Editor’s note: due to formatting problems, several versions of this post have appeared on VDC this morning. We regret the errors.
by Tom Licata
With reports of censorship swirling around Vermont’s media – particularly Front Porch Forum – I thought I’d share my account of my censorship and banishment from this platform.
Below is the smoking gun-the ‘thought crime’ if you will: my 2022 VT House of Representative campaign letter.
It’s altered to reflect my 2024 VT House write-in campaign. On a lark and a prayer, last month I put down some $870 to take out a full page Ad of my campaign letter in Burlington’s North Avenue News. One friend of mine thought me crazy. A real waste of money!
My thought? What price to pay to enlighten but one soul afflicted with what Mattias Desmet describes as Mass Formation, in his excellent book titled The Psychology of Totalitarianism. It is a kind of censorship and indoctrination being implemented not only by Front Porch Forum, but also by the likes of Vermont Digger, Vermont Public Radio, WCAX, Burlington Free Press, Seven Days, to name just a few of these cancer-spreading media outlets.
The following is an edited version of the campaign letter that led to my 2022 censorship and banishment from Front Porch Forum:
Dear Vermonter,
My message is blunt. It’s meant to awaken. To connect the dots. Most importantly: To inform.
The traditional Democrat Party is dead. It’s gone. Progressivism has absorbed it. Progressivism is a euphemism for today’s postmodern-Socialism.
On Socialism: Among Socialism’s 45 goals read into the 1963 Congressional Record were: (1) Control the schools and teachers’ associations [think VT-NEA]. (2) Emphasize the need to raise children away from the influence of parents [think VT Act 35]. Promote promiscuity [think Drag-Queen Story Hour]. (3) Discredit America’s founding [think CRT & BLM]. (4) Transfer powers from police to social/community boards [think Defund the Police]. Does all this sound familiar?
On Postmodernism: Postmodernismis a (Marxist) Cultural Revolution. It seeks to replace Modernism or the Enlightenment Era. Modernism believes that reality can be known through objective reason (male and female), and as reason is a faculty of the individual, the individual is the unit-of-value. Postmodernism rejects this reality for subjective reality (male becoming female); this reality is constructed through language [think gender affirming care] and social conditioning [think censorship and Mass Formation carried out by the aforementioned Vermont media outlets].
Postmodernism rejects the notion that education exists to primarily train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason. Postmodernism’s unit-of-value is not the individual child, but their categorized social identity. Postmodernism believes education should imprint onto the child’s consciousness a given social identity (race, sex, sexuality). These identities then clash for power and control (oppressors vs. oppressed). Postmodern-socialism dehumanizes the individual in order to elevate the most ‘marginalized’ of social identities; the writ-large objective of which is to achieve perfect “equity”… which can only be accomplished in the perfect Totalitarian Society: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”.
To summarize, among Postmodernism’s goals (weaved in with Cultural Marxism) is to control a mass of people through the manipulation of language. Think Genesis 3:1: “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” This-my fellow Vermonters-is today’s far-left Vermont Democrat Party.
A Forewarning: Former Vermont resident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke of such things during his prescient 1978 Harvard University Commencement Address:
“The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance…. [F]reedom toward evil has come about gradually… to which man… does not bear any evil within himself, and all defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which therefore must be corrected…. The humanistic way of thinking… did [not] see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth.
“And yet in… American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature…. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: Our Spiritual Life.”
Summation: I’ll measure every action I take against its impact on your family’s economic health. My goal is to heal the damage done by the reckless economic, law-enforcement, education, and family policies of today’s postmodern-Socialists; most notably disguised within the remnants of yesterday’s traditional Vermont Democrat Party.
My Advice: Stop voting for them: For if it’s man-and not God or nature-that determines reality, then the only God of man is man himself… precisely Socialism’s goal.
Sincerely, Tom Licata
The author is a Burlington resident and 2022 candidate for the Vermont Legislature.
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Categories: Commentary, politics
Absolutely correct Tod!!
My personal experience and analysis of deconstructionism :https://vermontdailychronicle.com/thurston-multiculturalism-is-deconstructing-our-culture/ . The Progressives are drunk on deconstructionism and socialism .
Not that I can vote for you, Tom, but I am curious. You call yourself an “Independent”, and it’s clear that you can talk (or write, in this case) a good game.
But “Independent” seems rather non-committal. Does that mean “wishy-washy”? Does that perhaps mean you’re an “old school Democrat”? It would seem that if you lean Republican you wouldn’t be hesitant to say as much.
I’m always skeptical of candidates who don’t make their allegiances known. So help your potential voters flesh out who you really are, Tom. As I said up front, I can’t vote for you, but I’m sure those who can would like to know, even at this late date.
Robin, I get a perfect sense of who Tom is and what he stands for through his words. No party affiliation needed.
Very ironic!
Guy Page or someone else from VDC censored my opinion piece. I had submitted a material introduction (or important part of my original submission) to my campaign letter and without telling me, they just omitted it.
I emailed Guy about this and have yet to hear back from him.
Tom Licata
There was no censorship involved by Guy or VDC. Just mere honest mistakes…
To Tom and our other readers: We had a flood of manpower and formatting problems with yesterday’s issue, and Tom’s column was probably the most impacted victim. Our regrets to all affected. There was certainly no intention to censor. Thank you Tom for clarifying that in your followup comment.
Bravo Tom! They are totally against our founding documents, the Declaration of Independance, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s why I call them Commiecrats. They say Trump would be a dictator when everything the Commiecrat Party does is exactly what a dictator does.
1. Take away our firearms.
2. Trying to keep Trump off the ballots of several states.
3. Trying to keep RFK Jr. on or off the ballots of several states as it pleases them.
4. Sueing the states Alabama and Virginia to keep illegal voters on the voting rolls.
5. Censoring speech on social media platforms.
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish a dictatorship”. – George Orwell
Totally agree with you Mr. Licata, vote them all out!!! I hope it’s not too late.
Thank you for the article. I plan on sending it to my 41 year old daughter in Massachusetts to read. I’m hoping she will read it with an opened mind but I’m not holding my breath. She was indoctrinated in college in Boston in 2001 and won’t even debate me on political issues. She shuts me down every time. Maybe this article will open up some lines of communications again. At least I hope it will.
Excellent article Tom. You know where I stand on this issue. Vote them all out of office. I was listening to a short podcast by the Mises Institute this morning and the president also referenced the threat of Socialism, DEI and Federal Reserve policies.
Does Vermont have any ” Blue Collar ” Democrats remaining, or have they all gone to the Progressive side??, I ask because I can’t believe they would follow the nonsense
being pushed by the so-called Progressive-Democrat party……………………
If you are, wake up they left you.
There is another party that is also dead to the republic, vtgop!
What will happen after today’s election?
Vermont has been subverted, just like Washington, D.C., who will cast more votes for tha cabal with the figure head of Kamala Harris? That will show the extent and depth of subversion that has taken place and the amount of useful idiots in place.
Who has more cover up of crimes, fraud and misuse of public money by percent? Washington DC or Montpelier?
Some us are tired of being a test subject of every stupid Marxist idea that comes down the pike. SOS, sanity over socialism, Lord please hear our plea, I ask in Jesus name.
It is not about left or right anymore. It is about good v. evil. Why is our country divided by a two party system that for over 100 years is controlled by bankers and propped up by foreign regimes?
The only thing that will “save” this country is a roundhouse God smacking (aka Cosmic 2×4) to the cranium that will drop society onto it’s knees. Today being selection day, I suspect the bankers will win and the billionaires will gather up their assets, along with ours, and the great financial reset will commence to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the Republic. Hate to say it, but it appears there is no justice as our Constitution is ignored, subverted, and spit upon by the controllers and paid operatives.
Romans 1:28 ESV:
“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.”
There is no Democrat party and there is no Republican Party. There is just the deep state, warmonger puppets and those who are trying to fight them. The whole system has been subverted by a small cabal of insiders who despise you and me.
Liz Cheney is not a Democrat, neither was her father but both now align completely with the Obama faction of the Democrat party.
Phil Scott is not a Democrat but he refuses to endorse the chosen candidate of the party he says is his.
Bernie says he is an independent socialist but he played pied piper for the most war-hungry, anti worker candidate in recent history (Clinton). He is also in the bag for Kamala – another puppet.
These party/ideology labels don’t matter. They are just tools to stifle your ability to articulate what is happening to our country.
The democrat party fought to maintain slavery, to establish Jim Crow laws and defend them in the courts, to set up the KKK as their militant wing, to intern American Citizens of Japanese ancestry and to use nuclear weapons on citizenry, not once but twice. They have since mended their evil ways and have progressed to allow in many jurisdictions the termination of unborn humans up to the time of natural birth, to destroy hard-fought Title 9 of the US Civil Rights Code, to allow men to compete against women in traditionally gender-segregated sports and to supersede laws protecting minors from making life-altering medical decisions, even criminalizing the intervention by their own parents. The democrat party is dead but still walks among us, mouldering like a zombie.
DNC DOA RIP.