Snake Oil, Vermont Secesher Style

Some of you may remember the imbecile who ran as the failed Vermont secession gubernatorial candidate of the Second Vermont Republic back in 2010, Dennis Steele (more than 99% of Vermonters voted for someone other than Steele). Being the sharp political strategist (not) that he was, he used imagery in his campaign honoring the admitted murderer Che Guevara.

Well, he's back as a distributor of an addictive product, nicotine laced e-cigarettes whose marketing has been roundly condemned by the Vermont Health Department . And he wants a state subsidy for his nicotine peddling. Here's what he had to say to WCAX:

"In my opinion they (the state) should subsidize what we are doing or just leave us alone (by not taxing e-cigarettes like tobacco products) and let us help people get off the analog or combustible cigarettes (emphasis mine).

Yet at his NEK Vapor website Steele emphatically states in his FAQs:

Will I be able to quit smoking using the e-cig?

"The electronic cigarette is an alternative to smoking and is not a smoking cessation device. Some people have quit smoking using the electronic cigarette but we make no such claims as to effectiveness for that purpose and e-cigs are not sold for that purpose."

Really? Which is it, Dennis? Talking out of both sides of your mouth is a common failing of most secessionists. If it's bad for Vermonters - secession, imagery of an admitted murderer (which he continued to distribute after his campaign said he was dropping the Che crap), or an addictive nicotine product - Steele's right there to peddle it to you.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

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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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.