Former Vermont Republican Party chair — and current Vermont Republican Party Treasurer — Deb Billado has a beef with, um, the Vermont Republican Party. Billado is reportedly “the head of the Donald Trump campaign team in Vermont.” She claims that state party leaders fixed the presidential primary in Nikki Haley’s favor, presumably when she wasn’t in the room. From the Vermont Daily Chronicle:

“Republican leadership invited that very dishonest mechanism to get someone elected and nominated, only to have them drop out the next morning,” Billado said in a phone call to VDC Wednesday morning.

The irony is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a machete. Billado’s beau idéal is the all-time champion of election skulduggery, having (1) sought Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, (2) tried to blackmail Ukraine into providing bogus evidence against Hunter Biden, (3) sought foreign interference in the 2020 election, (4) fought to overturn the results of that vote after being told over and over again, by aides, lawyers, and the courts that there was no evidence of fraud, and (5) sparked an attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Billado is fine with ignoring all of that. What she sees as a “dishonest mechanism” is Vermont’s long-established open primary system in which any registered voter can participate in the party primary of their choosing. She whines that only Republicans should be allowed to vote in the primary. Which would be a neat trick, since Vermont law does not allow voters to register a party preference. Perhaps she’d administer a loyalty oath at the polling place.

Billado’s sour reaction is not unexpected. It’s gotta be disappointing to lead the only Trump operation that failed to deliver its state. Maybe she should take it up at the next state party meeting, where she’ll be sitting at the head table with the alleged co-conspirators. I’d love to see her confront Gov. Phil Scott and his fellow saboteurs, including former governor Jim Douglas, former Senate minority leader Joe Benning, House Minority Leader Patricia McCoy, and Reps. Ashley Bartley, Casey Toof, and Jim Harrison,.

(Not for nothing, but if Trump does get back into the White House, Vermont is going to have a big fat target on its back. It will be the only state that voted against him in the primary. I suspect federal disaster declarations will be extremely hard to come by, and Trump will assign a full-time staffer to come up with ways to withhold federal funds any way he can. Vote Biden, folks.)

Billado’s phrase “dishonest mechanism” stuck in my ear. It’s just a bit off. It might have been generated by a buggy AI program or language translator. Or it’s something a high schooler might slide into an essay to smarten up the proceedings.

Just for giggles, I searched for “dishonest mechanism” on the triple W. I didn’t find much, but what I did find broke down into two categories:

1. It seems to be a term in British legal circles. A fraudulent means of getting other people’s money is sometimes called a “dishonest mechanism.”
2. It makes occasional appearances in far-right circles to describe the perfidious schemes of the Left.

I’m going to assume that the phrase has its origins in the British legal system, and that right-wingers have glommed onto it in the manner of the desperate high-school essayist: To make their ill-founded theories appear more intellectual than they are.

So let’s look at a few examples of “dishonest mechanism” appearing in the wild. Oh look, there it is on the “r/MensRights” Reddit thread. The concept of patriarchy is a “dishonest mechanism” created by feminists “to blame men for everything bad.” Okay, sure.

Here’s a guy convinced that Coinstar and other operators of coin exchange machines are running a scam on people trying to convert loose change into cryptocurrency. The machines are, yep, “dishonest mechanisms.” Points for using “dishonest mechanism” in reference to an actual machine, as opposed to an idea.

Yeah, it was inevitable that crypto would crop up in this. He may or may not have a point; I didn’t even try to read his seemingly endless LinkedIn rant. But c’mon, all coin-exchange machines are pretty scammy, right? They charge hefty fees for the convenience of dumping your coins into a machine without having to count or sort. Buyer beware, I say.

Finally, we get to the neo-Fascist European New Right, where Belgian historian David Engels has forsaken academic work for the more potentially lucrative field of ginning up intellectual explanations for the far right’s love of dictators and hatred of foreigners.

Engels refers to the European Community as having been established by a “dishonest mechanism,” i.e. dictated from above rather than arising naturally from beneath. He doesn’t want a return to full independent status for European nations because he sees Europe as a bulwark against, um, the inferior peoples of the East and global South. But the European Community was based on the shifting sands of democracy, separation of powers and pluralism. Engels finds a better model for a modern Europe in the Holy Roman Empire, which tried to combine the continent’s religious, cultural, and political commonalities in an authoritarian structure.

Yep, pining for the Golden Age of the Holy Roman Empire is where we’re going. Sigh.

Engels sees the HRE as springing from Europe’s “cultural, historical and spiritual subconsciousness.” This, he asserts, is the solid foundation of a kinda-sorta united Europe that can become a bulwark of civilization resisting the rising tide of sweaty, dark-skinned Outsiders.

Well, that was fun. I don’t put all of this, or any of it, directly at Billado’s feet. But I do suspect that she must have picked up the unlikely phrase “dishonest mechanism” while perusing some dark corner of the Internet.

I doubt there will be any consequences for Billado accusing her own party’s leaders of fraud. The “leadership” that backed Haley is not, in fact, the leadership of the VTGOP. Haley’s team was full of current and former Republican officeholders, who see Trump as a rancid extremist and know, from their own experience, that to win elections you have to broaden your appeal and expand your base.

The actual leadership of the VTGOP, as chronicled endlessly in this space, is full of dedicated Trumpers. Billado, party vice chair Samantha Lefebvre, and Republican National Committee members Jay Shepard and Suzanne Butterfield are all on board the Trump train. Party chair Paul Dame is more circumspect, but he never ever utters a word of criticism for the Trump wing because he knows they control the party. Electeds like Scott, Bartley, and Toof run under the Republican label, but they have largely given up on influencing the party. In other words, Billado fits right in, and throwing accusations of fraud at the likes of Phil Scott isn’t a punishable offense.