The (Fake) Free State Project of 1970: Turn a Texas Town Into a Haven for Every ‘Wholesome Vice Known to Modern Man’

Over at Historia Discordia, an
entertaining blog devoted to those anti-authoritarian pranksters
known as the Discordians, Adam Gorightly has posted one of the hoax
articles that the Discordian crew inserted into the press—in this
case, the November 1970 edition of Playboy
magazine—in the 1960s and ’70s. The piece describes a
libertarian “corporate commune” called “Mad Dog, Inc.” that plans
“to buy a small town they can call their own and rename it,
predictably, Mad Dog, Texas.” The town’s laws “will endorse
gambling, saloons, prostitution, marijuana, dueling, spitting in
public, lascivious carriage, cohabitation and every other wholesome
vice known to modern man,” though this code will “not,
unfortunately, supersede existing state and Federal laws.” Several
famous figures are identified as alleged participants in the
project, including underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton,
Pulitzer-winning journalist David Halberstam, former Kingston Trio
banjoist Dave Guard, and Sports Illustrated writer Bud
Shrake; Shrake is quoted proposing that the group purchase the town
of Shafter, on the grounds that its border-adjacent location
will be good for a “heavy tourist trade in expatriates, the
smuggling of Chinamen and extensive trade with the Far East in
jade, fine silks and frankincense.”

The unsigned piece was written by Robert
Anton Wilson and/or Robert
Shea, two Discordians who worked for Playboy at the
time. (They would later write the cult novel
Illuminatus!, which features a rather different Mad
Dog, Texas, in its pages.) The first page of the article is posted

here, and the remainder is
here. And as a bonus,
here’s a piece that a Discordian (probably Shea, though Wilson
may have had a hand in it) inserted into Teenset magazine.
This one exposes the nefarious conspiracy known as the Illuminati,
whose puppets turn out to include Lyndon Johnson, Ringo Starr, and
Bob Hope.

Advertisement: These hoaxes were part of a larger
project called Operation Mindfuck. You can read more about that in
my book The United
States of Paranoia or, if you want the short version,
right here.