“When did you ever feel happy to see kids burning books?” asks a hilarious Nathan Freeman of photos of his kids tearing up tomes and throwing them into a beach bonfire in Blumhouse Television’s opener The anarchists. For most, the answer will probably be: never! Even those who embrace the anti-establishment lifestyle, however, find no lasting joy in director Todd Schramke’s six-episode HBO docuseries (July 10), which focuses on an annual event known as Anarchapulco — held, as its title suggests, in Acapulco, Mexico—which unites men and women who oppose governments and their corrupt, authoritarian rules and social norms. It’s a compelling portrait of dissenting dissenters and their empty dreams of true freedom, beginning with a promise and ending with the age-old lesson of being careful what you wish for.
Launched in 2015 by entrepreneur Jeff Berwick, Anarchapulco began as an impromptu conference attended by a few hundred people and organized without real structure—an approach suited to a gathering based on the ideals of autonomy and decentralization. Berwick distinguishes his ideology from the more traditional view of anarchy (ie, violent rebellion), explaining that he and his Ron Paul-worshipping compatriots share a core belief in the unfairness of taxation and the evil of central banking. For them, anyone who believes in the global paradigm of “statism” is a sheep, and the only way out is to unite to form a new community based on unrestricted thought and action. Thus, in more than one archival clip, Nathan aims to performatively laugh at the word “allowed” as it contradicts the guiding ethos of this movement.
Nathan and his wife Lisa moved to Acapulco after the first Anarchapulco in 2015, whose creator Berwick embraced anarchism after his introduction to G. Edward Griffin’s book Against the Federal Reserve The Creature from Jekyll Island. Berwick seems like a hedonist with a lot of fake big ideas and not much in the way of nuanced thinking in The anarchists, and the sight of him drunk on stage and rapping at nightclub parties only reinforces that notion. However, Berwick tapped into the revolutionary sentiments felt by marginalized and screwed-up people who were angry at the world. What’s more, he was shrewd enough to recognize the disruptive anarchist potential of cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin in particular, and when that market took off in late 2017, so did Anarchapulco, attracting thousands of new visitors and becoming a trendy a meeting place for those seeking to shake up the status quo.
Filmmaker Schramke documents Anarchapulco from its inception, thus making The anarchists a comprehensive overview of the promotion of the event. At the same time, it is an in-depth snapshot of the personalities who dominate the scene south of the border, led not only by Berwick and the Freemans, but also by Lily Forrester and her friend John Galton, a pair of dreadlocked “anarcho-capitalist” who ended up in Acapulco after fleeing the United States because of an arrest on drug charges that would have put them behind bars for 25 years. The two fugitives aired their story (detailed in a 2019 Daily Beast article by Kelly Weil, which is briefly highlighted in the docu-series) on social media and soon became local celebrities for their adherence to an anarchist standard much stricter than that. , which they believed was promoted by Anarchapulco.
Filled with interviews with Berwick, Lisa Freeman, Lily Forrester, and Lily’s close friend Jason Henza (who forced his wife to join him for Anarchapulco and then was abandoned by her after hooking up with a crypto-brother living in Mexico estate), The anarchists uses first-hand accounts, archival material, and the occasional hand-drawn illustration to explain the sordid mess that ensues, culminating in a gunman attack that leaves Galton dead and Henza clinging to life. Cartel hitmen are rumored to be behind the murder, and the series strongly suggests that these criminals may have been associated with Paul Propert. A military veteran with severe PTSD, Propert initially travels to Anarchapulco in a small yellow school bus to deliver cryptocurrency, an ATM (which predictably never works), and he quickly becomes the restless fly in the idyllic anarchist ointment. After Forester fingered Propert for Galton’s death, he responded by posting online death threats to Henza, while Berwick tried to make Anarchapulco a bigger phenomenon by firing loyal and dedicated conference director Nathan.
“After Forester fingered Propert for Galton’s death, he responded by posting online death threats against Henza, while Berwick tried to turn Anarchapulco into a bigger phenomenon by firing loyal and dedicated conference director Nathan.”
Chaos ensued that should have been right up these anarchists’ alley and yet The anarchists includes rather dark complaints about the delegation of Anarchapulco after Nathan’s departure and Propert’s lunatic behavior. The fact that none of these outsiders can turn to the police—or to each other—for help in times of dire need makes their story an epitome of the maxim, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” Although in eventually Forrester realizes the downside of living a truly “free” anarchist life—an unsurprising insight, given that her days and nights have been filled with anguish and fear of impending murder—she’s one of the few. The main impression left is of scattered, alienated loners who find community for their outsider views through the internet, only to realize that perhaps such ideas are not as practical as they’d like, especially in a city like Acapulco, where — Berwick’s comforting claims notwithstanding — crime was rife and safety anything but guaranteed.
The suicides, the 2018 Bitcoin crash, and the cryptocurrency Ponzi-scheme scandals prove some of the The anarchists‘ cookbook, with Schramke recalling Anarchapulco’s early enthusiasm and then a more sobering reality about the danger of rejecting all social structures. Like so many docu-series before it, this six-part affair is needlessly drawn out in its momentum-driven back half. Regardless, he accurately frames his subjects as individuals bound by trauma and anger, born of unhappy childhoods and dysfunctional family dynamics. The sad irony of Schramke’s non-fiction series, then, is that it resonates as a story about various damaged people who have chosen to deal with the gaping holes in their lives by further rejecting the world and all it represents, rather than filling those gaps. with the many commonalities (togetherness, trust, selflessness, order) that matter most.
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