‘Liberland’: A Libertarian utopia that’s just a bunch of white guys on a tiny Island

It’s not recognized as a country by anyone.

The people of Liberland love Bitcoin and hate political correctness. There will be no taxes and very few women or people of color. But with some luck, the unrecognized three-square-mile territory on the Western bank of the Danube might one day become the Libertarian utopia for disaffected white men.

The women of Liberland may be free, but they most certainly will not be equal. “Equality rights—don’t be alarmed,” Kacper Zajac, Liberland’s Minister of Justice and the author of its constitution, says by way of introduction of this contentious topic. “It’s equality before the law and before the law only.” A PowerPoint presentation drives this home with the word “ONLY!” in all caps. “No other equality is acceptable, obviously.”

On April 13 of last year, Vít Jedlička, a Libertarian politician from the Czech Republic’s Free Citizens Party, ventured into some unclaimed swampland he discovered on Wikipedia, planted a flag, and called it Liberland. He, his girlfriend, and another friend unanimously voted him president of the muddy patch of land and alerted the media to the birth of a nation. Since then, Jedlička and his friends and followers have failed to make a definitive legal claim on the territory, which Croatia, in particular, is reluctant to concede (border disputes are kind of a “thing” in this part of the world, you may recall), and much of the media attention Jedlička received has written the whole thing off as a lark, a fantasy.
But Liberland is only a fantasy for Vít Jedlička inasmuch as an immigrant-free Hungary is a fantasy for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, both nations nestled in the belly of a right-leaning Central Europe. It’s only an impossibility as much as a win for UKIP’s Brexiteers was an impossibility: once a fringe movement, later an (inter)national nightmare. And it’s only as unfeasible as a Trump presidency—funny how that worked out—fueled by “straight talk” in the service of white men of means, and just about no one else.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.