Tag Archives: Vermont Stands Up

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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Masking Is Becoming a Rarity, But Mask Panic Is Still a Thing

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Oh boy. Mark your calendars and get your popcorn ready. The anti-maskers are coming to Burlington!

Yeah, not sure what they’re so upset about. The city’s indoor mask mandate expired more than a year ago, and masking is rapidly becoming a fringe activity. I’m still being cautious, but I recently attended an indoor event and was the only person to wear a mask in an crowd of about 30.

But anyway, here it comes, “The Vermont Emergency Forum to Assess the Respiratory Hazards of Masks” on Friday, May 12 in the Contois Auditorium. You could probably guess who’s behind it, but I won’t keep you in suspense. The sponsors are the Vermont Institute for Human Flourishing, the nonprofit plaything of conservative megadonor Lenore Broughton and her new bestie, former VTGOP chair Deb Billado, and Vermont Stands Up, a wannabe statewide organization of the anti-mask, anti-vax crowd.

And then there’s the “facilitator” of the all-day event: “Dr.” Rob WIlliams, once best known for the Second Vermont Republic organization that was once kinda respectable on the left but turned out to be Confederate-adjacent at the very least, and now host of “V-TV,’ an online interview show that’s been booted from YouTube but can still be seen on Vimeo if you must.

Oh, and you’ll also get the chance to bump elbows with the Desautels Family, who’ll be getting a “BREATHING CHAMPIONS AWARD” (caps theirs). Paterfamilias Mike Desautels, you may recall, was stripped of his UPS Store franchise in 2021 for refusing to abide by the state’s indoor mask mandate.

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Joe Benning Shows Up in Surprising Company

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Note: Sen. Benning has weighed in with a comment. It’s in the Comments, but I’ve also added it to the end of this post.

So there’s this right-wing fringe organization called Vermont Stands Up which you’ve probably never heard of, and neither did I until a couple days ago. It’s a freedom-lovin’, vaccine-hatin’, government-shrinkin’, gang o’ rascals who say the most pressing issues facing Vermont are “the COVID crisis of the past two years, the ensuing mandates, sanctioned discrimination against the unvaccinated, and threats to informed consent and bodily autonomy.” I’m sure we all agree.

VSU also promises “to provide authoritative resources, guidance, and outlets of support for community action.” We’ll get to their idea of “authoritative resources” shortly, and you won’t want to miss it, but first…

The organization’s website has a page called Freedom Champions. It’s a long list of approved candidates. Many of these Champions have appeared in my “stealth conservative” list and others await their time in the spotlight. John Klar is on the list, naturally. Stephen Bellows, 9/11 truther and graphene eradicator. Lynn and Lloyd Dike, two of the rabid clan of Republican candidates in Addison County. Rebecca Pitre, who sees Drag Queen Story Hour as “an atrocity.” Rob North, who says we could end Lake Champlain pollution by unleashing the farmers. Nichole Loati, who believes the housing crisis could be solved by unleashing the landlords. To name just a few.

And there, right in the middle of this list of VSU-approved candidates, is Sen. Joe Benning, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor who’s often referred to in the press as a moderate. Not true; he’s very conservative, but he’s not a nut.

So how is it that he appears on this list of Vermont Stands Up-approved Freedom Champions? It can’t be just because he opposes mandatory motorcycle helmets.

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