This is an article written last year about a fascist-in-progressive-clothing festival in Vermont called ‘Libertystock’. This thing is going to be happening again Dec. 12-14 at the Bellow Falls Opera House in Bellow Falls, VT under a new name: the “Liberty Food Fest”. People are more than annoyed by this thing and not only want to get the word out, but also show exactly the kind of people that would gravitate to the likes of a Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for example.

Anonymous

What do you say about an event where John Klar is a moderate among the speakers? The notorious Vermont transphobe and failed political candidate led off the speakers at ‘Libertystock’, the rightwing libertarian music festival held this past weekend in Cabot. The good news is that the attendance was tiny. The speakers and musicians and their families may have outnumbered the attendees. Pushback about the event caused the speakers to be moved to another nearby site, off the Pranksy farm where the music and vendors were. But the speakers and their fans, including John Klar, circulated freely at the main event.

There are some odd similarities between parts of Vermont’s progressive culture and the alt right. Both claim a concern for pure food and local agriculture, certain forms of bodily autonomy, and a skepticism of establishment authority. Raw milk and farmers markets are touchstones in parts of both communities. The extreme right has always tried to organize in communities of people who feel alienated or displaced. This includes rustbelt cities, commuter-cul-de-sac neighborhoods, and the punk scene. Covid lockdowns created huge new opportunities for rightist groups. The speakers at Libertystock made for a fascinating case study in the Covid Conspiracy Right, and one that we ignore at our peril.

Lead organizer of the event was Olga M Mardach-DuClerc, aka Olga Maria aka The Latina Libertarian. Olga is an acupuncturist. She is trained in Chinese Medicine, and her websites offer cupping and herbalism for addiction and pain relief. She raises and sells organic chicken from her homestead in Johnson. All groovy so far. She is also the head of the far-right Vermont Libertarians.

Music led out with lesbian comedian Suz Seymour introducing singer Nina Martinez. Her song about 9-11 went something like “You know and I know, because we are the awakened ones”. This concept of an ‘awakening’ was echoed by others, but just to be clear she informed her audience that “9-11 was a setup”. No word on whether the queer bashing later in the day gave Suz pause, but she is Fairfield’s Libertarian party chair, and she made awkward terf-y jokes about her own pronouns. Lesbian fash, Latina fash, I was starting to feel uncomfortable.

I climbed in the event shuttle vehicle to head across the road to hear the day’s speakers. This John Klar was a gentler, better groomed John than the sweaty raver of his anti-lockdown tours a few years ago. He’s always been prone to cringy white-guy statements of the ‘All my Black friends tell me Vermont is the least racist place they’ve ever known’ sort, and claiming Jewish and Abenaki ‘heritage’. He’s one of many disgruntled failed-to-get-elected way-too-right-for-Vermont political candidates I’d see at Libertystock.

Klar spoke alongside writer David Gumpert. Gumpert is best known for his book (and years of activism) fighting federal restrictions on the sale of raw milk (and, to the cognoscenti, for his role in exposing the Me Too moment in the raw milk world’s inner circle).

Gumpert’s role was to show that you could have liberal credentials (he’s had pieces in The Nation saying January 6th was a Bad Thing and Trump should be prosecuted like Hitler was for the Beer Hall Putsch) and still ‘have questions’ about masking and vaccines and the whole ‘government Covid narrative’. At least one Vermonter who says she participated in the January 6th insurrection was in the audience. No word
on how awkward that may have been for anyone.

Klar was born in Connecticut and worked as a corporate tax lawyer for PriceWaterhouseCooper before reinventing himself as the hope for Vermont’s small farms (the subject of his new book). Klar has learned a pretty polished rap about how bad food makes you unhealthy, small local farms grow healthy food, and ‘We’ve been artificially making bad food cheap for a long time, and now the Globalists are saying only Big Ag can save us’. I think there’s a dogwhistle in there somewhere. The audience definitely heard what he was laying down with “I believe in reparations. Give the dollars to farmers.”

Raw milk and organic farming were basically the gateway drugs here. Once you understand that the globalists have been messing with your health by trying to ban small farms and raw milk, it’s easy to see how they’d also mess with your health by forcing the jab on you during a fake pandemic. Sufi-Unitarian minister Mellen Kennedy came on at this point to tell how (according to her, I’ve heard a different version from a member of her former congregation) she lost her church because she refused to ‘get jabbed’. First they came for the Unitarians, but I did not speak up because I am not a Unitarian? Heralternate health facts were supported by a Christian Libertarian Peace activist medical doctor (Irene Mavrakakis) who let us know that her private studies showed that Covid is not what you’ve been told it is. I think she also said Vitamin D and Ivermectin would cure it, but my notes are blurry.

Lest we let a ‘double board certified’ doctor have too much authority, we also had ‘Dr’ (PhD in Environmental Studies) Rob Williams leading us in yogic quantum energy breathing exercises to cure our ills. Rob is a part time yak farmer and long-time voice for decentralization and Vermont independence. He teaches in the Vermont college system and wants to sound like a progressive, and he has a previous history of sharing projects with the far right – as wannabe head of the ‘2nd Vermont Republic’ he worked with a Neo-Confederate white hate group called ‘The League of the South’.

Now that we had heard the liberals (umm) make clear the alternative facts about the pandemic, we get two nice (Christian, Pro-Life: Retta Dunlap and Allison Despathy) homeschooling advocates who let us know how they discovered that Covid lies are not the only lies the government is pushing at us. I was shocked (shocked!) to learn that social justice and environmental justice and the whole climate thing are also being pushed by special interests as a way to control hardworking nuclear families (at this point in the proceedings we are well beyond welcoming anyone who is not white, cis/het and fertile). Our last three speakers are male, and get introduced by someone who asks us to remember the January 6-ers, Two friends of hers are being unjustly prosecuted for not doing anything at the Capitol Insurrection. (A nice older lady named Deborah tells me at some point, in a whisper, “I was at January 6th, and the police let us walk right in!”).

Harrison Kemp, head of the Libertarian Party in Maine starts to say the quiet parts out loud with his callouts to ‘save the children’ (blatant Q-anon child sex trafficking conspiracy theories) and to the fascist Constitutional Sheriffs movement. Kevin Hoyt, (a failed candidate for Vermont Governor in 2022) goes batshit with his claims that the Vermont Department of Children and Families is promoting pedophilia and hides secret pedophilia symbols somewhere. I lose track of the details. It is possible he has expert knowledge about child abuse. In 2007 Hoyt faced criminal charges for allegedly forcing a 9 year old child to touch Hoyt’s genitals. Charges were later dropped, apparently because the child did not want to be questioned in court. Hoyt has a calling teaching children to hunt. He was arrested more recently for game law violations. I don’t know what came of those. When Klar and Hoyt were both running for Governor (they both lost) they ended up in court over Klar bringing up Hoyt’s old child sex abuse charge. Kevin’s most recent arrest was last Fall for allegedly violating a stalking order and threatening a former state representative with a firearm.

But having pedophiles running the government is bad, and Kevin Hoyt knows it, and he knows how to stop it. “Sheriffs can deputize anyone they want. I’m working on a couple of them”. This is another nod to the Constitutional Sheriffs movement, which is the idea that the highest legitimate form of law
enforcement in the United States (so called) is the County Sheriff. The Sheriff is beholden only to his (he/him/ his) constituents and to the Constitution. And he can arrest anyone he wants for violating it. The Constitutional Sheriff thing is getting into seriously scary territory, and it is way popular with far right militia groups. It goes along with another fascist meme, that of ‘The Day of the Rope’, a chapter in the 1970s racist insurrection novel “The Turner Diaries” which the far right has been trying to make real ever since. (Hint, it’s Jews, race mixers, the Black criminal element, and corrupt media and politicians {-> they are all corrupt} who get strung up on the day of the rope).

Our final speaker is Chris Sky, anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-mask Canadian YouTube sensation and hero to his audience. There are persistent rumors that he secretly got vaxxed in spite of being a viral antivax personality, but that’s been said of other anti-vaxxers, and nobody asks him about it here.

Sky has a lot of tattoos (do you ever wonder about tattooed people who don’t get vaccinated because they don’t want to pollute their bodies with stuff from needles?). He wraps up the day on a global level, telling us that Government, Law Enforcement, the Media and the Medical Establishment are ALL lying to us. Covid and Climate Change and the so-called LGBT Agenda are about them (it’s them again) having power on a global scale. “Climate change takes every one of the Covid restrictions and extends them forever.” In September (it was September already) “They are going to plant things in the schools to make the children sick” to justify new mask mandates and lockdowns.

Chris Sky says the LGBT agenda is to pervert and sexualize your children and the more LGBT they can create the more families they can destroy, which is the globalist agenda. He goes into a very long side rant about how liveable cities (mixed use, high density, walkable downtowns etc) are part of the plot. Oh, and the LGBTs are the biggest supporters the government has because they (we?) have the highest compliance rates about masks and vaxxing and supporting Ukraine.

Circling back to Child Trafficking, the police, politicians, and prosecutors are the ones trafficking the children, so of course they don’t stop it. “It’s a trillion dollar industry because of the organ harvesting, the blood harvesting, and the adenochrome harvesting.” This is full Q-Anon. I won’t try to explain it.

Chris Sky has solutions though. He’s been thinking about it, and here are the three phases of the United Non Compliance campaign he is calling for:

• 1) Global Awakening to the problem (there’s that ‘awakening’ thing again, I’ve been hearing it ever
  since that singer at the start of the day).
• 2) Taking Action, which can be running for office, writing a song, whatever.
• 3) “Holding Them Accountable”. Chris doesn’t say what this means. He didn’t need to. I leave the
  details to the imagination of the reader.

The guy MC-ing this whole series is named Dexter Lafavour. He’s a former Libertarian candidate for the Vermont Senate in Washington County, a registered Professional Engineer, Eagle Scout, and married to Carol Krokenberger, who was also present. Dexter Lafavour is also an adjunct professor at Norwich University. The second conspiracy theorist I’ve met today who teaches college in Vermont.

The whole thing has been videoed by Ericka Redic (Libertarian against everything accept maybe the 2nd Amendment, ran for Vermont’s seat in the US House last time around and lost, loves doing the independent video-media thing) and by her husband, a Black martial artist/ videographer/ fight
choreographer from Texas with an enviable collection of leather and swords (at home and on the web, not at the event). I never hear him say a word the entire day.

So there you have it. A complete crunchie granola to batshit fascist insurrectionary fantasy pipeline in one easy afternoon. It’s up to you (us) to make sure it stays just a fantasy.

This was a tiny event, with anywhere between 25 and 40 people at a time taking in the speakers. Unless it really grew in the evening, the music scene was even smaller.

This was just a small slice of the far right, basically it was a Libertarian event plus hangers on. I don’t know what the fee was to rent the land for the weekend. There’s no way ticket sales covered expenses and paid the musicians. I’d love to know the finances of the event. The racial and gender/sexual politics of a few of the participants were weird and murky. But that didn’t matter. There was no dress code or purity test. Tarot readings, yogic breathing, and tradwife xtianity were all sitting side by side. The role of white women in normalizing health and government conspiracy theories was clear. As was the proposed role for white guys with guns.

The granola to fash pipeline is real, it’s here in Vermont, and the cannabis market and Covid and alternative health and crunchy organics are all places to get sucked into it. Friends don’t let friends get suckered by it.