SPRINGFIELD, WEST VIRGINIA — Phillip Grant is known best on Facebook and in libertarian social media circles as The Neoteric Libertarian. He is a self-described “gun rights advocate” and on his podcast, he is regularly seen with two or three semi-automatic rifles in the background, as he says to “remind anyone watching that guns are so cool just having them near you makes you tougher and stuff.” When Grant’s house burned down in late October though, he says he was “baffled” by the fact that his attempts to put out the fire that claimed his home all failed.
Grant told our interviewer that at around 3:00 o’clock in the morning on October 29th, he awoke to the smell of fire in his home. After making sure he got his family out, Grant tells us that he was feeling brave enough to head back in and try to put out the electrical fire that had set his house ablaze. “When you’re armed with an AR-15,” he told us, “you can take on anything, and I mean anything, you want. So I charged back in there, determined to put that damn fire out.”
“The first thing I did was go into my garage, which obviously hadn’t burned down yet, and grabbed the four gallon gas can that I always keep on hand to fuel up my dune buggies,” Grant told us, “and I headed into my office, where the fire had begun.” It was then, Grant says that “things took a turn for the completely and utterly unexpected.” He started dousing the flames with the gasoline, knowing in his libertarian heart that the only way to solve any problem is by “adding more of the problem into the mix,” Grant said.
The flames, however, went on unabated. Frantic, he says he started pouring the gasoline even faster on the fire, baffled that the heat just kept intensifying. “I went back to the garage to get my spare backup gas can, took it into the hallway where the fire had spread from my office,” Mr. Grant said with noticeable tears running down his cheeks, “but no matter how much gas I threw on the fire, it didn’t go out, but just kept spreading.”
Ultimately, Grant says he lost his battle with the fire that morning, but he learned a vital lesson. “We don’t really need taxpayer funded fire departments,” he told us, “because all you need to fight a fire is your trusty AR-15 and some gasoline. Sure you won’t put anything out, but isn’t that better than having some state sponsored terrorist with a hose come knocking on your door and helping you and shit? Especially when that guy’s salary is paid for by theft? I didn’t think so.”
“I just don’t get it. I know for a fact that every problem is best handled by exacerbating it,” Grant said as the interview was closing, “so why didn’t it work when I tried to douse the electrical fire with my gasoline supply I keep in preparation for Doomsday?”
