Liberty-Lovers Find Home

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POLITICAL MOVEMENT

LIBERTYLOVERS FIND HOME IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

Free State Project has attracted more than 6,000 people to move to the state since 2003

BY ALLAN STEIN

s a young schoolgirl in the People’s Republic of China, Lily Tang Williams spent most of her formative years believing in the totalitarian government of Mao Zedong.

The former Red Guards student group member learned that Marxist ideology was the answer to everything, individual rights and liberty, the enemy of the people.

Tang Williams said it would take years to remove the shackles of her “brainwashing.”

“I did not wake up and become an independent thinker until 20 years later,” Tang Williams told Insight, “because you are indoctrinated all your life in China.

“The ideology is communist indoctrination, [that] government is the solution to all your problems.”

In 1988, Tang Williams immigrated to the United States, met her husband, started a family, and ran for political office in left-leaning Colorado. She learned about libertarianism from her husband and a new political phenomenon called the New Hampshire Free State Project.

Tang Williams said she fell in love with New Hampshire on her first visit in 2016, and three years later, the family left Colorado and moved to the Granite State,

Lily Tang Williams as she appears as a young girl and member of the Red Guards in Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China during the 1960s.

where the motto, “Live Free or Die,” is more than just words.

Today, she is proud to call herself a New Hampshire “Free Stater.”

“I am the kind of person that cares about freedom,” said Tang Williams, 57, a candidate for U.S. Senate and organizer of the Republican Town Committee in Weare, New Hampshire. “If I say I will do something, I keep my promise.”

Part of Tang Williams’s promise is to continue serving the cause of liberty and helping other liberty-minded

“Free Staters,” who now number more than 6,000 since the project launched in February 2003.

The movement has grown exponentially since the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, she said.

Participants say the Free State Project is an idea whose time has come—a way of life rather than a physical enclave.

In 2001, its founder, Jason Sorens, wrote an essay about the project to galvanize interest in mass political migration, a movement dedicated to liberty but needing a place to settle and thrive in a history steeped in freedom.

The promised land was New Hampshire, picked from a list of 10 states based on its small size, favorable business climate, low taxes, and rural landscape. The goal was to have 20,000 people sign a pledge to move to the state.

Bruce Fenton was among those Free Staters who signed the pledge and moved to New Hampshire with his family.

“I just really liked the idea of pursuing liberty in our lifetime by going to a place where you are with like-minded people,” said Fenton, who is also running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Being from blue-state Massachusetts, Fenton said, “like many states,” the

Bay State is crippled by its bureaucracy.

“You do not get any benefit from it. You get many drawbacks,” Fenton told Insight.

“The bigger the government, the more corruption. The more government they have, the more broken they are.”

Fenton said his family signed the pledge 10 years ago and moved five years later. He also convinced friends and relatives to become Free Staters.

“You are indoctrinated all your life in China. The ideology is communist indoctrination, [that] government is the solution to all your problems.”

Lily Tang Williams, member, New Hampshire Free State Project

“It is nice to see most recently that it has come into its own and become more successful. Early on, it was speculative, an experiment. There was no guarantee it would work,” Fenton said.

“There are more moving [in] every day. It is a free state, though not perfect.”

Sorens said the Free State Project exceeded his expectations but not his hopes.

“I was pessimistic about the political future of the U.S. when I wrote the essay that started it all,” he told Insight.

“I did not expect so many people to move to New Hampshire and have such an [significant] impact in a short period, but I hoped something like that could happen.

“New Hampshire [people] are freer now because of the Free State Project and are probably the [most free] people in North America,” he said.

Sorens said the project’s mission seems even more relevant in 2022 as people network and pool their resources to promote change and freedom in New Hampshire.

Free State Project President Carla Gericke, an attorney from South Africa who moved to the United States in 1996, said more than 1,000 Free Staters came to New Hampshire in 2021 and that number continues to grow.

“Many people who identify with our values are now starting to say, ‘I am a Free Stater too,’” Gericke said.

Once they arrive, other Free-Staters volunteer to help families unpack and establish connections through social media, weekly meetups, and larger gatherings such as the yearly PorcFest and Liberty Forum.

“We bring people in, and then we try to create a healthy community where people can figure out what they want to do,” Gericke said. “We create the opportunities for people to show up. There is no specified [physical] enclave. People live all over the state.”

Gericke said the project chose New Hampshire not only for its vibrant economy but for the opportunities it offered for political activism and serving in the state Legislature, one of the largest in the United States.

Many Free Staters are now elected state lawmakers advocating for freedom. Many others serve at the community board and committee levels.

“They [Democrats] have to work with us, and they hate it,” said Gericke. “Sadly, the flip side is we have raised the state’s profile. We are seeing money coming into New Hampshire. Most of it seems to be Soros-funded.”

Fortunately, “we have enough influence where we have got to line up our billionaires to match theirs,” Gericke joked.

“What is interesting for me as an immigrant from South Africa is how many immigrants we have [in the movement]. We have a lot of Russians and Ukrainians and old Soviet bloc Free Staters. Many of us are trying to attract people who do not want to tear things down. We want people who want to build a future.”

Free Staters also run the political gam-

(Above) New Hampshire was picked as the promised land from a list of 10 states based on its small size, favorable business climate, low taxes, and rural landscape. (Left) New Hampshire Free State Project participant Jody Underwood plays with her two dogs on her off-grid property in Croydon, N.H.

ut, from Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman libertarians to freedom-minded Democrats. The movement’s anarcho-capitalist orientation and emphasis on free markets further enhance the appeal.

Living Free Off-Grid

Jody Underwood is another Free Stater who came to New Hampshire with her husband from Philadelphia in 2007.

The couple now lives off-grid in rural Croydon.

“I do not think of it as a membership. It is more of an idea than an organization. Everybody has their political issues, right? We tend to all lean libertarian,” Underwood said.

Underwood said she first read about the Free State Project in Reason magazine, a conservative publication, many years ago.

“My husband thought, ‘Wow! What a great idea.’”

“We have lived off-grid the whole time we have lived here,” Underwood told Insight. “We have solar panels that generate electricity. We have batteries that store it, and we use generators when there is not enough sun. That is how it works.”

Underwood credited libertarian economist and former presidential candidate Ron Paul for sparking a “wave of people” to sign the pledge.

“We were part of that first 1,000 that moved here. The next big wave was COVID. So many people moved here because of health freedom. They just wanted to get away from their state and were looking for the promise” of liberty.

The North Country of New Hampshire is among the more popular locations for Free Staters because of lower housing prices. Furthermore, in the current gig economy, this translates into telecommuting opportunities.

As a Free Stater, Underwood focuses her activism on school choice. However, the family’s dream is going “back to basics.”

“We’re not Preppers, per se, but let’s be prepared,” she said. “We chose it when we were ready to go on this adventure, which was moving up to New England.”

Fenton said viewing the Free State Project as an outlier political migration movement would be wrong.

“Opponents have said we have kind of taken over the state. It is not fringe. It is a majority in many ways. The message of liberty is popular right now,” he said.

In the meantime, Tang Williams said there are promises to keep, and many miles to go before the movement finally achieves its mission of more freedom, and less government.

“There are lots of battles to fight. There are many leftists in our state, too,” she said.

“This is the United States of America. Why are there so many Marxists and communists here?” 

Tiny as it is, a seed is like a mini biological computer. Inside it is all the genetic code—intellectual property containing billions of dollars of potential worth—that in the hands of adversaries could give them control over the food production of a country and beyond.

One unmistakable adversary in this area is China, according to Ross Kennedy, a U.S.-based logistics and supply chain analyst at Fortis Analysis.

For China, home to 1.4 billion people, “possessing the means to increase their own domestic food security is job number one,” he told NTD, sister media outlet of Insight.

“Lying, stealing, bartering—whatever it takes to get that technology—China has proven willing to do.”

Kennedy calls it a domain for “gray zone asymmetric warfare.” By stealing U.S. agricultural technologies and developing a version of its own, China would be able to fill the country’s most basic needs while undercutting America economically and diplomatically in its pursuit of global leadership in agricultural production, he said.

“Most people don’t realize that you could steal some kernels of corn, or a few soybeans, and perpetuate a multibillion-dollar industrial espionage campaign,” Kennedy said.

“If you’re able to ‘crack the code’ of a genetically modified organism, then you would be able to steal hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars of intellectual property.

“In recent years, if you could do that, you’re lifting the secrets to life of that corn, that soybean, and giving yourself an enormous step ahead in terms of time and cost advantage on feeding your own population.”

SEEDS AS A WEAPON

China is the world’s largest agricultural importer, with imports totaling $133.1 billion in 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Plagued by shrinking arable land and natural disasters, and with swelling demand for food to feed one-sixth of the world’s population, the country has for years shown considerable interest in U.S. agricultural assets, among which A technician holds up advanced seed chipping machines inside the Monsanto agribusiness headquarters in St. Louis, in this file photo.

the “most valuable and easily transferable property are seeds,” according to a May research report by the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC).

Seed innovation has generated billions of dollars for U.S. agricultural biotechnology firms such as Monsanto. In 2021, the United States exported around $174 million worth of seeds to China, accounting for 15 percent of its total exports, according to the report.

The importance of advancing seed technology is not lost on China. Chinese state media have described seeds as “chips” of agriculture, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping has long elevated grain security as a “core basis of national security.”

In an inspection tour of a seed lab in China’s southernmost province of Hainan in April, Xi called on the country to “hold Chinese seeds tightly with our own hands” to “keep the Chinese rice bowls steady and achieve food security.”

But some Chinese scientists have taken a shortcut by outright stealing U.S. agricultural trade secrets.

Days before Xi’s trip to Hainan, Chinese national Xiang Haitao, a former imaging scientist at Monsanto in Missouri, was sentenced by a U.S. federal court to 29 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets from his former employer. Xiang had attempted to steal an algorithm that helps farmers optimize agricultural productivity, in order to benefit a Chinese state-run research institute, prosecutors said.

In another case, Mo Hailong, director of international business at a Beijing-based agribusiness with ties to the

Chinese regime, attempted to steal corn seeds from testing fields at Monsanto and another U.S. seed producer, Dupont Pioneer, in 2011 and 2012. Mo was sentenced to three years in federal prison in 2016, after pleading guilty to conspiring to steal trade secrets.

In 2018, two Chinese rice researchers visited various U.S. research and production facilities. U.S. prosecutors who charged them with a conspiracy to steal rice production technology said they found stolen rice seeds in the researchers’ luggage at the Honolulu airport as they attempted to fly back to China. They are currently at large in China. Two other Chinese rice researchers who helped organize their trip were convicted in a connected case in 2018 and sentenced to one and 10 years, respectively.

“It seems silly, but if you can get three, four, five, six, 10 different varieties of seed, now you’ve got the ability to not only reverse engineer that seed’s tolerance to various pesticides or insects,” Kennedy said, but also, through reverse engineering, unlock a seed’s ability to produce high yields and adaptability to various climates, such as hotter and wetter environments.

“There’s places in China where they would love to be able to grow things like corn or soybeans, but they don’t really have access to the good genetic technology to make seeds that can thrive in more challenging conditions,” Kennedy said.

“So one seed is a problem,” he said. But if China gets its hands on multiple seeds, “suddenly now you’ve got a much larger issue.”

The communist regime could also weaponize seeds to effectively wipe out an adversary’s ability to produce crops at scale, Kennedy said. It could do this by turning on or off the genetic triggers that cause crops to fail, create toxins in plants to poison animals, or create weakness to certain types of bacteria or fungi to “dramatically increase the disease pressure on the land,” he said.

‘MASSIVE DIPLOMATIC LEVER’

With only a handful of domestic players such as Dow Chemical Company and Dupont controlling much of the U.S. food production, China has its obvious targets, Kennedy said.

“You really only need to penetrate or create problems with one,” he said. “Now you’re talking about 1.4 billion mouths to feed in a place like China that used to have to buy American and European genetic technology. And now they have the means to do their own and race ahead and provide that to the rest of the world, and undermine U.S. efforts in that way as well.”

Such technology theft can become a “massive diplomatic lever” for China and allow it to undermine American diplomatic and national security efforts worldwide, he said.

“In the same way they would export construction technology for [the] ‘Belt and Road [Initiative]’, you could also do Belt and Road with food and with energy,” Kennedy said, referring to Beijing’s trillion-dollar project to facilitate trade and infrastructure partnerships with Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

According to Kennedy, in places such as Africa where there’s an abundance of arable land and labor but a lack of modern seed technology, “China could come in and say, ‘Hey, we can give the farm equipment, the methods, the machinery, and this very expensive intellectual property. We can provide the soil to you to lift yourself up out of food issues or food poverty, but we want access to these critical minerals.’ Or, ‘We want to build a military base on your shoreline,’ or whatever it may be.”

“Lying, stealing, bartering— whatever it takes to get that technology— China has proven willing to do.”

Ross Kennedy, analyst, Fortis Analysis

Critics of the Belt and Road Initiative have dubbed the project a form of “debttrap diplomacy,” which saddles developing nations with sustainable debt levels and thus leaves them vulnerable to ceding strategic infrastructure and resources to Beijing. In September, research lab AidData counted at least 42 countries with public debt exposure to China exceeding a tenth of its gross domestic product.

But Kennedy noted that genetically modified seeds differ from construction projects in that they have a relatively

In 2021, the United States exported around $174 million worth of seeds to China, accounting for 15 percent of total U.S. exports, according to a report.

short life span: Each seed is “only good once, and only really keeps in condition in a bag for a year or two.”

“This is a way that China has an annual way of maintaining control over certain things,” he said.

By controlling the seeds, China gets to dictate the terms that the countries dependent upon the resource must follow.

“It’s a variant of debt-trap diplomacy, but it’s also one that hits immediately and hits very, very close to home in a way that maybe repossessing your bridge or your railroad does not,” he said.

SECURING LAND FOR CHINA

Chinese purchases of American farmland, another facet of Beijing’s involvement in the U.S. agricultural sector, have also been raising economic and national security alarms.

In 2013, Chinese meat processor Shuanghui International Holdings (now WH Group) took over the world’s leading pork producer, Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, marking the largest Chinese acquisition of an American consumer brand to date.

The deal, according to the USCC report, gave the Hong Kong-based firm more than 146,000 acres of land spreading across six states, supplying China with record amounts of pork in 2020 as African Swine Fever dwindled herds and pandemic lockdowns disrupted production in China.

Beijing’s goal is to be able to convert as much American farmland as possible to exclusively provide for China, Kennedy said.

“Now you have secured on that acre, and scale that however many hundreds of thousands of acres, you’ve secured your own supply chain for your country as the owner of that land, even if it’s on foreign soil,” he said.

Officially, Chinese investment in U.S. farmland has ballooned more than 25 times, from 13,720 acres to 352,140 acres between 2010 and 2020, according to a 2020 USDA report.

While this only represents roughly 1 percent of all foreign-held acres in the United States, the USCC report said there’s no mechanism in place at the federal level to track land ownership and usage, and Chinese investors could circumvent the rules with few repercussions.

25

TIMES

OFFICIALLY, CHINESE INVESTMENT in U.S. farmland has ballooned more than 25 times from 13,720 acres to 352,140 acres between 2010 and 2020, according to a 2020 USDA report.

$133.1

BILLION

CHINA IS THE WORLD’S LARGEST agricultural importer, with imports totaling $133.1 billion in 2019, according to the USDA.

“This is an enormous problem. It’s not one that’s going away,” Kennedy said.

Such lands could become a potential vector for the regime to stage various forms of espionage against the United States, Kennedy said. Chinese animal nutrition supplier Fufeng Group announced last November that it was in negotiations to purchase 370 acres of land in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to build its first U.S. corn milling facility. The proposed plant’s location, about 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force Base, has stirred fears of the site being used to spy on U.S. military activities in the area.

“Once you have land, you have options,” Kennedy said. Getting its hand on vast swaths of land, he added, “has been an enormous priority for China for a long time.”

Some lawmakers have already been sounding the alarm. Late last month, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) introduced legislation aiming to ban foreign nationals with ties to Beijing from acquiring agricultural land in the United States.

“If we begin to cede the responsibility for our food supply chain to an adversarial foreign nation, we could be forced into exporting food that is grown within our own borders and meant for our own use,” Newhouse said in a statement.

The threat of Chinese agricultural espionage calls for more national awareness and a switch in mindset, Kennedy said.

When it comes to collaboration involving sensitive technology, the first thing to ask, Kennedy said, should be, “Is this a last resort to partner with China on this?”

He said that instead of considering the benefits of a collaboration from only an economic point of view, business and academic leaders also need to factor in national security and ask: “Do we have any other options at our disposal to achieve the goal of whatever the program or the initiative may be? If the answer is yes, that needs to be pursued.” 

Workers transferring soybeans at a port in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China, on April 9, 2018. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has long elevated grain security as a “core basis of national security,” a report says.

Perspectives

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