Tag Archives: Black Lives Matter

Phil’s Friends: “Jesus Believed In the Flood Model”

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Poor ol’ Phil Scott. After getting repeatedly overridden by the Legislature’s Democratic/Progressive supermajorities, he’s desperate to get more Republicans into the House and Senate.

Not desperate enough to try to build a political movement or exercise influence over the Vermont Republican Party, mind you. But desperate enough to endorse some, shall we say, decidedly fringey characters posing as “common sense” fiscal conservatives.

Take Michael Boutin of Barre, last seen in this space when, as a member of City Council, he cast the sole “No” vote on the sale of Main Street’s Wheelock Building to the owners of East Montpelier’s very successful and LGBTQ+-friendly Fox Market. Boutin had earlier led an unsuccessful petition drive aimed at blocking the sale. Which is truly strange, because Barre’s Main Street can use all the vibrant businesses it can get.

Back in 2021, Boutin maneuvered to block the proposed display of a Black Lives Matter flag in the city’s downtown by offering a charter amendment limiting acceptable flags to four: the Stars and Stripes, the state flag, the city’s flag, and the POW/MIA banner. Boutin shows definite signs of far-right intolerance, I think it’s fair to say.

Boutin is not an altogether bad guy; his Facebook page is full of civic boosterism and pet photos and the occasional foray into Trekdom. But there’s one big strange exception: a video excerpt from a Christian talk show featuring, as the clip’s title puts it, “Christian Professor Disproves the Theory of Evolution.”

Hoo boy. Rabbit hole alert.

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Art Peterson Is Not Quite Done Being Vermont’s #1 Elected Bigot

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When state Rep. Art Peterson leaves the House at the end of his current term (words that should be sung aloud or shouted from the rooftops, not merely written in digital form), the unofficial title of Worst Person In the Legislature will be up for grabs.

Peterson, shown above in a slightly retouched version of his official picture, has once again figuratively pulled down his drawers and shown his ass to the world in a hateful and unnecessary response to a routine announcement from Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas.

She sent an email last Wednesday to members of the Rutland County delegation announcing that her office would be staffing a table at the Rutland Pride Celebration on Saturday, and inviting the county’s electeds to stop by.

Peterson, being who he is, took this like a rabid bull seeing a rainbow flag in front of his nose. His response, which he cc’d to members of the county delegation:

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Return of the Guy Who’s Definitely Not Racist, Not Even a Little Tiny Bit, How Dare You Suggest Otherwise

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This is kinda-sorta another installment of “Dregs of the Ballot” except, well, this one’s an incumbent. But what an incumbent he is.

Chris Viens is running for another term on the Waterbury Selectboard, where he currently serves as vice chair — having resigned as chair in November 2020 after suggesting, at a public event, that maybe we should segregate the police so we could, you know, have Black cops police Black people and white cops watch over The Rest Of Us.

I mean, that’d take care of the whole Black Lives Matter problem, wouldn’t it?

(Pay no attention to Memphis.)

All right, you might be thinking, he made one gaffe and took responsibility. That’s settled.

Well, except for two things. First, it’s not the only questionable thing he’s said. And two, his resignation announcement was an absolute disasterpiece of self-pity and blame shifting that, to my ears, was far worse than his original segregate-the-police remark. And although it’s more than two years old, it warrants a trip down Memory Lane.

Now the good people of Waterbury can make up their own minds on Town Meeting Day, but I’ll just note that there are three candidates on the ballot for two selectboard seats and Viens is the only one I know of who’s said some truly ignorant things in public spaces.

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Here Come the Right Wingers for Your School Board

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We are once again heading into Town Meeting season and all the local elections that come with it. And once again, far-right conservatives are targeting school boards with the goal of banning critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, gender education, and all the other stuff that’s paving the way for a Communist America by producing a generation of brainwashed kiddies.

I’ll be on the lookout for specific candidates, especially where the conservatives put together “tickets’ of like-minded hopefuls. Tips appreciated.

Our first entry may or may not run for her school board, but she’s encouraging like-minded folks to run by waving the bloody shirt of “woke-ism” as fervently as she can.

He name is Martha Hafner, a resident of Randolph Center and a retired educator who’s up to her neck in conservative conspiratorialism. She’s also the brains behind Save Our Schoolchildren and its truly terrible website that will remind you of the bad old days of GeoCities or AngelFire.

The screenshot above is from a brief and wretched YouTube video urging people to run. Bad graphics, stock images, and a soundtrack that must be experienced to be believed.

SOS’ website and Facebook page are a shrine of conspiracy theory’s greatest hits.

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Big Ol’ Cop Whines Like a Baby

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Oh noes, Northfield Police Chief John Helfant has a bad case of the hurt fee-fees. Helfant, who has somehow kept his job despite being labeled as an unreliable witness by the Washington County State’s Attorney, claims he’s a victim of retaliation for his bigoted comments about transgender athletes.

Let’s back up a minute. Helfant felt it necessary to wade into the controversy triggered by a disgrace-to-journalism report by WCAX-TV, since taken down and banished to purgatory, about the situation with the Randolph High School girls’ volleyball team. WCAX’s original report, for which it has failed to apologize and devoutly wishes would go away forever, featured one interview with an athlete who, at the bidding of her mother, went public with a complaint about a transgender team member. By all other accounts, she made up some shit about being harassed by the trans girl.

Helfant, who previously made a fuss about a Black Lives Matter flag at the high school, wrote a letter to school officials complaining about the equal accommodation offered to the trans girl and accusing the district of abetting criminal activity. Just to be sure it went public, he offered it up for publication by the Vermont Daily Chronicle. In it, Helfant repeatedly referred to trans girls as “biological males” or even as “male students” and called for them to be segregated in locker rooms and bathrooms. He wrote that the district might be criminal accessories to voyeurism for allowing the trans girl — oh, pardon me, “male student” — to use the gender-appropriate locker room.

The district has temporarily removed him as a volunteer coach for the girls’ soccer team, citing unfinished paperwork related to the customary background check for school coaches. You know, because there have been so many instances of youth coaches sexually abusing their charges, background checks seem like a good idea, no exceptions, even if you’re a police chief. Or, say, a Catholic priest.

Maybe it’s retaliation, I don’t know. But if I were running the district, Helfant would be kicked to the curb for good.

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Alleged Moderate Endorses Extremist

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Hey, is Jim Douglas getting crotchety in his old age? Is he sporting a tinfoil hat these days? First he turns his back (in a very limited, unimpactful way) on his alma mater Middlebury College for removing the name of eugenicist Vermont Governor John Mead from a campus chapel. Now he’s gone and given his imprimatur to state Senate candidate and certified extremist John Klar.

You know, the guy who ran against Gov. Phil Scott in the Republican primary two years ago? The guy who wants to recast the VTGOP as an ultraconservative, white supremacist-adjacent organization? That guy. “We need balance in Montpelier,” Douglas wrote of Klar. “We need real-world experience. John Klar has the energy and the background to tackle our problems.”

Hmmm. “The background,” you say.

This would be the same John Klar who’s been harassing the Orange Southwest School Board over a Black Lives Matter flag, which he calls “illegal,” and has accused BLM of practicing “reverse racism.”

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Wanted: Local Officials With Guts

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We’ve got a disturbing trend on our hands: Small-town officials coming under heavy pressure from small groups of loud people. Or even one single person.

I’ve written at length about stealth conservatives running for local office, rabble-rousing over critical race theory and Black Lives Matter, and arguing over school mascots. But three more incidents have recently come to the fore: the Chester library board suspending Drag Queen Story Hour, the Canaan school board facing demands to remove books from the school library, and the Randolph school board voting to take down a “Black Lives Matter” flag.

This isn’t going away anytime soon. The American Library Association says it’s getting more reports of attempted book banning than ever before. The head of the ALA, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, says “It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen” in her 20 years in the organization.

“When you have organizations like Heritage Foundation and Family Policy Alliance publishing materials that instruct parents on how to challenge books in the school library or the public library, right down to a challenge form enclosed in the booklet so they can just fill it out, you’re seeing a challenge to our democratic values of free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of belief.”

It’s never been easy to be a local official. It’s a lot of work. You’re always on call. When things go wrong, you get the blame. But these organized movements present a new level of difficulty. Local boards of all kinds are facing loud, insistent demands from tiny cohorts of The Aggrieved.

Our local public servants don’t need any more headaches. But they’ve got ’em, and they’ll have to respond.

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Dregs of the Ballot: Mill River Mafia

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We take you now to the Mill River Unified School District, where a small number of very loud white people are trying to take over the school board. And they may do just that on Town Meeting Day. Voters should be aware of who’s on the ballot, because some of these people are stealth candidates hiding behind bland statements about quality education and transparency and parental involvement. I previously mentioned one of them: Ingrid Lepley, a QAnon believer whose online jewelry business used to offer a bunch of Q-inspired pieces before she partially scrubbed it upon launching her campaign. (And like many of these people, she refused interview requests from Seven Days and the Rutland Herald.)

For the last few years, these folks have been making life miserable for board members, school staff and anyone who tries to watch a meeting with their yammering about critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, and the alleged misbehavior of members who don’t buy their agenda.

This all started in 2020, when the board approved the flying of the Black Lives Matter flag outside Mill River Union High School. This raised the hackles of those who believe that racism doesn’t exist, and that it’s used as a pretext for social engineering by, uh, you know, educators and the elites, and what the heck, maybe George Soros as well. The BLM flag was the original trigger, but the disaffected have added a laundry list of allegations to their agenda.

The electoral landscape isn’t easy to wrap your head around because the district includes four towns (Clarendon, Shrewsbury, Tinmouth and Wallingford) that independently elect board members. But the bottom line is this: The Congregation of the Aggrieved currently hold four of the eleven seats, and could potentially net another three on Town Meeting Day. That’d give them a solid majority.

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Dregs of the Ballot: Say, Did You Know That Sarah Fair George Is a Globalist Puppet?

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Oh, maaaan. I hear and read a lot of outlandish stuff while checking out the far-right zealots clogging up Town Meeting Day ballots around Vermont, but this one takes the cake.

According to the gent pictured above, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah Fair George “may have been funded by George Soros. I don’t know that for a fact, but she isn’t doing her job.”

Ah yes, the globalist conspiracy, dipping its toes into the Chittenden County justice system for who knows what nefarious purpose.

This man, who doesn’t know how to center himself on a Zoom call, is David Xavier Wallace, candidate for Winooski City Council, speaking at an online candidates’ forum earlier this week. Seriously, he spent almost the entire event looking downward.

I don’t know why he’s running for office in progressive, cosmopolitan Winooski, of all places. He’s got about as much chance of winning as David Foster Wallace.

Mr. X, as we might call him, makes no bones about his beliefs. But the voters of Winooski should know that he has a much subtler kindred spirit on the ballot: Chad Bushway, who loosely wears the cloak of Concerned Moderation but whose true colors show through from time to time. We’ll consider him in a moment. First, let’s hear more from David Xavier Wallace.

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We Have Another Contender for Worst School Board Member in Vermont

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Ladies and germs, allow me to introduce you to Stephanie Stoodley, very angry member of the Rutland City School Board. The image quality is horrible thanks to the worst streaming of a public meeting I’ve ever seen. But it fits her to a tee: Lacking focus, out of control, and kinda scary.

Thanks to her performance at a January 11 school board meeting, Stoodley has become a top contender for Worst School Board Member in Vermont. Essex-Westford’s Liz Cady remains the front-runner followed by Mill River’s Todd Fillmore, but Stoodley has the potential to out-yammer them all.

Stoodley was one of six trustees to vote in favor of restoring the high school’s old nickname “Raiders,” but she was the most obnoxious of them all. She repeatedly interrupted trustees on the other side, she had trouble getting out coherent sentences, she said the same buzzwords over and over, and she made it clear that she didn’t give a tinker’s damn for anyone’s opinion but her own.

Background: The previous board adopted “Ravens” after a lengthy process, on the grounds that “Raiders” and the arrowhead were offensive to Native Americans. In last March’s school board election, enough pro-Raider trustees were elected to create a one-vote majority in favor of racism. Stoodley is one of those new trustees.

The board’s action also clearly violated Robert’s Rules of Order, which the board had voted to follow in their meetings. The Rules only allow reconsideration of a past measure under certain circumstances (which didn’t apply here) and they don’t allow a measure that contradicts a previously adopted one. But pro-Raiders board chair Hurley Cavacas refused to consult Robert’s, and trustee Charlene Steward asserted that “semantics about Robert’s Rules have been suppressing our vote.” Yeah, they were not about to let “semantics” get in the way of bringing back the Raider name and arrowhead logo.

But let’s get back to Stoodley’s performance, which was miles beyond anyone else’s.

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