All That CHAZ

Hi all,

We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of the founding of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ.

As I wrote last year, I loved CHAZ. It was a spontaneous radical anarchist community that shared a nickname with the sort of blue-blazered boarding school kid who uses “summer” as a verb and corrects the pronunciation of “Gstaad.”

What I loved about it was the way in which it beclowned the modern Rousseauians who find the basic foundations of civilization contemptibly artificial and unnecessary. They thought they could live in radical egalitarian tranquility and comity. And then nature—specifically human nature—said, “Nah, bruh.”