Repurposing Guantanamo Into A Freedom City

There’s a chilling, unmistakable echo of eugenics-era logic baked into this proposal, cloaked in the glossy rhetoric of “innovation” and “economic dynamism.”

This Guantánamo “freedom city” plan from the libertarian tech-bro set isn’t just dystopian, it’s a fever dream dipped in Ayn Rand, sun-dried in Silicon Valley arrogance, and shipped freight to the edge of legal reality. The idea of converting one of the most infamous detention sites in modern U.S. history into a semi-sovereign techno-enclave where migrants are economically tested like lab rats is so cartoonishly sinister it sounds like a Bond villain’s PowerPoint pitch.

At the heart of the proposal is the Charter Cities Institute’s fantasy that you can bypass democratic governance, zoning boards, environmental rules, and judicial oversight by using a legal loophole wrapped in barbed wire. Guantánamo, with its unique extrajudicial aura, offers what they see as the perfect petri dish for surveillance capitalism, where corporate sovereignty reigns and migrant labor becomes a beta test.

The optics alone are radioactive. Turn a torture site into a libertarian startup zone? Where human beings must “perform” for the right to residency, under surveillance, and stripped of legal recourse? Even Peter Thiel’s floating “seasteads” seem quaint by comparison. This plan is less about innovation and more about domination, about crafting a stateless bubble where elite investors can experiment on the poor under the guise of meritocracy.

And of course, the entire project hinges on the myth of “freedom cities” as drivers of prosperity, when in reality they’re rebranded company towns with no accountability, no public voice, and no room for failure, unless you're a migrant, in which case failure means expulsion.

That Trump’s circle might be entertaining this idea isn’t surprising. His administration has consistently blurred the line between spectacle and governance, and nothing says “Make America Grift Again” like a billionaire-backed techno-colony on a military base with a history of torture. But as legal scholars point out, the U.S. court system can intervene at Guantánamo. So, despite the fantasy, it’s not a blank legal canvas, and even if Trump does try to greenlight such a city, lawsuits would swamp it faster than a hurricane.

Still, the proposal’s real danger is what it signals: a growing alignment between authoritarian impulses and libertarian economics. This is about a worldview that sees human rights, environmental regulation, and local governance as bugs in the system, not features. And in that view, Guantánamo isn’t a shameful relic, it’s prime real estate.

Read The New Republic reporting here