Tag Archives: Amy Hornblas

I’m Sure Front Porch Forum Is Quaking in Its Boots

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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!

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The Great Mask Panic Traveling Road Show

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If you see this woman at your local school board meeting, buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

This is Amy Hornblas, a resident of Cabot who’s made such a pest of herself that one school board has barred her from speaking at its meetings. She also quit her post on the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission (CVRPC) over its alleged “climate of fear, censorship, and intimidation” that’s “similar to living under Communism or Fascism.”

Hornblas has a real obsession with masks. She believes they’re a hazard to physical and mental health. She sees a vast conspiracy to suppress evidence of the downside of masking. And she’s traveling outside her home town to wherever a mask mandate might rear its head.

Hornblas is, among many other things, the instigator of the Vermont Mask Survey, which I thought was merely a bad memory from the pandemic’s early days. But no, she’s still flogging it as some kind of proof that masks are Bad For You.

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