Bye bye Vermont?
The Secessionist Campaign for the Republic of Vermont
The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is “strong,” but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether. On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. “For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign,” said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.
Steele and the secessionists have nothing but contempt for Vermont Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, who are otherwise considered among the most liberal members of Congress. “They’ve done nothing to stop the wars,” says Steele flatly. Thomas Naylor was more pointed: “Every time a Vermonter serving in the National Guard gets deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, likely to be hurt or killed, Bernie and Patrick are there to commemorate the departure and have pictures taken.”
With 20 or so mostly middle-aged attendees looking on, the candidates each stood at the podium to deliver a remarkably unified message: The U.S. government, they said, was an immoral enterprise – engaged in imperial wars, propping up corrupt bankers and supersized corporations, crushing small businessmen, plundering the tax-base for corporate welfare, snooping on the private lives of citizens – and they wanted no more part of it. “The gods of the empire,” Steele told the room, “are not the gods of Vermont.”</em>