By Guy Page

Nature abhors a vacuum. Vermonters abhor a vacuous news media that won’t ask tough questions about Vermont’s ever-growing taxes, failing schools, housing crisis, civil rights infringement, pedophile camps, faux environmentalism, and legislative tone-deafness to all of these problems. 

You see it everywhere. A ‘mainstream’ media outlet refused to publish a candidate’s criticism of the transformative Clean Heat Standard. The popular Front Porch Forum refuses to even acknowledge the existence of Rob Roper’s Behind the Lines column or the Vermont Daily Chronicle. 

Panicked about the prospect of losing the legislative supermajority, incumbents who drafted and/or voted for the Clean Heat Standard (CHS) are pushing back on their critics, calling their claims about high costs “baseless lies.”

Which is easy to do until someone pushes back with the facts.

The claim that the CHS will add $1.70 – $4 to a gallon of home heating fuel is in fact derived by simple arithmetic from data delivered in a state-mandated study. If Vermont had a properly adversarial, question-asking press corps, this inconvenient fact would have been stated and restated by our legacy media outlets, the ‘trusted news sources’ whose big donors include non-profits sharing the supermajority’s climate change and biodiversity conservation goals. 

Ditto their cozy relationship with the money-sucking Blob a/k/a the public school establishment. 

But I bring you encouraging news today. 

The number of news media outlets speaking tough questions to Power and reporting their answers (when they respond, which is too rare) is growing – in number, in influence, and in coordinated effort. 

Last week I received another phone call from my buddy Dave Soulia down in Pittsford. Dave is….a bit of a character. He’s a goat farmer, father of a deputy sheriff of the same name, rock and roll band leader, and computer whiz with a strong Libertarian streak who never, ever just repeats someone else’s ideas. The subject of every call is a question or a data point that emerged from his own mind.

A few years ago he started a blog called FYIVT that made good on the slogan “News That Affects You.” Then life (music/goats/computers) intervened and he took a break. 

But he’s baaaaack….fed up with the MSM carrying water for the LSM (Legislative Supermajority). They refuse to report all the ‘News That Affects You.’ So he’s doing it, this time making full use of AI-generating images. That ‘says it all’ cartoon at the top of this column? AI.

And Dave’s not alone. Every few days, a retired teacher in Randolph named Martha Hafner sends an unstintingly Christian, politically conservative email to thousands of Vermonters republishing VDC and Behind the Lines columns and promoting events like the VaxIII movie and the Million Women march in DC on October 12. She also prepares print-ready flyers on hot topics like the Clean Heat Standard. I always learn something new when I read it. 

Then there’s Right Side Up, a talk radio show produced by former GOP candidates Bill Huff and Mike Tagliavia. Bill is the creator of the G.E.T.R.E.A.L. campaign that urges voters to elect legislators who will vote for better laws on education, taxes, law enforcement and other quality-of-life drivers. 

In any early version of this column, I can’t believe I forgot to mention the redoubtable, indefatigable John Klar, who like Dave Soulia like ‘Farmer AND’ who somehow turns out Small Farm Republic column after column AND has authored a best-selling book – something neither Dave nor I have ever done.

The fire burns strongly in that one.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone(s) very important. Shoutout to Campaign for Vermont and WDEV Vermont Viewpoint host Brad Ferland, and Common Sense Radio host Bill Sayre for giving a sympathetic platform to Vermont voices sharing ideas of fiscal sensibility. 

People are noticing. Readership is up. So are views of Paul Bean’s Creemee Cast interviews and VDC-TV’s Friday at Four. Some state officials are actually paying attention to our reporters’ questions. 

Change will happen – in November, or in some November distant – when an informed electorate holds the policy makers and reporters sufficiently accountable. Then the Powers That Be will have a choice: Change, or Be Exchanged. 

But all of these media need your patronage, at least as a reader and often as a financial supporter and/or advertiser. To contribute $9 monthly on a recurring basis to VDC, please click here. To contribute $108 for one annual Sustaining Subscription, please click here. Checks in any amount (suggested annual contribution of $108) may be mailed to: Vermont Daily Chronicle, P.O. Box 1547, Montpelier, Vermont, 05601. Your support is not tax-deductible.