William Politt lives in Weare.

I am a Ma**hole and proud of it.

I grew up a short bus ride and an even shorter subway ride from downtown Boston and learned important life lessons there. Even though I’ve lived in New Hampshire 45 years, 40 of them here in Weare, I will forever be a Ma**hole to some. I chalk it up to envy of my “assertive” driving.

A common accusation is that we transplants from Massachusetts moved to New Hampshire intending to impose high-tax policies. People who think that way have it absolutely backwards. The vast majority of us settle here because we prefer what New Hampshire has to offer, low taxes being an obvious feature.

We come to New Hampshire for any number of reasons. Many come for the opportunities for outdoor activities in beautiful settings. Skiing, hiking, boating, hunting and fishing, etc. Some come to study at UNH, Dartmouth or other schools and like it enough to stay here.

I’m sure my experience is hardly unique. I was employed by a manufacturer’s representative selling consumer electronics. My sales territory was Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and a condition of continued employment was that I live within my territory. As I learned the geography, it became clear that Concord was the central point, and I moved there on Memorial Day weekend, 1980.

Later, my employer, apparently thinking that driving 50,000+ miles a year left me mileage-deprived, added to my sales territory the northern edge of Massachusetts. While living in Concord, I happened to meet the love of my life. We were married in 1984 and bought a house in Weare, where we have lived ever since.

I’m sure many others have settled in New Hampshire after finding their destiny here. Whatever brought us here, I can state with some certainly that the vast majority had no hidden agenda in coming.

Curiously, there are a number of mostly recent arrivals who manage to slip under the Granite State’s xenophobia radar. I refer to the Free State Project, a loosely (dis?)organized group of extremists who chose to relocate to New Hampshire with the express purpose of taking over the state’s institutions and remaking them into an everyone-for-themselves libertarian paradise.

Lest you think they are merely harmless cranks, dig into what happened when they took over one small town’s government. “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear” is a short, easily readable book that describes their misadventures in Grafton some years ago. More recently, they nearly shut down public schools in Croydon before the townspeople came out to reverse their disastrous budget cuts.

They have succeeded in electing several of their numbers to the state legislature. Some of them are, to use descriptions from the time of my youth, “card-carrying members” and others “fellow travelers.” They have garnered outsized influence. For example, a representative from Epsom seems out to build a career sponsoring bills that aim to kneecap or even eliminate public education.

Free-Staters seldom reveal their affiliations, meaning it is incumbent on voters, with perhaps a little help from news media, to sniff them out. Some of them will assuredly appear on March 11 ballots, using weasel words to disguise the extreme nature of their positions. Our informed votes can and must prevent any other communities from suffering the ill fate of Grafton and Croydon.

Take the time to learn about candidates and issues. Make sure to vote. Tell your friends and family to vote. By doing so we can send a message to the Free-Staters and their sympathizers that we value our institutions and that our towns and our schools are no place for their cockamamie ideas.