Motorcycles and liberty – Sturgis 85 (2025)

We last touched on several points about why TPOL sees the annual Black Hills Rally as tied to liberty. Let us continue our look at liberty, bikes, and bikers.

This 2025 85th Rally seems to be off to a great start: lots and lots and LOTS of bikers – and RVs and pickups and even semi-trucks hauling bikes – are filling the Black Hills. Not just Sturgis, but Spearfish and Lead-Deadwood, Rapid City, Sundance, Newcastle, even remoter places like Hulett (near Devils Tower) and Custer City and Hot Springs. The air vibrates with the roar of bikes. Even when storm winds and rain briefly floods streets, parking areas, and vendors (to say nothing of tents and bivy sheets), people pick up and go on. You don’t see many sour faces, either. Except for those Mrs. Grundies and Karens that every community has too many of (1 being defined by many people as “too many”).

In addition to the unfortunate interference of various governments with tourism and the Rally in particular, and the economic benefits of the Rally, let us touch on that unique American subculture, the Bikers, and how they are associated with liberty.

The biker subculture – not just the outlaw portion of it – has always had an aura of rebellion and the rugged, sovereign individual about it. Although motorcycles have been heavily used and associated with traffic cops and military operations, at least in American (and Commonwealth) eyes the image that comes to mind is that of the bearded, dewrag-wearing, leather-vested hard- or easy-rider.

Yet that is equally misleading: although bikers glorify the open highway under the big sky and a million stars, travel by motorcycle is just as much in gangs or clubs. Formal or informal, big (several hundred) or small (3 or 4 individuals or couples). Contrary to the lone individualist image, most bikers believe strongly in cooperation. Voluntary cooperation: choosing to band together and stand up for each other. Whether it is against the actual dangers of the open road (rain, snow, hail, bugs, high winds, bad road surfaces, rude drivers, or the cops) or against the nanny-state regulations (restrictions, helmets, special speed limits, and “jest where do ya think yore going, boy” attitudes – bikers stick together. A motorcycle breaks down on the empty spaces of SD-34 or WY-471, and before you know it, five or ten other motorcycles are parked while their riders try to help.

So working together, cooperating, is important and practiced. Except when it is not, and typical historical American rivalries show their (usually ugly) heads. Not much different than what happened for millennia: two rival AmerInd nations squabbling and fighting and killing over claimed ownership of hunting and foraging grounds. Or Scots and then Appalachian clans, with slow-burning, often deadly feuds building up over generations. Often the rivalries would not and will not be set aside even when outsiders (the Lowland clans, the English crown, Spanish conquestadors, American settlers and troops) are the biggest threat faced.

But still, overall, riders of steel horses generally get along better with each other in their sub-culture than they do with outsiders. Especially when facing what they see as persecution by government, and mistreatment or callous disregard by motorists and truckers and others.

No, not every biker, not every rider and “old lady” (applied to an 18-year-old as much as to an 87-year-old female rider) is a lover of liberty. But years of observation seem to back up the idea that a larger percentage than the American population is found in the biker community. It is generally a live and let live society. Someone may object to your brand of beer (or even to you drinking alcohol at all), or to the way you are dressed, but almost none of them are likely to get into your face about it. Even if they preach and teach against it.

But cooperation extends far beyond the vendor’s stalls filling the streets, or the open highways or the big party places like the Full Throttle or the Buffalo Chip.

There used to be an organization called ABATE: A Brotherhood Against Tyrannical Enactments. A very liberty-loving name – and group. They still exist, although a decade or so ago they backed off (wimped out) and officially became American Bikers (or “A Brotherhood”) for Awareness, Training, and Education, they still are a pretty pro-liberty group with chapters in virtually every American State and a few outside the States.

Their motto remains “Dedicated to the Freedom of the Road” and perhaps a second motto is “Taking care of business” – an echo of Franklin’s “Mind your business” on the first American coins.

They realized that they could make a bigger difference in dealing with various laws and road problems and so much else if they weren’t quite so up-front in-your-face. But that attitude of being against tyrannical enactments still is behind the scenes. Even in the chapters in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Massachusetts. But especially in the Mountain West: the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and other places. And in the last decade, as more and more mandatory helmet laws have been removed, the idea seems to be working. And it isn’t just outsiders and government agencies they work hard to persuade: even sub-cultures need people who are able to, and willing to, smooth ruffled feathers, negotiate and build consensus, and foster good relations. All essential to a live-and-let-live society.

Which is sometimes kind of hard to explain to many club and gang members who used to have to shave their beards and ‘stashes off before they returned to their medical practices and law firms. Or let their hair recover from helmet rash and dew-rags.

Because liberty always has a price. But the benefits far, far outweigh the price.

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2025/08/04/motorcycles-and-liberty-sturgis-85-2025/