Ah, the last dying embers of Republican power in Vermont. Jim Douglas and Brian Dubie. Those were the days, eh?

Now, who’s that nice little old lady between them? That would be Maryse Dunbar, Essex resident and two-time candidate for the House. Lovely, right? Nice of Brian and Jim to lend her a hand.

She’s also gotten a big assist from VTGOP chair Paul Dame, who sent an email blast soliciting support for Dunbar. Cool. I assume he’s fully informed about Dunbar’s political views, and they must be consistent with his vision of Republicanism.

Now let’s take a look at Dunbar’s Facebook page and… oh dear.

Yep, that’s Our Lord and Savior guiding the hand of God’s Chosen One, Donald J. Trump. Funny thing, this is not an outlier on Dunbar’s Facebook page, a melange of conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism, and Covid denialism of the rankest sort.

In other words, she’s just another Vermont Republican candidate in the year 2022.

I’ve seen some shit writing this series, but Dunbar’s personal Facebook page is a particularly dank place.

Oh look, she shared a link to the nuttiest Covid conspiracy site I’ve come across. “Brave: Live Courageously” is a nine-episode “docuseries” detailing how “the Covid-19 ‘virus’ was the first step in [the] Great Reset,” a global plot to control the world’s population and downsize it dramatically.

Note the air quotes around “virus.” Because Covid-19 isn’t a virus, it’s an “envenomation bioweapon” that “mimics a heart attack… and leaves no trace.” But fear not; in this series, you’ll learn how to fight the effects of “envenomation” through “optimal nutrition” and suchlike. In another post, Dunbar writes that “Ivermectin seems to be the drug that works.”

I should mention here that Dunbar is (or maybe was) a registered nurse. Dame’s fundraising email plays this up big-time: it’s entitled Help This Nurse Win Back a Long-Time Republican House Seat. Dunbar did work in a couple of area hospitals, but that was a long time ago. For nearly 30 years until she retired, she ran an electrolysis clinic in Essex. Methinks her medical expertise is a tad out of date.

The peak of Dunbar’s Facebook activity came between Election Day 2020 and Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. On January 24 she posted the Jesus/Trump image above (that, IIRC, was rejected by the Franklin Mint). Five days later, she wrote “President Trump–PLEASE come back quickly & save America.”

In early December 2020, when things were looking bleak, Dunbar posted a link to an episode of FlashPoint, a video series produced by the VICTORY Network, an operation of Kenneth Copeland Ministries. If you don’t know who Kenneth Copeland is, look him up on YouTube and marvel at the lizard skin and World’s Most Obvious Toupée.

Oh heck, I’ll save you the trouble. Here he is, blowing at the TV screen to cure his viewers of the Covid.

Bit I digress. Along with the link, Dunbar wrote, ““Listen to God’s Prophets. So encouraging!”

That edition of FlashPoint featured three “prophets,” one of whom asserted that we are “one miracle away” from restoring Trump to his God-given place as a two-term president who will save America from turning into Venezuela and/or going communist. Another guest said that “We are being called to war… God is recruiting people to stand in the gap and enforce the miracle we need.” The miracle: someone at the highest levels of the conspiracy being moved to “turn state’s evidence” on the election fraud. Because otherwise the evidence will be “concealed by the forces of evil.”

Ohh, that explains why Trump lost all those court cases.

One more item from Dunbar’s Facebook page. She posted a link to an article claiming that the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show was “a huge Satanic ritual.”

There’s more, but why beat a dead horse that fell victim to envenomation?

Dunbar’s campaign website and her campaign Facebook page are much milder stuff. She’s against a carbon tax. She says we need to do more to fight crime. She’s big on fiscal responsibility. And she’s really upset about Vermont’s tax on military pensions, which is probably the only thing she has in common with Phil Scott. Besides, you know, being on the same ticket.

Dunbar is running in the Chittenden-23 district, which will send two representatives to Montpelier. Her fellow Republican is Denis White; the Democrats are incumbent Golrang Garofano and Leonora Dodge. As always, you are absolutely within your rights to vote for Dunbar, but you ought to know what she really stands for.