Meet Eric Brakey, the executive director of the Free State Project. Those of you who’ve read the excellent book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, by journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, might recognize the group—a collection of cranks who have tried (and hilariously failed) to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian utopia.

It’s a new gig for Brakey, having moved there late last year after serving in Maine’s legislature. He also ran a forgettable 2018 campaign against independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, pulling a laughable 35 percent of the vote as the Republican nominee.

Ahead of Election Day last year, he tweeted, “If Trump wins NH by a single vote today, you will be glad I moved and declared my primary residence in NH.”

Trump didn’t win New Hampshire, but Brakey did get the president he wanted—which makes his recent experience all the more ironic.

On Sunday, returning to Florida from a Royal Caribbean cruise, he posted on X that he had been detained by Border Patrol for an hour and a half while agents dug through his luggage, confiscated his phone and computer, and even read his personal journal. When he’d asked what rights he had as a U.S. citizen, he’d allegedly been told that agents didn’t need a warrant to search anything in his possession, even his electronics.

Brakey said he’d had to explain, in detail, that the Free State Project was a “nonviolent, peaceful libertarian movement” and that his “Defend the Guard” activism wasn’t part of some militia or insurrection plot. Eventually they let him go, he said, but he was “shaken up and in shock.”

And he should be. There is no justification for federal agents to paw through a citizen’s private journals and devices without just cause or a warrant. But this is exactly the kind of authoritarian overreach so many of us warned about in 2024—while right-leaning libertarians like Brakey shrugged it off as liberal paranoia.

They were convinced that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was the real threat to liberty—because she once prosecuted cases, or because she talked about public health rules, or because they imagined she’d sic the IRS on their crypto wallets, or something. Somehow, they decided that a functioning government enforcing basic laws was tyranny, but that a man who bragged about weaponizing the Justice Department was pro-liberty. They mistook accountability for oppression, autocracy for freedom—as long as the boot wasn’t on their necks.

The same people who sneered at supposed liberal hysteria over creeping fascism helped empower a movement that worships unchecked executive power—so long as it targets the “right” people.

Given his experience with Border Patrol, maybe Brakey finally understands what we meant when we said Trump’s America wouldn’t stop with immigrants or liberals. Fascism always runs out of “others” eventually—and when it does, it comes for its own believers, too.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos