Meet Eric Brakey, the manager director of the Free State Mission. These of you who’ve learn the superb ebook “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear,” by journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, may acknowledge the group—a group of cranks who’ve tried (and hilariously failed) to show New Hampshire right into a libertarian utopia.
It’s a brand new gig for Brakey, having moved there late final yr after serving in Maine’s legislature. He additionally ran a forgettable 2018 marketing campaign towards impartial Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, pulling a laughable 35% of the vote because the Republican nominee.
Forward of Election Day final yr, he tweeted, “If Trump wins NH by a single vote today, you will be glad I moved and declared my primary residence in NH.”
Trump didn’t win New Hampshire, however Brakey did get the president he needed—which makes his current expertise all of the extra ironic.
On Sunday, returning to Florida from a Royal Caribbean cruise, he posted on X that he had been detained by Border Patrol for an hour and a half whereas brokers dug by his baggage, confiscated his telephone and laptop, and even learn his private journal. When he’d requested what rights he had as a U.S. citizen, he’d allegedly been advised that brokers didn’t want a warrant to look something in his possession, even his electronics.
Then-candidate Donald Trump speaks on the Libertarian Nationwide Conference in Washington in Could 2024.
Brakey mentioned he’d needed to clarify, intimately, that the Free State Mission was a “nonviolent, peaceful libertarian movement” and that his “Defend the Guard” activism wasn’t a part of some militia or rebellion plot. Finally, they let him go, he mentioned, however he was “shaken up and in shock.”
And he needs to be. There is no such thing as a justification for federal brokers to paw by a citizen’s non-public journals and gadgets with out simply trigger or a warrant. However that is precisely the form of authoritarian overreach so many people warned about in 2024—whereas right-leaning libertarians like Brakey shrugged it off as liberal paranoia.
They had been satisfied that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was the actual menace to liberty—as a result of she as soon as prosecuted instances, or as a result of she talked about public well being guidelines, or as a result of they imagined she’d sic the IRS on their crypto wallets, or one thing. In some way, they determined {that a} functioning authorities implementing primary legal guidelines was tyranny, however {that a} man who bragged about weaponizing the Justice Division was pro-liberty. They mistook accountability for oppression, autocracy for freedom—so long as the boot wasn’t on their necks.
The identical individuals who sneered at supposed liberal hysteria over creeping fascism helped empower a motion that worships unchecked govt energy—as long as it targets the “right” folks.
Given his expertise with Border Patrol, perhaps Brakey lastly understands what we meant once we mentioned Trump’s America wouldn’t cease with immigrants or liberals. Fascism all the time runs out of “others” ultimately—and when it does, it comes for its personal believers, too.
