Bear Attacks Destroyed This Libertarian Utopia | Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling Interview
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear, a book about what happened when libertarians took over a small town in New Hampshire with the one goal of dismantling its government and then the bears arrived. Matthew is an award-winning author, longform writer and investigative international journalist based in New England and his work has been featured in the Associated Press and USA Today. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. Topics Discussed The small world of bear authors Axe Cop Libertarian Utopia Problems with Libertarian utopia Bears arrive Burying the lead People that would move to a Libertarian utopia The Libertarian pastor New England's history with bears Bear vs llama Subscriber Portion History of utopia's Fordlandia Epcot Matthew's diverse and oddball career before journalism Small town journalism Ethan story Why we need small town journalism Vampires in New England 10 questions 11th question about reaching out to the other side
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Bears.
Libertarians.
Guns.
Llamas.
Shipping containers.
Donuts, buckets of them.
Sheep.
Bum fights.
Tabasco sauce.
Cayenne.
Cayenne peppers.
Sorry.
Yeah.
What do all these have to do with each other?
Well, we're going to find out.
Today we brought on Matthew.
We never asked him how to say his name.
Hungolds Hetling.
So it's got two last names.
Hungolds, Hetling.
So there was a fascinating article done about this story.
I think it was based on this book that Matthew wrote called A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear.
It's about a small town where libertarians decided they were going to take over, but they also had this issue of bears taking over at the same time and like who wins, who gets the town?
Bears or libertarians.
And bears are more centralized, I think.
They have more of a government infrastructure.
Yeah.
Gives them more power.
Well, aren't they all connected to the mind?
Because they're all of one mind.
Well, the truth about bears is there actually isn't, it's kind of a myth that there's bears.
There's just like a bear god and then it kind of disperses into smaller.
There might be multiple that, but they're too big to fit on one planet.
So anyway, so that's why they can all think the same combined.
Anyway.
It's like the Borg from Star Wars.
I guess.
I don't watch that.
I only do non-fiction.
I think he did that.
That was a joke.
I knew he wasn't going to catch it.
Sounds like that beyond Star Wars.
A thing called a Borg.
Anyway, it was a fun conversation because, you know, we had a, he's a journalist.
He's a typical journalist, left-linging Democrat guy.
But he was a really jovial, fun, nice guy.
He was weirdly obsessed with what our address was.
Yeah, he asked us where we were.
He's like trying to dox us.
I don't know.
It was strange.
I'm just kidding.
That's not true.
But no, it was good.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
There's some fun stuff in the well, he has a great story about a llama fighting a bear.
So make sure you get that.
And then there's some great stuff in the subscriber portion, too.
Got a little moving.
It did.
It got a little touching at the very end there.
People from different sides of the political divide together.
Reaching poop and booping.
Unpolarizing.
So if you want to see us booping each other, it's kind of like a polar bear.
Check out this interview.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sorry, I couldn't find it.
Anyway, bear.
Check it out.
Let's do it.
Well, thanks for coming on, Matthew.
This is going to be a fun talk.
Bears?
Libertarians?
Donuts, firecrackers, garbage?
Donuts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I saw your book on, well, okay.
So I, I made a book about bears.
So we have that in common.
Um, And so after doing that, I now get sent every bear thing that ever gets made ever on the internet multiple times.
So I had been sent when your book came out, I got sent links to the story at least a few times.
And then, you know, I kind of perused the, I perused it, and I was like, libertarians and bears.
This could be good.
This could be good content for the Babylon Bee.
Kyle is a, I don't know if Kyle calls him a libertarian.
I've started.
Started to think of myself as leaning more libertarian, but uh, I love the uh the challenge of what do libertarians do when they start a little town and bears take over.
And I wanted to see Kyle squirm a little bit.
I'll be all right.
Yeah, how nutty.
Like, uh, we're in the club of bear book authors.
Yeah, that's a pretty exclusive uh uh set of the Venn diagram.
Do you get sent lots of bear stuff now, too?
Uh, I do, actually, yeah, yeah.
Um, and yeah, uh, there was like an XC, what's the name of the uh, the comic XKCD XKCD, that's it, that's it.
Uh, one of those was bear-themed recently.
Um, uh, yeah, people are always uh kind of driving that digital traffic toward me.
And also, uh, before we get into it, I just want to say what a big fan I am of Axe Cop.
I know that's probably feeling pretty far in your rearview mirror.
Um, that was uh how I first heard of you and your work.
And uh, what a delightful premise.
Thanks so much.
Do you know that he did Bear Mageddon also?
Yeah, yeah, where bears take over the world.
It's kind of like your story, but like worldwide.
Everybody's a libertarian, and bears kill them all.
And Bear Mageddon, are they all black bears?
Or did you mostly grizzly?
I like the grizzly because that's the scariest of the bears.
Yeah, the big giant brown ones.
All right, so how about give us the rundown on just the story of your book so we can kind of just jump in from what is the you know, obviously you can't read the whole book out loud to us, but you could.
You could.
We got time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So basically, the book is called A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear.
And it is about this kind of utopian social experiment that a kind of splinter fragment of the libertarian community tried to do in this little town called Grafton, New Hampshire.
So, you know, the libertarian community is pretty loosely affiliated in part just because of the DNA of the philosophy, I think, that they don't tend to march in lockstep.
But this idea kind of got bandied around by Jason Sorens, who you will know as the founder of the Free State Project.
Just kind of like this idea that if libertarians could concentrate their voting power, they could change a place in the United States to be kind of like an example and a showcase of libertarian values in action.
Because as you guys know, there's no libertarian states.
There's no libertarian countries.
So it can be kind of hard to see what a pure libertarian philosophy means in practice.
And so they decided to go to this small town, you know, a small group of libertarians and begin what they called the Freetown Project.
And so kind of like in their mind, they were founding fathers or liberators.
They came to this town and invited libertarians from around the country to come to Grafton.
And then they worked to change the culture and the rules in the town to kind of do away with as many taxes as they could, do away with as many rules and regulations as they could, and kind of just like assert their individual rights and freedoms at every turn.
So it's kind of like libertarian chaz.
Except for a bit like NAS, New Hampshire Autonomous Zone, right?
Naz.
Well, Grafton Autonomous Zone, Gaz.
Gaz.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, every philosophy has its kind of like fringe extreme members, right?
And so.
And those are the ones you want building a society, right?
Right.
You know, like basically, if you say, like, hey, I'm building a utopian town.
Who's with me?
The folks who show up on your doorstep the next week are the folks who are, you know, pretty unmoored.
Yeah, Crazy Larry.
Cock-eyed Connie.
Nutty people.
I don't know.
Anyway, so yeah.
Do you guys know Zach Bass?
When he said Crazy Larry, it reminded me of him because Zach Bass was a pseudonym for his actual name of Mario Narvis.
My brother has a cat named Crazy Larry.
That's where I got it.
But Zach Bass, he was like a male order bride business owner who was one of these founding fathers.
And he came in and he kind of like stated their goals in these really extreme terms.
You know, he wanted, he set up a website that was like, you know, we are going to assert our right to traffic drugs and organs and make sure that we can support bum fights and, you know, all the big important stances.
All the important issues.
Right, right, right.
So, yeah, the people of Grafton kind of like flipped out because, you know, they were like, you know, go build your own town.
This is our town.
How dare you build your utopia in my face?
And yet, over a period of about 12 to 14 years, they were really able to have a very strong influence on the culture and the structure of this town.
So what my book talks about is kind of like that social experiment and how several years in, the town started seeing really unusual bear activity.
And my book makes the case for why this particular Bear Mageddon is connected to the Freetown Project.
All right, so Freetown Project.
I've never heard of it.
I know.
Is it like an offshoot?
It is very emphatically not connected to the Free State Project.
Basically, the Free State Project sent them messages like, get the hell out of New Hampshire.
You guys are kind of like whatever.
Can I swear on your show?
Yeah.
As well as you want.
It's a funny way.
And it's funny.
Don't piss on our water.
You got to work for us.
You're so out there.
You don't want to, you know, we don't want you representing us.
Because as you know, the Free State Project, you know, they have some fairly, you know, as extreme as the libertarian philosophy can be, like, they're organized.
They have a budget.
They have funding.
You know, they're really like trying to do something.
They have timelines and plans that they're fairly well thought out.
These guys were just coming in and telling a town, like, hey, no, this is our town now.
They're like the Rajnishes of libertarians.
I think I'm trying to find a good analogy.
Remember Antelope?
Yeah.
Sure.
The Rajnishi cult, they try to take over Antelope, point in the water supply.
Come on.
Wild, Wild Country, Netflix.
Come on.
Tinos.
No idea.
He's educated.
It's the tiger king of the libertarian movement.
That's a reference we'll all get.
Yeah, no.
So they came in and they started trying to implement these rules and regulations or, you know, do away with rules and regulations.
And so, you know, they basically throttled the municipal taxes and municipal services as much as they possibly could.
And meanwhile, one of the reasons that they came to Grafton in the first place was that Grafton had a long history of like anti-tax sentiment, and they also had no zoning.
So that meant that as the freetowners came in, they could buy a lot of land for cheap and then set up kind of like whatever sort of living situation they might want.
So they were living in yurts and tents and shipping containers and cabins and kind of like this ragged assortment of camps of almost exclusively armed white men just started to kind of like grow magically in the woods.
Well, this sounds fantastic so far.
This is the modern Thoreau.
Did they have bags of sprite?
Like the chair?
Chaz had bags of sprite.
Yeah.
Really gave them a leg up.
So they successfully built a bunch of these oddball places in the woods.
They are cutting town services.
You know, Grafton had like one full-time law enforcement officer, the police chief, who was voted in every year, right?
So it was like an elected position.
And he had to get up at town meeting and say that he hadn't been able to do his job effectively for a couple of months because his only cruiser had badly needed repairs and he couldn't afford to make it safe for the road.
Some of the other impacts were they shut off their street lights because they didn't want to pay for electricity bills, dramatically cut back on road maintenance so that, you know, like potholes kind of got out of control very quickly.
And this wasn't like a big community in the first place.
They only had like a thousand people and they always kind of go thrifty.
That's kind of like the New England Yankee mentality anyway.
So it wasn't like there was all sorts of money that they had to like stop the expenditure of.
Can you hear my cat?
I can.
Is it bear?
Sounds like your cat's defending libertarian values.
20 years old.
This cat.
This is my ancient cat.
Hi, kitty.
Hi.
Hello, kitty.
So the bears show up.
We got to get to the bears.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
So basically, when you have a bunch of oddball living situations in the woods, each one of which is managing its own food in its own way, and each is managing its sewage and food waste in its own way, and each is dealing with bears in their own way.
What you're basically saying to bears is every place is a puzzle.
And if you unlock this puzzle, you will get the caloric reward, right?
So the bears looked at it and thought, we could make our own chaz here.
Bath.
Bath.
So then we saw a buffet.
Yeah.
it's like a golden corral opened up in the middle of new hampshire so you had some people that were shooting them some people were feeding them some people were yeah yeah yeah uh Yeah.
Like in addition to like the unintentional feeding that like non-standardized food storage systems created, they had all sorts of folks who were kind of asserting their right to feed the bears.
So just for kind of like the pleasure of watching them eat.
So there's one anecdote in the book about two elderly women who live. side by side, they're neighbors on like a wooded hillside.
And one of them, when the bears start to get out of control, is completely terrified.
And she's like, she won't leave her house without doing a bear check.
She's like hearing noises in the night at the front door and thinks it might be a bear and like getting her gun and going to like check it out.
She's when she cooks meat, she won't leave the house for several hours because she doesn't want to smell like meat and therefore tempt the bears.
Meanwhile, her neighbor has been feeding the bears for like 10 years.
And her neighbor, who want to remain anonymous, we call her Donut Lady, established this routine where every day, twice a day, she would go out with two full buckets of grain topped by a pile of sugar donuts.
And she would kind of like totter out there.
And there would be, Ethan, do you know what a group of bears is called, being a bear book author?
Yes, I do, but I've been blanking on it right now.
A sleuth.
What's that?
A sleuth.
Yeah, a sleuth.
That's right.
Are you even a bear expert, man?
I know.
It's been a while.
I've worked on her stuff.
There's a sleuth of bears waiting outside Donut Lady's house.
How did she come up with all those donuts?
Every twice a day, a bucket of donuts.
Yeah, she wouldn't tell me how much she was spending.
She's like Willy Wonka or something.
She must have some magic donut factory.
That's crazy.
Someone told me she would back up her truck to the local grain supply store and just load it in.
That was the only way she could keep pace with the demands.
So she saw herself as the Snow White of bears.
Yeah.
Sing a little song and the little woodland creatures would come.
But it's all bears, but it's just bears.
So it really showed me how two people can live side by side with totally alternate realities and perceptions of the same exact phenomenon of a bunch of bears, right?
Like one woman was living in the fairy tale, the Snow White story.
The other was living in some horrific wilderness-based horror movie.
Like misery or something.
Yeah, misery, right.
So the timeline here, it took them like 10 years.
Like they took over the town and then there was a decade of progress feeding them for 10 years.
Yeah.
Like is she one of the people that came to the town as a libertarian?
No, she was not a freetowner herself.
You know, she would probably describe herself as libertarian leaning.
She's probably a commie.
But she was just one of several folks who were feeding them.
Some of them were the freetowners.
She was kind of like the longest standing and maybe most famous example in the town because she just had such a pack of admirers in the bears.
And like she was literally like within, you know, like she could touch them.
Like they would crowd, yell like a dog crowds you to be fed.
Yeah.
You know, bring out its dinner dish.
You know, she was like, yelling, go away, go away, just to clear a little space for her to be able to set their food down.
Wow.
And like how many bears would show up?
One woman told me that when she drove by the house and she looked back down into the yard, it was just thick with bear.
Thick with them.
You don't even use the plural at that point.
They are able to meld into each other and become one giant kind of bear loaf.
Yeah, it was the bear collective.
I'll guess, you know, something like eight, eight to twelve.
Wow.
And they didn't even hibernate because they didn't have to hibernate through the winter because they had donuts on tap.
Wow.
Wow.
She messed up their circadian rhythm.
Wow.
Donuts.
Yeah.
So, and also kind of like exacerbating the problem was the Covertarians and the Freetowners did not kind of truck with government.
They tended not to take advantage of the state fishing game like wildlife conflict resolution process.
So like ordinarily, if there's a bear that gets a little clausy, you can call and they'll come and, you know, kind of like assess what's going on.
And if there really is a problem there, they will make the call to either kill or trap it.
But in this case, those folks weren't getting called.
Or, you know, maybe that warden will tell the neighbor, hey, stop putting out birdseed.
You know, you're attracting the bears or whatever the human source might be.
So bears just got nuts in this town.
And even though the state of New Hampshire had not had a bear attack in probably 150 years leading up to the Freetown Project, since the Freetown Project began, there have been three bear attacks all clustered in this Grafton area.
The first one right in Grafton, and then the subsequent two in towns that kind of neighbor Grafton, that are within a bear's territory of Grafton.
A bear's throw.
Something, I don't know.
Yeah, how far can a bear throw is the question.
So when did you hear about this?
And I see you wrote something about cats going missing, and this bear comes and takes kittens away from a lady, and you had heard about this.
Is that what tipped you off to this?
And why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, I was just like a small town reporter working for my daily newspaper, support local independent journalism.
It's important.
And they sent me to do this story about a Vietnam war era veteran named Jessica Soule.
And Jessica was having a hard time getting the VA to make her house accessible.
So she kind of like couldn't really safely access her own bathroom or her own upstairs.
And she was in this like protracted disagreement with the VA trying to resolve that.
So I went to her house to interview her about that issue.
And she had a bunch of cats.
So I was kind of like chit-chatting about the cats.
And she says, oh, yeah, I used to let them outside, but that was before the bears came.
Thunder.
Who cares about the VA?
Tell me about the bears.
I've never heard that particular arrangement of words before.
Just as an aside, like totally burying the leaves.
Before the bears came and attacked the entire town.
Yeah, you know, this VA thing.
It's like you're interviewing someone about cheese or something.
And they're like, oh, yeah, young, but it keeps the aliens away.
You know, like, what?
And so that got me asking questions about bears.
And so I started talking to her neighbors.
Oh, and actually, she'd had like this horrific series of encounters with bears where the first one was the one that you mentioned and alluded to.
She's like out on a picnic table in her backyard, and a bear comes breaking out of the underbrush just a few feet from her, snatches up two of her kittens and eats them like in front of her.
Oh my gosh.
Didn't go for the picnic basket?
Did not want the picnic basket.
Maybe it was kind of her and like lost its nerve.
I don't know.
But my editor asked me to remove a sentence in the book, which I did.
I thought I'll share it with you guys.
I'm trying to remember the exact phrasing, but it was something to the extent of she couldn't say for sure whether the cracking of bones ended before her whether the muling kittens, the sound of the kittens mewling ended before the cracking of bones began.
So they're okay with keeping in the humans being murdered by bears, but not the kittens as much.
don't get too graphic with the kittens um and so you know she had uh you know bears trying to force their way into her house at one point uh And she also had this thing where she was, yeah, and she was in a wheelchair related to her service.
And she at one point, you know, like had to start arming herself to go to her mailbox in her front yard because, you know, she never knew when she was going to hit an angry bear out there.
And yeah, so she was a character.
She was a former Mooney who came to town to start a summer camp for Moonies in that town.
So that was an interesting backstory for her, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sounds like you met some interesting people.
So you went to the town, you interviewed how many of the people from how many people are still there from this?
Like, how did this dismantle?
And how many people from this group did you interview?
When I got there, things were, it was in 2016, and things were had kind of like just started to die down and fizzle out.
So, you know, I probably interviewed about 50 people from the town, and the town only has like 800 to 1,000 people in it.
And what happened was the Free State Project triggered, you know, and I'm not sure how familiar you are with that, but like basically their whole thing was they were going to sign up, I think it was like 15,000 or 20,000 libertarians across the country.
And as soon as enough of them, as soon as they hit that goal in terms of thousands of people, then the event was triggered and they all had to make good on their pledge to move to the state.
And so what that did was you had libertarians from all around the country kind of continuously replenishing the supply of libertarians in Grafton up until that point.
But as soon as it was triggered, then libertarians who wanted to go do this kind of like grand social experiment adventure, instead of just going to Grafton, now could go to virtually any community in New Hampshire and try to work their will on a more statewide level.
And so that kind of like took the energy.
It sapped the energy of the Freetown Project because probably a lot of libertarians looked at Grafton and say, well, why would I want to live there?
There's all these bears there.
Yeah, so yeah, Kyle went, you went there.
Yeah, and I was going to say, you know, you had mentioned the Free State Project being more organized, probably having more of a legitimacy as an organization.
And what struck me was just, you know, there's this great diversity of people and like they all had different reasons.
You know, you had religious people, you had non-religious people, you know, you said people from all different walks of life, but they did kind of have this common goal.
When you were interviewing people at this free town project, I mean, was it all, were they all there for similar reasons?
Was there any diversity there?
I mean, how did they strike you?
Were they like conspiracy theory survivalist nuts or just like a wide range of people?
I mean, they were definitely diverse, but what they had in common, yeah, like they were diverse in terms of like how they would articulate that, articulate that reasoning.
Some of them, yeah, like had strong faith.
Some of them were more interested in like just like a back-to-nature type model.
Some of them were really concerned with like marijuana legalization, you know, those sorts of issues, which were still, you know, now they're much further along than they were then.
They should have fed the bears marijuana donuts.
And that'd just make them hungrier, right?
Yeah, but they wouldn't be like themselves.
They wouldn't probably wouldn't be eating kittens.
Too much work.
Yeah, I guess.
They'd just be staring at the kittens.
So, yeah, like the liver, they were definitely like a diverse group, but they also, like, because of that, the way they had been kind of like pre-selected,
you know, like that idea of people who were just ready to kind of like pick up from wherever they were living and move across the country to this random small town, that was kind of like the defining feature was that they all were very kind of like individualistic and unmoored.
Did many of them have kids?
Very few.
Okay, that's all I was going to say.
Yeah.
And you know, they tried unsuccessfully to get Grafton to withdraw from the school district, you know, which was a multi-town school district.
They tried to have the town of Grafton declared a United Nations free zone.
What is that?
Just in case the United Nations was thinking of coming to Grafton.
Their money is no good there.
But then like somebody in Grafton was like pissed at the free towners.
So he amended the wording in the motion.
Like there was like a legislative town-level legislative motion made to declare it a United Nations free zone.
And he amended it so that instead the text read that the town wanted to make it a SpongeBob SquarePants free zone.
My wife would be on board with that.
And there was one character in the book in particular who I'd love to get your take on because I know you guys have strong faiths, right?
Yeah.
Ironclad, ironclad.
Ironclad faith.
I love it.
There was a guy named John Connell who was like a Massachusetts factory worker.
He worked in like a chemical plant.
He acted heroically during the fire at the chemical plant and developed some health issues as a result because he had inhaled a lot of toxic turnips.
And he came as a freetowner to Grafton and he like cashed in his factory pension and used it to buy this historic building that had traditionally been used as a church.
So it was technically called the Grafter Center Meeting House.
Because the town was so kind of like anti-tax in general, it didn't want to take that building on as an asset because it represented a cost.
And so this guy came in and was able to buy it for $68,000.
And it's like a 300-year-old, gorgeous, quaint, historic New England church.
You know, it's got the peak with the big tower and all the pews that had been there for, you know, I don't know if the pews themselves were there for hundreds of years, but like you get that this was like a really hallowed, sacred place for the people of Grafton.
How quickly was it transformed into a bum fighting arena?
Well, he himself, he was this really interesting character because he had no religious training, but he declared himself to be a pastor of what he called the Peaceful Assembly Church.
And he was very, very, it was really important to him to like walk the path of peace and pacifism.
He was very into.
But he quickly got himself, like, so he held like Sunday services.
But again, he didn't have any like formal training.
He would talk some sometimes he would say that he was like, you know, like speaking directly to God, you know, having like a back and forth conversation.
And he got into this like knockdown, drag out, years-long fight with the town over whether he had to pay taxes on this property.
Because he basically said, I'm a church.
I'm religiously exempt.
And the town said, you're not really a church because you're more like a clubhouse and you don't have any religious credentials.
And they said, if you want to be accepted as a church, you have to apply to the IRS for nonprofit status.
But because this guy was such a big libertarian, he said, I don't recognize the IRS.
I refuse to do that on moral grounds.
And so, yeah, there was like this slow building tax bill that he was refusing to address that had the potential to oust him from the church.
Yeah, the town slowly gaining the right to like take over this building.
And I just wonder, you know, where do you guys stand?
Like this guy, with his background, you know, he read a lot of philosophy.
He read a lot of religious texts.
You know, do you kind of like accept him as like a potential spiritual leader?
Or is he just like, do we discount him because he didn't have formal training?
And because a lot of what he did was maybe not in lockstep with traditional mainstream churches.
Yeah, I don't know that guy specifically, but I mean, I think it's probably smart to at least file the IRS paperwork.
And if they say thumbs up, then I mean, you know.
Yeah, I mean, they'll make anything in a nonprofit.
I mean, the lack of formal training is like there's a ton of pastors that don't have formal training.
So I wouldn't say that in specific as like a disqualifier.
But yeah, it sounds a little suspect to me.
Do you live in this church?
Like you said, he moved from one place to me at his house, and then he's like, people can come over and I'll tell him about God.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Sounds a little suspect.
I am a church.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He got into like actually like his story kind of like turned tragic over years because eventually the town put so much heat on him that he came up with this idea that he was going to give the church to a group of libertarians, um, you know, other freetowners who could apply to the IRS and go through all the paperwork and all that, and they would allow him to live there indefinitely as the pastor.
But he did it on like a handshake deal.
So they suddenly owned the church that he had put his life savings into.
And then he got into conflict with them and they did not solve the tax problem and also were doing things that he felt violated kind of like the religious principles that he was adhering to.
Like he was a strict pacifist and they were like linking it to the right to bear arms and you know doing a lot of like gun-themed demonstrations that he was uncomfortable with.
And meanwhile, he was like basically completely out of money because he hadn't made any sort of a long-term plan because he just believed that God would provide.
And just about a month before the town could have taken over the church, and while these new owners were threatening to change the locks and freeze him out, the church burned down with him inside it and he died in the fire.
Oh, that was unexpected.
Yeah.
Oh my God, that's not the ending I was expecting.
And after, you know, and part of the appeal for Gratch and remember was the lack of zoning requirements.
So like the church didn't have to be fire safe, you know, as demonstrably not.
And so, yeah, this beautiful historic sacred building burned down around his ears.
The town lost that asset.
He lost his life.
And you know, I know you don't think this is funny, but you're smiling the whole time you're saying this.
That's why I didn't see it coming.
You're like, and then they burned down with him inside it.
The delicious burning of libertarians.
I'm very detached from the yeah, I it's like the Timothy Meadows guy.
You remember him?
Grizzly Man?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, we can say both that maybe he was sympathetic in some ways, but also did this idiotic thing that resulted in his own death.
Sure.
That's personally how I think of Canel.
You know, like nice guy.
Did you ever talk to him?
Did you interview him?
No, he died just before I got there.
Sad.
So who's like the craziest character you talk to in this town?
Let's see.
I mean, most of the, I suppose one of the libertarians who they who John Connell like seated actually, let's see.
All right, so the group of libertarians that John Connell gave the church to appointed a co-pastor named John Redmond, who also had no official religious training and who was like the big Second Amendment rights guy.
He I first met him living in this like oddball camp off in the woods.
And he came in and I wasn't even there to interview him.
I was talking to this other guy, Tom Plojet.
And while I'm talking to Tom Plojet, he's just like, this guy's name is John Redmond.
He's just inserting himself into the conversation with a lot of really like wacky assertions.
Like, you know, like, hey, yesterday, you know what I saw?
I saw a crow flying upside down.
I never saw a bird action so joyously flying upside down before.
It's like one of the ones from Dumbo.
And I'm asking, you know, this other guy, like, you know, so what does being a libertarian mean to you?
And, you know, have you had any interesting bear encounters?
And then he's like, hey, I saw these bird tracks the other day in the woods that were bigger than a man's hand, and they weren't turkeys, and I don't know what the hell they were.
And then he slapped a package of bullets down on my car console at one point because we were interviewing in the car because the mobile home that they lived in had some other guy sleeping in there.
Had bears.
Yeah, yeah.
And he also, like, his, the Freetowners all had their own like bear favored bear deterrent methods.
So like one guy built booby traps, another guy threw firecrackers at him.
He's like home alone with bears.
And so this guy's thing was he, when he put out his food garbage, he covered it in cayenne pepper.
So that Tabasco says on there.
That's expensive.
Yeah.
He said he bought a restaurant-sized bulk container of it.
I love that the bears are having an explaining.
Okay, you go to that house, you eat the food.
There's covered in cayenne pepper.
This one's covered in donuts.
Go to this house.
Word got around in the bear community.
Is that for the bears that are like into spicy stuff?
Spice lords, what they call them.
Guys that like hot stuff.
Yeah.
Hot wings guys.
Bears.
Bears.
There's a bear expert who lives in New Hampshire named Ben Killam.
And he's kind of like the bear whisperer in that documentary about pandas that came out maybe about a year ago with Kristen Bell narrating.
And so he wrote a couple of books on bears that I read, and he asserts that bears are like so amazingly smart that we think of them as these like kind of like solitary, brutish thugs off in the woods.
But he says that they are actually smarter than apes.
Meaning that if they had fingers instead of paws, they could do sign language better than Coco the Gorilla.
They have, they can count to like 13, that they have a real lot of gray matter that allows them to like problem solve.
And that they even have like a social justice system.
So if a bear kind of like transgresses.
I was wondering if they were like Antifa.
That's why I was a libertarian to show up in their town.
That makes sense.
They have a social justice system.
That's right.
That's right.
I don't know that kind of social justice.
Sorry, sorry.
They're bear warriors.
They're social warriors.
And then they can adopt each other's cubs when there's a need, but they'll only do that if it's a relative bear.
I don't know.
Yeah, so they're wicked smart.
They also eat people's faces off.
And all the skin off their skull.
I guess they're probably trying to eat the whole head, but it just thing and bear attacks.
People are just like, yeah, I could hear the grinding of the teeth in my skull.
Oh, my God.
Sorry, that was a.
I don't know why I added that.
I'm surrounded by psychos.
This is crazy.
That just popped out.
I don't know why I read a lot of bear attack books in preparation for riding Bear Mageddon, and there's all these stories about how a guy would shoot a bear in the heart, and the bear would still fight and kill people for 20 minutes before it died.
They'd look at the bear and find that the heart had been shot, but it just kept going.
I don't know how scientific that is, but any of that?
You better wrap.
Some of the historic stories in that region were pretty wicked because, you know, the settlers had guns, I suppose.
And so there were always stories of like bears snatching kids and fathers trying to shoot the bears to save them off.
And it just kind of not working.
Yeah, there's stories of bears getting people's gun.
They'll knock it out of their hand.
They'll bite it and bend it or whatever.
And grab the barrel and turn it.
Bend it like RoboComponents Bunny or whatever.
Got time for yet another bear story?
Absolutely.
That's what we brought you on for.
Well, now it feel kind of like inferior because your bear stories all have more serious and dramatic consequences than my bear.
I have like bear envy, bear story envy.
I have the advantage of that I just made up the whole book.
Still, still.
That does help, I suppose.
So this woman named Diane Burrington wakes up in the middle of the, or actually it's not the middle of the night.
It's like super early morning.
And she hears something is after her sheep.
And so she jumps out of bed, runs out in her nightgown with a gun in each hand, as one does.
I'm tracking with you.
So she hears a sheep screaming out there, like, ah!
That's how she knows something's chasing them.
I'm just trying to, and she hears the rustling.
Well, yeah, she didn't know what it was.
Yeah, bear was on the menu of possibilities.
You have to get two guns out.
Yeah, it's two guns.
Yeah, she doesn't mess around.
And she goes running out there, and she has like an electrified fence system around her pasture that's meant to deter bears.
But somehow this bear has gotten through and it's kind of like stampeding her sheep around the barn area.
And one sheep has gotten tangled up in the fencing.
And so she goes and she starts to address that sheep.
And she's got like, you know, wire clippers handy.
So she's freeing that sheep so that it doesn't strangle itself.
It was bait.
What was that?
It was bait.
It was bait.
Yeah.
Tangled it up in there and it was wiggling behind her.
It's a classic superhero move, a super bowl move, right?
The sheep was a damsel in distress.
So no, the bear comes out of the barn and it sees that she's there and armed and decides, you know, discretion is a better part of valor and it just takes off.
It starts running away.
And so she's like, okay, good.
But then she sees that, oh, and I haven't mentioned she has a guard llama.
Guard llama?
And buried the lead there once again.
Sheep lazy from size.
The llama's name is Hurricane.
And it has grown up with the sheep.
It thinks that it is a sheep.
And it's a 300-pound llama, and it typically kind of acts like a protector of these sheep.
And so now when the bear takes off, Hurricane the llama starts chasing the bear across the pasture.
And the llama's chasing the bear.
Wow.
Diane's like, donkey.
No, yo, if you catch the bear, the bear is going to eat you.
So she's like, yeah, like hurricane, no.
And she starts like chasing after it, but she only has two legs.
So both the bear and the llama are outpacing her very quickly.
And she's, she totally, for some reason, like, I was like asking her in great detail, like, well, what went through your mind?
And she said, I wish I had a third gun.
Third arm.
She's running, chasing the llama and the bear.
Yosemite Samson around him.
like shoots down at the ground and make her go faster um and so uh the the llama is literally like nipping at donkey bear and as they're chasing across uh the uh dimly lit pasture And then...
Like AK-47 spit that this is going to be a problem because the bear is going to hit the fence at the far end of the pasture.
And then it's going to have nowhere to go.
And it's going to have to turn and kill the llama to like defend itself.
And just as she suspects, and they're like really outpacing her at this point.
So she's not close enough to get any kind of a shot off.
The bear runs into the fence.
It kind of like bounces off at an angle and the llama's right behind it.
So the bear turns and engages with the llama and like launches itself at Hurricane.
And Diane said, and that's when I got to see everything I had read about llamas.
And basically the llama just started to kick the bear.
Oh, man.
I wish that she had one hand on a video camera.
Yeah.
She would have been the YouTube.
She would have owned YouTube by now.
So the llama starts whirling around like a dervish, like lashing out of the bear, kicking the bear in the chest, face, head, side.
And the bear doesn't seem to be able to lay a claw on a hurricane.
And eventually, after a couple minutes, like before Diane even catches up, the bear decides that, you know, this is just a bad night.
I've had enough.
And it squeezes out through the wiring and retreats off into the swamp.
And lies to his friends about what happened.
Did the sheep do that to you?
No.
I used to live, my neighbors, one of my best friends growing up had a llama ranch right down from our house.
And we camped out there one time and I was making a weird noise, just goop being an idiot, you know.
And I had accidentally figured out the noise that llamas make during mating season because this llama down below that was in the mood or whatever just started making the exact same noise at me in the dark in the distance.
So like I'm going, I think I was like impersoning a giant seagull or something in the context of whatever I was doing.
And then all of a sudden like I hear it and like you could see a silhouette of this llama going insane down there like thinking that there was some, I don't know, some rendezvous in the woods that it needed to get to.
He died laughing though.
It's pretty awesome.
Well I wonder if there's gainful employment for someone who can do a llama mating call.
And it feels like that's a very useful skill something.
Maybe a llama breeder.
Get him going.
He was excited.
Well, do we want to do a subscriber portion?
Yeah.
So we do a subscriber portion that's been a paywall.
We can talk a little more freely.
And then we have our 10 questions we ask every guest.
All right.
Which are often funny because they're geared towards Christian guests.
So sometimes they're funny.
They just confuse people.
Though I don't know.
We just assumed your faith.
We don't know what your position is.
We don't know where you come from.
Yeah, it makes me uncomfortable talking to you guys knowing that you have strong faith.
I have no faith.
We have atheist on people that are agnostics.
Good, good, good.
Yeah, no, it's all good.
So are we now in subscriber?
But first, let's hawk your book.
All right.
Let's do it.
Purchase the book, everybody.
Libertarian.
Libertarian Walks into a bear.
Yeah.
The utopian plot to liberate an American town and some bears.
They're trying to liberate the bear?
All right.
Well, with that, goodbye, freeloaders.
Subscriber portion.
Here we go.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Can I ask you a final question?
I'm just curious.
Question 11.
Yeah, this is different in the list.
Your Twitter bio is intriguing.
Okay.
Stockboy to server to business owner to poker player to cabby to social worker to Pulitzer finalist and award-winning journalist.
Little newspapers from like the 1800s, they just get hacksaw.
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