Who is Jeremy J. Olson?

Jeremy J. Olson is a liberty activist, real estate investor, IT professional, and small business owner from New Hampshire.

Jeremy moved to New Hampshire from Massachusetts in 2007 after the enactment of Romneycare, the predecessor to Obamacare. From 2007–14, he volunteered with political campaigns and organizations in and around the Manchester area, and engaged in legislative advocacy in Concord with the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance and Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform – New Hampshire. He served as Research Director for the NHLA in 2008–10 and 2012–14, and has been Secretary of CCJR-NH since its founding in 2011. After moving to Grafton, he concentrated on local politics for a number of years before scaling back his involvement in 2016.

In late 2021, in response to Covid-19, Jeremy reconnected with the liberty community and got involved again. In 2022, he served as campaign manager for Donald McFarlane for N.H. House, volunteered for the successful Michael Yakubovich and Keith Murphy for N.H. Senate campaigns, and the Don Bolduc for U.S. Senate campaign. In 2023, he was a member of the N.H. Republican State Committee for Grafton County. He is again working with the NHLA on legislative advocacy in Concord, and is now volunteering with Americans for Prosperity, working on election campaigns and organizing local volunteers in Manchester and the surrounding towns.

As a participant in the Free State Project, Jeremy was mover #200. He regularly attends the Taproom Tuesday and New Movers Party events, and hosts the monthly Merrimack Valley Porcupines meetup. Like many other liberty activists, he now owns a rental property in West Manchester, purchased through Porcupine Real Estate and managed by Ledgeview Commercial Partners. In late 2023, he moved back to Manchester.

Jeremy is a libertarian, an eleutherian, a voluntaryist, and an anarcho-capitalist: A liberal in the classical, and proper, meaning of the word. He is a secular humanist, and believes that human behavior and morality ought to be guided by the Non-Aggression Principle. His personal motto is “Quod vis fac.”

As an information technology professional, Jeremy specializes in IT security and privacy, and has worked in the industry since 2000. He created his first website in 1996. He is currently a senior software developer at a mid-size software business in southern New Hampshire. In 2007, he founded EPRCI, a small web-hosting, IT consulting, and web-development business, with many other liberty activists and organizations as its customers. EPRCI is not currently accepting new customers but is still online, and Jeremy continues to run the company in his free time.

Volunteerism & service

In 2022, Jeremy served as campaign manager for Donald McFarlane for N.H. House, volunteered for the successful Michael Yakubovich and Keith Murphy for N.H. Senate campaigns, and the Don Bolduc for U.S. Senate campaign. In 2023, he was a member of the N.H. Republican State Committee for Grafton County. Also in 2023, he began volunteering with Americans for Prosperity, working on election campaigns and organizing local volunteers in Manchester and the surrounding towns. AFP’s get-out-the-vote efforts successfully led to the election of a Republican mayor in Manchester, Jay Ruais, and a majority of Republicans being elected to the city council.

As a participant in the Free State Project, Jeremy was mover #200. Since 2022, he regularly attends the Taproom Tuesday and New Movers Party events, and as of 2023 hosts the monthly Merrimack Valley Porcupines meetup.

Jeremy has been a member of the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance (NHLA) since 2007, and served on the Board of Directors as Director of Research from 2008–2010 and 2012–2014. He has also served as their Gold Standard Committee chairman, IT Committee chairman, and regional coördinator for the Upper Valley. He will be at the State House this year working with the NHLA on legislative advocacy.

Jeremy is the Secretary and a member of the Board of Directors of Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform – New Hampshire (CCJR-NH). He was one of the founding members of CCJR-NH in 2011, has served on their Legislative Policy Committee, and is their Research Committee chairman and webmaster.

Jeremy co-founded the Manchester Free Press with other liberty activists in 2007. The Manchester Free Press is a news aggregator which brings together in one place all the news about what’s happening in the Free State of New Hampshire. He handles all technical aspects of the website and since 2021 has been the site’s content coördinator. He also served as Editor-in-Chief from 2009–2011.

Jeremy has been a member of the Canaan Lions Club since 2011, and served as President in 2014–2015. He previously served as Tailtwister, Second Vice President, and Vice President.

Jeremy created FreeHampshire.Com in 2011, a general New Hampshire information website.

Grafton

Jeremy has been a member of the Board of Directors and the Secretary of Peaceful Assembly Church since 2013. He was a party to the lawsuit against the Town of Grafton which won the Church its property tax exemption in 2016. After stepping back from most activism in 2016, he continued to support the Church behind the scenes, through a second lawsuit in 2018 and then the sale of the meetinghouse in 2019.

Jeremy founded the Mascoma Valley Taxpayers Union (MVTU) in 2012, and has served as its Chairman and Treasurer since its founding. In 2012 and 2013, the MVTU successfully blocked a renovation to the Mascoma Valley Regional High School, saving the taxpayers $24 million each year.

From 2011–2014, Jeremy organized the liberty community in Grafton to attend the yearly deliberative sessions and vote in all local elections. In 2013, the thirty-member liberty bloc was sufficiently large and organized to defeat the Town’s budget (by a vote of 29–35), and then placed a 10% budget reduction on the ballot, by a single vote (33–32). At deliberative sessions, every single vote counts.

During the same period, Jeremy also led efforts to place numerous pro-liberty warrant articles on the ballot and run pro-liberty candidates for every local office. He was the lead plaintiff in Jeremy Olson &a. v. Town of Grafton, 168 N.H. 563, 133 A.3d 270 (2016), an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Town government from sabotaging petitioned warrant articles by placing their own negative recommendations on the ballot alongside the measures.

Jeremy was an elected member of the Trustee of the Trust Funds from 2012–2015. He also was appointed as a Planning Board Alternate from 2011–2015, and served as minute-taker in 2014–2015. He ran for State Representative in 2010 and again in 2012. He ran for the Town Budget Committee in 2011 in a three-way race and lost in a tie (135–135–128), again showing how every single vote counts in local elections.

From 2012–2014, Jeremy helped plan and organize the annual Burning Porcupine Festival, Grafton’s answer to the Free State Project’s annual Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest). In 2009, he was a volunteer for PorcFest, and from 2010–2015 hosted the Grafton information tent at PorcFest, promoting Grafton to new movers and other liberty activists.

Jeremy continues to maintain the Free Grafton website, an information repository on the liberty movement in Grafton, and previously ran the Grafton Forum, a discussion forum for liberty activists. He also continues to assist the current liberty activists in Grafton behind the scenes.

Earlier efforts

Jeremy moved to New Hampshire on 2007-06-30, in response to Massachusetts enacting a coercive health insurance law (“Romneycare”) that applied to residents. This law went into effect the next day. He was Free State Project mover #200. On 2008-02-01, he quit his tech job in Massachusetts to participate in the liberty movement full-time.

Jeremy was a volunteer for the Ron Paul presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. He has also volunteered with many other state and local political campaigns around New Hampshire, including State Representative campaigns for Paul Comeau, Tom Ploszaj, Bob Hull, Mark Warden, Phil Greazzo, Brad Jardis, Joel Winters, and Andrew Carroll; State Senate campaigns for Eileen Landies and JR Hoell; Brad Jardis for Sheriff; Frank Guinta for Mayor of Manchester; Phil Greazzo and Tammy Simmons for Manchester City Council; and many, many local candidates and measures in the Town of Grafton.

At the State House, Jeremy was involved in the successful campaigns to defeat mandatory seatbelts (HB802, 2007) and car insurance (HB639, 2009), legalize same-sex marriage (HB436, 2009), repeal laws banning switchblades and other knives (HB1665, 2010), allow jury nullification (HB146, 2012), and legalize medical marijuana (HB573, 2013). Between 2007–2013, Jeremy was also particularly active in the attempts to decriminalize marijuana, eliminate pistol permits making New Hampshire a constitutional carry state, protect citizens’ right to audio-record the police, reform sex offender laws, eliminate car inspection requirements, raise speed limits, and eliminate sobriety checkpoints. [Both marijuana decriminalization and constitutional carry finally passed in 2017.]

In 2009, Jeremy and two other liberty activists successfully led the effort to gain sufficient Republican support for the same-sex marriage bill to pass it. The initial roll call to pass the bill failed by a single vote (182–183), and then the attempt to kill the bill failed by twelve (177–189). After much parliamentary wrangling, the bill passed upon reconsideration by a mere seven votes (186–179). Ultimately about forty Republicans voted in favor—without which the bill would not have passed. New Hampshire became the second state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage through legislation. (Vermont beat New Hampshire by three days.) In 2010, Jeremy then successfully led the effort within the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance to organize a meeting of all members and have same-sex marriage removed from the NHLA’s “don’t touch” issues.

In 2007–2008, Jeremy was one of many liberty activists who, working with Keith Murphy, helped to reinvigorate the Manchester Republican Committee. In 2008, he ran for Republican Party delegate for Manchester Ward 3. As an NHLA volunteer, he attended the first Tea Party rallies, which took place in New Hampshire in March and April, 2009, and supported State Representative Dan Itse’s states’ rights bill (HCR6). He helped organize the New Hampshire delegation to the Continental Congress 2009 assembled by the We The People Foundation. He was part of the “Not Ayotte” campaign against Kelly Ayotte for U.S. Senate in 2010, a campaign to promote pro-liberty candidates in the Republican primary. While briefly involved with the Democratic Party in 2010–2012, he was a member of New Hampshire’s Democratic Freedom Caucus (DFC) chapter. During the 2014 U.S. Senate race, he volunteered with the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund in their effort to elect enough Republicans to repeal Obamacare.

Along with other liberty activists, Jeremy founded the New Hampshire Courtroom Legal Opposition Group (NH-CLOG) in 2009, a site to educate and aid activists in their legal battles. NH-CLOG was involved in dozens of legal cases around Manchester, Keene, Concord, Nashua, and elsewhere—aiding activists with their defense strategies, videotaping trials and putting them online, and promoting these efforts within the liberty movement. In 2014, he co-founded LGCPA, Inc., a similar project concentrating on the court system in the lower Grafton County area.

From 2007–2012, Jeremy ran N.H. Citizens Union to Reform Sex Offender Registration (NH-CURSOR) along with other liberty activists. In 2008, NH-CURSOR helped defeat a Manchester city ordinance that would have imposed residency restrictions on sex offenders. In 2011, members of NH-CURSOR went on to found CCJR-NH, expanding their scope to the much broader topic of criminal justice reform.

Jeremy ran the N.H. Tea Party discussion forum in 2008–2012, a spin-off of the earlier N.H. Underground forum.

Websites

Jeremy hosts and maintains several websites, mostly non-profits and liberty activist organizations, including the Canaan Lions Club, Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform – New Hampshire, EPRCI, Escape from MA, Free Grafton, FreeHampshire.Com, the Grafton Forum, LGCPA, Inc., the Manchester Free Press, the Mascoma Valley Taxpayers Union and its archive, N.H. Citizens Union to Reform Sex Offender Registration, N.H. Courtroom Legal Opposition Group, the N.H. Freedom Activism Image Repository, the N.H. Tea Party forum, Peaceful Assembly Church, the 420 at 4:20 on 4/20 archive, and personal websites for Dathan Tyler Cade, Mark Warden, and Tom Ploszaj.

Jeremy previously hosted and maintained the websites of the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, the Ridley Report, 420 at 4:20 on 4/20, and the Church of the Invisible Hand, and many other now-defunct projects, including the AltExpo, Amagi TV, Anarchy in Your Head, Citizens for Sensible Legislation New Hampshire, the Civil Disobedience Evolution Fund, Copper Commerce, the Grafton Gazette, Grafton Gulch, the Grafton Independent, Informal University, Mail-to-Jail, N.H. Brass Balls, N.H. Coalition for Common Sense Marijuana Policy, N.H. Compassion, N.H. Liberty Dollar, the “Not Ayotte” campaign, Pimp My Activism, Porc Manor, Porc Therapy, Shire Silver, and candidate websites for John Babiarz, Ken Blevens, Paul Comeau, JR Hoell, Brad Jardis, and Greg Surbey. And there are probably many more sites he has forgotten.

Jeremy also designed the look and feel for many of these websites.

Colophon

The color scheme and general layout of Jeremy J Olson.com are loosely based on the New Hampshire Advantage PAC website. The site is typeset in Poppins, a font by Jonny Pinhorn.

The site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and is hosted by EPRCI: “IT services for liberty activists, by liberty activists.” SSL certificates are provided by Let’s Encrypt.

Jeremy J Olson.com was initially launched on 2010-06-01. From 2012-06-10 until 2021-09-20, this site was a Drupal site. Jeremy is converting all of his Drupal sites to either static HTML, typically processed using XSLT on the back-end, or another platform, due to the Larry Garfield controversy. On the former site, the primary font was popular web font Georgia. The shade of purple used throughout the site was rebeccapurple, #663399. This was also, coincidentally, nearly identical to the purple used by Peaceful Assembly Church.  ▰