By Meg Hansen, republished from Chronicles, The Magazine of American Culture
Sam Douglass photo via Vermont Legislature
In what can rightfully be called an orchestrated purge, Politico published an exposé of private, transgressive messages between members of a national Young Republican group. Michael Bartels, a former executive secretary of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC), attested under oath that former NYYRC president Gavin Wax used threats and blackmail to obtain the chats and that Wax then selectively leaked them to the press.
Vermont Republican State Senator Samuel Douglass was named in the report, which prompted a frenzy amongst his party colleagues. Uniquely exposed as an elected official, Douglass is now the target of a show trial and attempted expulsion.
Every Vermont Republican official with a party title performed the ritual denunciation: reciting the usual litany of -isms and -phobias. How else could they signal their suitability for continued participation in managed opposition? Governor Phil Scott, whose political survival depends on Democrat votes, called on the beleaguered lawmaker to resign and leave the Republican Party. Douglass apologized on Wednesday and said that he will make another statement before the end of the week.
Fixating on the content of these chats, however inappropriate, misses the real issue at stake. Selective outrage and witch hunts are routinely used to eliminate political rivals and settle scores. Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, a Democrat, is in the thick of a scandal over leaked texts in which he fantasized about murdering a Republican legislator and his young children. Have any Democrats—or Vermont GOP politicians for that matter—called for Jones’ withdrawal from the race? Why not? Because politics is not a morality contest. Politics is about gaining and holding onto power, unsettling as that may be to many-a-Republican officeholder.
Politics is about power, and Douglass has it right now. My advice to the 27-year-old state senator from Orleans County: Don’t give it up. Speak with your constituents. Clarify your intent and the context. Make amends if you must but keep your focus on advancing the priorities for which you were elected. Let them strip you of committee assignments. Let them turn you into a pariah in Montpelier. So what? Make a difference where you can. If Vermonters re-elect you in 2026, you will outlast the critics. If they keep voting for you every election cycle, you will build your own mandate.
One does not need to defend Douglass, let alone like him, to recognize that the voters alone get to decide who represents them. Douglass’s fate should be decided at the ballot box next year—not by media operatives or party insiders today.
Orleans County and the rest of the northeast region remain a red island in deep blue Vermont. In the 2024 elections, Vermont Republicans exceeded expectations to win 17 state house seats and six state senate seats. They did particularly well in the northeast, where Douglass defeated a Democratic candidate in whom the left had heavily invested. Culling Douglass would hand Vermont Democrats an important symbolic win. He’s also one of the very few young Republicans from a rural, working-class background in a state legislature otherwise dominated by wealthy retirees and trust-fund progressives.
If Douglass caves to this coordinated hit job, he will give the regime exactly what it wants. The Zoomer right increasingly rejects the Boomer canonization of World War II as the nation’s founding myth and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as its new constitution. Moreover, like their left-wing counterparts, they hold negative views of Israel and the Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy. Sacred cows, once deemed untouchable, are now being dragged to the slaughterhouse. The liberal-interventionist oligarchy fears and loathes this generational reckoning.
Publicly purging a Republican Gen Z state senator would reassert the old guard’s dominance. The rising generation, and other dissidents not seduced by the beauty of losing, have but one choice: Tear up the script and wear tar and feathers like it’s the new black.
Meg Hansen is the Budapest Fellowship Program’s visiting senior research fellow at the Danube Institute in Hungary. Previously, she served as president of a State Policy Network-affiliated think tank in Vermont.
