Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey
Activism And The Birth of The Bad Quaker
As my reading comprehension returned, I began looking for harder books to read. Around this time I remembered owning Murray Rothbard's book, Conceived In Liberty, but I couldn't find it anywhere in my library. I must have lost it in one of our moves across country. Up until this time, I thought Murray Rothbard was some obscure historian.
I did a search for Rothbard online and discovered the world of Austrian Economics. I was taken back to a memory that had all but faded from my mind. Namely, the gold-based economy of the game I had been playing before good old Homer entered my life. I began reading as much of Rothbard's work as I could find, learning about Austrian Economics and a more pure form of anarchism than I had ever encountered.
Jeffrey Tucker was adding digital versions of Murray Rothbard's library onto the Mises Institute's website, and I was downloading them and absorbing them as quickly as I could. Floy Lilley was reading and recording Rothbard's major works, and I was downloading those and listening as I gardened or worked in my wood shop. I purchased as many books as I could afford from the Mises Institute, and spent my evenings reading them over and over.
When the weather was bad, I spent my time either using Photoshop to create libertarian-themed pictures (we didn't call them "memes" yet) for the web site Fark.com, or doing Internet searches for more libertarian and anarchist writers. That's when I first encountered the works of Jim Davidson and L. Neil Smith, among others.
Sometimes my daughter, Ki, would stop by on her travels, and we would have long talks at our fire pit in the back yard. She helped me rediscover and refine my philosophy with challenging questions and helpful suggestions. She had fully embraced the philosophy of anarchism many years earlier, and talking things out with her helped me sort out discrepancies and contradictions in my own thoughts. During that time I became a “Convinced Friend”, or Quaker as we are most often called.
By 2008, I had long abandoned the cesspool of Fark.com and had started spending more and more time on libertarian and gardening focused forums, where I could express myself more freely. Sometime early in 2010, I was approached by some Internet acquaintances on one of these forums, and the idea of my own web site with exclusively my own content, was suggested. I was told that they would fund the basic web site for the first year, and in that time, we could see if it was a viable project or not. I agreed to the proposition.
Later that year, we had a contest on one of those forums to determine the name for the new web site. After a few weeks, the name Bad Quaker was the clear winner, so I did Internet searches to determine if anyone else was using that name. At the time, I could find no one calling themselves Bad Quaker. I began refreshing myself on web site construction and operation, and by the beginning of 2011, BadQuaker.com was secured and I began site testing.
On March 28th, 2011, I published"Waffle People, or why everything you know about anarchism may be wrong, the site's first public article. I published several more, then on April 20th, 2011, Ki and I published the first ever Bad Quaker podcast.
The podcasts became popular very quickly, however there was one common complaint; the shows were too short. We tried to keep the shows under thirty minutes, but people wanted them to be at least an hour long. It took us a little while to adjust to recording that much, but eventually we began to relax and let things flow. Then, it became a challenge to keep them from becoming much longer.
The Liberty Radio Network (LRN) picked up the show and downloads and visits to the Bad Quaker site were skyrocketing. We started getting international traffic and the emails began to come in faster than I could answer them. I began getting invitations to speak at events and it appeared that people liked the show. I never understood the popularity, and I hated public speaking, but we continued.
Liberty Radio Network
In September 2011, Cindy's mother suddenly took ill, so Cindy and I jumped into our motorhome and headed to Missouri. The Bad Quaker site took a back seat for four months, as we had to deal with my mother-in-law's illness. She passed away in January 2012, as we entered the year that we lost five close members of our family. It started with Cindy's mother, then Ki's husband, followed a few weeks later by my nephew, then my uncle Arnold, and in October of that year, my dad died. The year 2012 is somewhat fuzzy in my mind, but it finished on a positive note with the birth of our grandson, Miles.
I can't remember when this happened, but at some point Michael W. Dean introduced himself to me and began incessantly nagging that I produce better sounding audio recordings. The site was producing a steady cash flow by then and we were developing a small war chest, so I thought that it would be a good thing to spend the money to make the show better. With advice from Michael, I dedicated a room of our house for the studio and bought microphones, stands, a mixing board, and a dedicated computer.
When 2013 finally arrived I thought things would get better, and in ways they did. At the end of 2012, Cindy had quit her job, we had sold our old motorhome, and upgraded to a nice new class-A coach. Then, we went on the road full time. I had invitations to speak at events, paid invitations, and we had escaped Ohio just as the winter's first storm was invading from Canada. It chased us down into southern Kentucky before it caught us and forced us into a campground.
Remember That Time We Outran That Tornado?
Cindy and I wintered in southern Alabama on the Emerald Coast, otherwise known as the Redneck Riviera. Late that winter, a strange event happened. We pulled into a campground near Foley Alabama, and paid ahead for two weeks. It's a clean but simple campground with great access to Gulf Shores and all the sights, but it was a fraction of the cost of the campgrounds in Gulf Shores. Earlier that day, we had visited the Walmart and the Camping World stores in Robertsdale, and were fully stocked up and ready to kick back for two weeks, and relax.
We pulled into our spot and began our setup routine. I leveled the coach and slid out the room extensions, while Cindy started her routine of setting up everything inside the coach for an extended stay. I went outside to do all the hookups and get the satellite dish set up, so Cindy could watch her Food Network shows, when suddenly, for no reason that I know of, I had a very creepy feeling. I felt like something was seriously wrong and I had a tremendous urge to run away. I stopped what I was doing and walked toward the motorhome door, only to be met by Cindy coming out to find me.
"We have to leave right now," she stated flatly. I agreed and spun around to put away the things I had just pulled out of storage. While I did that, Cindy started breaking down the things she had set up on the inside. I quickly came into the coach and retracted the slide outs, retracted the jacks, and fired up the engine.
Right at that moment, my phone rang. Normally, I don't answer calls from numbers that aren't already in my contacts, but for some reason, I answered the call. It was a local campground that got my number from Camping World. They were offering us a week of free camping to try out their park. They were north of where we were, so I asked if we got there in the next hour, could we start the free week that day? They said that would be no problem. Prior to that moment, I had no idea what direction we should go, I just had the strong urge to leave.
We left without even stopping at the office for a refund. I wouldn't have expected a refund anyway, campgrounds usually don't work like that. We hit the road as fast as I could safely drive, and north we went. As we drove, I could see a giant black cloud descend behind us. At one point, two trash dumpsters rolled across the road right after we passed them. In my mirrors, I could see tree limbs flying and debris of all kinds whipping across the road behind us. The wind was buffeting us, but the big V-10 engine in the coach was winding up and hauling us out of harm's way. But had we gone any direction other than north, the winds would have caught us.
I have a possible solution for the strange feeling Cindy and I had simultaneously. There was likely a big drop in the barometric pressure, and Cindy had never experienced that feeling. I had been in the general vicinity of a tornado when I was a child, so maybe somewhere in my brain, some old memory was screaming at me. That leaves the phone call with the free camping in a safe direction as just a coincidence. Or maybe it wasn't a coincidence and it all fits a pattern, who knows.
First post & table of contents
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.
