Tag Archives: Amy Hornblas

Thankfully, These People Are Nowhere Near the Levers of Power (In Vermont)

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Regular VPO readers are well aware of my feelings about Vermont exceptionalism: Too often, it’s an unmerited sense of self-regard and an unwarranted obstacle to progress.

But there are times when Vermont really is exceptional in a good way. Like Tuesday morning, when a blessedly small cohort of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers assembled in the Statehouse for “Children’s Health Day,” an event aimed at spurring legislative action to, um, preserve “health care freedom” which means fighting vaccine and mask mandates. Thanks to Trump, people like them are now in charge of America’s public health programs. But in Vermont, they’re a tiny, ineffectual band of whiners.

Pictured above: guest of “honor” Mary Holland, head of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaxxer organization founded by, you guessed it, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The local organizers included Amy Hornblas*, notorious anti-masker who is STILL sounding the alarm over mask mandates that expired more than five years ago, and Alison Despathy, purveyor of Anthony Fauci fanfic conspiracy theories.

*Hornblas, a perpetually smiling grandmotherly type, approached me** before the press conference and asked if I’d ever written about her. She introduced herself only as “Amy,” so I didn’t immediately put two and two together. Now I can say, yes indeedy, I have written about her. And I suspect she knew that.

** She was one of three women*** to approach me at the event. One woman offered me a Children’s Health Day sticker. I replied “I’m media, so no.” Then she said “It’s just to show you’re for the children.” Sure.

*** The third poked my elbow during the event and asked who I was writing for. “Myself,” I said.

The fact that I was wearing an N-95 mask and holding a notepad probably didn’t endear me to anyone else in attendance.

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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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