( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

Perhaps the most important thing I should point out from the get go with regard to the puff piece published last Wednesday (3/6/13) in Seven Days by Kathryn Flagg is that the "new" book based on a compilation of articles published during the short life of a "news journal" that never broke a story in six years, Vermont Commons (VTC), is that it is largely a work of fiction, based on the false premise that there is or ever was a meaningful Vermont secession movement.

Part of the reason that the movement never really got off the ground in any significant way here (and, no, running a small lackluster slate of quirky losers in one election does not a party make nor does the staging of statehouse stunts with puppet people pass muster as a groundswell of interest) was because the whole endeavor was much more Potemkin-like than Vermonters first realized it to be. It was based on a scam that neo-Confederates like Kirkpatrick Sale (a South Carolina based representative to the secessionist Southern National Congress) and fellow Southerner, Thomas Naylor, co-founders of the mistakenly named (I'll get back to this.) Second Vermont Republic (SVR), had been working for years. It goes like this: fill a small room with a group of self-proclaimed "scholars" and conjure up a fantasy world that the rubes (as the seceshers thought of many of the public when communicating on what they thought was a super secret listserv) can buy into; issue a press release; self publish a few pieces at sympathetic neo-Confederate and anti-Semitic websites; rinse and repeat. The mainstream media does the rest. Presto! You're treated as a (and this word has been improperly used so often in conjunction with Naylor and SVR that it's lost all meaning) "prominent" movement based in Vermont.

Flagg's piece is a perfect example of the sort of sloppy reporting that glides by the large, steaming piles of secessionist bullshit and even goes so far as to minimize inconvenient facts. Flagg never mentions the numerous conspiracy theories promoted by SVR and VTC principals and bloggers like the anti-Semitic 9/11 Truther nonsense about Mossad involvement with the World Trade Center attacks, the US's involvement with aliens mining on the darkside of the Moon in exchange for advance alien military technology and, perhaps most despicable and disgusting of all, one SVR leader of Vermont Senate takeover effort and past blogger for VTC, Dennis Morrisseau, who believes that Sandy Hook parents of the murdered children faked their emotions as a part of governmental conspiracy to create a climate necessary to take away guns from Americans. Maybe those kids aren't really dead; they must all be just sleeping in a lot.

 

(jump below the fold for a rather extensive look at the movement and what Flagg missed)

Flagg wrote, “the idea of breaking free from the United States struck many Vermonters as worth considering.”  Really?  How many?  10?  20?  200? 2,000?  Their gubernatorial candidate, Dennis Steele, received fewer than 2,000 votes in 2010; 99.26% of Vermonters voted for someone other than the secesher.  Percentage-wise, many seceshers have done worse in their communities than Steele.

Flagg’s piece seems to want the reader to believe that there once was a time when the seceshers may have been relevant.  But by what measure? A singular float in one July 4 US Independence Day parade (there’s an irony for you) gliding by a captured audience isn’t an achievement; it’s a stunt.

Grandstanding and theatre do not make for relevance.  Relevance is achieved by solid accomplishment and impact in the target area.  For years, Rob Williams promised to have secession articles on 200 Vermont town meeting warrants to advance secession discussion by 2012.  He hasn’t gotten one town to pay attention in years of supposed attempts according to the AP, so how’s that for relevance?  Williams can’t even get his wife to support secession; likewise for SVR co-founder Ian Baldwin.  If the SVR honchos are unable to achieve  relevance on the home front, should they have been surprised when the vast majority (and in this case that’s actually something of an understatement) of Vermonters took a pass on their electoral offerings in 2010.  After their shellacking in 2010 the seceshers declared their rump capitol to be down the road from Montpelier, in Hancock, VT at a small B&B. Since their first “plenary” session in December of 2010 (and you know it was important since there’s a YouTube vid of the dozen or so attendees in largely empty room – it made for quite an appropriate hollow sound on the vid) there hasn’t been another publicly announced meeting in “the Capitol.”

The 2012 electoral plan was to run seceshers for all 30 Vermont Senate seats. The seceshers only ran three senate candidates and the each came in last.  Really, really last.  They had no impact on any of the races, were never a threat to any incumbent or challenger or the outcome of any of the races and did not put forward any issues that interested the voters. In short, they were irrelevant.

Flagg’s representation of Vermont as having once been a republic reads like a badly written Wikipedia entry or talking points from the seceshers themselves.  Her “proofs” of Vermont’s independent status fall far short of convincing – all of the states had their own militia and Vermont’s served under the command of the Continental Army while it received its pay from New York who from 1777 to 1791 never abandoned its claim of title to all of the land west of the Connecticut River; every state produced its own currency; Vermont’s postal unit was but one spoke of the system that emanated from Philadelphia to all of the states that did not formalize its organization as the Post Office Department until 1792.  Moreover, Vermont based its own constitution on that of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the hope that such a template might further their admission to statehood.If Flagg had bothered to check she might have learned that:

“From 1777 through 1790, Vermont’s government continually requested and expected admission into the United States as an equal partner.  Despite several solemn promises, Congress consistently drew back from union at the last minute because of heated opposition from New York.  But after Ethan Allen held Vermont aloof from Shay’s Rebellion, in early 1787, the New York legislature dropped its opposition to Vermont statehood, as long as Vermont reimbursed those New Yorkers who lost their lands in the region. Over the next several years representatives of the two states worked out the details that culminated in the treaty of 1790, and New York vacated its claims to the Green Mountains upon Vermont’s admission into the union.”

– A More Perfect Union: Vermont Becomes a State, 1777-1816; AnticipatingAmerica, Michael A. Bellesiles, pg. 95, footnote 47. Support for Bellesiles’ research came from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

It was after I came across the above while doing research, as well as a number of other references to primary documents of the period that I began to question in my own mind the whole notion that Vermont had ever been a republic.  Proof of such as provided by Flagg and the seceshers is so uncompelling that it can’t be treated as serious scholarship.  Tie that to the fact that there is no written record of Vermont’s supposed status as a republic until suggested by a shopkeeper and an armchair historian in the mid-20th century and there is more than sufficient reason to doubt the republic myth.

Flagg continued, “Naylor, and the group he championed, suffered a tough blow after critics pointed out SVR’s loose ties to the League of the South (LoS), a neoconfederate secessionist group with white-supremacist undertones. Naylor lashed out at critics, and the secessionists found themselves, as Williams recalls, “dragged up and down the Vermont blogosphere.”

“A bunch of folks began to intimate that if you were a Vermont secessionist, you were a racist,” says (UVM professor and then SVR advisory board member, Frank) Bryan…”

First, SVR did not have “loose ties” to the League of the South; one LoS director sat on SVR’s advisory board, as did the past director of LoS’s Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History who later went on to form another of these phony “institutes” naming it after the slave plantation, Abbeville, of the notorious John C. Calhoun, who in a speech before the US Senate in 1857, called “slavery a positive good”; as well as others with strong ties to the LoS and its institutions.  One SVR advisory board member was a member of the Italian racist group Lega Nord.

Second, LoS doesn’t merely suffer from racist undertones; it is explicitly racist.  As a matter of policy it views slavery as “God ordained,” opposes “race mixing” and sees segregation as necessary to preserve the “integrity of the races.”  More about the LoS here.

Despite what Frank Bryan said about being a Vermont secesher getting you tagged as being a racist, I know I never said that on my blog or suggested that, nor did I ever read or hear it come from others I know who had blogged extensively on the matter.

What in fact happened was that the powers that be at SVR dismissed concerns about racist associations in a particularly repugnant way.  

In two exchanges with reporters/investigators for the Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) who were pursuing the reports of Naylor’s racist connections, he responded,

“Naylor told the Report for Beirich’s story that the (League of the South) was “not racist,” adding that he didn’t “give a shit” what the Report wrote. He appeared twice on a Tennessee-based radio program called “The Political Cesspool,” a white supremacist show that specializes in interviewing neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and the like. When the Report first published its story, Naylor described it as an attack by “the well-financed, hate-mongering, witch-hunting, left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center.”

And in another exchange with the SPLC, the founding father of SVR and the Vermont secesher movement revealed what a truly classy wouldbe ruler of the Vermont said,

“Reached by telephone at his home in Vermont, Naylor declined to discuss the state of his relations with the neo-Confederates. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “It’s the SPLC that’s the hate group. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

Must be a style Tommy Reb picked up at the Cheney School of Dickishness.

Rob Williams, then co-chair of SVR with Naylor, said,

“Is (Donald Livingston, founder of the LoS Institute For the Study of Southern Culture and History and founder of an institute named after a famous slavery proponent’s slave plantation and who has said that segregation was a Northern invention) a racist? I don’t know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level.“

And so began Rob’s longstanding policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Care” when it comes to the extremist, racist views of he and Tommy Reb’s neo-Confederate allies.

And then, as if their tone deafness to valid concerns of Vermonters about a completely unnecessary partnership with a racist group, the League of the South, couldn’t have been worse, Naylor and Williams doubled down and launched a purge of SVR members who express displeasure with the racist association.  Any “tinge of racism” acquired by the Vermont secesher movement was entirely self-inflicted and continues to this day, no matter how much they’d rather that Vermonters not take a close look at their history.

As recently as a year ago Williams contributed a chapter to the Abbeville Institute director Donald Livingston’s most recent secesher literary effort to slap a whole lot of lipstick on their racism tinged pig.

Flagg also failed to tell readers that only two months ago the White House spokesman, Jon Carson, put out this, a definitive statement on the issue of secession, saying that,

“Our founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union” through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. They enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot — a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it. As President Abraham Lincoln explained in his first inaugural address in 1861, “in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual.”

Nor did Flagg disclose Seven Days own early distribution agreement with VTC that fell apart as news of racist associations of SVR and the increasingly troubling statements that came from SVR’s leadership, the purges and the vicious personal attacks launched by Naylor and his flying monkeys minions against individual Vermont bloggers.  Yes, yes, I know that the statement that came from Seven Days famed Red Room said that it was really about potential confusion over which publication was which but that never came up before the racism stink attached itself to VTC and SVR.  It wasn’t believable then and it isn’t today.  Little wonder then that Flagg didn’t bring the matter up.

At the outset of Flagg’s piece she wrote that Frank Bryan said,

“I think that the Vermont secessionist movement is over. Has been for a long time.”

If she’d ended her piece there, rather than repeating secesher talking points and advancing some pretty crappy history about Vermont and the secesher movement, she might have written a decent piece.  Which leads us to the question, where were the Seven Days editors who pride themselves on their critical journalism, some of whom must have journalistic memory of the period, and why didn’t they raise the standard of the piece to something more than a reiteration of the meme that Rob Williams has been promoting for years that flies in the face of the known facts.  Once Flagg had criticism from Williams and Bryan regarding bloggers, the blogosphere or whatever other artful way that they could come up with to allude to three of the most well known critics of their enterprise, she had the obligation to pursue the facts further rather than just accept, and thus endorse, their self-serving point of view.