Vermont Secessionists Lose Big In 2014 Gubernatorial Race

While the 2014 election cycle in Vermont produced little in the way of candidates from the secessionist camp, what is most notable is how little Vermonters are buying into the secesher message.

Self-declared secessionists Peter Diamondstone, a longtime serial loser (20+), and three time loser Emily Peyton vied for last with a knot of three other losers at the bottom of the percentile poll. According to unofficial results 98% of Vermonters voted for someone other than the seceshers. Those that did vote for Diamondstone and Peyton likely did so for reasons other than secession. In Diamondstone's case it probably had more to do with his longstanding Marxist message, while with Peyton it likely had to do with her promises to giveaway land and homes and to coddle child molesters and murderers.

One can only hope that these two secessionists will listen to the voters and retire their fruitless campaigns for good.

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October Surprise?

I'd thought that the on again, off again secession supporter Emily Peyton, a 2014 Vermont gubernatorial aspirant, couldn't top her tone deaf solicitation of campaign support from "child molesters, murderers, violent criminals and other convicted felons" that I posted about back in June here but, in what can only be described as a self-inflicted October Surprise this month, Peyton points to a "recent mention" about her and her campaign at an anti-Semitic hate website called Veteran's Today. She provides a link to the article on the home page of her campaign website with no warning about the article being contained at a website that promotes whacked out conspiracy theories and Jew hatred, thus putting the reader one click away from such loony filth.

The article published earlier this month at VT is written by Mia Feroleto who has also been mounting a largely unsuccessful letter writing campaign on behalf of Peyton to various Vermont newspaper's Letters to the Editor pages here, here and here. A fourth letter from Feroleto here prompted this comment:

Comment to Reformer Letter
"emilypeyton=smellysatan" • a month ago
"sorry Mia but you don't know emily peyton aka smelly satan... she's been arrested for her racist assault against John Hughes, a really talented artist and musician..documented, she's also a woman who's campaign's are funded by her dad in Boston... he should be taken to task for allowing this to go on year after year year after year and the assault on ALL of us that comes with each election cycle. NPR is doing real JUSTICE by not giving a platform to her redundant and false rhetoric. It's total bs from a serial narcissist."

The publisher of Feroleto's Peyton piece is Veteran's Today's senior editor and chairman of the board, Gordon Duff, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, a 9/11 Truther, a promoter of Holocaust denialism and of the claim that Julian Assange's Wikileaks is an Israeli intelligence operation. The Southern Poverty Law Center has published an extensive report on Veteran's today that can be found here . Veteran's Today provides a publishing platform for a host of well known anti-Semites like Alan Sabrosky, Gilad Atzmon, Kevin Barrett, to name only a few. One VT contributor, J.B. Campbell, who believes that Jews control the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Army, wrote:

“Since Jews control every important aspect of our lives through banking, finance, law, war, food & drugs and entertainment, we are literally floating on a reservoir of truth blocked by a dam of lies… . The Jews have poisoned our minds for a long time, certainly for all the time that we’ve been alive.”

Peyton has indicated that this may be her last campaign but that she's willing to share her expertise incompetence with anyone stupid enough to buy into her platform. She'd even school that person on how to get campaign finance funding, something that she's been unable to do for her own campaign. Only a fool would take advice from her.

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Vermont Secessionists and Their Naive Student Contributors Are Now Pretending That The 2010 and 2012 Elections Never Happened

The secessionists in Vermont have taken a lot of hits over the years, and not just from me. From outright critiques by bloggers and freelancers to tongue in cheek assessments by MSM, the only "press" that has treated their "movement" as serious are propaganda outlets like Fox News, RT (Russian Television) and Iran's Holocaust denying PressTV. Vermont's local press has all but ignored the secesher movement's presence in this election cycle even though two statewide candidates, Peter Diamondstone and Emily Peyton, are on record as supporting Vermont seceding from the Union.

First, their troubles began nearly eight years ago when their ties to racists and homophobes were exposed here as well as on other blogs; their founder Thomas H. Naylor's predilection for doing interviews with Fox News scaremongers and a number of racists and Holocaust deniers was then exposed here. I'd warned that when they announced a "slate of candidates" in 2010 that I'd be keeping an eye on the group and eventually exposed a secret listserv where they plotted to take over Vermont government including a secret seditious attempt to reconstitute a long ago disbanded arm of government by appointing themselves and not using the electoral process that had originally staffed it; spouted all kinds of crazy, misogynistic bullshit on the secret listserv and hid the fact that their their primary out of state contributor was a Stromfront, Jew hating, neo-Nazi poster whose hatred of gays, blacks and women was easily discerned in his listserv contributions.. 99.24% of Vermonters voted for someone other than the secesher gubernatorial candidate while their legislative candidates faired just as poorly. The 2012 election proved to be just as bad for the seceshers, only with fewer seceshers willing to put their names forward for a drubbing.

This year two of the looniest candidates in the gubernatorial race, Peter Diamondstone and Emily Peyton, are secessionists. Peyton has tried to weasel her way out of her earlier statements made when she thought that there might be a secesher electoral wave that she might be able to ride on. Such a wave has never materialized. Today even the crazies (Diamondstone excluded) are seeing the problem with attaching oneself to the secesher faction.

Now comes Joe Humes, a St. Michael's college student and Vermont Public Television intern and bottle washer to give his take on last week's VPT gubernatorial debate. In an often confusing, written harangue published on the Second Vermont Republic hate site (sorry, I don't link to this hateful site), Hume, who served in a production role at the VPT sponsored debate, attacks virtually all the participants in one way or another.

In the oddly edited piece (presumably by the website's apparently sole remaining editor, Rob Williams) Humes ostensibly and falsely claims via a link to Buzzfeed that Vermont seceshers are gaining "traction."

"Good to see "secession" get some traction"

But if you follow the link to the Buzzfeed post the only mention of secession is a thoroughly disparaging reference to Diamondstone's nuttiness as it being one of the "7 reasons" why the debate was "one of the strangest debates this year.

"2. There was the time Liberty Union candidate Pete Diamondstone quoted Karl Marx to say if taxing the rich doesn’t work then Vermont should secede from the Union."

It doesn't get better. The Hume post then opines,

"But seriously, folks – what if a serious independent-minded candidate or slate ran on a Vermont independence platform? Hmmm…"

Now I don't know if that quote arises from his recent arrival from Connecticut and perhaps thus Hume's ignorance of the 2010 & 2012 elections or from a dishonesty that is a fundamental aspect of the SVR hate site, but such misrepresentation is a hallmark of the Vermont secesher movement and its website.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time bashing the stupidity of Hume's piece or the questionable ethics of a member of the debate production staff publishing such a commentary but I will point out something tangential; the gasbag editor of the SVR website, Williams, is a middlebrow adjunct faculty staff member at Burlington, VT's Champlain College who has a history of grooming students ignorant of Vermont politics to publish in some form or another at his hate site. In today's world that's an Internet history that'll prove to be impossible for the unsuspecting student to shake in later life because of the anti-Semitism of the the majority of the past contributors to the site.

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"I Am A Secessionist"

These words were spoken by the Liberty Union Vermont gubernatorial candidate Peter Diamondstone, a decades long serial electoral failure, at last night's Vermont Public Television cattle-call debate during his opening remarks. Apparently, according to Diamondstone, communistic, anti-capitalistic economic principles are the cure for what ails Vermont. How'd secessionism or communism work last time around, Pete?

VPT's debate, which hasn't been posted online yet, has come to be known as the one where the lunatic fringe gets to strut their stuff. Last night did not disappoint; it included a Duck Dynasty impersonator, another who claims disability status based on her STD and another secessionist by the name of Emily Peyton.

Must see TV, not.

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Vermont Secessionist Gubernatorial Candidate Emily Peyton Comes In Dead Last In Republican Primary

Although the results are still unofficial, it appears that the sometimes Vermont secesher candidate Emily Peyton finished in her usual last place dust up with another fringer, Steve Berry in the Republican primary. The current totals for Peyton and Berry are 941 or 6.55% and 991 or 6.9% respectively. An unknown write-in candidate, presumably Dan Feliciano beat their combined totals by 2014 or 14.3%. Republican scion Scott Milne coasted to an easy win with 10,410 or 72.51% of the votes cast.

So it appears that the albatross of secession once again holds true to its dragging its supporters down to a last place finish.

As a reminder of her true thoughts about secession, here is what Peyton said about it in August of 2010:

"We ought to do the groundwork before we secede. That is the basis of my platform, to prepare the foundation for economic survival and integrity, thus that we have legs to stand on when we wish to secede!"

"Of course we want to be an independent republic, what has being a member of the US done for us?. Brought us the pride of being the terror of the world? The dignity of creating the worst pollution per capita ? The joy of having more prisons and prisoners per capita than anywhere else? The hope of being the place where our gross national product is dominated by things that kill other people?"

"With economic stability that my proposals bring, and the economic independence we could actually secede. Right now we would be scrambling for a way to do business as the FED places sanctions on us for doing so. Put the [public] banking proposals I name in place and the VUE, vermont unit of exchange, and we can do quite well all by ourselves. People! Hear this! Please." Source

Pathetic.

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Perpetual Gubernatorial Wannabe Emily Peyton Backs Away From an Earlier Declared Position in Support of Vermont Seceding from the Union

In a stunning act of verbal and political legerdemain Republican primary candidate Emily Peyton seems to see the light, as in if you outright support Vermont seceding from the Union you are dooming your electoral campaign.

I'll get text up when it becomes available but in a direct question at the VPR gubernatorial primary debate from Vermont Republican Party scion Scott Milne, about whether she supported secession of Vermont, Peyton skated away from the question and eventual sorta answered by saying Vermonters could attain "financial independence" by signing onto her loopy monetary policies.

Here's what she did say, as reported by Seven Days in August of 2010, when the seceshers were in full but utterly fruitless campaign mode, and in her first run for governor she was trying to pander to every fringe voter demographic she could find that I covered in a post earlier this year here:

"We ought to do the groundwork before we secede. That is the basis of my platform, to prepare the foundation for economic survival and integrity, thus that we have legs to stand on when we wish to secede!"

"Of course we want to be an independent republic, what has being a member of the US done for us?. Brought us the pride of being the terror of the world? The dignity of creating the worst pollution per capita ? The joy of having more prisons and prisoners per capita than anywhere else? The hope of being the place where our gross national product is dominated by things that kill other people?"

"With economic stability that my proposals bring, and the economic independence we could actually secede. Right now we would be scrambling for a way to do business as the FED places sanctions on us for doing so. Put the [public] banking proposals I name in place and the VUE, vermont unit of exchange, and we can do quite well all by ourselves. People! Hear this! Please." Source

Text Update at 3:30 PM: +++ Redacted text from the 45+ minute VPR 2014 GOP gubernatorial primary debate first aired in the noon hour of Friday, August 22 +++

In a cross question segment between the candidates, Scott Milne prefaced a question about secession by asking Emily Peyton if her campaign platform had changed over the years. Peyton responded with a definite, "No." Ruh-Roh!

Milne then asked Peyton very directly at the 32:36 minute mark:

Scott Milne: "Emily, in the past you, I believe, advocated that Vermont should secede from the Union. Do you still believe that?"

Emily Peyton: "What I have said, (garble)... we need to get financial independence, uh,...

[SNIP... Here Peyton does the verbal politcal teaberry shuffle while explaining word-saladly an economic "vision"]

... with appropriate monetary policy we'd have the financial independence right now that we do not now, so that's what I have advocated for always."

'Nuff said. Or as Emily herself says, "You have to play the game so to speak." (8/19/14 Essex Republicans debate)

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Did The Fringe Just Birth Another Secessionist for the 2014 Vermont Gubernatorial Election?

Two months ago I described the announced secession supporters in this year's gubernatorial race, Peter Diamondstone (Liberty Union Party) and Emily Peyton, here. On Tuesday of this week CCTV in Burlington held a primary debate for the Republican aspirants - Dan Feliciano, a kinda Libertarian ; Emily Peyton (Wingnut-Putney), a secession supporter; and, Steve Berry, who apparently thinks that a vague likeness to Mark Twain, with only half the wit, will propel him to the governor's office and, oh yeah, maybe secession.

When the Vermont secesher ship of state foundered on the rocks of its close association with racist and homophobic hate groups, its leadership desperately sought a new descriptor for the re-branding of their movement, eventually settling on the term "independence." At the debate, amongst other his incoherencies like governing by fiat, Steve Berry said,

"I would surround myself with like-minded people who have a goal to bring back independence."

Apparently, the moderator failed to ask the others about their secesher positions when this opening cropped up so we'll just have to wait for another debate go around to see if the any others in the group will make a grab for the crazy ring.

This could get interesting.

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Vermont Secessionist Losers and Their Trail of Broken Political Promises and Bullshit

"Never give up, Never give in, Never surrender"
"Senator" Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner, November 13, 2012

With those words, two time loser for an Addison county Vermont state senate seat, closed his 2012 campaign, seemingly promising to rise again from its ashes to wage another fruitless campaign. He even immediately renamed his Facebook page, "Robert Wagner for Vermont Senate 2014" where on March 13, 2013 he wrote,

"I remain your candidate..."

Well, maybe not so much. That was the last thing he's posted on the matter. More than a year later, June's 2014 filing date for independent Senate candidates came and went with no petition submitted by Wagner. Even his "Senator Wagner" website has gone dark.

Likewise, Wagner's self-described "friend," the proudly misogynist and the inveterate anti-Semite at Rob Williams' hate blog, Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau, also failed to register for an independent run for a Rutland county Vermont Senate seat but he still has a 2014 campaign website. Go figure.

Morrisseau was the architect of plan to replace each and every one of Vermont's senate incumbents with secesher Kool-Aid drinkers. I guess that's now on hold too.

In a fashion similar to Wagner's, Vermont's 2010 secesher gubernatorial candidate Dennis Steele, while acknowledging that more than 99% of Vermonters voted for someone else, pledged,

"Today represents a beginning, not an end. When I agreed to take on the difficult and exhausting task of running for Governor as an independent this year, I did so with the hopes that my actions would serve to help lay the foundations for a robust, grass-roots movement that will carry the message of a Free Vermont forward. Towards that end, I’ve been collaborating with several supporters to found a democratic, state-wide organization. Dedicated to spreading the ideas of Vermont Independence, providing support for Independence-minded candidates for public office, and organizing volunteer activities that both serve our neighbors and help lessen our communities’ dependence on the Federal Government, it will serve as our movement’s new center and engine of growth. It will be organized by county, and I encourage anyone who supported my campaign to get involved in their county committee."

And since then no one has heard shit from Dennis Steele. According to one published report, it indicates that he's presently engaged in peddling an addictive and possibly carcinogenic substance in the NEK. So much for "serv(ing)... neighbors" and reducing "dependence," eh?

After their miserable showing in 2010, the seceshers declared their "independence" and established a provisional capital in the sparsely populated central Vermont town of Hancock. Most of the VT secesher movement's luminaries attended the convening session of their, uh, congress - their hate blog publisher, Rob; Gary "The Rocket Scientist and Public Bankster" Flomenhoft; Matt "Never Won An Election Yet" Cropp; you know, the usual suspects.

A promised run by a Fairfax, VT secesher insider has also failed to materialize. Secesher outliers like "Terry" Jeroloman, Gus Jaccaci, James Merriman and Gaelan "Aliens-NASA Conspiracy on the Dark Side of the Moon" Brown are again sitting this election cycle out.

The fact is that the only secession supporters left running are kooks like Ben Eastwood, Emily Peyton and Peter Diamondstone (who raised secession in a debate with Bernie Sanders in 2012), and there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that any one of them will eke out more than a low single or fractional digit electoral result.

It's beginning to look more and more like Thomas Naylor's dream of an independent white homeland called the Second Vermont Republic or Novacadia or some such nonsense, is nearly as dead as he is.

"Ex nihilo, in nihilum"

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Two Secessionists Are Running for the Vermont Governor's Office This Year

If you've been following race, then you must be a blogger. In the real world, nobody much cares at this point. I've already posted about Emily Peyton's incoherent campaign which relies on child molesters, murderers and assorted convicted and incarcerated (out-of-state) felons for campaign work; that on its face doesn't seem to very bright, optics-wise. You can read that post here.

Now comes the Liberty Union's perennial loser (22 times, I believe he's said), Peter Diamondstone, for yet another shellacking. In an at times confused, incoherent, muddled and just plain irrational interview on VPR This evening, Diamondstone cites as his number one issue in this year's gubernatorial race is to be - drumroll - secession. He wants to carry on the failures of the still dead Thomas Naylor and his handpicked gubernatorial loser, Connecticut native, Dennis Steele. That shouldn't be a hard record to match given his own string of unbroken failures

In what promises to be a hard fought battle as to who can get the fewest votes - last time in 2012, Diamondstone got a whooping 0.9%, meaning that more than 99% of the Vermont electorate voted for someone other than Diamondstone.

No doubt there's a bitter fight going on between the Diamondstone-Peyton campaigns over who's going to get the benefit of the secesher political oligarch, Rob Williams' savvy boneheaded campaign insights. When it rains idiots running as secesher candidates, it pours'em, eh, Robster?

I really don't know whether to laugh or throw up. Either's appropriate in the case of these two secesher losers. You'd think they might have pooled, rather than split what little support that there is for secession in Vermont by running on a complimentary ticket - you know, guv and lite guv. Must be too complicated a calculation for this secesher brain trust.

Dennis Steele still has time to get in on the action as a write-in loser.

Quel plaisir!

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Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

Emily Peyton, a longtime secession and public bank backer has now sought support from and affiliates her campaign with the worst of the worst - child molesters, murderers, violent criminals and other assorted convicted felons.

I'll deal with the secession stuff first.

In August of 2010, during her premier, disastrous gubernatorial campaign where she eventually garnered a whooping whole quarter of one percent of the votes cast, Peyton commented in a Seven Days article,

"We ought to do the groundwork before we secede. That is the basis of my platform, to prepare the foundation for economic survival and integrity, thus that we have legs to stand on when we wish to secede!"

"Of course we want to be an independent republic, what has being a member of the US done for us ? Brought us the pride of being the terror of the world? The dignity of creating the worst pollution per capita ? The joy of having more prisons and prisoners per capita than anywhere else? The hope of being the place where our gross national product is dominated by things that kill other people?"

"With economic stability that my proposals bring, and the economic independence we could actually secede. Right now we would be scrambling for a way to do business as the FED places sanctions on us for doing so. Put the [public] banking proposals I name in place and the VUE, vermont unit of exchange, and we can do quite well all by ourselves. People ! Hear this! Please."
Source

For years now, Emily Peyton has been at the helm of a boatload of batshit crazy proposals like Vermont secession but this report from Vermont Public Radio confirms the worst of it. It seems that Peyton, who on a good day polls in the single digit percentile or less, is so bereft of supporters here in Vermont that she has taken a very dark turn and has encouraged a letter writing campaign from prisoners at Vermont's out-of-state prison facility in Beattyville, KY aimed at Vermont newsrooms. What is she seeking to unleash? Prisoners who have no access to local programming are demanding coverage for Peyton and her whacky views, one of which is that rather than incarceration for non-violent prisoners, Vermont should give them free land to farm! Giving the miscreants 3-4 acres to farm will do far more to rehabilitate them than letting the Court direct the remedy, be it incarceration, a drug court, probation with conditions like not drinking or getting a job, etc, according to Peyton. Welcome to Peytopia for criminals! Maybe I'll repeatedly drive drunk, burglarize a few empty residences, embezzle funds from a corporation or two and bounce some checks, and then ask for my 4 acres in Woodstock or some lakefront in Charlotte! Ka-ching!

The reported leader of her gray bar outreach campaign is an admitted child molester whose conviction Peyton calls "questionable." The undisputed, unquestionable facts of his case are that this monster:

• First admitted to sexually molesting his stepdaughter in 2002 when she was five or six years old.
• Self reported his crime to an agent of the Vermont Department of Children & Families in May of 2006.
• The next day admitted to officers of Burlington PD's Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations that he had sexually molested his stepdaughter four years earlier.
• Pled guilty to two counts of molesting his stepdaughter in November of 2007.
• Six weeks later, in January, 2008, the child molester tried to back out of his guilty plea wherein he had escaped additional charges including possession of child pornography and obstruction of justice.
• In a December 2013 appeal decision related to the child molester's case a three judge panel of the Vermont Supreme Court issued yet another smack down of his repeated collateral attacks regarding his conviction.
• The child molester agent for Peyton's campaign in the gang riddled Beattyville, KY prison has unsuccessfully sought in US District Court (Vermont) in 2009 to thwart the Department of Corrections from properly supervising computer access by prisoners, and has recently filed a new collateral attack in the same court. Also, he made a premature application for relief from the same court awhile ago which got kicked back. He refiled something like it in April of this year (pro se, of course) after the Vermont Supreme Court shot him down, arguing 1) that he was denied the right to a speedy trial, 2) had ineffective assistance of counsel (he acted pro se after repeatedly firing his court appointed lawyers, fer crissakes!), 3) involuntary guilty plea, and 4) insufficient evidence to sustain the prospect for conviction (like the self reporting to a child protection agency and the subsequent confession to police investigators should be ignored at this time). Anyone want to make a bet at this point? If not on the likelihood that he'll get denied, then on the likelihood that he'll appeal the denial to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit? No? Don't blame ya.

I won't be mentioning the scumbag's name since, like school shooters and mass murderers, this guy craves attention. He had a website which later was shutdown, only to reemerge when he began trolling for support in the pen for Peyton - and, no, I'm also never going to link to any of his weasley, justifying, word salad ramblings because this dirtbag has gone so far as to further his abuse of his stepdaughter by repeatedly publishing her full name and where she now lives, and, perhaps most reprehensibly, published the graphic details of her forensic pediatric clinical examination along with his commentary about her genitals on his blog.

You can read Peyton's long-winded and tortuous March 25, 2014 letter to this scumbag here.

The only thing questionable here is why a candidate for governor of the State of Vermont who has done so poorly in her two previous tries would chuck her dignity to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for support from an admitted and convicted child molester, among numerous other felons. Has she no shame?

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