PREVIEW: Grafton New Hampshire

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of No Gods, No Mayors.

Thanks for watching.

Wait, for you say hello to them?

Yeah, I'm saying to them.

I've said hello to you.

We've been talking for several hours.

Yes, yeah, that's my fault.

I'm sorry.

It's full-spectrum psychological mayoral warfare over here.

More fair.

Thank you for paying into the mayoral benevolent fund.

And this episode is on the Mayoral Benevolent feed.

And I can speak English, the language that I speak natively.

I'm your mayor for this episode, Maddie Luchansky, and I'm joined as ever by two beautiful women, my friends and yours, Benevolent City Councillors, November and Riley.

Hello, girls.

Hi.

Hey.

Any day now.

Any day now.

Any day now.

I am about to head down to London.

I am going to see Riley in person so that we can do the Trash Future live show.

I can just bring, I have like two extra vials of estrogen that I can just bring in my suitcase.

You're going to turn your class ring around, removing the gem and revealing a little spike.

You want to pat him on the back.

Yeah.

Or it'll,

yeah, we like, maybe we'll like high five or hug or something and then you just leave a patch.

My daughter class ring only has a, has a like a November flag on it, actually.

So that's, that's, that's the status of my little ring.

My little like

thank you ring, yeah.

Yeah, there's a, because like the Guns N' Roses song?

Yeah, like the Guns N' Roses song, or like the thing that looks like you fucked up really bad officiating a Formula One race, the like blue

November, like the letter

International Maritime Signal Alphabet flag.

Yeah.

The international symbol for N.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Okay, no time for rodeo.

None.

No, no.

Don't don't you do it.

Not a single.

Don't you fucking dare.

Sorry, but this is like the greatest like anti-cavalry invention since the Chiltern.

Yeah, this episode has been buried.

The general is not even on a horse to let you know he was not on a horse.

It's just a statue of a guy.

It's a statue of a guy, and he's pointing at his feet, which are on the ground.

Yeah, a statue of a guy standing on one leg.

Both feet are in the air, which means he was not on a horse.

And if all four feet are off the air, it means he was in the Air Force.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

The horse's legs are all perpendicular to the horse.

Letting you know that the horse was a plane.

If the horse's legs were crossed, he was a famous wit.

Or he really had to pee.

So let's get into the topic for this episode.

I am once coming to you with a round of my favorite game.

Is this utopian community, quote unquote, a mayor?

And of course, my other favorite game, Maddie read a nonfiction book, and now you have to hear about it.

See, for me, this gets diverted into left on red, likewise, Riley.

But like,

I have no left on red to divert anything into.

So So it goes here into the slush pile I call a call of my friends every week.

You should, you should come on left on red.

I should come on left on red.

I should come on left on.

You just release this as a left on red episode.

No one will know.

You haven't read the book.

Mayor stuff.

Only I've read the book.

Yeah.

The word mayor is not going to get mentioned a lot in this episode, but it's a, but I, I'm, it is a municipal thing.

Anyways, you have to be alive to the mayor that you see before you, you know,

that's exactly true.

There, There will be a great mayor-shaped hole, I think, in the scene with mayoralty, everything that happens to you.

So I want to get into the topic.

Oh, yeah, sorry.

This week we are studying the sort of like the libertarian hydra that took over the town of Grafton, New Hampshire.

Yes.

And this episode, I'm drawing heavily on Matthew Hongolt's Heitlings book.

A libertarian walks into a bear, the utopian plot to liberate an American town and some bears.

The story was, if I recall a few months ago, sent in by my friend, John Levitt.

If it was not you, John, hi, John, and let me know who it was, please.

So this is less of a story, you have about a mayor and more of a terrifying municipal tale to frighten.

Scary stories to tell in city halls.

This is the shit that happens when you don't have a mayor.

Yeah, this town doesn't even have a city hall.

It has a fire station.

You're experiencing homelessness.

That's right.

That's right.

So, all right.

Okay, girls, it is time for a stroll through what i like to call the context zone

if we can get some context music i don't know we can definitely say like sam can you like find some contextual music

that sounds contextual yeah music that sounds and if you can't find anything leave this in with us sounding like assholes as your revenge for giving you an impossible task as a kind of reminder of the things which we ask you to do the impossible tasks hey yeah hey sam could you find a song that evokes the feeling you get when you look at the color orange and you haven't seen it for a while?

Can you get a song that sounds like prawns taste for this next one?

Hey, Sam, my water is kind of warm.

Could you get some ice?

Could you edit this episode in a way that cools my water down retroactively?

Oh, my water just got cold.

That's crazy.

Thank you, Sam.

In the future,

New Hampshire, glorious

from the borders to the sea

and with men.

So like most towns in most of New Hampshire, Grafton was founded by anti-tax maniacs.

And it's not even in Kaika.

New Hampshire.

What's that?

And it's not even in Connecticut, which is what I say.

It's not even in Connecticut.

Yeah, that's true.

So

New Hampshire, for the unfamiliar,

has no sales tax.

It allows the governor to only serve two-year terms.

It's the only new england state with the death penalty they don't require car insurance or penalize the uninsured which is the only state in america to do so don't they also barely require license plates as well yeah it's i mean their legislature also this is just a fun fact that i think about a lot it's enormous it's got 424 members the only bigger legislature in america is the united states congress

um and it's like 95 crank by volume because it means one in 10 000 people is in the state government somehow which is 60 times more likely than your senator or congressperson.

Oh,

I love that they have like a universal jobs program for the weirdest people from New Hampshire.

Yeah.

And also that it seems like New Hampshire is all about like, but two regulations away from having death race just be kind of happening all the time.

This is what happens when you put live, free, or die on the license plates.

People take it really to heart.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like it is, they're just really serious about it.

And the other thing of the license plate, of course, is the man of the mountain who did fall off the mountain, a famous mountain shaped like a man's face that fell apart recently.

That's got to be a bad omen.

It's, it's not a good omen.

I'll say that much.

So, I mean, granted, it's pretty bad.

It sounds like we might be in the time of a great becoming.

I'm really worried about that.

How's my gyre?

So Grafton was named, in fact, for Augustus Fitzroy, the third Duke of Grafton, who as a tax collector in the colonies suggested that the British crown levy fewer taxes on American colonists.

So they're very like,

taxes are bad.

Freedom is good.

They're tax otakus.

Like they are nerds for libertarianism.

They're o-texus.

Yeah.

So as early as 1777, the white residents of Grafton, after they displaced the local native population, they were already petitioning the new Continental Congress that they should be exempt from taxes for some reason.

Just on the basis that we don't want to pay them.

We simply don't want to do it.

We'd like an exemption on the

clause.

I really don't want to.

Yeah.

Your Honor, it says, I don't want to right here on the town when we walk into town.

The sign that's there.

At some point, Ethan asked me.

Your Honor, how would you like it?

Assuming judges don't pay taxes.

Yeah, judges are exempt, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because

they live in the courtroom, I think.

Yeah, that's why I became this judge.

Experiencing courtlessness.

Oh, you would hate that.

Yeah, you know, when you're a kid and you think the judge lives at the court and then you see them at the grocery store and you're like, what are you doing out here?

Just banging a gavel on a park bench.

They've removed all the flat surfaces from the park bench to make it hostile to judges banging gavels on it.

Guy who learns social rules by rote and thinks that you always have to stand up when a judge is around.

It's not just in that one room.

Yeah, all the benches in the park are now sunken, so it's less welcoming to judges who are used to being up higher.

Lawyers are always approaching them.

For whose vision You approach the part thing.

Side note.

So at some point, Ethan Allen, the guy who, the revolutionary who the furniture store is named after him, convinced all the Graf Knights to join Vermont, his fledgling state, where he promised no taxes would be levied, which doesn't work out.

This happens a bunch of times.

They keep sending couriers like over and over to the state government and to the federal government over and over, sending these couriers being like, well, we don't want to pay taxes.

And every time the government is like, does not respond to their letters and just or sends the guy home, like

the out-of-office courier.

I love how this, like, this is a centuries-old weirdness that has not changed at all.

It's like the Dunwich horror, but like in a kind of more normal way.

Yeah.

Like the Dunwich unpleasantness.

I really, I really do just want to stress how fucking strange.

uh this place is um like grafton also had a brief brush with uh national notoriety in the 1970s where the the unification church, like the Moonies, bought a house in town and a bunch of them are living there.

Oh.

So like all the older residents in town have this memory of like all the moonies showing up.

Most of them are gone now.

So, but yeah, I want to stress how weird the place is.

Like, like I'm wondering if Grafton, New Hampshire is on like a ley line of some sort.

Mm-hmm.