Hey, anybody know how to get in touch with the gender-nonconforming CHAOS! Dance Troupe? Because they’ve got another prime opportunity coming up this week.

The occasion: A bunch of far-right activists has reserved the Cedar Creek Room on Wednesday at noon for a Parents’ Rights Rally. “Parents’ Rights” (they actually misspell the phrase, but we’ll get to that) is ultraconservative code for cracking down on the allegedly liberal proclivities of public schools and libraries. It’s really about book banning and getting rid of DEI and critical race theory and, most of all, anything having to do with acceptance of gender nonconformity. After all, we’ve got to make those people as miserable as we possibly can, right?

The list of speakers for the event includes prominent ultraconservative culture warriors like John Klar and Gregory Thayer. We’ll get to the rundown, and wow is it a doozy, but I have to begin with one of three lawmakers who will share a lectern with this bunch of bozos.

I’m referring to Sen. Terry Williams, second-term Republican from Rutland County. He has been relatively circumspect in his public profile, and has shown few outward signs of being a far-right nut. But he’s been on my watch list*. And here he is, making common cause with some outrageously far-right figures. Which makes me wonder yet again how in Hell this guy wound up on the Senate Education Committee. I mean, they had to do something with all those Republicans, but if Williams is in the Thayer/Klar ballpark, he should have been shunted to something less crucial like Agriculture or Institutions or the useless Senate Ethics Panel.

*Note: A reader has provided a link to an outrageously telling commentary by Sen. Williams posted on, you guessed it, Vermont Daily Chronicle. See below.

His participation also makes me wonder about his “Yes” vote on Senate Resolution 15, “supporting Vermont’s transgender and non-binary community and declaring Vermont’s commitment to fighting discrimination and treating all citizens with respect and dignity.” This resolution passed the Senate 30-0, and Williams was officially recorded as voting in favor. Maybe someone will bring up his vote in front of the rally crowd. Should be worth a chuckle.

Anyway. Having implicitly called for this meeting to be disrupted in an act of civil disobedience, I feel compelled to affirm that these mooks have the First Amendment right to say whatever they want. However, they don’t have the right to a polite, respectful hearing in a venue of their choice. They don’t have the right to free and untrammeled use of the historic Cedar Creek Room as a venue for spreading their bile. If they’re peddling noxious views that threaten harm to some Vermonters, then those Vermonters have the right to publicly oppose them and make their lives difficult, just as they’re trying to make others’ lives more difficult. Which they are definitely doing.

And if would-be disruptors violate the law in expressing their views, they should be prepared to face the consequences, up to and including arrest and prosecution. That, kids, is how the First Amendment works.

I see some poetic justice in the potential disruption of this event because the organizers are trying very hard to disrupt public education and the lives of the gender-nonconforming, among others. They’re kind of a joke in deep blue Vermont, but people like them in redder precincts pose a direct threat to the life, liberty and happiness for many, not to mention democracy itself.

If Gregory Thayer lived in another state, he might well be a state senator or lieutenant governor or even a slightly less butchy version of Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress. He would be part of the great rightward putsch aimed at decimating the federal government, killing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, ending birthright citizenship, bringing the great institutions of law, education, and media (to name just three) to heel, and making the lives of countless people much more unpleasant. We should point and laugh at our puny band of ultraconservative activists while we can enjoy the privilege — and try to keep them small and powerless as long as we are able.

So, on to the pointing and laughing.

Thayer is the chief instigator of the Wednesday event, under the auspices of his minuscule organization Vermonters for Vermont. his grandoise vision for his group is “bringing all the conservative Republican fringe groups together.” Nice of him to label himself “fringe.” VfV first hove into my view in 2021, when it organized a mask-free bus trip to the January 6 insurrection. Later that year he organized a series of rantfests about public education, which prominently featured many of the same people who will descend on the Statehouse this week. Thayer ran for lieutenant governor in 2022 and 2024, finishing a distant second in the Republican primary both times.

John Klar… good grief, where do I start. He’s been gracing the digital pages of the Vermont Daily Chronicle and the late unlamented True North Reports for years, with his weighty essays chock full of arch-conservatism and Vermont nativism in the guise of good ol’ down-to-earth common sense. He ran for governor in 2020 and got spanked by Phil Scott in the Republican primary, and ran for state Senate in 2022 only to lose badly to Democratic incumbent Mark MacDonald despite getting his picture taken with that selfsame Phil Scott.

Joining Klar and Thayer at the lectern is Martha Hafner, Randolph’s own right-wing loony, notable for publishing remarkably poorly-designed and rhetorically unhinged political material that casts our schools as captives of left-wing activists who are trying to turn America into something akin to Mao’s China.

Also on board the Klar Klown Kar is Marie Tiemann, head of the conservative pressure group SPEAK-VT, featured recently in this space whining about how a handful of gender-nonconformists wreaked havoc with conservatives’ free speech rights at that infamous March 12 “CHAOS in Montpelier” event.

Finally, in addition to Sen. Williams, we’ll hear from two members of the House’s minority caucus: veteran lawmaker Mark Higley, one of the more conservative members of the House’s old guard, and freshman lawmaker Mike Tagliavia, one of the pieces of jetsam deposited into office by the Republican tide of November 2024. Tagliavia, like Williams, has left very little evidence of his views on social media. He did leave a comment on a 2022 Vermont Daily Chronicle post in which he pooh-poohed the seriousness of Covid-19 and branded efforts to contain the virus as ill-considered social engineering experiments.

And there are your ultraconservative All-Stars. Read ’em and weep.

These people who’d like to fundamentally overhaul public education in their own image appear to have not paid much attention during their English and grammar lessons, to judge by their own publicity materials. The Wednesday event’s title is “Parent’s Rights in Education.” The errant apostrophe makes this literally mean one parent, not a group of parents or all of them. (An earlier version of the publicity bore the title “Parent’s Right in Education,” singular, and urges readers to “Share and bring with you family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, School activist, Home Schools etc.”) One of their Facebook posts implores readers to “share with everyine with a pulse,” and I do mean “everyine.” And there’s a line beneath the photos of the invited speakers that says, literally, “Parent’s have a Right to know what is going on in their child’s classroom & with the Administration.” Which almost makes sense if you ignore the rules of our language.

So yeah, clowns. But clowns who’d be dangerously influential in other jurisdictions, and are making things as difficult as they can for school officials and school board members across the state. They’re now bringing their traveling circus to the Statehouse, and I say let’s welcome them with all the respect they deserve.

Which is zero.

Update! Following up on my observation that Sen. Williams has kept a low profile regarding possible nuttery, I received a comment from a reader named Chris. He provided a link to a 2023 essay by WIlliams that was published by the Vermont Daily Chronicle. In it, he explained his vote against a bill (now Act 13) banning paramilitary training camps. The Senate vote on the bill was — wait for it — 29 to 1, with Williams the sole dissenter. The bill appears to have passed the House without a roll call vote, so Williams was the only member of the Legislature to publicly oppose it.

Ouch.

Williams believed that he himself could have been prosecuted under Act 13. He and his two sons, all military veterans, had taken his grandson onto a family property for some military-style training. All were wearing military kit and carrying rifles. Williams wrote that he’d been having disputes with a neighbor for 33 years, which is kind of a red flag right there, and he feared that the neighbor could have filed a complaint against him uif Act 13 had been law at the time. In the process, Williams expressed a sympathetic view of Daniel Banyai, operator of an actual paramilitary training facility that was the inspiration for Act 13.

So yeah, I think we have grounds to label Williams as an extreme conservative. On this significant vote, he was clearly the most extreme member of the Senate. Which again, why is this guy on the Senate Education Committee?