Tag Archives: Ethan Lawrence

Dregs of the Ballot: Stealth Candidates

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Let’s start here. Everyone has the right to run for elective office. But if you run, you ought to be honest about who you are and what you believe.

But there’s a movement among adherents of QAnon conspiracy theories to run for local office while concealing their extreme ideologies. And some of it is happening right here in Vermont. Voters need to watch for the warning signs of a stealth candidacy, and news media need to be more diligent in their often formulaic coverage of local elections.

The biggest tell that you’ve got a QAnon type running for school board or select board is a complete absence of any policy positions. Instead, the candidate emphasizes family, community ties and activities.

Take, for example, Ingrid Lepley of Tinmouth. In a social media announcement of her candidacy for the Mill River Unified Union School Board, she wrote paragraph after paragraph about her participation in numerous community activities while saying little to nothing about education policy. She offered a couple of bromides about loving her community and the local schools, and hoping they “continue to grow and do well.”

Meanwhile, she reportedly ran an online jewelry design business that featured numerous pieces that seemed to signal QAnon adherence. She used coded phrases and symbols from the QAnon lexicon. And some of her customers specifically praised her for selling QAnon jewelry. She has apparently scrubbed her site of the more overtly coded pieces, but there are still large quantities of “Q” and rabbit designs. (“Follow the white rabbit” is one of Q’s dog-whistle slogans.)

After the jump: Advice for the news media.

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Dregs of the Ballot: Ethan Lawrence, Stealth Conspiratorialist

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People of Essex, be forewarned. The man who uses this as his social media image is Ethan Lawrence, candidate for Selectboard. In fact, Ethan Lawrence is the only name on the ballot for the office he seeks. But he’d be such a disaster that town Democratic Party chair Brian Shelden has stepped forward as a write-in candidate in hopes of derailing Lawrence’s bid for office.

Lawrence is an anti-vaxxer, anti-masker, and angry despiser of all things liberal. But he’s presenting himself as a thoughtful moderate in hopes of sneaking into office as Liz Cady did last year in her bid for Essex-Westford school board. Now, Lawrence has every right to be a candidate, but the voters deserve to be informed about his views and his character.

Until very recently, Lawrence maintained a lively, vulgar, conspiratorialist presence on social media. Now that he’s presenting as a moderate, he’s tried to hide his tracks. But hey, this is why God invented screenshots. Here’s a pretty typical example.

We’ve got more, and worse… after the jump.

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