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The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

You want to be free in an unfree world. What can you do, today, to help make that happen?

For over a year now, I have been consistently encouraging readers of this Substack to get involved in the place where they live. Find out who around you is interested in freedom. Work with them to be useful to one another. Look for people who are being treated barbarously and free them from human traffickers.

It isn’t a new thing for me. All the way back in 2011, I began writing about Sovereign Mutual Aid Response Teams which has a rather SMART acronym, for those people who like word play.

The idea arose because one of our friends had been pushed down the stairs by her husband; then when she called the cops her father-in-law took the phone away from her and hung it up; then when the police made a mandatory welfare check in response to the 911 call, the father-in-law told them that she was insane. I got a team together and we put some voices on a pro-freedom radio station which generated a host of calls to the sheriff, the hospital, and other people in the community.

Within a few hours we walked out of that hospital with our friend, who was being held against her will on suspicion of insanity. It helped our case that her father-in-law told the first responders who hauled her away that she had taken a lethal dose of a medication and “fell” down the stairs because she was drinking alcohol. When the hospital turned up a blood test showing no sign of alcohol or the medication they dismissed the claims and pursued the course of fewer looming lawsuits, as many institutions are prone to do when left to their own devices.

"Society must be so converted as to preserve the sovereignty of every individual inviolate [and] it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate, without involving the persons or interests of others."
—Josiah Warren, 1840

You don’t live in a free country. I’m not even sure if you were taught in school that it is, or was ever meant to be, a free country. But you are definitely burdened by an excess of politicians, bureau rats, agencies, taxes, regulations, inspections, detections, and idiocies. You should stop putting up with it.

It seems hard, doesn’t it? Where should you begin? How can you stand alone against the system? I will tell you where I believe you should begin: prayer. God loves you and wants you to be happy, with God, forever. That’s why God sent His word, His son, Jesus, to live, suffer, die, and be resurrected to purchase for you the rewards of eternal salvation.

Now, some will tell you that you aren’t allowed to have any happiness in your life in this earthly realm, and may even cite some scriptures to support the idea that you may be oppressed and you may suffer. I believe God is connected to your soul. I believe God wants you to be happy in this life, rather than sad, because God doesn’t enjoy needless suffering. Nor does God inflict needless suffering.

Other people will teach you, falsely, that God gives authority to every mass murderer, demagogue, and tin-pot bureau rat, quoting some passages from the epistles of Saint Paul to Romans who were, in the time when Paul wrote to them, being viciously tortured and murdered by the Roman government. State supremacists of today love the idea that you are required to obey the government in all things, but it simply isn’t true. Jesus not only opposed the false teachings and corruption in the Temple in Jerusalem, but also the brutal tyranny of the Roman empire.

Mutual Aid by Subscription

Whether you live in a small rural community or a big city, there are people not far from you. My purpose in encouraging you to get involved in understanding your county and in forming a search and rescue team is to show you that you can join others to work together on being free. Just as you would go to a local worship service and participate with you fellow believers you can go to a local freedom group and participate in supporting each other’s individual sovereignty.

But Jim, I pretend to hear you say, where do I find people who are interested in freedom? This place, you lament, is awful, filled with communists and reprobates. No doubt there are many such places.

One of the places you can look for other people like yourself is on FreedomCells.org which was created by two people I’ve known for some time. Derrick Broze is an author and freedom activist who has put together “The Greater Reset” conferences with John Bush, his colleague in co-founding Freedom Cells. I met Derrick in person at the 2019 Jackelope Freedom Festival in Arizona, which is a Summer time event you might look for if you are in that region.

I first met John in Kansas City at a Ron Paul event for Campaign for Liberty in 2009. There was a time when the Ron Paul campaigns were where people who cared about freedom located one another. John is active today with a group he founded called Live Free Academy. Please note that the groups to which I have linked in this essay represent a congeries of freedom outfits, which may ask you to join them in various ways, and I am not endorsing their requests for payment. FreedomCells dot org is free to join, and I heartily encourage you to do so, if for no other reason than to communicate with other people who love freedom. Some of them near you might even meet you in person if you start a group on the site, which is free to do.

You can find me on Freedom Cells as planetaryjim. There was a time when you could find me in a lot of places with that user name, but then 2019 happened and it became very fashionable for people who used to pretend they were for freedom to report, ban, and attack anyone who actually is. So some of my profiles under that name have been, shall we say, deprecated. It’s okay, I don’t mind. The ten thousand “people” who follow on me on Twitter under that user name probably notice, from time to time, that my profile is frozen in time now. It isn’t like the mElon is even vaguely interested in free speech. Nor is it like there were any sort of groundswell of people demanding that my profile be restored to my control. Oh. Well.

Now, you might think you can find liberty minded people at the Libertarian Party national convention toward the end of next month. It is true that I have met some people of that ilk, including famous Anti-War.com activist Angela Keaton and famous author Mary Ruwart at, exemplia gratia, the 2008 convention in Denver. But there are a number of caveats that, as an expert on the topic, I feel obligated to share.

First, this year’s convention is in Mordor-on-the-Potomac to use a term of phrase coined by my friend Bill Buppert and promoted by Skip the Free Rifleman on Twitter. I don’t encourage you to go anywhere near the nationalist socialist capital because it is over-run by Stasi finks, filthy cia and fbi goons, and horrifying communists of all stripes.

Second, the Libertarian Party has always been full of poseurs, and they are most actively thwarting freedom and being nasty jerks at the time of the quadrennial convention to choose the nominee for their pointless presidential candidacy. Their endless bickering, despicable abuse of Robert’s Rules of Order, and hatred of all things true and good have led them to nominate such fiends against freedom as Bob Barr when they had a really great candidate in Mary Ruwart that they chose to reject. There are a lot of infiltrators, by which I mean traitors, from the deep state and the Kochtopus on the national committee of the Libertarian Party. None of them are very interested in freedom, and those few who come up through the ranks are easily suborned or corrupted, or made powerless by being beset on all sides by evil men.

Third, the Libertarian Party, while founded by a good guy, David Nolan, moved its headquarters from Colorado where it was away from the madness inside the Beltway, to Washington the District of Corruption. At one point they rented space in the actual Watergate office building complex, which signified the level of corruption and idiocy involved in its national team. I gather they have more recently moved to Alexandria, to a building they own. Which was probably infested with a rat’s nest of wire taps and monitoring devices from foreign and domestic espionage agencies within minutes of their signing the property ownership document.

So, if you go to any of their conventions, or meet with any of their caucus groups, I suggest being wary. I have attended a number of their conventions unofficially as an unpaid visitor simply by putting on a name badge from a previous convention. No good can come of contributing money because, as Samuel Edward Konkin III noted many years ago, the entire concept of a libertarian political party is an oxymoron. There is no way to ameliorate the problems caused by the excesses of politics through the addition of more politics.

All that said, you will find there are free marketeers, anarcho-capitalists, and people interested in individual sovereignty meeting with one another in the exhibit hall and in the hallways of the convention hotel. So, viewed as an exploration for freedom rather than as a discovery of freedom, their convention may be useful to you. Much the same can be said of state Libertarian party events.

There are many other resources for freedom gatherings. If you are of an academic or erudite mind set, you might like Mises Circle events put together by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you like gathering at a campground and wandering in the evenings from camp fire to camp fire to talk, trade, and ponder, you might enjoy Midfest in the 4th month and the 10th month every year. Midfest is very centrally located in Oklahoma for those seeking maximum inconvenience from the coastal regions.

Having wandered the world in search of freedom and of groups seeking the same, I can make a tentative recommendation of the world congress of Liberty International. It was called the International Society for Individual Liberty before Barack Obama made a personal campaign in 2011 to attack it by pretending it was associated with Daesh or the Islamic fundamentalist group in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). I have previously attended their events in Canada, France, Mexico, and Virginia. These are not huge gatherings, but their efforts to bring people from distant countries have yielded impressive results.

Subscription

How much should you pay to subscribe to a local mutual aid response team? I have no idea. The best services at the best available price are what you want. If you are intending to offer subscription services, how much should you charge? All the market will bear.

But, as a practical matter, everything is very expensive these days. People are suffering. So they probably don’t have a lot of free money hanging around in their wallets or bank accounts or under the mattress at home to throw at a speculative venture. I suggest you agree to pay nothing at first, and see whether the free parts of the group provide support for the contention that it might be worth paying to join. Similarly, I suggest you offer free gatherings, perhaps weekly or monthly, so people can get a sense of who you are and what it is you are about.

One of the best ways to generate comaraderie and joy is to have a meal together. One way to do so without going to any expense is to have everyone bring their own beverages (BYOB) and each person bring something to share around. The “pot luck supper” and “bring in” are great traditions at many places I’ve been, and even where the idea is unknown the concept quickly catches on. You can also meet at a restaurant where food is sold - these places often have a private meeting room you can schedule at some part of the week or weekend for free if everyone understands they are expected to buy an appetizer or an entree. (And if you see someone at your gathering ordering nothing but water, see what you can do to buy them a meal, or take up a collection for that purpose, if it seems right.)

Other free things you can offer: a Twitter group message; a Failbook group; a group on FreedomCells.org; an email list service; some other sort of web hosted group of your choice. I’m not on Failbook, but if you invite me to one of the other sort of groups here in the comments, I’m happy to stop by on occasion when the mood suits me.

I would also encourage you to have a sign up list for gathering the names of people who attend and whatever phone number or email address they wish to provide. Don’t be pushy about it if someone doesn’t want to share their contact info. It is appropriate for people to be skittish these days. But, with such a list you can offer an emergency number for people to call or text and to pass along emergency calls to action if someone is in trouble. Trouble could be with the legal authorities or with random gangsters roaming the region, or with a criminal cartel (such as the gooferment).

People might also get stuck on the road or find themselves in a calamity so being able to communicate with one another is useful. There used to be an app project called “Cell 411” which posited that people might enter a bunch of names and phone numbers and then in an emergency send one message that would go to all those people they know who they had previously entered. I haven’t looked for it in some years, but I know some of the developers.

You might also think up a free movie night to watch some film like Casablanca, V for Vendetta, Serenity, The Empire Strikes Back, We Were Soldiers, or what you would, together. People react differently to watching a video in a group than in private. And if you are raising funds for a project, you can charge for popcorn or whatever. The purpose of eating together and watching a show together is to build up group elan. And you are going to need quite a lot of that when the commies start setting cities ablaze once again in the coming months.

As for what to charge to subscribe to your group’s services, I think you should have different offers. An introductory offer at a low hurdle that people can afford would be sensible. A way of “paying” by undertaking to perform useful services such as standing watch, or manning the radio station, or monitoring the police band and emergency networks, might be good.

I don’t live where you live, nor do I know the people with whom you congregate. So talk it over amongst yourselves. Do what seems good, and make allowances for people to put in more or less money as they feel inclined, and you won’t go far wrong.

Services

One of the things that is very likely going to happen in your community is armed response showing up at someone’s home. There are all manner of sheriffs, constables, police agencies, and SWAT teams. People, including your humble author, have been SWATted by persons who want to see them suffer. So you might want to have an aspect of your mutual support team be in the way of lawful emergency counter-response.

You might need to work together to raise bail. One of the frustrations of being in jail awaiting arraignment (which in Utah took over 40 days in 2022) is not having very many names and numbers committed to memory. You should definitely have one phone number committed to memory, and if that is the number of your local support group, it should be at a phone that will be answered no matter the time or day. You might not choose to contribute to someone’s bail, but you can very easily get in touch with people they would know if you have some of the same contacts and online connexions.

You might need to think about a time when it would be appropriate for a group of people to show up armed in response to a home invasion by thugs. It is possible for thugs to be in the uniforms of the local constabulary because we are coming into an era of rapid developments. And there are places I’ve lived where the local police are the local enforces, drug dealers, pimps, and murder for hire criminals. (Djibouti City, 12th month 2000, for an example.)

You might arrange for some skill sharing conferences and camping activities. Lots of places I’ve lived have “gun ranges” wherever there is an empty bluff by the side of the road, or down a short trail. Teach one another good gun safety. Teach emergency first aid, or learn it from someone you bring to a gathering to teach you. Teach each other how to swim, how to respond if someone is drowning, how to restore breathing or end choking, and other first aid.

Be aware of your immediate environment by monitoring the emergency channels and police band. Share tips on how to be a radio amateur. Tips like “you don’t need a licence to broadcast on the emergency frequencies in an emergency.” Teach each other how to use radio equipment, night vision gear, guns, how to use a light without spotlighting yourself, the difference between concealment and cover, and the intricacies of what you look like from a drone that has infrared or ultraviolet cameras.

I don’t know what you need in your neighbourhood from your neighbours. Maybe canning tips and grid down meat preservation recipes. Maybe someone to talk to when things are tough. Maybe campaigns to save each other’s homes from foreclosure.

There was a time after the war between the states ended its army field operations in 1865 when groups of opportunists came from Yankee territories to the South. These so-called “carpet baggers” carried some money and weapons with them in their carpet bags. They would arrive and buy up mortgages and bonds and other things, often at a steep discount because they had ready money. That was especially true after the local money became prohibited for use around 1868.

One of the ad hoc methods for dealing with an imminent foreclosure was for a group to take up a collection that would pay off the mortgage. Then the owner of the farm or ranch or home would request the banker or carpet bagger come to their home with the deed and note to be paid in full. (There used to be two postal deliveries every day, and one on Sunday afternoon, in the 19th Century in much of America, if you are wondering how that worked before the widespread deployment of telephones.) The banker would ride out to the home in the afternoon, and the home owner would offer them a meal and some moonshine. Then the payment would be made and the mortgage note burned and the deed signed over free and clear.

The banker would then find that the sun had set and head back to town at night. The group that took up the collection would way lay that banker and steal from him the money he had received. Perhaps they did so wearing white sheets and hoods and whistling Dixie. It happens that many homes were kept by families that endured many privations after that war, and if you want to be the judge of your neighbours, I don’t.

Prayers

I mentioned that you should pray. As often as you pray for guidance, I would encourage you to pause your mind. Still that voice in your head which is you telling yourself what to do and think and say. Try it a few times every day, such as when you are ready to sleep at night, or when you wake up, or when you can be alone in the bathroom. Listen for any inner voice suggesting how to proceed. God is with you. All you have to do is listen.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to pray for help with this prayer:

Eternal Father please help us free the slaves, stop the wars, end tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction and all souls in between. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. Amen.

As well, I encourage you to pray for God’s angels to defend you from your enemies, including demons:

Holy Michael the archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray, and do thou, o prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and the evil spirits who roam through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.