Monthly Archives: November 2022

Stealth Conservatives: The Angry Chiropractor

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Meet Matthew Stralka, Thetford resident and chiropractor whose shingle hangs across the river in Hanover. He’s also the Republican candidate for House in the Windsor-Orange-2 district, currently represented by Democrat Jim Masland.

Almost forgot: Stralka is a Covid denialist of a particularly fulminant strain. And he thinks Gov. Phil Scott is a TRAITOR.

Funny that they’re now on the same ticket, but that’s what the Vermont Republican Party has been reduced to in the Year of Our Lord 2022.

The Republicans failed to recruit a candidate in the district. Stralka ran a last-minute write-in campaign, as did quote a few Republican nominees, and managed to snag the nomination. He appears to have done nothing whatsoever in terms of actual campaigning since. No campaign website or Facebook page, He hasn’t filed a campaign finance report since August 1 when he reported receipts of $682.50, all from himself, and zero expenditures. No filing on September 1 or October 1 or October 15.

Now, that’s a commitment to stealth.

He’s a blank slate with one exception. Stralka has a Twitter account. Not much of one; he has zero followers. He’s never Tweeted on his own. He has, however, occasionally replied to other people’s tweets, and done so in a remarkably incendiary manner.

The most frequent target of his ire is Governor Nice Guy. Let’s get to it!

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Stealth Conservatives: A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots, But It Can Try to Pass as a Cheetah

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Meet Kathi Tarrant, mom, musician, teacher, and Republican candidate for the Vermont House in the Washington-Chittenden district currently represented by two Democrats, Tom Stevens and Theresa Wood.

Ms. Tarrant might not like it that I topped this piece with a picture of her at the August 2021 Patriot Rally on the steps of the Statehouse. The event was captured on video by the good folks at Orca Media, and you can see several speakers talking about the poor attendance. And you can see Tarrant talking about the federal lawsuit she filed against Gov. Phil Scott over his mask mandate. Yep, she’s one of them.

But that’s not how she’s presenting herself in the race for House. Instead, she’s donned the garb of a garden-variety conservative — to the right of Phil Scott, but not quite off the deep end. In a candidates’ forum sponsored by ORCA and another of my former employers, The Bridge, she managed to avoid subjects like the Covid vaccine and climate change denialism (“CO2 is NOT a pollutant”) and weather conspiracy theories and her membership in 802Freedom, the online community of anti-vaxxers and their ilk.

Instead, we got anodyne language about carbon taxes, ballot security, supporting law enforcement, fixing the housing shortage by unleashing the landlords, doubts about cannabis legalization, Second Amendment absolutism, and opposition to Article 22 over its wording, not its intent.

Now, it’s possible that she’s completely changed her political orientation in the past year. But it’s much more likely that she’s trying to pass as a standard conservative when in fact she’s way out on the fringes of political discourse.

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Un-Stealth Conservatives: The Wild Bull of Bennington-1

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This… THIS… is the photo that Bruce Busa chose as his campaign portrait. Sadly, it’s a decent reflection of his politics.

Busa is the Republican candidate for Vermont House in Bennington-1, currently represented by Democrat Nelson Brownell. This isn’t Busa’s first run for office; in 2018 he was an independent candidate for U.S. Senate. Bernie Sanders won with more than two-thirds of the vote. Busa finished ninth out of nine candidates with 914 votes, or a whopping 0.34% of the total.

So here he is again. He’s not a “stealth conservative” because he makes no bones about who he is. But his candidacy is yet another stain on the Republican brand in Vermont.

High-, or lowlights. Busa believes that the combination of Article 22 and the Global Warming Solutions Act could lead to state-mandated abortions. He thinks school shootings are the schools’ fault. He wants creationism taught alongside evolution. And of course he’s dead set against the Covid vaccine.

Oh, almost forgot. He attended the January 6 insurrection, and he thinks it was a false flag operation incited by Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

He also endorses the platform of the Bennington Republican Committee which, I didn’t realize they had one. Of course I was curious.

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Stealth Conservatives: The Guileful Apiarist

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Hey, it’s another Essex Republican! To be specific, Roger Drury, retired member of the Vermont National Guard, proud dad, hunter, maple sugarer, and beekeeper. Now, those are some impressively Vermonty bona fides! Almost as good as fermenting your own kombucha!

Aamong all the stealth conservatives I’ve profiled in this series, Drury comes closest to actually pulling it off: Maintaining a veneer of reasonable conservatism and keeping the extreme stuff safely hidden.

But he can’t quite do it. Spend enough time looking at his record and public statements, you start to see stuff. He’s a climate change denialist, he’s against abortion, he thinks our southern border is wide-open, he’s in favor of parents getting into the weeds of school curriculum, he thinks a lack of “personal responsibility” is the cause of high health care costs.

Oh, and he thinks cannabis legalization may be a cause of our opioid crisis.

Yeah, there’s actually quite a lot.

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