Progressive legislators who pushed Vermont’s new Affordable Heat Act display little wisdom when they self-servingly latch on to children to bypass experienced business people and retirees paying higher taxes to heat their homes on fixed incomes. Why address the issues when you can simply hold up sympathetic adolescents as human shields in lieu of intelligent discussion?

In precisely this way, state Rep. Chip Troiano, D-Stannard, displaced people of voting age in a pontification supporting S.5:

This comes the same week when hundreds of high and junior high school students rallied on the State House lawn urging us to take action on Climate Change. As I walked through the crowd and engaged these young people I found them to be knowledgeable and well informed on the status of our climate situation. They all had this urgency, because they will be the ones who will be most affected by climate change and they know it.

Has Rep. Troiano met with young people who have a different view, and assessed how he finds them to be informed? When asked about the inequitable regressivity of the bill he used children to tout, he refused to engage in any knowledgeable or well-informed fashion.

The hypocrisy and confusion of child-manipulating progressives is widespread. One progressive bill seeks to raise the age for buying tobacco to 21, placing criminal liability solely on those selling cigarettes, proposing zero consequences to minors who try to buy butts: how’s that for a moral hazard? Vermont has the highest age for criminal accountability for juveniles, at age 19, so expect a crime spree by unaccountable kids for greater crimes than cig-sales.

Vermont law raised the age of marriage to age 18. Progs do not credit youngsters with that decision, though they are permitted to consent to unmarried sexual intercourse at age 16. Meanwhile, minors under 16 are afforded the maturity to decide to irreversibly sterilize themselves with gender hormone therapies, hide their gender identities from their parents while enlisting teachers and school counselors as allies, and confidentially obtain abortions.

This is patently manipulative. Perhaps Troiano and progressives simply never grew up, and lack the adult wisdom to logically weigh all facts and respect all sides. This would explain why they bypass exactly that using the children they pre-purpose for the task.

Active shooter drills traumatize young children but make them good political weapons in future gun control battles. Sexual education that displays graphic sex to toddlers is suspect, but serves the laptop-class Uber-Party. Terrifying others’ children about climate change, and shaming children for being white, male or heterosexual, inculcates them to be future political cannon fodder at prog-organized events like the one Chip Troiano championed.

Progs now want to extend this macabre display of fear-seeding to 3-year-olds, to inflict daycares and pre-schools with loony-left brainwashing. “Comprehensive” sex education views children as “sexual beings at birth.” A recent event open to minors at Vermont Technical College included a segment teaching “Queer Sex Ed: Strap-ons and Anal Play.”

Progs have activated their child zombies using all the wrong fears. This generation of anxious children are barraged with the political platform of socialists who are themselves apparently unafraid of how Vermonters will afford massive budget increases; how escalating inflation will impact food, housing, and energy prices; what rising interest rates mean for the future of our children; or what happens if a Great Depression recurs, when most of Vermont’s farm production has been replaced with out-of-state industrial processed foods subject to supply-line disruptions. It seems this group of adults have amnesia over basic truths once known by their elders.

This is wisdom that my generation acquired, even when we were still children. If Vermont children were taught math, economics, how to manage a budget or the risks of a runaway money supply and hyper-inflation, would that be political manipulation for self-promotion, or merely a sound education?

Troiano and others manipulate youth to avoid adult conversations with adult taxpayers, also ignoring the moderate or conservative young who do not share the views of a high school freshman conditioned and then soapboxed to parrot vapid prog mantras.

Any child can see the clean heat standard is a disgraceful mess and an inequitable economic disaster. Unless they’re scared stupid.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2023. All rights reserved.