As The Second Vermont Republic Sputters to Its End...

... apparently the new plan to attain relevance in our time by the secesher brain trust is a concerted anti-Bernie Sanders campaign by Vermont's flailing secessionists.

The publisher of SVR's hate blog, Rob Williams, points us to this piece by longtime secesher flack, Bill Kauffman, as though it isn't a piece of transparent, partisan "analysis." Kauffman "analysis" relies entirely on the musings of, at one time or another, three of Vermont's best known crackpots. (I've written before about Kauffman here. Kauffman is also a contributor to the notoriously anti-Semitic, neo-Confederate and racist Chronicles magazine. Williams suggests to us that he has a relationship with Bernie - that's a laugh since Bernie has a short fuse around assholes like Williams. Although he is well aware about his Dixie singing founder of SVR, the quite dead Thomas H. Naylor,, Kauffman never discloses what he also knows about the SVR-Williams'-Naylor's many, many ties to racists and homophobes like the declared anti-Semites and racist League of the South, delegates from the racist Southern National Congress, and Williams past publication of the ravings of racist UVM prof. Robert S. Griffin, anti-Semites like Carol Moore and Dennis Morrisseau (too name only two of his Jew loathers), the racist LoSer board of director and convicted felon Franklin Sanders (no relation to Bernie), as well as the particularly nasty homophobes at South Carolina's Christian Exodus who Rob invited to Vermont because they like him.

In short, with no successes that he in the more than ten years that he's been fluffing the secesher hog - a failed publication; a rejected distribution deal; the goal of distribution throughout Vermont never even came close; although he promised them in all towns there has been no meaningful effort to get Vermonters to vote for secession at town meetings; despite his saying seceshers would be in the legislature and proposing legislative articles of secession by 2015, no secesher has come even remotely close to something exceeding a single digit showing when people knew it was a dyed in the wool secessionist running - Williams is now apparently orchestrating anti-Bernie campaign aided by a tiny group of usual suspects (former Bernie friends and/or allies Peter Diamondstone, Greg Guma, Robin Lloyd, Ben Dangle, to name just a few - all seceshers and lifelong losers.

The biggest laugh I got from the piece is that Williams might possibly believe that Bernie Sanders might see him as something better than (as in advisor) the neo-Confederate, anti-Semitic, racist enabler that he is. Next time you see him remember that Bernie sees you for exactly what you are.

"... support for the Pentagon’s F-35 Burlington-based joint strike fighter baffles and infuriates me. I find his cozying up to Lockheed and Sandia Labs perplexing, and his support for Israel maddening.”

“Bernie knows I am a secessionist,” says Williams. “I have often suggested he run for president of the 2nd Vermont Republic. I’m not sure he appreciates this.”

Right, Rob. Anyone is bound to be sweeped away by the pleadings of a neo-Confederate, racist and anti-Semitic enabler rather than the platform for the presidency. Williams really is a completely delusional, narcissistic asshole, and Bernie knows it. What Williams didn't say was that more than five years ago Thomas Naylor sought to get Bernie to run as the secesher gubernatorial candidate but who they eventually got to stick his neck out was Dennis Steele, a bad caricature of the Brawny Towel Guy. Although conventional wisdom has long held that Bernie hasn't a chance in the Democratic 2016 primary, the seceshers own track record for failure may push Bernie over the top. Wouldn't that be a trip?

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Are anti-Marriage Equality Activists Preparing to Resort to Secession?

A few days ago Christianist windbag and conspiracist nutter Joseph Farah, publisher of the evangelical online hatesite called World Net Daily proposed exactly that but is apparently ignorant of the fact that Christian haters have tried that before.

A little more than ten years ago Cory Burnell, a failed member of the leadership of the Texas branch of the racist League of the South, proposed that Christians from across the country emigrate in 12,000 member waves to the State of South Carolina where they'd eventually takeover the various legislative districts. Well, Corey failed miserably but not before getting an invite to visit Vermont by Second Vermont Republic's own Rob Williams where Burnell condemned "sodomite marriage" to Vermont's seceshers. To date, Vermont's seceshers still consider same-sex marriage to be an unsettled issue in Vermont.

Here's what Farrah said,

Does Same Sex Marriage Warrant Secession?

"I know there are millions of Christians, Jews and others who would pull up stakes and move to another country that honored the institution of marriage as it was designed by God – a union between one man and one woman.

As Jesus said it: 'For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.'

Is there one state in 50 that would not only defy the coming abomination, but secede in response? The rewards could be great. I would certainly consider relocating. How about you?

The founders of this country found a place of refuge in America and shaped it into the greatest self-governing nation in the history of world. Just think what one state could do if it simply stuck to the principles that made this country great? Americans wouldn’t have to cross an ocean to rediscover what brought most of our ancestors here. We could simply drive.

Are any states so inclined?

I haven’t heard this question raised by anyone else. So I’m raising it now. We don’t have much time before the nine high priests in black robes decide to follow Baal instead of the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We need a Promised Land. We need an Exodus strategy.

[snip]

"Are there any governors or legislatures out there among the 50 states willing secede to offer a refuge for the God-fearing?"

Various forms of this misbegotten scheme have been tried before by the likes of Burnell and Jason Sorens' failed New Hampshire Free State Project. The idea always fails because of the huge cost attached to uprooting 10s of thousands of disgruntled religionists and other true believers - it's simple economics. The bucks trump the hate.

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Will He or Won't He?

Back in February I challenged Vermont's last secessionist, the failed publisher of the defunct secesher propaganda rag Vermont Commons, Rob Williams, to once and for all renounce his ties to the racist and anti-Semitic hate group known as the League of the South after the LoS announced its plans to celebrate the murder of Abraham Lincoln by the deranged secessionist John Wilkes Booth here. This came after LoS's ironfisted leader, Michael Hill, organized a guerrilla group that he called "The Indomitables" and had directed his members to arm themselves with a variety of weapons including train derailers!

Here we are three months later and all we've gotten from Williams is crickets but not so at LoS. Now comes the revelation by the Southern Poverty Law Center that, not unlike the SVR super hyper secret listers of 2009-2010 that this blog exposed, the LoS had a members only secret Facebook page where like the SVR group they could chat about Jews, pesky women, homosex, miscegenation and "tribes." Here's the SPLC story.

So, with a fresh revelation of racist and anti-Semitic chat by his supposed allies at LoS the question remains, will Rob Williams ever distance himself from his bigoted friends at the League of the South or are we to assume that he approves since they, like he, are seceshers?

I think we know the answer.

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Vermont State Police Report neo-Nazi Graffiti In Charlotte, VT

In a press release yesterday the Vermont State Police reported an incident involving neo-Nazi graffiti at the old Charlotte, VT train station. Their press release reads, in part:

SUMMARY OF INCIDENT: On this date and time VT State Police Williston received a vandalism complaint from VTrans (Vermont Transportation Agency). They received a report of graffiti vandalism at this location. A trooper responded and noted a significant amount of graffiti painted on the structure, to include but not limited to swastikas, anti-Semitic and racist statements.

Charlotte, home to Vermont's 1%, was the longtime community of residence of the now dead founder of the Second Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor. Naylor was a raving anti-Semite with strong ties to the Holocaust denial community that includes Iran's propaganda arm, PressTV, as well James Edwards notoriously racist and anti-Semitic program called The Political Cesspool. Edwards is also a figure of importance at the racist League of the South where, when he lived, Naylor maintained ties for many years. Interestingly, before he died Naylor conspired with Canadian neo-Nazi, Sebastian Ernst Ronin, to create a "white homeland" in northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes.

Perhaps the Charlotte graffiti holds a deeper meaning; that is, an act meant to honor a past resident who harbored such sentiments.

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Second Vermont Republic Co-founder, Kirkpatrick Sale, Throws A Hissy Fit Over The "Clout" of Uppity Gays

In a recent op-ed published by the Charleston, SC Post Courier Second Vermont Republic co-founder and editor at large for its defunct print publication VT Commons, as well as a raging anti-Semite who argues that the State of Israel should be "undone," gets his panties in a knot over the successes of the gay rights movement. That's easy to understand given that it's coming from a committed and vastly unsuccessful secessionist, as well as a past South Carolina delegate to the racist, neo-Confederate Southern National Congress, long affiliated with the Southern secessionist hate group, the League of the South which shares his obsession about gay marriage.

Besides not seeming to know much about cultural matters, how law suits develop, how politicians evolve in tandem with the American body politic and a host of other questions, Sale seems truly ignorant when it comes to the nature of progress. Unsurprisingly, Sale is little troubled by the state of Indiana's effort to institutionalize discrimination, bullying, and disparate treatment.

There's a lot in Sale's op-ed to criticize but his opening crap about Indiana's overtly discriminatory "Religious Freedom" act as "innocent" perhaps says more about Sale's crackpot biases than I ever can. He also erroneously states that boycotts were threatened; fact is, business voted with its feet as did our own State of Vermont in discouraging travel and business to Indiana that would make their employees, state or otherwise, second class visitors.

Perhaps if Sale and his ilk hadn't so profoundly ineffective in their own secessionist endeavors he wouldn't have felt so moved to pen this lame op-ed:

How Did Gay Power Get Such Clout?
by Kirkpatrick Sale
Apr 11 2015

The recent flap over an innocent law in Indiana protecting religious rights got taken, even before the ink was cold, to be an attack on homosexuals, particularly same-sex marriages, and quickly drew national attention. A powerful gay-rights lobby went into immediate and high-powered action, threatening boycotts and protests, and it didn’t take days before the law was amended.

How did this lobby develop such power, with instant media and political clout, and how is it able to cow elected officials so effectively?

Well, it’s not because it represents a significant part of the American population. In fact, a recent poll by Gallup published in The New York Times estimates that there are only approximately 3 million homosexual men in the cities of the United States, a finding that comports well with previous studies. Perhaps the most comprehensive one was by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using 2013 census data, which estimated 1.6 per cent of the population as lesbian or gay, and roughly 0.7 per cent as bisexual. What all that means is that a tiny percentage of the American population is not straight heterosexual — say, 2 percent, or 6.2 million people.

My question is: why do they have so much influence in American society, politics and culture? Why is the dispute over same-sex marriage front-page news and the source of multiple lawsuits? Why are there now gay characters peppered throughout television series and openly gay sexual acts depicted, and even whole series given over to homosexual and lesbian themes? Why did Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State put forth gay rights — actually the whole gamut, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender — as an important American cause?

I have no objection to seeing homosexuals enjoy equal rights and establish a place in our culture. What I am asking is how did such a tiny percentage of the public get to have such sway over American life, when comparable minorities, at least in terms of numbers, have nothing like that influence.

There are nearly 15 million Asians in the United States, but do we see them massing for their rights and demanding that there be Asians on TV shows, or even whole networks devoted to their cause? Do the Polish-Americans, said to be some 9 million people, ask for Polish characters and Polish themes in movies, and measure, with full media attention, how many Polish characters there are on ABC Family and Fox? Are the 6 million American Jews boycotting stores that sell pork?

American Indians, who by any measure deserve some primary place in our national conscience, number a little over 5 million people, just under 2 percent. Every so often, mostly around Columbus Day, you hear something about activists asking for more Indians in Hollywood films (or at least real Indians playing Indian parts). But for at least 40 years, American tribes have been owed something like $3.2 billion that the American government has earned from mineral and other extractions from Indian lands, and while there have been Indian protests and lawsuits, it has remained an invisible issue for most Americans. And even the scandal of the Bureau of Indian Affairs losing $2 billion of that money and not being able to find it has not caused any national attention. And remember, these are the people against whom we committed genocide.

I suppose it could be said that it is the fault of these people for not organizing, not learning how to control the media, not sufficiently proving that their rights have somehow been violated. The homosexual community, especially after Stonewall and in the face of AIDS, was a masterful example of how to achieve all of that, and it took plenty of hard work, devotion, money and skill to do it.

But there’s something more than that. Indians, after all, have organized, have protested, have sued, and their moral claim is the highest of all, yet their collective political and media power is minuscule. There is something more in the homosexual cause that seems to get to American hearts and minds and make their claims to equal anti-discrimination protection legitimate. Something that even convinces more and more Americans that the bizarre idea of marriage between two people of the same sex, which for most of human history was not only not proposed but for the most part not even thought of, is not only legal but morally uplifting. There is something more playing at the American psyche that has seen gay marriage gain public support faster than any other social cause I can think of in the last 50 years.

I am not, alas, able to identify that “something more” with any precision. My initial instinct is to say that it has to do with the victory in America’s cultural wars of the academic skullduggery known as political correctness. Once everything is judged by p.c. standards, all minorities, no matter how small or what their characteristics, must be accorded equality, and if they have been denied that for a long time their case is especially strong. And that matters most in the area of sex and gender, an area that Americans are uneasy about in the first place. Hence the cause of homosexuality, and the attendant unusual gender orientations, has come to the American psychic, and thus political, fore.

Kirkpatrick Sale lives in Mount Pleasant, SC.

Charlestonians respond here and here.

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There's A New Hate Group In Town

And given the current baas of the Second Vermont Republic's very low bar for who he'll work with in pursuit of secession I think that Burlington VT's Champlain College adjunct staffer, Rob Williams, is gonna find this to be a match made in heaven. The Middlebury, VT based Creativity Alliance hates Jews, "coloreds," "niggers," race mixing and mestizos. Williams has long worked with and supported important neo-Confederate figures in the racist and anti-Semitic League of the South like Michael Hill, Franklin Sanders and Donald Livingston, so working with the Rev. Pat Tracy of the neo-Nazi Creativity Alliance should be an easy fit.

The Spring 2015 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the neo-Nazi Creativity Alliance as located in Middlebury, VT on their national hate map here. The contact information for the North American liaison for the Creativity Alliance's Reverend Pat Tracy, PO Box 1006, Middlebury, VT 05753 northamerica@creativityalliance.com can be found on pg. 4 of their handbook here. Their very particular and extremely racist and anti-Semitic membership requirements and obligations can be found on pages 7-10 of the handbook. The average, present day SVR member should fit in quite nicely.

Coincidentally, Middlebury, VT is also the original home to SVR co-founder Kirkpatrick Sale's racist enabling and anti-Semitic Middlebury Institute.

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Liar, Liar, Carol Moore's Anti-Semitic Pants (Sweats Really) On Fire!

Every so often I take a gander at the Second Vermont Republic's favorite misandrist, transphobic and anti-Semitic hate blogger's DC based website, The Carol Moore Report for a taste of whats au courant among Jew loathers. Carol never disappoints.

In a phallus festooned post (NSFW) Moore once again promotes the anti-Semitic exaggeration that Jews control Congress and the likely presidential candidates. Here's a taste:

"Look at Congress applauding their true leader (Benjamin Netanyahu), the one who is willing to destroy America if it's good for Israel; and makes sure they know they are out of office if they don't support him. (Perhaps Carol can point us to the precise area in Netanyahu's speech where he says that) I wonder how many non-attending Democrats will face stiff electoral challenges supported by Israel-directed money machines for boycotting his speech."

I strongly doubt that either Bernie Sanders or Pat Leahy are exactly quaking in their boots over such a supposed threat. I'd defy Carol to show us proof when 2016 rolls around of her cocksure prediction of even one Democratic boycotter getting such treatment from the "Jewish cabal." I'll remind her when the time comes to provide evidence of such nefarious contributions from Jewish or Israeli "money machines."

'Course, Carol goes on to anoint Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas billionaire casino owner and Jew to be the ultimate Republican Party King maker. Putting the lie to Moore's racist premise was this piece from a year ago in the Washington Post:

"Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife plowed more than $92 million into efforts to help mostly losing candidates in the 2012 elections, is undertaking a new strategy for 2016 — to tap his fortune on behalf of a more mainstream Republican with a clear shot at winning the White House, according to people familiar with his thinking."

"In 2012, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent so much of their money on long-shot candidate Newt Gingrich that they helped extend an ugly intraparty fight that left the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, severely bruised by the time he faced President Obama in the general election."

Newt who? Must have all been a part of a secret plan to secure the field for President Obama, if I got my conspiracist thinking right. Carol's never been one to let the truth get in the way of one of her anti-Semitic tropes, for instance, the view she shared will Holocaust denier Kevin Barrett that Jews were "definitely" involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers. Among her periodic discharges of racialized anti-Semitism has been her championing of segregation, positing that such a thing is okay when secessionists are the ones doing the segregating. Thing is that she hasn't posted much recently at the SVR hate blog operated by the new baas there, Rob Williams. Links from her Twitter account to her articles at VermontCommons/SVR from as little as two years ago are now deadlinks. I wonder why that is? Maybe it's because she's such an out and out liar? That's probably the safe bet. Or maybe it's because she has declared SVR to be "defunct." It's certainly not because of her blatant anti-Semitism since anti-Semitism has been a touchstone of the Vermont secession movement ideologues for more than a decade.

Previously published on this Vermont Secession blog about the lying anti-Semite Carol Moore: Vermont Secessionist Blogger Carol Moore's "Jew Counting," "Jew Washing" and "Jew Lubing", A Vermont Commons Blogger's Anti-Semitic Rant, More on James Edwards (Thomas Naylor's Hate Radio Friend) & Others and Vermont Commons Blogger (Carol Moore) Now Calls Second Vermont Republic "Defunct".

Corbett - Sitush - Steeltrap - SPECIFICO?

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Cascadia? Nuts!

Years ago secession guru, anti-Semite and a co-founder of the Second Vermont Republic, Kirkpatrick Sale, made the surprising admission that a good many of the secessionist organizations listed at his Middlebury Institute (much to Middlebury VT's chagrin) were little more than websites comprised of only a few or one member. While he described his own group as an "umbrella" organization, it too was little more than a website maintained by another anti-Semite like Sale called Carol Moore.

Sure, the now dead baas of SVR, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor was also a member of MI but that was pretty much it. The MI organized and sponsored a couple or three poorly attended (primarily by racists from the League of the South, the Alaska Independence Party and the Hawaiian independence movement) conferences, mostly in the Deep South, that were little more than gatherings of the same small group of committed racists and anti-Semitic secesher assholes - Michael Hill, Donald Livingston, Rob Williams, Naylor, Sale, the Dexters, ad nauseum. Stunts, really, designed to get some AP and FOX News coverage and accomplished little more. Except for the overtly racist LoS, they've stopped even doing that. All the "big plans" - Town Meeting articles, constitutional conventions, candidates standing for elective office - have come to naught, as well as to an end.

Recently the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece titled "Cascadia Secession Apparently Not As Easy As It Sounds" on the Left Coast secesher group Cascadia Now! After a word salad interview of seemingly one of its few members, Brandon Letsinger, the Chronicle lays bare the phoniness of the group. (Note: The group claims thousands of members but offers no proof, much as Naylor once claimed that more than 60,000 Vermont voters supported secession but when the time came to vote far less than 1% of Vermont's registered voters supported the secesher gubernatorial candidate, a number comparable to the average of spoilt ballots in an election.)

Then the Chronicle's Caille Millner got down to it:

"When it came to the question of how this republic might come about, however, Letsinger was more circumspect. He thinks politics are “irrelevant, negative, and toxic.” Cascadia, he emphasized, is about “an identity” to connect the region’s 15 million people."

"To this end, Cascadia Now! has a soccer team (they want to play Quebec), a poetry festival, and a Scouting Association. They have their own beer, “Cascadian dark ale,” made with hops from the region."

"The crowd seemed pleased. Cascadia sounded like great fun until the next speaker, Joshua Clover, took the podium."

"Clover is a 52-year-old UC Davis literature professor who specializes in political economy. He came prepared with his own PowerPoint slides; he wanted to tell the crowd about the history of secession movements in the 20th century. (I told you Kadist was sly.)"

"Cheerfully, Clover talked about how previous breakaway movements around the world had led to battles, purges, invasions and sieges."

"As the bodies stacked up, I could feel the energy in the room shift into discomfort."

"What had happened to the hops? Where had the positive identity gone?"

"As for freedom from the shackles of the empire, well, Clover didn’t think Cascadia would have that, either — not in today’s global market. 'It’s unclear what regionalism could mean unless a place is prepared to, say, make its own refrigerators.'"

"Right now, Clover said in a buoyant voice, all of the world’s refrigerators are made in China."

"Clover wasn’t done yet. He layered a demographic map of the United States over that of Cascadia. Look at the dots, he urged us. Cascadia is 'a peculiarly non-diverse region with the exception of some native peoples for whom previous secessions have proven deadly.'"

"Cascadia, he said, represented 'demographic anti-blackness.'"

"It took the audience a few moments to come up with questions after Clover sat down."

"But his gimlet-eyed view of Cascadia’s Happy Valley had an unexpected benefit: Some audience members discovered that they had a few doubts about this whole secession thing."

"An audience member asked Letsinger about the steps that Cascadia had taken to reach out to the region’s indigenous people. Letsinger said that they had engaged in outreach, and that some of the tribes had “similar values” about environmentalism and activism. Cascadia’s values, he added, were attractive enough that others would come to them."

"But the question persisted, and Letsinger got annoyed: 'I’ve heard this, the idea that this movement is not diverse enough so you need to reach out to these people. We see that as a colonization of our values.'"

"The idea that a suggestion to reach out to historically oppressed people would cause the Cascadia movement such suffering! It was so dazzling, so bizarre, that I almost missed the next question."

"'Cascadia seems more like a brand, like a shared narrative fantasy,' said an audience member. She wanted to know, essentially, what the plan was to make the idea more concrete."

"Unfortunately, making Cascadia concrete would require, well, politics. Letsinger wanted to keep talking about bioregionalism, about creating a brand that was “open source,” about how Cascadia Now! makes all of its own merchandise."

"I felt the evening’s vision of freedom and positivity ebbing quickly away, and I felt so bad for Letsinger that I didn’t even ask him to explain his statement about colonization. Instead I asked him about how Cascadia could avoid the violence that had plagued so many other breakaway movements throughout time."

"'It’s a good question,' he said, and admitted that violence would be a breaking point for him personally."

"He wanted a model more like Scotland, where the voters had had a choice. But the voters in Scotland voted not to secede, and that election had a degree of seriousness that I hadn’t gotten from this discussion. I walked out of Kadist with new questions, like:"

"Does Cascadia really want to secede? Or do they just want a good beer?"

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner

Oddly enough, early SVR member and longtime syncophant, Peter Buknatski a.k.a. "Petey Sweety," was a registered at the Vermont Secretary of State's website as an owner of Second Vermont Republic Beer, Ale and Brewing or some such nonsense which has likewise come to naught. Little wonder then that Williams got some serious wood over the alcoholic aspect to the article in his own post at his hate blog (Note: I do not link to Williams' hate site; it's easily found if you have to.)

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Second Vermont Republic Ally Celebrates the Sesquicentennial of a Murder for Presidents Week

Longtime Second Vermont Republic ally, advisor and friend at the neo-Confederate hate group called the League of the South, by way of its president and champion of the Southern War of Treason, Michael Hill, has issued this proclamation at its website:

Honoring John Wilkes Booth

"The League of the South looks to the present and future. However, from time to time we do look back at our past.

This 14th of April will mark the 150th anniversary of John Wilkes Booth’s execution of the tyrant Abraham Lincoln. The League will, in some form or fashion, celebrate this event. We remember Booth’s diary entry: “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” A century and a half after the fact, The League of the South thanks Mr. Booth for his service to the South and to humanity."

"Stay tuned . . ."
"Michael Hill"

I know I should probably give up trying to get him to do it but I'm going to ask Rob Williams, the last remaining Vermont secesher, one more time to renounce and denounce the League of the South and once and for all end SVR's ties to the racist hate group.

UPDATE: 11:00 PM, 2.17.15
Almost six and a half hours after I put the above post up, Green Mountain Daily's Jack McCullough added his voice to the call for SVR to put some daylight between themselves and the racist hate group, the League of the South. It's likely, though, that all we'll get from Rob Williams will be one of his trite aphorisms or homemade secesh bromides.

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He-e's Ba-ack!

Second Vermont Republic honcho and the self-described "Very Foreign Minister" of the secessionist movement, Dennis Morrisseau, has been keeping a very low profile for months. Yesterday he popped up at the Vermont State House to protest the General Assembly even having a hearing on proposed gun control legislation. Morrisseau went so far as to threaten the removal from office of any legislator who dared to support such legislation.

"Anyone voting ‘yes’ for that bill, according to opponents, will pay for it with their political lives. On the Statehouse lawn, an orange, 10-foot-tall sign greeted people arriving at the hearing Tuesday with a message: “We will vote you all out.”

“And it means everybody – all of you,” Dennis Morrisseau said, waiting in line outside the House chamber before the hearing. “These bills need to disappear.”
Source

You see, in Morrisseau's world of crazy the only thing that counts is his point of view - no discussion.

This isn't Morrisseau's first or even second time to the "vote'em all out" rodeo. In 2009, 2010 and 2012 he secretly conspired with secesher candidates to replace all of Vermont's senators. He called his plan "The 30." He never recruited more than a half dozen half-hearted candidates. He's also repeatedly claimed to have a plan to "Fire Congress." He's failed at that too. You can read some of his crazy about all of that here. Morrisseau has proposed capping the number of children that brown people can have in Vermont to two; he's given free one way (out of town) tickets to Burlington homeless people in the 1980's; he proposes capping income and assets in Vermont; he proposes replacing teachers with older students.

You can read much, much more about Morrisseau's desire to be the "Very Foreign Minister" of SVR here.

But what should be a concern to legislators and the security staff at the Vermont State House is Morriisseau's history of advocating for "hit lists" of people he hates. I wrote at length about that here. Here's just a small sample of what Denny had to say then:

"I have suggested here and elsewhere that we should begin to post the perps’ names and physical addresse on a permanent electronic board somewhere, so that nature can begin taking it’s course. [On the thoery(sic) that a few such take downs would have some chance of stopping what is coming if we do not act.]"

"I include “international financiers” and certain Likudniks and media moguls on my personal list."

To me, a nationwide assault on the entire sitting Congress en masse, and known to all, pitched to all as the only possible peaceful revolutiong(sic), does have a shot if presented right that might allow us to regain the power of we the people. Thus it could defeat what I agree is a massive and evil zionist design. And it would save decent people of all cultures……" d m, w pawlet, vt By: dennis morrisseau . February 12, 2012 . 5:35 pm

Morrisseau has been wildly unsuccessful in all of his various elective runs during the past four decades and was 100% unsuccessful in replacing any of the members of Vermont's Senate in 2010 and 2012, his candidates finishing in the single or less percentile but he has been a threatening presence and State House security would be wise to take note of his visit.

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Racist Writer for White Supremacist, neo-Confederate Website Outed by Southern Poverty Law Center

During the past few months there's been a back and forth of outing and doxing going on that's shaken the racist right to its jackboots. The racists at Occidental Dissent have been on an outing campaign of their own which has produced not very compelling results. Yesterday the SPLC dropped the latest bomb - a writer and moderator for the avowedly racist and virulently anti-Semitic mouthpiece for the neo-Confederate League of the South supporting website mentioned above, Occidental Dissent, who goes by the pseudonym "Jack Ryan" is in fact John V. Ellis of Hyde Park, Chicago. SPLC has the whole story here.

Tit for tat, eh Jack?

Speaking of the racist League of the South, we've been waiting for months for the current head of the so-called Second Vermont Republic, Rob Williams, to renounce and denounce SVR's past and present ties to the LoS and its militia. Well, one can always cling to the wistful hope that Williams will one day come to his senses.

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"A Rose by Any Other Name..."

Followers of this blog know that the name that I use here, Thomas Rowley, is a pseudonym. Blogs that are singular efforts devoted to exposing racists, anti-Semites and the like often are posted anonymously for reasons that often have to do with safety. I learned that lesson early on when another blogger who was identifiable and assisted in exposing the deep ties of the Second Vermont Republic to the racist, white supremacist League of the South was attacked by the SVR chairman, Thomas H. Naylor, at his job. Naylor sought to end that blogger's employment and healthcare for his family.

As things heated up for the SVR crowd because of the exposure of their ties to bigots and for their having provided a platform at their various websites for the writings of racists, conspiracists, segregationists, anti-Semites, misogynists and homophobes, so did their anger come to a boil. One of the leaders urged that crimes be committed against those that exposed them. Another sought to normalize their group by demanding that they be debated at a venue of their choice and using a moderator who'd been secretly associated with their leadership for years. Despite those and other efforts, the SVR leadership never came close to successfully refuting a single fact presented here and at other blogs. Most of the links that I have provided to their posts no longer work because of a more than year long effort by the SVR leadership to purge their websites of the evidence. Thankfully, the screen caps all remain.

I mention the above to give some context to a recent incident regarding the efforts of racists and anti-Semites to reveal the identity of one similarly successful blogger who I've mentioned here a number of times. He/she goes by the name Spelunker. A New Yorker who uses the pseudonym BoyHowdy and is a sustaining member of the hate website Stormfront.org mistakenly identified a supposedly Jewish journalist as being Spelunker. Stormfront posters have been tied to more than 100 murders so this is no little matter. Online haters like the website Occidental Dissent ran with the Stormfront misinformation that you can read about here. So consumed with the notion that they could "out" the identity of Spelunker the haters failed to notice that they lacked one element - facts. Apparently, thinking that a purportedly Jewish journalist looked as they would imagine that their nemesis Spelunker might look was all that the haters needed to dox him. Despite denials by Spelunker and others, the haters remained convinced that they had their man. I'd even pointed out to them that they lacked "incontrovertible evidence" but that didn't matter.

This week the story took a decidedly ironic turn. Stormfront's supposed outer of Spelunker, the pseudonymous BoyHowdy, was himself outed in a damning exposé published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. BoyHowdy is in fact a Manhattan Web designer named Robert H. DePasquale and his cyber target was erroneously identified as Jewish, although DePasquale's supporters could agree that the target looked Jewish, whatever the fuck that means. SPLC reports,

"His victim, who asked not to be identified, told the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) he is not Spelunker, just someone who is now caught up in the vindictive and racist underworld of Stormfront. Spelunker, who has not revealed his identity to the SPLC, also said that the journalist is not him."

It gets better. According to the respected anti-fascist website One People's Project, in 2013 DePasquale ran for the NJ U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Frank Lautenberg. Although he his a NY resident, DePasquale claimed NJ residency by using the Butler, NJ post office box of the racist American Freedom Party. You couldn't make shit like this up. Read the One People's Project report outing DePasquale here.

Spelunker has demanded that the racist nutters take down their erroneous information but I don't think we should be holding our collective breaths for that for long.

UPDATE: 4:30 PM I posted a comment at the Occidental Dissent hatesite today on their "Who Is Spelunker?" post suggesting that they update their post correcting the erroneous information about who Spelunker is and the comment wasn't approved, natch. And so the lie of the racist Brad Griffin, aka Wallace Hunter, and son-in-law to the racist founder of the Council of Conservative Citizens Gordon Baum lives on.

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

McSecession - National Journal Pairs Second Vermont Republic With the League of the South in Scottish Independence Article

Update At Bottom

With less than a week to go to the Scottish independence election, the usual spate of articles about nothing begin to appear. National Journal, a DC insider publication that like many others is straining for eyeballs on the web in a post print era has produced another in a series of articles that treat the tiny Vermont secession movement as a contender. The NJ highlights, as though they're relevant to the Scottish situation, three largely unsuccessful U.S. secesher outfits

I'll start with the second featured first: Cascadianow! From their About page,

"CascadiaNow! is working to become a grassroots, umbrella non-profit organization that provides resources and direct services to groups, projects, and community partners to raise awareness of Cascadia, celebrate our distinct regional identity and culture, and increase the independence of the Cascadia bioregion."

They've been on the web for 8 years and they're just now "working to become" a tax free 501c3 and nothing more than an "umbrella" thing. This is just the sort of e-group that secesher maven, Southern National Congress delegate and all around crank, Kirkpatrick Sale, has complained for years about, calling such groups little more than a website address. And the NJ writer Kaveh Waddell moused his way to their website and "interviewed" the leader of the group.

Third up for NJ's Waddell was the loudest, if not the largest secesher organization in the U.S., the notoriously ludicrous and hateful League of the South. Waddell's interview elicits the fact that the LoSers racist leader, Michael Hill, has virtually no insight into the Scottish independence effort and goal. Hill ignorantly states that a successful "Yes" vote for Scottish independence will be,

"a brick out of the wall of centralization and the old idea of empire-building"

News Flash!: A primary goal of the the Scottish independentistas would be accession (as opposed to secession) in 18 months to the European Union with its more than 200,000 pages of laws and regulations that make it arguably the most centralized union on the planet, as well as one of the largest economic empires to have ever existed. Hill must be smoking too much kudzu.

Nowhere in his fawning outline of the LoS's past and present does NJ's Waddell reveal that the collection of aging felons, Klansmen and racists is being replaced by a new generation of racists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and potential felons. I say potential because they've formed a militia called "The Indomitables" who intend to target for guerrilla war type action journalists (pay attention Waddell), politicians and "elites." Waddell completely missed the racism and new radicalism that permeates today's LoS. As for Waddell's repeating LoS's claim "at one point recently to have 25,000 members," Waddell offers no explanation whatsoever as to why at repeated LoS demos over this past summer the average turnout was only 10 of the racists.

First up, though, was my favorite; an interview of the Second Vermont Republic's new baas and a member of Champlain College's adjunct staff, as well as a self-described historian, Rob Williams wherein Williams is positively wet-his-panties giddy over the upcoming Scottish independence vote and what he wrongly conjures it to mean to the essentially non-existent Vermont secesher movement. Williams unjustifiably effuses that,

"'I think the Scots have done a fantastic job of really making secession sexy,' Williams told (Waddell). 'If you look at the way the secession conversation has unfolded in the past several years, they've really tapped into what makes Scotland Scotland. That's something we've been trying to do in Vermont.' Williams thinks Vermont should follow suit, playing up the symbols, culture, and history that make the state unique."

Williams' muddled understanding of history causes him to conflate Scotland's centuries long struggle to re-assert independence from a United Kingdom created from the threat of force of arms with his boutique style secesher clown show. While there has always been a large segment of the Scottish body politic, including the present leader of the Scottish House of Parliament, supporting the independence line, under Williams' leadership the Vermont seceshers have disastrously fielded candidates that polled in the low or fractional digits of the electorate (99.24% of votes for governor in 2010 were for someone other than the secesher candidate).

Williams prattles on to misstate historical fact.

"The Vermont independence movement has already taken some of these lessons to heart. The movement has its own flag—borrowed from Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys militia—and a "reasonably robust network" of activists. What they're missing, Williams said, is the grassroots power of the Scottish campaign. "The Scots have proved that with a lot of time and effort and energy, you can build a political and economic conversation around independence," he said.

Williams said the success of the Scottish movement has had a positive effect on the Vermont independence movement, no matter the outcome of Scotland's referendum. Williams could hardly conceal his excitement for what's happening overseas. "If I didn't have to teach," he told me, "I'd be in Edinburgh right now!"

First off, Williams and his "reasonably robust network" of misfits, who now probably number somewhere under ten, stole the battle flag of the successors to the Green Mountain Boys, the Vermont Army & Air National Guard, and dishonor it by having done so. He also in saying that "the Scots have proved that with a lot of time and effort and energy, you can build a political and economic conversation around independence," leaves out the fact that there's is a valid, lawful claim made for hundreds of years, unlike the threadbare, historically perverted claim of the Vermont seceshers. The comparison of the two movements is typical of the hubris upon which Williams' leadership style is based, just like the spirit of sacrifice shown in his statement that if he didn't have to work he'd be right there with the Scots. What an empty, unself aware, blowhard Rob regularly shows himself to be.

As long as Williams' "activism" amounts to social media, a defunct hate blog, an occasional Statehouse stunt that can only attract 20 or so mostly out of staters and alliances with out of state hate groups like the League of the South, the Union is very, very secure.

What Waddell's article fails to disclose (beyond the seething anti-Semitism of the Vermont seceshers and the race hatred of the LoSers) is that most economists agree that Scottish independence will lead to a serious recession for Scotland that would probably extend to England itself, but that at least the "golfing in Scotland will be a lot cheaper.”

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2007/02/rob-williams-svr-co-chair-breaks.html

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2012/03/rob-williams-continues-to-maintain-his.html

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/second-vermont-republic-vermont-fairy.html

http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2011/02/vermont-commons-bloggers-anti-semitic.html

(h/t Spelunker)

UPDATE September 17: Days have passed since in his first post in months at his Second Vermont Republic website Williams sought to conflate some meaning for his dead movement from events in Scotland. An opportunity (again) was missed by Williams to renounce and denounce the racism and calls from violence now eminating from his allies at the League of the South in crowing about Waddell's throwaway e-piece about U.S. seceshers to put some or any distance between his group and the LoS; stupid is as stupid doesn't.

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

"The Cheese Stands Alone" Part IV - The League of the South Establishes A Militia Unit

At its annual meeting in June this year, Michael Hill, president of the League of the South announced the creation of a paramilitary group called "The Indomitables." No, really. The Southern Poverty Law Center has an exclusive report here.

On July 15 Hill posted on his blog an e-call to arms entitled "A Bazooka in Every Pot." Since then he's continued to ramp up the rhetoric that includes an outline of intended targets for his strike group,

"the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite..."
Michael Hill, League of the South führer and lunatic-in-chief

Hill has established a General Staff packed with KKKers, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He's even created some Nazi style iconography for the outfit.

In a twelve point manifesto from his group, #1 is,

" The mantra “Violence [or the serious threat thereof] never settles anything” is patently false. History shows that it indeed does settle many things. Please don’t forget this—your enemy hasn’t."

My question to the new baas of the Second Vermont Republic, Rob Williams, remains when will he renounce and denounce his racist, neo-Nazi, KKKer allies at the League of the South" for the climate of hate and danger that they are creating in the nut bar pursuit of secession? Other than to take down a letter written by Thomas H. Naylor that once called for the League to renounce racism from his hate blog called Vermont Commons, Williams, a member of the adjunct faculty at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, has done nothing to put any distance between himself and the other conspiracy obsessed hate group, LoS.

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

Another One Bites The Dust

It's been a slow summer melt for the remnants of the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) and its hate blog at Vermont Commons that's managed by secessionist dick Rob Williams, although all he seems to do there now is post self-important movie reviews, usually with a secesher twist. Vermont Commons is the hate nest of racists, anti-Semites, homophobes, anti-Americans, neo-Confederates, anti-vaxxers, anti-national defense and just about very other fringer, conspiracist nutjob that can't get a post up at a legitimate website. Even the secesher movement's most bloated pom-pom girl calls SVR "defunct."

For the last few years William's nutters have had a little competition from an anti-Shumlin, anti-humanist, gay hating, racist, religious chauvinist weblog called CrockerPost. I once (and only once) wrote about the blog here. I doubt that my notice caused its proprietor, Warren Crocker Herrick, to throw in the towel as he did in early June. More likely it was the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center had found his hate site and carried it on its list of "white nationalist hate groups" that caused him to flush his bowl of bile. The website proprietor "is an admirer of such (racist) hate sites as the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly: the White Citizens Council), VDare and the Occidental Observer, as well as scumbags like Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter."

Here's Crocker's "announcement":

Having realized that my interest in politics and current events has turned me into a negative and critical person, I’ve decided that there will be no more of it for this blogger and will no longer define myself and others according to a political standard. I’ll be heading off into a more positive direction and would like to apologize to people like Vermont’s Governor Shumlin who I’ve severely criticized over the past few years. I may or may not continue blogging, but it will be from a non-political perspective if I do. Thank you very much. See you all down the road. Source

Course, no apology to the lesbian & gay families that he's repeatedly maligned, nor to the non-theist community that he's belittled by calling them all liars, nor to Vermont's black community, well, you get the idea. He sucks up to the highest state official that he can and says, without saying, "fuck you" to everyone else that he's gone to great lengths to shit on over the years and then with a shrug says, "Nevermind."

Crocker's unplugged his website but you can still see its mirror here at a conspiracy addled "news" site that is "an outlet for gibbering lunacy” that Crocker frequented and contributed to.

Good riddance to the bigoted asshole.

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

"Dear 'Baghdad Rob' ..."

(Recently, Rob Williams, the Vermont secessionist leader, groupie and America hater, had a hissy fit over one or more of my posts.  I'm not linking to his screed because it's, well, embarrassing to him and it might seem like I was kicking him when he's down lower than he has ever been since the Vermont secesher movement began 10 years ago this month [an anniversary that I can't find him noting somewhere, anywhere, in his ongoing, incessesant, ineffectual promotion of his neo-Confederate cause]).

I've taken to calling Vermont secessionist, Rob Williams, "Baghdad Rob" because he shares so many of the unhinged qualities of the former Iraqi Propaganda Ministry mouthpiece during the outset of the war in Iraq, Baghdad Bob.

Like Baghdad Bob, "Baghdad Rob" has little to no sense of irony.  Baghdad Bob announced to the world press that Americans were commiting mass suicide at the gates of Baghdad while in the the background of the camera shot of Bob's announcement, American tanks were rolling through the Baghdad city square. Not unlike Baghdad Bob, "Baghdad Rob" would like to sell his independence hokum to a group larger than his (and I'll use Second Vermont Republic co-founder Ian Baldwin's salient comment about the size of the Vermont secesher group) "small community" of secesher hoopleheads like Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau, Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner, Jim Hogue (an unconvincing Revolutionary War reënactor), Gary Flomenhoft (promoter of a seditious plot to secretly reconstitute an unelected group to restore the long disband Council of Censors, a plot that came to a screeching halt when I exposed it on this blog here during their failed 2010 election debacle), Gaelan Brown (a secesher "expert" on UFO's, chemtrails and the US military "plot" to obtain secret alien technology in exchange for resources on the dark side of the moon), Vermont Commons web editor and anti-Vermont National Guard sham activist, Juliet Buck, and Matt Cropp (whose efforts to install secessionists or himself in a variety of public and non-profit offices has been a complete and more than utter failure).  Most, if not all of these low achievers, declared their "provisional capitol" to be a B&B in Hancock, VT after their dismal showing in the 2010 election cycle, which was first only to their even more miserable showing in the 2012 election cycle.

Other than the dead guy and your Brooklyn flack, have I left someone out, Rob?

In a juvenile post that employed thinly veiled homophobia and a scatological reference, "Baghdad Rob" launched into tirade about his criticisms of this blog based on his unbridled hatred for blogs that (1) write the truth, (2) don't drink the secesher Kool-Aid and (3) don't accept direction from a media master like "Baghdad Rob," who drove his print journal into a financial ditch and then a year and a half later blamed Tropical Storm Irene and not his own shortcomings, and who is left with a cheesy blog that is little more than a nest of conspiracy theorists (Rob's a 9/11 Truther) whose latest includes a despicable, parent and child hating Sandy Hook Truther; the usual anti-Vermont National Guard hate rhetoric in pursuit of fixing a bad personal property gamble; delusionist, anti all of Vermont's statewide and legislative elected representatives; fake, uncredentialed "journalists" like William Boardman and Christopher Ketcham who routinely fail to disclose their personal, extremist agendas; as well as anti-Semites, segregationists, misogynists, racists and homophobes.

"Baghdad Rob's" irony meter must have been on mute when he wrote this:

"Or, haters (a k.a. "Thomas Rowley"), you can just keep on keeping on with hating on the Vermont independence crowd. Anonymously. With no transparency or accountability for your words. It is easier that way, of course. And safer. To be anonymous. In the closet. Hidden."

That's rich. That's coming, Baghdad Bob-like, from the guy who seemed to be in charge of the 2009-2010 super secret secesher Free Vermont Listserv, populated by candidates and, um, co-conspirators in the effort to hide from Vermont's electorate all that the Vermont secesher candidates intended to do if elected to office. They talked freely when they thought no one was listening, yet when I exposed their nonsense on October 3, 2010 they chose to shutdown their listserv on October 4 and I don't believe that they've ever fessed up to their activities there to date.  So much for transparency, eh, Rob? Naturally, their Great White Godfather, Thomas H. Naylor, excused their activities on the listserv as being thought to be private and that they were merely "Internet cowboys," although I've yet to hear a peep from their blowhard leader, "Baghdad Rob."  Wassup with that?  And what exactly does "Baghdad Rob" mean by "safer?"  Of course, it's not like Vermont secesher leaders, neo-Confederates, Vermont Commons'anti-Semitic bloggers and their ilk haven't haven't threatened  perceived opponents in the past, is it, Rob?

"Baghdad Rob" oversaw conversations for more than a year on the listserv amongst racists, conspiracist nutters, economic whack jobs, immigrant haters, homeless haters, women haters, lesbian haters, including his own posts about the "Israeli Mafia" and about his having bragged that he'd,

"spent 4 years defusing the SVR/(racist)LOS (not so) nonsense and it is finally done, even in the blogosphere."

Yet he never tried to shutdown the extremists.  So how'd that work out for you, "Baghdad Rob?"  Didn't your "Independence Party," as you like for one day in 2010 called it, lose every friggin' race it entered?

And I'm not even going to drag up his "Don't Ask, Don't Care" policy that he's maintained for his hategroup allies since February of 2007.  Hell, he's even continued his association with hategroup League of the South bigwig, Donald Livingston, by contributing to his neo-Confederate throwaway collection of essays as recently as 2011.

In his deranged post "Baghdad Rob" called me out (again!) with his not so vaguely homophobic,

"Your call. We're here when you are ready to come out of the closet."

Ya see, Rob, I don't meet in bars (as you've previously suggested) with racists, homophobes, misogynists, Jew haters or their persistent allies, like you.

Unlike you, "Baghdad Rob," I've never, ever sat down with convicted felons, the neo-Confederate, racist, hate group, League of the South board directors, anti-Semites, the virulently anti-gay and led by neo-Confederate, hate group members, Christian Exodus.  Ya see, hate insinuates itself into many of "Baghdad Rob's" willing associations, so much so that he sees it in everyone else, especially those who, like me, find his chosen, hate enabling, out of state friends to be so repugnant.

Perhaps this is the reason that, according to published reports, Williams' wife "does not agree with secessionism."

"Baghdad Rob" has never responded to my earlier suggestions as to how we might mend fences and engage by his first renouncing the extremists he so willingly embraces.  Perhaps, since his movement is so off-the-rails, he may be willing now to publicly cull his nest of hateful bloggers and his still active association with national neo-Confederate and hate group principals, as an opening act of good faith.

In the meantime, warmest regards Rob,
Rowley


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

Will Vermont Jurisprudence Be Joining The Discussion of Expanding Voir Dire to Include Probing Potential Jurors About Their Feelings Concerning the Confederacy?

There's an important discussion that has begun concerning the biases that attach when a potential juror is sympathetic to the Confederacy, the modern neo-Confederate movement and its ideological sympathizers. While much of the work and research is Southern oriented, it has relevance to Vermont.

Proponents of the Vermont secessionist movement have long had significant ties to the Southern neo-Confederate movement, most particularly the racist League of the South (LoS). Starting in 2007, the leadership of the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) (the still quite dead SVR founder Thomas H. Naylor and his then SVR co-chair and present VTCommons propagandist Rob Williams) launched a purge of members who'd voiced concern about associating with indisputably racist groups. Committed Vermont seceshers have repeatedly and publicly expressed support for the acts of the Confederacy and the modern neo-Confederate movement.

In addition to presenting research on the racial bias of potential jurors, the researchers, Edward H. Sebesta and Dr. Euan Hague, PhD, have a piece published at The Black Commentator entitled The Confederacy and Jury Selection,

"The historical record irrefutably shows that the Confederacy was formed for the purpose of preserving white supremacy and slavery. Such sentiments are expressed is the declaration and resolutions of the seceding states, in the speeches of the leaders of the Confederacy, and in innumerable other sources, typically being expressed in a straight forward manner.

It would be reasonable, therefore, to ‘challenge for cause’ potential jurors identifying with the Confederacy because of their identification with a white supremacist regime that sought to keep (its) African Americans enslaved. These potential jurors identifying with the Confederacy might object that they would not be biased as jurors, but elements of the pro-Confederate Lost Cause mythology inherently lead to bias. One element is that African American slaves were well treated and content as slaves, and that slavery was like being a part of a large family, rather than that it was a grave and often horrific condition. At some psychological level, Lost Cause rationalizations are embraced and accepted because for that individual, an African American’s freedom and humanity are valued less than their own."

Alan Bean at the Friends of Justice blog has a piece, Probing the Subtleties of White Racial Bias, and there's a New York Times Op-Ed piece by a senior editor at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the topic of ingrained racism here.

Vermont has a growing immigrant population, as well as an increasing population of color located in Vermont's small urban areas. Racial profiling has been a recurring issue that has found its way to the courts and that's not likely to end. White Vermonters who have embraced the white, racist neo-Confederate movement, while an admittedly small group, are still eligible for jury duty.

Vermont secessionists have sought to legitimize their endeavor by claiming that (1) Southerners had a "right" to secede and that, similarly, (2) Vermonters do as well because there once existed a Vermont republic. Vermont republic mythology is a staple for Vermont secesher water carriers like Rob Williams, Juliet Buck and two time Vermont secesher legislative candidate in Franklin County, Todd Pritsky. Pritsky was a member of what was thought by the surreptitious group to be a super secret listserv where some Vermont seceshers, including a neo-Nazi, could engage in racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, seditious and abusively misogynistic (sounds redundant but it's not) "chat," while other invited members, like Pritsky, remained largely silent. The racist leader of SVR later referred to this group as "Internet cowboys," with the usual CIA/Mossad paranoid delusions here.

Juror bias is an issue that needs looking at in Vermont where secessionists and their sympathizers, who embrace the neo-Confederate meme, can potentially contaminate the jury with an element of racial bias.

If you believe, as I do, that the Vermont judicial system needs to examine this issue, please consider contacting the Vermont Judiciary Court Administrator Robert Greemore by writing to him at 109 State Street, Montpelier, VT 05609 or calling him at 802-828-3278; contacting the President of the Vermont Bar Association, Amber L. Barber, at abarber@drm.com or by writing to her at P.O. Box 100, Montpelier, VT 05601-0100; and Attorney General William Sorrell at 109 State Street, Montpelier VT 05609-1001 or calling him at 802-828-3171. This is one of those occasions where I would strongly urge you to put your concerns about this issue in writing.

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

White Nationalism Comes to Montpelier, VT

My copy of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report arrived in the mail today and, as I always do, I looked for what might be new in hate groups, like the Second Vermont Republic and its hate blog at the Vermont Commons website, that have nestled in the Green Mountain state.

Lo and behold, there's a new (well, not so new - it's third anniversary arrives in ten days) white nationalist website that's been operating in Vermont's capitol, Montpelier called the Crocker Post (scroll down to Vermont in the SPLC list of active "white nationalist hate groups").  The website operator is an admirer of such hate sites as the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly: the White Citizens Council), VDare and the Occidental Observer, as well as scumbags like Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter.

The blogger, Warren Crocker Herrick, would rather not say where he works but he's written:

I live in Montpelier, Vermont and am a professional waiter by trade, so I meet a lot of people to write about. 

Source

Just so you don't end up on this white supremacist website for the wrong reason, you may want to consider ordering the white rice for your side when at the New England Culinary Institute restaurant in Montpelier.  Oh, and I'd play it safe and stay away from the Black Eyed Peas because you never know who might be listening.

It should come as little surprise that Herrick also gets quite a raging, bigoted stiffy about the issue of gays or marriage equality on his blog.  He regularly goes on and on about it.

Oddly, this up and coming hate blogger isn't a fan of Vermont secessionists - give him time.

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

Anti-Semistism? Racism? Thomas Naylor Made It A Convoluted Twofer As He Trotted Out His Anti-Obama, Anti-America Dog and Pony Act for Iran's Propoganda Service in the Wake of the 2012 Election

Much as Saturday Night Live did in the fall of 1975 regarding the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, I can confidently report that the baas of the Second Vermont Republic and Charlotte, VT washashore, Thomas H. Naylor, "is still dead... but he's feeling better every day."

Late last year I'd mentioned that the Vermont secession movement was maintaining it's embrace of anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying elements at home and abroad, whether that be by promoting the notion that Israel is a criminal enterprise (the "Israeli Mafia" meme has been advanced by Naylor and his gubernatorial stooge, Dennis Steele, and "agree(d)" with by Naylor's heir apparent and former Second Vermont Republic (SVR) co-chair, Rob Williams) or that Israel can be "undone" (SVR co-founder and now a South Carolina delegate to the racist Southern National Congress) or that as one secesher leader (SVR's self-described "Very Foreign Minister" and decades long losing, as in usually running last, congressional and Vermont legislative candidate, Dennis Morrisseau) has recommended that there should be a hit list of prominent Jews or one member of the small, super secret nest of seditious Vermont secesher plotters of the group exposed by this blog just before the 2010 election who'd posted many, many times at the neo-Nazi messageboard of Stormfront.org (White Pride Worlwide!) using the nom de Nazi, "Donnachaidh" or making a number of appearances on the racist, anti-Semitic, virulently homophobic, misogynistic and Holocaust denying Political Cesspool (Naylor & Sale) or Naylor's own numerous appearances on the anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying, anti-American website of the Iranian Ministry of Propaganda, er, "Information" called Press TV - well, you get the idea.

In October of 2012, less than a week before the general election, Naylor, sensing as almost anyone did whose last name wasn't Romney, Rove, Morris or Gingrich (as well as not being a Faux News clone) that President Obama was poised to get a second term, took the occasion to dip his toe once again into the barely concealed racism pool so much a part of the secessionist movement, even in Vermont, and in another of his tiresome, self-important essays, Naylor engaged in his usual anti-Semitic dog whistling and inferences of Jewish domination of the world and U.S. foreign policy.  Interestingly, in the second piece by baas Naylor, the supposed man of peace, he makes an argument of sorts for further nuclear proliferation:

"Israel maintains almost vice-like control over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.  It tells Washington what it wants and, give or take a bit of face-saving waffling, usually gets what it wants.  It actively supported the war on terror against Muslims, two wars against Iraq, and the NATO attack on Libya.  And since Israel is the “exceptional” nation in the Middle East only it is entitled to have nuclear weapons, and Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons project must be taken out."

Okay, that Naylor is a Jew-baiting anti-Semite is a given (more on that below in the stuff I've got on his most recent appearance with the Iranian propaganda douchebags at their Holocaust denying website, PressTV), but in his first screed Naylor clutched at an obscure remark about President Obama being "cool" and constructed an attack that ended with:

"Above all, what Obama was about was being “cool.”  And it worked in spades."

"Spades?"  Really, Tommy?  Couldn't he have summoned up a little more resistance to his moth-like attraction to the flame of racially loaded double entendres?  Maybe it was because for too many years he palled around with his friends at the racist League of the South and at the Southern National Congress where he liked to sing Dixie?

The dust had hardly settled on one of Naylor's last remaining politically wishful Vermont secessionist boneheads, Senator Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner's disastrous last place showing in the 2012 Addison County senate election, when up pops another interview that Naylor did for the genocidal, Holocaust denying folks at Iranian's Propaganda Ministry's online "news service" Press TV. Naturally it contains references to Naylor's racist Obama screed and his usual anti-Semitic dog whistles, a staple for the folks at the Holocaust denying Press TV, including the their mutual anti-Semitic mainstay about the illegitimacy of the State of Israel concluded with what Naylor had to know is a racially charged statement, especially with Naylor's past race-laced writings and his long history of cozying up to racist groups like the League of the South and the Southern National Congress, both directly and through his association (Naylor's big on guilt by association) with SNC delegate and SVR co-founder with Naylor, Kirkpatrick Sale.


'Course, if the Press TV propaganda vid doen't open, use this link: http://www.presstv.com/usdetail/271010.html

It is interesting that after all the years of my pointing it out that the "crack" propagandists at Press TV haven't figured out that the skyline of Charlotte, NC has nothing to do with Charlotte, VT, Naylor's former residence. Maybe some of his ashes will get sprinkled there on his way back to his beloved state of Mississippi. And I doubt the Iranian hate scrum will pick up on the pronunciation differences.

"I am cool, and I know that you know that I am cool", says Thomas H. Naylor, founder of Second Vermont Republic about Obama's public persona. Naylor thinks that Obama lacks a "vision of the future".

In a phone interview with Press TV's U.S. Desk on Wednesday, Naylor said, "He would speak of a jobs program throughout the campaigns but the reality was that he had no jobs program. The United States does not have a coherent foreign policy; it has four different foreign policies. One for the middle-east, one for China and Russia, one for the NATO allies, and one for the rest of the world ... There is really no glue that holds the Obama administration together other than a kind of notion of what's above all, the most important thing is for Obama to appear to be cool."

Obama, 51, faces governing in a deeply divided country and a partisan-rich capital, where Republicans retained their majority in the House and Democrats kept their control of the Senate. His re-election offers him a second chance that will quickly be tested, given the rapidly escalating fiscal showdown as indiatimes.com reports.

Naylor's longtime relationship with the genocidal maniacs at the Iran Propaganda Ministry's outlet Press TV puts the lie to his commitment to secession when you factor in that the Iranian regime has murdered more than 10,000 Kurdish separatists in Iran, not to mention displacing (as in rendering homeless) 200,000 "Iranian" Kurds.

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Roger Pion, Hero of the Vermont Secessionist Movement, Found by the Vermont Superior Court to be Incompetent

Late last summer what passes for the brain trust at the remains of the Vermont Commons (VC) news journal blog was all atwitter about the convict and would be domestic terrorist, Roger Pion.

In a post promoted by the Vermont Commons web editor, sham

radical, anti-Vermont Army and Air National Guard (VTANG) activist
and trusty sidekick of the Vermont secesher mouthpiece, faux journalist and Lincoln hater Rob Williams, Juliet Buck promoted an absurd piece by another relatively unknown radical, Jasna Brown:

What do Roger Pion, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have in common? a Guest Post by Jasna Brown, promoted by VC web editor Juliet Buck
Fri, 08/17/2012 - 2:23pm

"I can’t seem to stop believing that Pion, most probably in all of his ignorance, may have started a movement. Could his act, of crushing the whole fleet of Police Cruisers with a giant tractor be a wake-up call for VT farmers..."

[snip]

"The question is when will our farmers get sick of being messed with? When will they get tired of seeing their land stolen by the banks, by Monsanto and the gang? Will Roger Pion be remembered as the first farmer who ignited the spark with his foolish and impulsive act? Maybe not, but I’ll sure remember how big and powerful his tractor was."

The [snip] was of a completely and utterly irrelevant comparison of Pion's violent act of the destruction of $300,000 worth of taxpayer owned property, motivated by his peevish reaction to the local Deputy Sheriff's doing their jobs, to the protests of European farmers over prices. Only a delusional secesher fool would compare Roger Pion's focused act of violence to two of the greatest martyred promoters of non-violent protest, Martin Luther King and Mahatmas Gandhi.

Like the Vermont seceshers at VC, another like minded group that has a reputation for promoting anti-Semitism, anti-miscegenation, segregation, homophobia and racism, the neo-Nazi website known as the Vanguard News Network (No Jews, Just Right) got some serious wood over Pion's terroristic (note that I don't say "alleged" since his supporters and family don't really dispute the known facts of his actions) attack here.

Vermont Commons blogger, fringe activist and self-anointed media critic, William Boardman also prattled on about Pion's terroristic act at VC, noting that one Vermont Senate candidate called Pion a political prisoner. One needn't wonder for long why the self-anointed critic of Vermont's media didn't name the senate candidate since it might have further derailed the "Senator's" already doomed campaign. You see, Boardman is a little regarded activist whose media critiques are only taken seriously by the unhinged crew at VC.  He chronically whines on and on about what he perceives to be conflicts of interest in Vermont media, with little regard for his own crass promotion of the radical, fringe politics of Vermont seceshers while writing about them and their various hobby horses.

This week we learn via the Burlington Free Press here that Pion appeared in Superior Court sporting a new "Travis Bickle" look this Tuesday rather than his late summer, post arrest, "tweaker," ah, ambiance.

Man Accused of Crushing Cruisers Found Incompetent for Trial Prosecutors seek another evaluation in 90 days 5:57 PM, Jan 9, 2013

Pion’s attorney, David Sleigh, said a hospitalization hearing should be held, and that should lead to the dismissal of the charges against his client.

State’s Attorney Alan Franklin said he could not assume Pion’s incompetency is permanent. “The state is not going to dismiss at this time,” Franklin said.

He asked Superior Court Judge Howard VanBenthuysen to order another evaluation in 90 days.

VanBenthuysen said the court will schedule a hospitalization hearing, where the court will determine how and where Pion will receive treatment.

In September, documents filed with the court stated Pion was suffering from mental instability and was being driven to action by voices in his head.

At that time, both the state and Pion’s father and court-ordered custodian, Armond Pion, asked for an emergency mental health evaluation.

Deputy State’s Attorney Jim Lillicrap wrote at the time that he’d obtained information that Pion was being “told by god to harm someone by noon today,” referring to Sept. 14, 2012.

In an attached affidavit, State Police Lt. Kirk Cooper wrote that Pion had told an employee of his family that he was “advised by the gods to start shooting people.”

The man, Josh Hall, told Roger Gagnon, who told sheriff’s deputy Kyle Ingalls that he was getting nervous around Pion because he was “going off the deep end again.”

Why does it come as little surprise that an seemingly unhinged domestic terrorist is a hero to a wide array of Vermont's unhinged secesher movement, not to mention neo-Nazis who've in the past have praised VC's dead godfather and baas of the just about dead Vermont secesher movement, Thomas H. Naylor?

The Vermont secessionist movement has a long history of advocating violence against those they dislike; Vermont secessionist candidate for a 2010 Rutland County state senate seat, Dennis Morrisseau, in addition to advocating shipping Vermont's homeless out of state while repeatedly expressing anti-Semitic sentiments, has also proposed a hit list of Jews; Vermont secessionist candidate for a 2010 Washington County state senate seat, Gaelen Brown, advocated for capital punishment for Vermont legislators presumed guilty of a non-violent crime; Vermont secessionist candidate for a 2010 Addison County state senate seat, Robert Wagner, who although he's never been elected to any Vermont office prefers to call himself "Senator," has outrageously proclaimed that an African-American mother with a substance abuse problem who'd committed a robbery "Needed Killin'" while at the same time ignoring a similar crime committed by a white male. You get the idea.

Williams likes to promote the crap that he spews as "journalism" but don't expect much from his blog or his new venture, Vermont Independence Press, to get anywhere near the whole or even partial truth on this case.  It's not what he or his clown journalists/bloggers/nutjobs do.  I mean by that that Williams, VC's publisher cum journalist, hasn't ever broken a story himself that I can find.  His forté seems to be journalistic and historical fiction.

Much like Pion, Williams' secesher movement seems "incompetent."

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