog post at Free Keene.

Now, one year later, the FSP has announced that John McAfee will be headlining Porcfest 2017. John's a great guy and I had the pleasure of interviewing him last year at the D10E conference in San Francisco. He would have been a great pick for the OLD Porcfest. You know, the once-great Summer libertarian camping festival with open cannabis use, unlicensed food sales, and Buzz' Big Gay Dance Parties?

Last year that festival became "family friendly", after years of prudish libertarians complaining about drug use and occasional female toplessness. To kick off the changes, I was banned from the FSP events because of my libertarian views on age of consent, according to their press release. It's commonly known that my most recent girlfriend was a later-teenager and this supposedly infuriated key volunteers within the FSP, leading to my ouster.

Did you know that John McAfee was in his late 50s when he had a 16 year old girlfriend? According to the same WIRED article, at age 66, one of his multiple live-in girlfriends was 17! Surely plenty of men secretly wish they could do the same, while outwardly condemning John for his attraction to young women.

To be clear, I don't want John to get banned from Porcfest, nor do I have any interest in being part of the FSP. I just want to point out the glaring, laughable hypocrisy. People who love liberty should probably still attend Porcfest, but it's getting harder to recommend that, given that the event length this year has been chopped in half but the price hasn't lowered one bit.

Plus, Porcfest now has a more-principled competitor, SomaliaFest, which is set to happen June 16th-20th, at Rogers Campground. That's right before Porcfest, which is slated for June 21st-25th at the same campground. Unlike today's Porcfest, but more like Porcfest from the old days, SomaliaFest has no entrance fee. Attendees can just camp, vend, hang out with cool liberty folk, and self-organize whatever they want. SomaliaFest sounds like a good time, and much more market-driven than the now-centrally-controlled Porcfest.(html comment removed: more)

Schisms are healthy and a natural part of a growing movement. We have the world's largest concentration of liberty-loving people here in New Hampshire. It's inevitable that there will be disagreements and splits. This isn't the first, and won't be the last.

Thank goodness we have two active movements competing to attract libertarians, voluntarists, and liberty-loving anarchists to New Hampshire. There's the FSP with their contradictory and confused board, swayed by the political winds and contributors... and there's the Shire Society, which has no board - only a declaration set in stone and signed in real life (at Porcfest!) back in 2010. Since then, countless people have signed the Shire Society declaration online and in real life, many of whom have since moved to New Hampshire.

Maybe someone who can attend Porcfest should present John McAfee with a printed copy of the Shire Society declaration and see if he'll sign on. Unlike many of the haters in the FSP, I don't judge him for his preferences, so long as everyone's consenting. Here's a hilarious video where John snorts bath salts while in a near-orgy with multiple women. Maybe he should be at SomaliaFest instead?