Hey, is Jim Douglas getting crotchety in his old age? Is he sporting a tinfoil hat these days? First he turns his back (in a very limited, unimpactful way) on his alma mater Middlebury College for removing the name of eugenicist Vermont Governor John Mead from a campus chapel. Now he’s gone and given his imprimatur to state Senate candidate and certified extremist John Klar.

You know, the guy who ran against Gov. Phil Scott in the Republican primary two years ago? The guy who wants to recast the VTGOP as an ultraconservative, white supremacist-adjacent organization? That guy. “We need balance in Montpelier,” Douglas wrote of Klar. “We need real-world experience. John Klar has the energy and the background to tackle our problems.”

Hmmm. “The background,” you say.

This would be the same John Klar who’s been harassing the Orange Southwest School Board over a Black Lives Matter flag, which he calls “illegal,” and has accused BLM of practicing “reverse racism.”

The same John Klar who chalks up Vermont’s disproportionate number of Black people in prison to “inner-city gangs transporting narcotics to Vermont,” while also slamming the studies showing that we’re jailing Black people at an alarming rate to “flawed statistical analysis.” In other words, the study is wrong, but he’s got a ready explanation for why it’s right.

The same Klar who traffics in Covid denialism, saying that masks and vaccines don’t work. The same Klar who touts hydroxychloroquine as a Covid cure.

The same Klar who says Black Lives Matter and what he calls “the BIPOC crusade” wouldn’t exist in Vermont if not for hordes of “activist blacks” being “bussed in.” And he called these outside agitators “carpetbaggers.”

Gee, sounds like an aggrieved Southern white guy after the Civil War.

The same Klar who has endorsed a method of reparative therapy, the Christian fallacy that you can pray away the gay, and opposes gender-affirming surgery for transgender folk as comparable to lobotomies and the eugenics movement.

John Klar is Vermont’s number-one public advocate for conspiratorialist, ultra-right (and ultra-white) ideas. That’s his “background.” And Jim Douglas is endorsing this guy?

Maybe it’s time to rethink alleged moderate Republican Jim Douglas.