You could be forgiven if you’re confused about whether Gerald Malloy’s Twitter feed is a maladroit attempt to articulate his views or a piece of anarchic performance art. Lately, the unsuccessful 2022 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has been deploying a mish-mash of anodyne observations and conservative talking points with plenty of ALL CAPS thrown in for good measure.

We’ll run down some of the more entertaining examples, but first I must address the above Tweet, which prompted me to write this post. Malloy posits the late musician/composer/activist Clifford Thornton as an exemplar of THE AMERICAN DREAM, I guess? Based solely, it would seem, on the fact that Thornton titled his first album Freedom & Unity. I seriously doubt that Thornton had Vermont in mind when he made that record, and I suspect that if he knew he was being championed by Gerald Malloy, he’d be spinning in his grave.

The real Clifford Thornton was a practitioner of free jazz, the radical mix of cutting-edge art that cared not for melody or harmony or traditional structure. He was associated with avant-garde greats like Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Anthony Braxton. A critic wrote that Freedom & Unity was “a natural extension of the music of Ornette Coleman.” There is precisely zero chance that Malloy has actually listened to any of Thornton’s music.

But that’s not the weird slash ironic part.

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