Tag Archives: Vermont Mask Survey

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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All the Rabbit Holes

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I think this is the point where the far left and the far right come together. Or at least try to.

The above cacophony of colors and fonts is making the rounds on social media. No indication of creator or sponsor; “Vermonters Against Unconst. Lock-downs & Tyranny” is either brand new or fictitious. A Google search produces no matches. Dive down this rabbit hole at your own risk.

The Burlington “flash mob” event follows a rally at the Statehouse this past Saturday which, by my count, attracted maybe 30 people. I wasn’t there, but a participant uploaded a nine-minute video of the rally on BitChute, a “free speech” alternative to YouTube that’s welcomed many who’ve been banned by mainstream social media sites, including shouty conspiratorialist Alex Jones. The video plays under the headline, “Covid is a Fraud and We Know It.”

The speakers at the Montpelier event included Newport print shop owner Mike Desautels, who has lost his UPS affiliation and his court battle against the state’s mask mandate. (The video’s narrator claimed that Desautels is $15,000 in the hole for legal fees, and pleaded for donations to Desautels’ GoFundMe page.)

Another speaker was Shylo Bourdeau, co-owner of a farm in Lowell. The video includes a short passage from her speech, which I transcribed to the best of my ability.

They can’t stop us by convention in this oath of office allegiance. And the importance of as established by convention in this oath is them swearing to uphold the Constitution as established by convention for we, the people, was removed. So who are they swearing to? Who are they holding their allegiance to, with that removed?

Your guess is a good as mine. At that point, someone in the audience helpfully shouted “Rothschilds,” so there’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion George Soros World Jewish Conspiracy which funded the creation of coronavirus in a Chinese lab, I guess?

After the jump: All the rabbit holes in one convenient location!

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The Anti-Maskers Emerge

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Spotted on a Montpelier bulletin board

It was inevitable, but it’s still disappointing.

“Citizen scientists.” Really.

Impartial seekers of the truth, putting out a one-sided “survey” in a transparent effort to gin up some “evidence” to support their preconceived notion. This is, must I say it, a disgrace.

And to judge from the rhetoric and approach, I’ll bet you a shiny new quarter that the Venn Diagram of “Mask Survey” and “Anti-Vaxxers” is a single circle.

But I have to credit the bravery of the “citizen scientists” behind this flyer. They’re right up front owning their beliefs and accepting the conseq— oh wait, sorry. They actually provide no identifying information or means of two-way contact; only a gmail address and, on its website, a P.O. box in Marshfield.

Nowhere on flyer or website do they cite any of the “research” that “shows there are likely to be disadvantages” to wearing masks. I like the qualifiers: “likely” meaning “fuzzy and unproven,” “disadvantages” in place of “hazards” or “dangers.” In plain English, “undisclosed research that shows a possibility of inconveniences in wearing masks.”

Of course there are “disadvantages.” Masks are a little annoying, they make my glasses fog up, people can’t see your facial expressions, it is a little harder to communicate. The rest of it is bullshit of a particular type — the conspiracy-minded worried-well contingent that makes up most of the anti-vaxxer movement.

And now they’re coming after masks.

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