Here’s the saddest sentence I’ve read in a while.

The event took place at the Elks Club, where a modest but impassioned crowd of 25 attended with several left-wing protestors outside. 

“Modest but impassioned” is a well-meaning attempt at making lemonade out of some dried-up rinds.

Those words were typed by one Mike Bielawski, the QAnon-adjacent “reporter” who formerly plied his trade at True North Reports, and has now apparently sold at least one article to Guy Page at Vermont Daily Chronicle. He’d been dispatched to cover an all-day meeting, and I do mean “all-day,” designed to spread conspiracy theories among the True Believers of Vermont’s tiny contingent of ultraconservatives.

Yep, “tiny” sure does check out. “Impassioned crowd of 25” indeed.

The advance publicity for the event focused in on the nefarious activities of Progressive/Democratic Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, currently conducting a series of Banned Book events in book stores and libraries around Vermont. Or, in the hysterical framing of VT Grassroots eminence (best known in this space as the co-sponsor of the bus trip to the January 6 insurrection) Ellie Martin, “promoting unbridled access to pornography and critical race theory material in our schools.”

Sounds like Our Man Dave at work.

The event was co-sponsored by VT Grassroots, one of the many small, disorganized right-wing groups in our state, and Moms for Liberty, the fine folks responsible for PORN IN SCHOOL LIBRARIES panic-mongering. The advance announcement promised eight full hours of speeches and listed seven speakers, one of whom was Stacey Malloy, apparently the wife of Gerald “Deploy” Malloy, unsuccessful Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022.

Her speech was not covered by Bielawski; from the content of his dispatch I surmise that he didn’t stick around for all eight hours, not that I blame him. It must have been a long, dismal slog. He quoted two speakers and interviewed two others after the event.

The main speaker was “nationally acclaimed author William Federer,” and boy, if he really is nationally acclaimed, it must have been depressing to find himself in a small-town Elks Club talking to a handful of people. His message is that America is following the path of the Soviet and French Revolutions, which seems like a bit of an overreaction.

His pitch was echoed by Vietnamese-American “journalist” Chau Kelley, who cautioned of the Communists and “authoritarians… [focusing] their efforts on children in our schools.”

Yeah, take that, Comrade Dave!

I do not mean to denigrate the lived experience of Kelley and her family, who fled an oppressive regime and found a new home in the United States. I’ve spoken with Russian emigrés who have a healthy skepticism about big government in all its forms because of what they saw Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs do to their homeland. I get it. But just because it happened over there doesn’t mean there are totalitarians brainwashing America’s children here or dictating public health policy a a precursor to Communist takeover.

The speakers interviewed by Mikey B were most concerned with the Communist conspiracy known as the Covid pandemic. Bielawski wrote that Ben Olsen, identified in the article as “a business owner and homeschooling parent” and not identified as a spectactularly unsuccessful 2022 candidate for state House in Lamoille County, “carried with him books and documents” about the unpublicized side effects of the Covid vaccine. Said materials qualify Olsen in his own mind as “an information warrior” who is also, I’m sure, a real hit at parties.

Bielawski also spoke with “Not That” Elizabeth Miller, “an artist and homeschooling parent” who trod the perilous path of self-education regarding her “personal health choices,” a.k.a. vaccine refusal and mask denialism and has now arrived at a place where she is convinced that public health measures taken during the pandemic were nothing more than “our freedoms and way of life… being chipped away.”

The person who first alerted me to this event also offered to buy me a $45 ticket (FORTY-FIVE DOLLARS oh my heart) if only I’d attend and write about it. Yeah, well, you wouldn’t have caught me dead in an eight-hour assemblage of nutballs, plus I wouldn’t want to enrich the coffers of VT Grassroots or Moms for Liberty by a single penny. I think I’ve given the event all the time and effort it deserved without attending, thus saving myself eight goddamned hours of grinding my teeth in the process. .