Author, Activist, Attorney: After winning the Green Card lottery, Carla Gericke left the plains of Africa for a better life in America. Before then, she finished boarding school when she was sixteen years old, and law school when she was 21, working as an attorney in South Africa and California.
Carla is author of The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly), now available on Amazon or directly from Carla at The Art of Independence (www.CarlaGericke.com). Says Nick Gillespie, Editor-at-Large for Reason Magazine: “It’s a fantastic package of writings that veer from fiction to autobiography and memoir to political polemics…. I highly recommend The Ecstatic Pessimist: Stories of Hope (Mostly).”
Carla has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured in GQ and Playboy, been quoted in The Economist, and has discussed libertarianism on the BBC. She has visited more than 40 countries, hiked to the base camp of the 10th highest mountain in the world, lost a shoe in a taxi more than once, had her passport stolen in Goa, got kidnapped in Vietnam, and has noshed on more “mystery meat” street food than she cares to admit. Carla once spent an entire summer while working as in-house counsel at Logitech eating tuna fish sandwiches with Doug Engelbart (the Mother Of All Demos dude), she worked on Apple’s acquisition of Steve Job’s NeXT, and bought her first Bitcoin for $6.
In 2010, Carla was arrested and charged with felony wiretapping for filming police officers during a late night traffic stop, and four years later, she won a landmark First Circuit case affirming the First Amendment right to do so. Afterwards, NH Magazine named her one of 2014’s “Game Changing Remarkable Women.” In 2019, working with the ACLU-NH, Carla filed a lawsuit against the City of Manchester to stop permanent police surveillance cameras from being installed downtown. Sadly, she did not prevail, and the cameras have been installed. Legislation has now been introduced to ban the use of surveillance cameras statewide.
Carla’s been a hair model, waitress, fiberglass chair maker, playwright, college lecturer, magazine editor, nonprofit director, and high-tech lawyer. In addition to her law degree, Carla holds a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from CCNY, and has won awards for her short stories and essays. She once attended a writing retreat in Texas hosted by Lonesome Dove author, Larry McMurty, where she received the nicknames “Galactica” and “Galileo,” because no one could agree which moniker best captured her intrepid spirit. Carla has now three times run for New Hampshire Senate against an 12-term Establishment incumbent, garnering 45% of the vote in 2020. She will keep running, because someone has to!
Carla co-chairs ManchTalk TV, hosted the Told You So podcast (currently on sabbatical), and is launching a new TV show soon. She serves on several non-profit boards, follows a Keto lifestyle, practices yoga and shooting, and plays a mean game of Scrabble. She enjoys cooking, gardening, painting, reading, and watching documentary films. Carla is pursuing “the good life” with the love of her life, Louis Calitz, her husband since 1994 (yikes! :)) and their rescued dog, Nervous Nellie. They live in a 1950s atomic-ranch they are slowly renovating in West Manchester.
Carla is known as Queen Quill, First of Her Name, Demander and Defender of Truth, Giver of Confidence, Liberator of Arcadia, Queen of the Free Staters, and Mother of Porcupines. She promises to not burn down your village because she, first and foremost, believes in peaceful, voluntary human interactions. Carla is pro-markets and anti-state, knowing government is force, funded by theft, and she knows we can do better. Since 2008, Carla Gericke has been building a voluntary society in the Free State of New Hampshire. Live free and thrive!
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Ben Swann has spent 20 years working as a journalist in broadcast news, behind and in front of the camera. Swann began his journalism career in El Paso, Texas as a news photographer, quickly working his way up to prime time anchor. Along the way, Swann became a two time Emmy Award winner and two time recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award. Covering Mexico’s drug war, Ben Swann discovered the national media was not reporting the truth of what was actually happening in Mexico’s drug war or the problems associated with the failed “War on Drugs” in the United States.
Sovereign Lovestream is a love, sex & psychedelics podcast with hosts Vanessa Velez & Danny Panzella. Vanessa and Danny share their stories of how they did everything wrong in their relationship, how they corrected course and the modalities they are using to healing themselves and their relationship.
http://www.SovereignLove.nyc