Croydon, New Hampshire—a town of about 800 nestled amongst rolling hills and pristine ponds, where an 18th-century one-room schoolhouse still operates—lies just miles from American playwright Thornton Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Croydon’s idyllic atmosphere was shattered in 2022, however, when a group of ultra-libertarians, members of the Free State Project (FSP), hijacked the annual town meeting and voted to halve the town’s school budget, a cut which would have effectively abolished in-person education for Croydon students. In an amazing rally of unity, the townspeople fought back. After going on what one school board member described as a “witch-hunt” for Free Staters and calling an unprecedented second annual town meeting, the townspeople overwhelmingly voted to restore the school budget.
Imagine if your neighbors moved to your state with a hidden agenda: to destroy it from the bottom up. It may sound like fiction, but this has been unfolding across New Hampshire for over a decade. Despite less open organizing and increased public awareness of the FSP since the events in Croydon, the project’s threat has grown to unprecedented heights. Now, operating silently through the State Legislature, the movement’s agenda is hidden in complex legislation, allowing its vision to inch ever closer to realization. Alarmingly, few seem to realize.
The FSP was founded in 2001 by Jason Sorens, a doctoral student at Yale who theorized that, if a group as small as even 20,000 people dedicated itself to infiltrating and dismantling state government and moved to a low-population state, a paradise of anarcho-capitalism could be born in America. In 2003, New Hampshire, where Independents outnumber both major political parties, was selected by several thousand initial Free Staters as the ideal state because of its size and small-government culture (‘Live Free or Die’ is the state’s motto). After the selection, many Granite Staters, including then-Governor Craig Benson, welcomed them. By 2023, about 10,000 Free Staters had followed through and migrated to New Hampshire, though more than 20,000 have signed a pledge to move. Free Staters, importantly, do not want to merely pass a slew of budget cuts: Their goal is to extremify the state’s freedom-loving culture, eliminate all government, and establish a “libertopia” where all property is privatized.
You might wonder: How dangerous can a group of just 10,000 ideologues be to a state of 1.4 million? The answer: extremely. The initial plan seemed to be to establish “colonies” of Free Staters in small communities of several hundred, like Croydon, to seize control of local governments. However, after the events in Croydon and previous missteps around the state (for example, Grafton, New Hampshire, was taken over by black bears in large part thanks to the Free Staters’ belief that nobody could stop them from feeding boxes of donuts to local bears), many Granite Staters became wary of the movement. Numerous Free Staters, however, have managed to remain undetected, even in the State House.
A common joke about New Hampshire’s state legislature—the third largest in the Anglophone world—is that whoever wants to be a legislator can be. This also means that it is ripe for Free Stater infiltration. Since Croydon, the FSP has shifted from a simple, idealistic migratory movement to a state-by-state funnel for national donors to platform libertarian values. While the share of representatives openly identifying as Free Staters when last counted in 2018 was just 17 out of 400, the effort to create a Free Stater-dominated legislature has not waned. In 2024, big oil PACs like Make Liberty Win and Americans for Prosperity donated over one million dollars to fund at least 130 FSP-aligned New Hampshire House candidates.
Alongside the growth of the FSP-affiliated bloc, the Free State agenda has increasingly appeared in legislation. In the 2025 legislative session, the House-approved budget (later revised in conference with the state Senate) included provisions to slash funding for most state departments, services, and councils. The Republican House Majority Leader, Jason Osborne (R-NH), a Free Stater, was behind perhaps the most dangerous provision of the House Budget, which would have imposed a budget cap on school districts. In many cases, legislation championed by Free Staters is not even written by Free Staters but by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a libertarian think tank with financial ties to Project 2025.
Outside of the legislature, Free Staters’ focus now lies on repealing local zoning laws that slow their migration. Sorens authored a 2021 study of land-use regulations, in which he explains the need to amend local zoning ordinances in New Hampshire to increase the availability of affordable housing. He specifically advocates for zoning changes in the Monadnock region to allow a large tract of land to be filled with mobile homes, explaining that the development is needed because it would cause a “substantial growth in the tax base” to fund local public schools and reverse falling enrollment.
However, if Sorens truly did care about affordable housing for the sake of Granite Staters, he would not argue that it would reverse falling enrollment in local schools while simultaneously orchestrating a movement that works to defund public education. Sorens’s aim is for affordable housing projects, like the one in the Monadnock region, to be filled by Free Staters, many of whom are then encouraged to run for local office.
Free Staters’ hypocrisy does not end there. Sorens defended President Donald Trump’s mass deportations in a recent article, arguing that it is better to over-deport immigrants because some are “terrorist sympathizers,” eager to destroy our country, than not to deport enough and fail to capture them all. He writes that “terrorist sympathizers… will vote away our freedoms when they get a chance” and that voting away others’ freedoms “is a form of aggression,” thus “voting is not like free speech—it necessarily affects the rights and interests of others.” Therefore, “you have a duty not to vote if your vote would be incompetent or unjust.”
Based on Sorens’s own logic, by moving to a state with the intent of eliminating public schooling for other people’s children and changing zoning laws to move in more members of their dangerous ideological movement, Free Staters are waging a war of “aggression” on Granite Staters. The Free Staters who carry out this malevolent mission even describe themselves as part of a “mass migration.” On their website, they also offer advice on navigating the immigration process to New Hampshire from overseas. Unlike most migrants, though, Free Staters migrate solely based on their desire to radically change the political nature of their new home. The Free Staters, of course, justify their actions by ignoring this inconsistency. Anyone who criticizes them, they say, is discriminating against them, but they also have a track record of silencing critics with violent threats.
Granite Staters take the issue of personal liberty seriously: New Hampshire is the only state where wearing a seatbelt is not legally mandated. The FSP is a cancer on New Hampshire’s ideals of personal liberty, as it works insidiously to bend Granite Staters’ lives and freedoms to its will. Importantly, Free Staters seem to recognize that what they are doing is deeply unpopular: They operate covertly, waiting for the perfect moment to strike (like an underattended annual town meeting) and implement plans with disastrous consequences. Most Granite Staters seem not to realize the immediacy of the sustained threat posed by the FSP. After Croydon, the gloves are off in the fight for liberty in New Hampshire. Granite Staters should be mad and fight like hell to preserve their freedoms.