Here’s a shocker, and a subject I will likely never mention again: A handful of ultraconservative Vermonters has created an alternative to Front Porch Forum. Well, they want to position it as an alternative to FPF. In reality, it’s something much simpler, stupider, and more useless.

The organizers, with all the cleverness they can muster, are calling their new thing “Vermont Back Porch.” Yeah, baby, I wanna be your back porch man.

It appears to be nothing more than a statewide message board, open to anyone who signs up. Reddit for Dummies, if such a thing is possible. What it doesn’t offer is the community-by-community connectivity that has made FPF so useful and popular.

Conservatives have long been upset over FPF’s fairly modest content moderation standards, which are designed to prevent outbreaks of toxic partisanship. Political comment is fine, especially on local issues, but there are limits — which the nutbags try to label “censorship” because, as usual, they don’t understand that actual censorship involves the imposition of political authority on speech. The First Amendment has nothing to do with social media content moderation; like any other non-public entity, FPF is free to adopt whatever rules it wishes and you can’t call it censorship.

But hey, what are facts anyway? Especially when the organizers of this new endeavor hail from the ranks of — you guessed it — Covid denialists! Yay whoopee!

The lead dog on this sled to nowhere is Amy Hornblas, who has made a couple of previous appearances in this space. She’s an ardent anti-masker who made such a pest of herself in one school district (not her own) that she was actually barred from speaking at school board meetings. But she’s best known, to me, as the organizer of the terrible, horrible Vermont Mask Survey, which branded itself a “peer-reviewed” “scientific study” by “citizen scientists” but was actually nothing more than a collection of complaints from anti-maskers.

The “Survey” simply asked people to report problems they felt they’d experienced with masks, and provided a helpful list of potential issues. You know, to jog the memory. Respondents self-selected; there was no attempt to balance the sample or obtain a wider array of views. In other words, not a shred of scientific process.

The survey’s Final Report (caps theirs) was posted in 2021 but is still downloadable from Hornblas’ own website. The results were less than impressive; the Survey got a grand total of 82 responses over 10 months. Hornblas spun this tiny mishmosh of statistical debris into an overwrought, trying-way-too-hard 77-page Final Report (Because It’s More Important If It’s Capitalized) that included a staggering 150 footnotes.

That was four and a half years ago, and mask mandates are a distant, unpleasant memory. But Hornblas is still out there pounding metaphorical tables and trying to rouse the rabble. Her organization Vermont Stands Up is all about “medical freedom,” which is code for “Get those masks and vaccines away from me!”

(The scary thing about all this, need I remind, is that under the “administration” of King Manbaby, people who think like Hornblas are in control of American public health policy. Let’s hope we don’t get another global pandemic while RFK Jr. is roaming through the halls of Health and Human Services breaking shit up.)

In case you harbored the notion that Vermont Back Porch could claim a shred of legitimacy, Hornblas makes it clear that there are zero degrees of separation between the new social media platform and Vermont Stands Up. The latter organization no longer posts stuff on its own website; instead, all its content will now be posted over at VBP. What an incentive.

Hornblas’ Back Porch promises to offer “the free exchange of ideas, without censorship or attack.” What that means in practice is the right of people like her to spout whatever nonsense they’ve come to believe. I highly doubt that people like me, who believe vaccines are one of the most important public health advances of our time or see mask requirements are a reasonable course in the face of deadly epidemics, would be equally welcome to offer their “ideas, without censorship or attack” on Vermont Back Porch.

I have no plans to find out, anyway. Waste of time, and an unnecessary risk of triggering spikes in blood pressure.