Tag Archives: Dr. Rob Williams

Another Event I Won’t Be Attending

Mark your calendars and then make other plans! This is the weekend of Libertystock, a Gathering of the Disaffected on a farm in Cabot which I like to think of as Klar-a-palooza. Libertystock’s market positioning is nicely encapsulated in the above T-shirt: an ultraconservative slash Libertarian message in alt-culture clothing.

It sounds like a downright tedious event. And it’s emblematic of the central problem of the far right in these parts: Way too many aspirational chiefs, nowhere near enough Indians, if you’ll pardon the dated turn of phrase. If you go a-Googling for conservative organizations in Vermont, it’s downright amazing how many you can find. All of them are starved for membership.

Anyway, Libertystock includes speakers, musicians, performers, and vendors in what its website describes as “an amazing event in a beautiful location” that will almost certainly draw an embarrassingly small audience. Probably more than VT Grassroots’ recent “modest but impassioned crowd of 25,” but I’d say there’s a very good chance that the performers, speakers and vendors will outnumber the actual attendees.

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The Great Mask Panic Traveling Road Show

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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