Despite years of promoting Vermont secession and patently bullshit representations of the law to absolutely no affect other than to clog the Internet with various forms of her lies, Missy Rosemarie keeps limping along like some demented, energized bunny.

In her most recent dishonest bit of fact omitting legerdemain, Jackowski, who describes herself as an “advocacy journalist” ( who, by the way, has no journalistic roost other than the websites that offer an unrestricted portal to any nutjob with a keyboard and internet access) has yet again (12/13/13) accused a Bennington Select Board member of “threatening” a member of the  public.

Taking, for a moment, Jackowski’s claim to be an advocacy journalist, let’s consider what, exactly, an advocacy journalist is.  By the definition of most in the reality based world, an advocacy journalist is one who uses facts while presenting a point of view of said facts.  In Jackowski’s perverted use of the term “advocacy journalist” such a journalist plays fast and loose with the known facts and conveniently ignores facts that interfere with the point of view being pushed.

Recently Jackowski has been making the charge that Bennington’s “highest ranking public official” has made “threats against a citizen.”  Oddly, the citizen purportedly threatened has made no complaint.  Jackowski’s left that out of her “reportage.”  Moreover, while that official has made a public apology to the citizen for his intemperate remarks that were not intended as a personal threat (12/6/13), Jackowski has continued to work her meme more than a week after the apology at another website while making no mention of either the apology or the lack of a complaint.  In fact, she has been repeatedly challenged to make the complaint herself if she thinks it’s such a fucking big deal but, like with requests for facts from even her supporters here, she’s done nothing and ignores all queries.

Rosemarie Jackowski has lied about a smear poem that she concocted at one website by stating that (although no one said she did) she didn’t smear them on GMD.  I’d doubt that the Board would agree that she hasn’t smeared them here with unsubstantiated claims of conflicts of interest on GMD – we’re still waiting for those ghost facts of yours, Rosemarie.

It’s time for Rosemarie to man up and do what that Select Board member did and to apologize for her own specific gross misrepresentations, calculated omissions and lies here and elsewhere.  As an example of the two faced quality of her journalistic standards, Jackowski dedicates her diary below to one of the most foul mouthed mud slingers on GMD.  I guess she’s only against mud slinging when it isn’t one of hers doing the slinging.

Time to come clean, Rosemarie.  Or maybe you ought to just personally secede.

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 one time Vermont secesher legislative candidate in Franklin County, Todd Pritsky. (Pritsky came in stunningly last in a field of five.) Pritsky was a member of what was thought by the surreptitious (exclusive – heh)  group (on 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.

( – 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.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

As I searched through the braintrust publications of the Vermont secesher community, it struck me the other day that I was finding more and more frequently that I was coming across an increasing reliance on the contributions of known anti-Semites.  Last week I wrote about one VTCommons blogger’s long, distatsteful history of anti-Semitic writing and activism.

The most recent find was of a woe-is-me, the-sky-is-falling, economic type of article, much favored by the Vermont secesher community, by one Paul Craig Roberts.

Vermonters are supposed to read this stuff, climb into the secesher clown car and head for the nearest cliff. After all, according to “Vermont Commons” publisher, Rob Williams, and Thomas Naylor, baas of the Second Vermont Republic, there is no god but secession and through secession thou shalt be saved. And heck, Naylor’s got that whole Israeli Mafia and the possibility of the Mossad running operations here in Vermont running around in his head.

Paul Craig Roberts was once a writer for national publications and had served in the Reagan administration. No more, for in 2006 Roberts took a very hard turn to the dark side. Now his work is more often published in VDare.com, a white supremacist, anti-Semitic website where his archive of hundreds of pieces may be found among this nation’s most virulently anti-Semitic writers.

VDare is designated as a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center; more on VDare.com is to be found here, here and here. In addition to his despicable contributions at VDare, Roberts writes for American Free Press, successor to the racist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying Willis Cato‘s earlier hate publication, The Spotlight. Roberts’ work on the Jews and Israel has been frequently highlighted at Cato’s well known Holocaust denial website, Institute for Historical Review.

The Anti-Defamation League has an extensive report on Roberts promotion of anti-Semitism here

Naylor has featured Roberts’ squirrelly February 7 piece, The Official Unemployment Rate; an “Official” Lie at the SVR website. Naylor had earlier published Roberts’ stuff here and here. Like Naylor, Roberts has been a repeat visitor to the racist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying web radio program, The Political Cesspool. The Political Cesspool‘s host, hatemonger James Edwards, polled readers of his blog in late December, 2010 about who some of the first guests of the year should be on his show; among other top vote getters like David Duke and Pat Buchanan was none other than SVR‘s own Paul Craig Roberts. Roberts got one of the coveted early appearance spots on January 15, 2011.

Thus it was hardly a surprise then when I found that Paul Craig Roberts work had also been featured by no less than VTCommons publisher Rob Williams himself. Why wouldn’t Naylor and Williams have their respective toes dipped into the same ideological cesspool? After all, when Naylor’s problem with the Israeli Mafia first reared its head, Williams said that he agreed with Naylor about Israelis.

“Since most Americans have been conditioned by years of corporate media training to associate anti-Israeli sentiment with Anti Semitism, talking about the Israeli Mafia smacks of antiSemitism blah blah. Holocaust, SVR are racists, etc ad nauseum. I have spent 4 years defusing the SVR/LOS nonsense and it is finally done, even in the blogosphere. Why go there again?”

“… the thing is I agree with Thomas re Israel.”

Fact is, as time goes by, the “small” Vermont secesher crowd more and more resembles the usual bigoted suspects.

(The above was posted yesterday, Sunday, February 13. Williams has posted a usual non-responsive response that reiterates his intention to proceed with his solo bardate.  None of the invitees have any inclination whatsoever to appear on his fantasy debate team.

A new post on another VTCommons/SVR content contributor who has strong ties to the anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying community has gone up today.

mor2cum)

(Thanks for posting this here– fairly thorough debunking of an oft-cited fake statistic. – promoted by JulieWaters)

The recent Vemont election has finally exposed the Second Vermont Republic polls commissioned by Thomas Naylor to be the misleading and deceitful constructs that I’ve always said they were.

Naylor’s handpicked candidate for Vermont governor, Connecticut native Dennis Steele, finished the race at what can only be described as a very distant and abysmal third place. Some of the independents who ran speak of this third place showing in an unreal way, as though the three “top” vote getters were all within a few votes of each other. Of the 241,605 votes cast, nearly 240,000 supported Dennis Steele’s opponents. Steele has the support of approximately 0.79% of Vermonters who voted.  

Given that Naylor has been telling the out of state press and anyone else who’d listen that a UVM poll (that he rarely tells people that he’d written and commissioned) showed that 13% of Vermont voters supported the notion of secession, something must have gone terribly, terribly wrong over the past 10 months for the tiny band that comprised the Steele campaign. Indeed, Naylor has “extrapolated” that his polls indicated somewhere around 60,000 of Vermont’s voters support secession. Yet, now that the counting is finally done, Naylor’s “extrapolated” projection of the support in Vermont for his and Steele’s “imaginings” for secession has fallen short by more than 58,000 votes.

In Charlotte, VT, the town where Thomas Naylor retired to after spending most of his life in the South, and where people generally roll their eyes at the mere mention of Naylor’s ambition for Vermont, only 10 people voted for Steele. That’s 0.48% of the 2041 votes cast in Charlotte. In Waitsfield, home to “Vermont Commons” publisher and über propagandist for the SVR and Free Vermont crowd, Rob Williams, Steele got 9 votes. Perhaps worst of all, Steele got only 5 votes in his present hometown of Kirby, VT.

So, what went wrong?

Well, nothing really. You see, the so-called “Vermont secessionist movement,” said to be making great strides in moving the secessionist ball forward in the United States, has always been an elaborately constructed hoax. Despite “secession activist Thomas Naylor(‘s)… left-leaning Second Vermont Republic movement” having been described as successful in generating popular support for Vermont’s independence, it just ain’t so. Steele’s vote total is on a par to that of other bizarro fringe candidates that appear from time to time in Vermont.

A part of the structure of the hoax of a Vermont independence movement has been, in addition to the phony poll results, an academic veneer carefully applied during the past 7 years by people such as Naylor, “Professor” Williams, Ian Baldwin, Kirkpatrick Sale, Donald Livingston, Thomas DiLorenzo, Jason Sorens, and a host of other scholarly bullshitters scattered mostly in the South. These guys grind out papers and books at a remarkable pace for something without much success or substance – secession.

Another part of that hoax has been the writers who “corroborate” the overstatement that a movement is afoot and growing. Often these supposedly objective chroniclers of this story repeat unquestioningly the “facts” put forth by the leaders of secession without presenting other contradictory facts that they are aware of, including those that directly undermine the figment of a movement to address the deficiencies of difficult times – secessionism.

No one would dispute that these are difficult times but, really, when in the experience of humankind haven’t the times been difficult? Hasn’t there also always been a human need to consider something that might be possible to ease or offer a pleasing alternative to the difficulties? (And no, I’m not about to launch into an equation of secession to that other great opiate, religion.)

One such instance of an easier to think of alternative to the hardships of the time occurred in England during the Great War in 1917. It was embraced by theosophists who looked for evidence of the potential for evolutionary development of man. It had to do with the supposed existence of fairies. And it was a hoax.

In order to perpetrate a fraud, a hoax or a con, you need only the con and those who want so badly to believe in an easy path to something better.

Naylor and company have been industriously working at making their secession plan appealing to whoever, and in whatever manner it takes, so as to sell the gullible on their idea. Naylor’s called his plan a Genteel Revolution and has come up with all sorts of cute catch phrases to suggest that nothing could be simpler than to opt out of what he calls “the Empire.” Along the way he’s mangled quotes attributed to early Vermonters, issued a form of currency that he calls a token, purloined the regimental flag of the Vermont National Guard, and has lashed out at virtually every Vermonter and local institution since we have not slavishly endorsed his enthusiasms as has his “small community of secessionists”. I’m surprised that they haven’t thought yet to conjure up a Vermont Secession fairy for there movement.

The truth is that the Vermont secession movement, like the Cottingley fairies, is simply a hoax. Naylor at first claimed to have 125 members in SVR and then discontinued membership claims. Based on a variety of sources, a more modest figure of somewhere between 20 to 25 people constitute the hardcore center of “membership” to the Free Vermont independence group. Before launching their campaign late last year, a party registration was discouraged. Obviously that was so the true dearth of secessionists would not be revealed.  Even at the January 15 announcement this year of their campaigns for statewide and General Assembly offices, they only gathered the usual 20 or so deadender sesechers that always show up for Naylor’s dog and pony shows.

“I’ve been writing about Vermont independence for nearly ten years… and, more often than not, it was for an audience of one.”– Thomas Naylor (starts at 3:07)

Vermont has had a history of oddball candidacies, some more successful than others. Just six years ago Peter Stevenson ran for Lt. Governor on the Liberty Union party ticket and received nearly 1400 more votes (3291) than Steele and a higher percentage of the vote total, 1.08%.

“Umm, I, ahh, it would be my privilege to work as Vermont’s next Lt. Governor. Umm, I’m a very loyal person. I’m a hard worker and I would do a lot for the people of the state of Vermont. They say a good friend would help you move. A really good friend would help you move a body. And my message to the people of the state of Vermont is, let me know if I need to bring a shovel. Thank You.”– Peter Stevenson (starts at 3:33)

Fact is, fringe candidate Stevenson is more real, as well as a more successful candidate, than the fairy tale that there is a growing Vermont secession movement.

Just in case there is any doubt about the unhinged from reality quality that infects the Vermont secesher community, here’s their latest InterTubes communiqué from the “provisional capital of Free Vermont,” a dispatch, if you will, meant to cash in on all that nomentum they’ve built up from the election:

Ribbon Cutting & First Plenary Meeting



Posted on November 4, 2010

Center for Vermont Independence

Sunday 12/12 at the Center in Hancock!

Please keep this day open, bring your expertise and ideas.

In 2006 a single Free Vermont candidate ran for governor, a horse

farmer and a man of the theatre known to us as Ethan Allen. This

year, FORTY independents ran! This has led to many new organisational

initiatives. We want to keep the momentum going. Let’s coordinate, support each other, and be successful. Hancock is now the place to go, the provisional capital of Free Vermont.

Let’s please be clear that this is about Vermont’s Independence:

food/energy relocalization, our constitutional liberties, financial

independence from the corporate oligarchy, the post-carbon future of

Vermont. This is not just painting a pretty picture, this is DOING it. Want in?

Potluck meal, bring a dish if you can, then we’ll roll up our sleeves.

In a day the most we can hope to accomplish is to review the current

and future initiatives, and match up talent with those initiatives and future initiatives, and match up talent with those initiatives and

determine how to coordinate. There’s also dealing with media, lessons

learned from the 2010 election. A 2012 discussion will have to be

left for another day. (I’ve already declared for 2012, on Twitter of

all places.)

If people have concerns they should submit an agenda item in advance. New topics will be identified, interested parties can return to meet.

Cheers,

Robert (Wagner, notably unsuccessful secesher candidate for senator from Ripton, VT)

Likewise, Steele intends to cash in on his mandate by launching a new initiative:

Campaign Reflections and the Road AheadNovember 3, 2010

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

… Our next step is to build upon the foundations of this success and take our movement to the next level!

Dennis Steele

No doubt that next level is to be somewhere other than where he found himself at the close of the polls – flat on his face.

In the coming months I’ll, of course, be reporting on their usual lack of substantive results and the attendant puffery from the “small community” of local seceshers, as well as their out of state supporters and flacks.

Official Vermont Secretary of State results for the 2010 general election may be found here.