William Tucker of Miscellany Blue works the Free State Project beat:
Carla Gericke, president of the Free State Project, took to the pages of the Concord Monitor today to dispel the notion that the group’s ultimate goal is secession from the United States.
"The Free State Project has never supported secession," she wrote. "From the very beginning, the Frequently Asked Questions section on our website made it clear that the organization takes no stand on this issue.”
When Jason Sorens first proposed the Free State Project in 2001, he described it as a “strategy of secession.” Even when he subsequently conceded that he may have “overstated the importance” of withdrawing or threatening to withdraw from the United States, he continued to support it as an option.
"The point is to take over a state government and then advance liberty as best we can," he wrote two weeks later. "At some point this pursuit may require actually seceding or threatening to secede. However, there are various political tools at our disposal, and secession is just one of them.”
Gericke claims Sorens’ ideas on secession “never formed part of the organization.” Free Staters “have different views on this question, just as other Granite Staters do,” she explained.