Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey

The Bad Quaker Podcast Nears Retirement

As I stated earlier, I began the Bad Quaker site because no one I could find was expressing the concepts that I was expounding upon, in the fields of libertarian and anarchist thought. I was growing weary of spending hours writing articles for other people's web sites, and then being at their mercy as to if my article would be published or forbidden. Also, since most of the sites where I had regular readers were not actually dedicated libertarian nor anarchist web sites, anything published would always receive harsh criticism by a small fanatical and outspoken pro-state faction. Or, even more frustrating, the education level of many of the readers was so poor in the fields of economics and politics, that I would either have to dumb down my message or I could expect to spend countless hours explaining the basic concepts of freedom and the market after each article was published. At the Bad Quaker site, on the other hand, I could say anything I wanted. Plus, I had the added advantage that my audience enjoyed a far higher degree of understanding in the fields of freedom, the market, and politics, than I had faced at survival, gun, and gardening sites.

That said, by January 2014, my health was in serious question and I just couldn't spend four to six hours preparing for a podcast; an hour sitting perfectly still so I would be at optimum distance from my microphone; and another two hours of editing and posting. Since we were in the motorhome together all the time, Cindy could see what I was going through and was pushing me hard to stop recording.

After my hospitalization at the end of January, I took a few weeks off and rested. The rest of 2014 was focused more on events and meetings and less on podcasts. I was making more and more radio appearances, and by the end of the year, I was a regular on the nationally syndicated radio talk show, Freedom Feens. At that time they were on about 25 radio stations. Before I left the show in 2015, we were broadcasted on 38 radio stations from coast-to-coast.

Cindy and I put a lot of miles on our new motorhome, traveling through 25 states in 24 months. We made a giant circle, from Ohio to Alabama, then going up the east coast, across New England, and then west to Missouri, where we spent the summer of 2014, then down to the Louisiana coast.

That summer in Missouri was when I decided I needed to do more than make sound recordings. A supporter in Missouri had arranged for us to stay free for some weeks in a campground owned by a biker gentleman, who was well connected with the militia movement. While in that campground, we had a number of visitors who came by to sit and talk to me about their operations and their plans for the future. When we left that campground, we moved from farm to farm, as other militia activists hosted us. They had large barns and shop buildings with concrete slabs to park our coach, and water and electric hook-ups. We dined on grass fed cattle, free range pork, free range chicken, fresh out-of-season deer, and frog legs, all courtesy of our hosts.

The summer of 2014 was the year of the Ferguson unrest, and the militias, bikers, and shop keepers I spoke with were almost convinced the entire Ferguson incident was about to be used by government agents, as an excuse to bring troops into Missouri, similar to what happened at Watertown, Massachusetts the year before. Except, they believed it would eventually pour out into the countryside, and door-to-door searches would result in an attempt to disarm the Missouri militia. They expected some false flag event to happen in Ferguson, where a biker or militia man would be accused of killing someone, and that would be the excuse to bring the troops out of Ferguson and start rounding up militia members.

The above statement may sound a bit outlandish, unless you were there hearing their evidence. For a quick glance at one of their main points of suspicion, have a look at Fort Leonard Wood in Google Earth. It's a bit hard to find, but in 2014 there was a newly built facility there that strongly resembled a concentration camp. Many of the bikers and militia members had either worked there as contractors building it, or knew someone who had worked on it. The workers were told it was a FEMA camp for people fleeing natural disasters, but that doesn't explain why you would surround it in tall, multiple layers of fences, topped with concertina wire and machine gun towers. If you want to know how to make a right wing militia paranoid, that's how you do it.

Having frank discussions with some very tough dudes about what they would do if the government came out of Ferguson and into their countryside, fit perfectly with a book idea I had been working on that summer. I was able to record some of our discussions, but mostly I made notes by hand. We talked about ways to stop an MRAP armored vehicle, how to cause distractions and divide your opponent's forces, and how to disable communication systems. In return, I educated them on Bitcoin and blockchain technology, and how to access the Dark Net.

Wikimedia

It was in Missouri that I learned about a vigilante group from the 1800s called the Baldknobbers. I actually stood on the hills they took their name from, and the bikers and militia guys and I talked around the campfire about their exploits. Many of them were descendants of the Baldknobbers. We also talked about how those hills worked to the advantage of not only the Baldknobbers, but the James Gang, the Younger Gang, and the Dalton Gang. Nowadays, such geographic advantages vanish with modern satellite imagery and helicopters with night vision and thermal imaging. But all of this discussion was fueling my need to put it all together in a book. So I did.

We ended our visit to Branson, Missouri, where we suffered, hands down, the hottest three weeks we ever spent camping. But it was free, so we stayed. While we were in Branson, the campground mentioned earlier, owned by the biker gentleman who hosted us for some weeks, was raided by the Feds and the whole campground was confiscated, along with adjoining acreage. Few outside of Missouri will ever know how close to war the revenuers and the militia were that summer.

Next chapter

First post & table of contents

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If you would like to read the book in its entirety, you can purchase it with cryptocurrency at Liberty Under Attack Publications or find it on Amazon. We also invite you to visit BadQuaker.com, and, as always, thank you for reading.