(Said meeting, by the way, is being held at the Hilltop Inn in Berlin. This morning, Spence put out a Twitter thread about his attempt to put an anti-racism resolution on the Vermont Republican Party’s agenda for its state committee meeting this Saturday morning. But that’s not why he’s the subject of tonight’s sermon. In the category of “No good deed goes unpunished,” we find Shayne Spence, former Ethan Allen Institute minion and wannabe filmmaker, who’s now running for House as a “Progressive Republican” in a district currently served by two Democrats.ĭesperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose. I realize you have to grab the reader’s attention with fiery rhetoric, but this is deliberate pandering to the Trump/tea party/Proud Boys wing of the conservative movement. Which, need I remind you, was a Republican invention. Nothing would impose speech codes or a “McCarthyite blacklist.” Nothing the Democrats espouse would pave the way for socialism. The party, nationally and in Vermont, is a broad coalition that can barely agree on a common agenda, let alone threaten the overthrow of the American way of life. Referring to the Democratic Party, presumably. We have to decide if we are going to maintain the Constitutional freedoms set in place by our founders - the ideas and principles that made us the greatest country in the world - or abandon them for a path toward socialism, speech codes, and McCarthyite blacklisting of citizens who expreess anything other trhan obedience to a single-party agenda. The nation and Vermont are at a tipping point. So let’s take a look at the rest of the thing. No Marxists there, except in the fevered imagination of EAI President Rob Roper, who signed this thing. Which is, need I remind you, a for-profit corporation. And for God’s sake, the 1619 Project was conducted by the New York Times. “Antifa” is basically a right-wing boogeyman it’s decidedly not an organization, let alone one capable of overthrowing the global political order. It poses the ludicrous proposition that the Black Lives Matter movement, Extinction Rebellion, Antifa and the 1619 Project all spring from the poisoned well of Marxism.īLM and Extinction Rebellion are nonviolent protest movements. The hardy-har-har political “cartoon” above was part of the solicitation. How else to explain the fact that an EAI fundraising plea ended up in my mailbox? And yes, it was addressed to me personally, not to “Occupant.” I must infer that the Ethan Allen Institute is hurting for money. Everything else I’m about to write comes from a single anonymous source, because official mouths are firmly zippered shut chez EAI. Mermel has confirmed he is now EAI’s president. Here I must pause to delineate established fact from informed hearsay. The vote of the EAI board was reportedly five for Mermel, four for Hansen, and two abstaining. She’s been ousted in an apparently messy process that culminated last night in Mermel’s razor-thin election to the presidency. Roper retired last March, and was replaced by serially unsuccessful political candidate Meg Hansen. After he stepped out of leadership in 2013, former VTGOP chief Rob Roper took the reins. It was headed for many years by former vagabond John McClaughry, who remains a prolific writer of those opinion pieces. Hey everybody, meet Myers Mermel, the new president of the Ethan Allen Institute.įor those unfamiliar, EAI is Vermont’s most prominent conservative “think tank,” best known for such influential operations as the seldom-heard Common Sense Radio and a steady supply of seldom-read opinion pieces.
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