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.