Stop the presses! Big news from the world of Vermont politics! The state Republican Party just filled out its statewide ticket with three people who… uhhhh… you’ve never heard of. And who have roughly the same chance of winning as I do, and I won’t be on the ballot.

The few who voted in the Republican primary were greeted, over and over again, by the name of H. Brooke Paige, Vermont’s favorite novelty candidate. He was the only name on the Republican ballot for attorney general, auditor, secretary of state, and treasurer. His stated intent was to occupy those slots so no Democrat could slide to an easy write-in victory. (It happened in 2020 when Doug Hoffer captured the Democratic, Republican, and Progressive nominations and won the November election with 84% of the vote.) After the primary, Paige withdrew from all races except secretary of state, allowing the state Republican committee to nominate replacement candidates.

And now they have. I don’t know if they picked names out of a hat or held a W.C. Fields lottery* or if some thought actually went into the exercise, but it really doesn’t matter. None of the “lucky” three nominees has a snowball’s chance of winning in November. Vermont Public ran a brief story about their nominations but didn’t put in the slightest effort at identifying them beyond their names and home towns.

*”First prize was a week in Philadelphia. Second prize was two weeks.”

So just for shits and giggles, let’s fire up the Internet Machine and see what we can learn about these three “major party” candidates.

First we have Ed Kemon, Republican nominee for attorney general and… oh dear, he’s a chemtrails truther. In October of 2024 he started a petition drive in Vergennes to ban “harmful GeoEngineering activities” that were allegedly occurring “on a weekly basis.” Specifically, he’s all het up over “the intentional release of toxic chemicals into our Vermont skies.”

For those fortunate enough to have never encountered this delicate strain of nutbaggery, the idea is that the contrails produced by airplanes are full of hazardous chemicals and minerals designed to fundamentally change our environment. In truth, there is no conspiracy. The contrails consist predominantly of water vapor expelled as ice crystals from planes flying at high altitudes. I read about Kemon’s activism in an article on the Vermont Daily Chronicle written by chemtrails truther Paul Bean, who unhelpfully noted that Kemon had been circulating his petition for about three months and had collected “nearly 15 signatures.” Smells like failure!

And now Mr. Kemon is a major party nominee for attorney general. Nice work, VTGOP.

On to Lynn LaFleur, newly minted Republican candidate for treasurer. She’s apparently the chair of the Lamoille County Republican Committee. Or at least she’s identified as such in a letter to the editor published last October by The News & Citizen, in which LaFleur railed against a planned “No Kings” rally in Stowe.

LaFleur recycled the right-wing rhetoric about “No Kings” — that it’s an astroturf movement fueled by a cadre of uber-wealthy progressive types including, you guessed it, George Soros himself. Those huge crowds you see at rallies across the country? They’re full of bought-and-paid-for protesters bussed in by Soros and his fellow conspirators. See, there’s no actual authentic reaction to Trump-era Republican extremism, authoritarianism, and cruelty. It’s nothing more than gangs of dirty hippies on the Soros payroll.

This spring, LaFleur sent a letter to the Vermont Daily Chronicle regurgitating conservative claims about election integrity, which have been repeatedly proven to be without foundation. The number of fraudulent ballots actually cast is vanishingly small. And in many cases, the perpetrators are conservative activists trying to prove a point. But that won’t stop the LaFleurs of the world from pushing their baseless claims.

And now she’s the Republican candidate for treasurer. Congratulations, VTGOP.

Finally, we have Ivar Kronick of Poultney, his party’s nominee for auditor. I’m guessing this is Charles Ivar Kronick, who apparently goes by his middle name or by “C. Ivar Kronick.” In 2021, as “Charles Kronick,” he was a candidate for city council in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; his platform seemed to lean heavily on concerns about rampant crime and lawlessness:

It’s not really well reported. It’s probably hard to report due to lots of laws, there’s no criticism there, but is a real problem, it’s claiming a lot of lives in Pittsfield on a weekly daily basis. I don’t know about daily, but definitely weekly.

Cool. Glad you cleared that up.

Kronick actually won the election but his subsequent tenure was, shall we say, a bit rocky. According to The Berkshire Eagle, a 2023 Council meeting “erupted in chaos” after Kronick staged a maneuver that “potentially put Pittsfield at odds with state budget regulations.”

On four separate occasions — three budget items and a committee appointment — Kronick invoked a charter objection, a move that essentially prevents the council from discussing or voting on an item until its next meeting.

Well, that seems deliberately obstructive, no?

At issue were some “fairly routine” end-of-fiscal year budgetary adjustments that legally had to be made. But Kronick thought they sounded “fishy” and refused to play along. It left Council with two unpleasant choices: Proceed in technical violation of state law, or call an emergency meeting on short notice. All of this because Kronick had a bug up his butt.

According to The Eagle, it was the second time Kronick had forced Council to hold an emergency meeting by raising charter objections to routine processes.

On another occasion Kronick loudly opposed the hiring of a Chief Diversity Officer in Pittsfield with the same quality of rhetoric you’ve seen above. After a Black councilor expressed shock that Kronick was opposing the move “from a lens of a white male,” Kronick couldn’t contain himself:

You call me, you can call me a white male, I’m not going to take the bait. I will debate it outside this chamber. But you want to, how you like to characterize me, I have lots of, lots of identities I can pull out of my, my sock. But the point is this: This department that we’re voting on, I say we should not fill this position, we should let it sit on the line and debate in the future budget. It will grow. You’re going to have two people, and then you’ll have your third, you’ll have your intern coordinators. You’ll have offices, it’ll become big.

In the end, Kronick was on the short end of a 9-2 vote on the issue.

Kronick graced a subsequent meeting with some virulently anti-transgender comments. “I think that this is sort of a commonsense sort of thing, you know what you are because we were told that when you were born. It is a religious principle of mine,” he said. Which essentially means that transgender people don’t exist, or shouldn’t exist. I call that bigotry.

Kronick apparently did not seek re-election, big surprise. Sometime between 2023 and now he moved to Vermont, where he seems to have left no trace of any political activities. And now he’s a statewide candidate under his middle name, perhaps trying to obscure his out-of-state political past.

Again, congratulations, VTGOP. You’ve shown just how desperate you are to find anybody willing to accept your precious statewide nominations, and how willing you are to endorse extremists for high office. Congratulations on making H. Brooke Paige look mainstream by comparison. We look forward to seeing Gov. Phil Scott stumping for this motley crew between now and November 3.