This week has brought controversy to Republican House candidate Michael McGarghan and Burlington School Board member David Kirk for posting hateful content on their social media accounts.

Well, we’ve got another hot one: Bill Lawrence, candidate for the House in the Chittenden-3 district, which includes Jericho and Underhill. And I’m guessing that if we spent a few hours trolling the social media accounts of Republican candidates, we’d find more than a few like McGarghan (who Tweeted that President Obama should be hanged) and Mark Donka, whose Facebook extremism has previously been chronicled in these pages.

I might humbly suggest to Don Turner that he should teach his would-be candidates not to post egregiously awful stuff on Twitter or Facebook. I mean, you don’t want to make it appear that the VTGOP is a party full of racists, conspiratorialists, and extremists, do you now?

Bill Lawrence, to judge by his social media content, is a very conservative Republican, a Donald Trump supporter, formerly an enthusiastic backer of Bruce Lisman, a racist and a xenophobe (especially when it comes to Muslims), and an aficionado of far-right conspiracy theories.

He certainly has the First Amendment right to post whatever garbage he wants to. And I have the right to inform the good people of Chittenden-3 what kind of person is tainting their ballots.

Mr. Lawrence’s proclivities were brought to my attention by a fellow liberal Tweeter named Scott Pavek (@RSPavek), who RT’d several of Lawrence’s more intemperate Tweets. Good thing, too; Lawrence seems to have closed down his Twitter account after his posts were discovered.

Too bad we have screenshots. Also too bad that Lawrence hasn’t thought to scrub his Facebook page, which has quite a few other nasty pieces of alt-right propaganda.

And here, submitted for your consideration, are some entries from the Lawrence Files.

Continue reading →