Neil Johnson: The real ‘climate change’ crisis in Vermont

Editor’s note: This commentary is by Neil Johnson, a resident of Waitsfield.

Vermont has been suffering from serious climate change for at least 30 years. Every year the climate gets worse and worse.

We have poverty. We have drugs. We have a curriculum that teachers are forced to indoctrinate our children with. We engineer poverty. We have the largest corruption scandal in the nation in EB-5 — a pet project of our own Sen. Patrick Leahy. We have increasing suicide among our youth. We have a brain drain from our youth fleeing our state. We have crony capitalism that those in Washington could only dream of.

We have perhaps the poorest education about the foundational documents of our nation. We are a state that believes we are a democracy, with little understanding of a republic. We have a representative legislature with members who have little or nor regard or their sworn duties. We have a state run amuck on emergency powers. We have rampant censorship in almost all our media platforms: Front Porch Forum, VTDigger, Vermont Public Radio and Seven Days.

Neil Johnson

We build “affordable housing” at $524 per square foot when luxury slope side residences are built for $423 per square foot. We have one of the highest minimum wages in our country, yet we are the least affordable. We have been working on the affordable housing crisis for decades, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, but there are still no affordable new homes for people buy. We have skyrocketing rents, but with rules and regulations that prevent and discourage anyone from ever becoming a landlord.

We know where every drug dealer is in every single town, yet we tell our police force not to arrest them. We arrest a known drug dealer going to a known drug hang out, taking a taxi from New York to Vermont “for Chinese food,” with a taxi full of drugs, yet we let the accused go free due to profiling.

We strive for equal pay for women, but the state pays a female attorney less by massive amounts, and then the state fights the pay discrepancy for years, ultimately losing. We prevent by development, including competitors bringing up bogus permit complaints, keeping Costco from selling gasoline for over a decade.

We fund pet projects through the free money trough known as grant money, whereby every stupid idea nobody would fund with their own money immediately becomes viable and wonderful. We have a political system that touts itself as wonderful, yet independent agencies rate our state with one of the lowest grades in the nation (a D-). We have non-profit agencies like Planed Parenthood funding entire political parties and then being funded by tax payer money. Planned Parenthood has implemented failed policies for decades that has not moved the needle on unplanned births, of which Vermont holds steady at 50%. We had the highest rate of addicted births in the nation, whereby woman get their children hooked on hard core drugs prior to even entering this world.

We strive for women’s rights but want to legalize the sex trade because it’s racist against blacks. We tax anything that moves, but porn “entertainment” showing interfamilial sex goes tax free, all coincidentally booming during the lock down.

We publicly fire a Vermont principle for suggesting that burning and looting might not endear people to any cause. Our cancel culture is alive — state employees, teachers, and government officials live in fear, knowing they must toe the line or lose their lucrative jobs. Rules for Radicals is our Bible and God to worship.

We have the most environmentally beautiful state in the nation, yet we are clamoring for more environmental changes. Even so, our biggest “climate change” crisis in Vermont is socialism — aka communism.

This list is but a tip of a large iceberg. We are the test case, we are the guinea pigs, we are the lemmings for the New World Order.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Darij and Ana

31 thoughts on “Neil Johnson: The real ‘climate change’ crisis in Vermont

  1. Spot on when you said: “We know where every drug dealer is in every single town, yet we tell our police force not to arrest them.” Several years ago I was speaking to a policeman in BARRE….Barre has a huge drug problem. He told me same thing. He knows where every drug dealer is, who they sell to, where they get the supply, how they sell, where they sell and where they live. But he said his hands are tied.. Laws favor drug dealers and the dealers know it. . Unless you catch them cold, in the act, with drugs & cash… police stand down. They need probable cause.. Even so, he said that he caught more than a few in the act, cold, dealing…but the ACLU, and free defense lawyers (paid for the State) get’s them off almost every time….so WHY bother arresting……and they all went back to dealing drugs ASAP. Which begets more & more addiction & crime, because the buyers of the drugs need money desperately…so they rob, steal, break in, shoplift…sell sex…whatever they can do to get money to buy more drugs. Thank you ACLU.

  2. The technocrat fascists set the agenda, and lured us in with a carrot – “dream a little dream” if only you are connected to the IoT…
    Ripped the agrarian roots right out of the ground, and tore the elder wisdom trees from our streets for their electrrmagnetic invasion of lines into our lives and our health and minds.
    Gave us credit cards and said, spend.
    Chuckling as we indentured ourselves to the Devil disguised as the local car salesman. Or the local banker.
    Bigger, brighter, more is better.
    Look here, look here, look here.
    Hooked to a screen in on 3 short decades.
    Easy prey.
    We were willing.
    We’d rather the simulation than the reality.
    Vermont’s verdant hills hold ugly secrets we don’t want to talk about.
    La la la la la la.
    Take the handout cuz there’s nothin’ else to give.
    And you will learn to love it.
    Achtung baby.
    We all gonna’ die – someone order me a cheeseburger!

  3. Education is the answer. But, not the education promulgated by a government that results in indoctrination. Reading both sides of issues with historical comparisons of the results of each system. I recently purchased Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. I am about 60 pages in to a 500+/- book and am truly surprised at what I have learnt about how everything functions. Go to the library get the book or buy it you will be enlightened.

  4. Great job, Neil.
    Now the trick will be to be sure the Climate Idiots take heed.

    I do not know how that will be possible, only at the next election. Defeat is the only thing they understand. They CAN be defeated, Chestnut-Tangerman was.

  5. Great article and comments. I wonder how truly “blue” our state really is. I’d like to see an audit of our election results and see where the fraud is. I’m sure there’s some there as we probably use some Dominion or Smartmatic tally machines. I’ve been here for 50 yrs and run my own hvac business. I’m very busy and make good money but I feel that I have zero representation as a conservative Christian here in this state. I feel as though I am enabling a drug addict every time I send my quarterly tax payments in. We are pretty much done with the insanity here and am looking to myself and my business to the Carolinas. I used to write letters to the editor and call my reps but I get a better response from my dogs. So sad

  6. An interesting article by the Smithsonian about what contributes to Climate Change. The Dome crowd seemingly promotes marijuana and desire to tax it for revenue enhancement. However they are contributing to the situation they wail and wring their hands over being against, atmospheric concerns. It’s the Flat Earth scenario believers and they are out to save everything. It’s an emotional mentality to them for “feeling good”, not reality. They don’t research any materials before they try to pass laws. Just do it, do something.

    Case in point: The Smithsonian article about VT’s cash crop, marijuana. Will they endorse growing to get taxes or eliminate to save the climate? A shock!!! Oh my god, a decision.

    Growing an Ounce of Pot Indoors Can Emit as Much Carbon as Burning a Full Tank of Gas
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/growing-ounce-pot-indoors-can-emit-much-carbon-burning-full-tank-gas-180977240/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20210315-daily-responsive&spMailingID=44624953&spUserID=MTAxMjM1NjA4MDIwNgS2&spJobID=1961249491&spReportId=MTk2MTI0OTQ5MQS2

  7. “may I suggest preaching to a different choir…”

    NOT while Churches are have been Verboten for a full year – regardless of “social distancing”!!
    You might sing out, or shake hands?!?!

    Accurate analysis, horribly sad, and viciously DANGEROUS.

    Un-Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged, Animal House

    • I think you misunderstand my recommendation… I’m simply saying its marginally productive to argue your point of view on this forum and Vermont Chronicle, for example, except to hone your arguments with perspectives from other like-minded people here. A valuable resource, to be sure.

      I’m taking my conservative commentary to the leftist strongholds, to at least let them know an alternative point of view exists. Perhaps a couple of minds can be changed there.

      P.S. Animal House (John Belushi)?? Or Animal Farm (George Orwell).

      • Tho it may seem the comments here don’t amount to much – anyone searching online for topics can find their way here. If our comments and the stories posted were tagged it would lead to more traffic. Most of what I read I do not comment to primarily bc there’s just no time. Opened a Gab account and have said next to nothing but read what everyone else has to say for better or worse.

        In a world gone mad – personally need the comfort of conservative points of view. Democrat derangement continues apace. Arguments in such places as VPO & GMD are falsely framed always arriving @ the same dead end cul de cac of predictable partisan-bashing conclusion TADA!

        Still believe there are fairminded Dems who are in closeted disagreement but fear the dogpiling mob.

    • Posting errors third try
      Spoiler Alert – Debating dishonest leftist propaganda anywhere but here a waste of my time. Read your comments and you fared well Mr Eshelman – background in journalism helps as to being on equal footing.

      Followed this writer for quite a few years – and found him to be gifted and talented, insights are precient, abstract thinking and summary of presentation magnifies the heart of a given issue and his strong suit.

      Can barely keep up with and digest all the conservative news I’m plugged into and the hatred emanating from the left is simply abhorrent to me. I do not have your patience with debate. Will avoid the litany of wisecracking jabs he himself would utter to any conservative in a similar status as his own and must admit highly entertaining and even lapses into fairmindedness on occasion. It ends there.

      Abject hatred consistantly shines through and a dealbreaker afaic. Intellectual dishonesty is prevalent and a shared committment of nearly all Democrats in general and spanning all of the left with exceptions of Glenn Greenwald and possibly Matt Talib. Untruthfullness and assertions inadequately backed are common when inconvenient truths cannot be refuted. Welcome to the political propagandist club – membership is free. All of VT media contributes to the Pravda Industrial Complex of the VSSR. They all make me sick.

      Oh-so tired of being sick and tired simply cannot wade into the jungle of lies and damn lies. Be it TV, news in all forms or opinion my bs-o-meter explodes on contact.

  8. Is it not tellingly curious that our Governor, his administration, our legislators, and those who voted them into office, are conspicuously absent from this discussion? That they ignore this very reasoned list of grievances begs the question, yet again, of how to remedy our corrupt condition. I am, admittedly, at a loss on the matter. Perhaps its time to take this debate into the lion’s den.

    There is a leftist Vermont blog by a fellow named John Walters, that accepts commentary. The Vermont Political Observer. a.k.a. the VPO: Analysis and observation of Vermont politics from a liberal viewpoint.

    If anyone has the stomach for the typical leftist dribble and personal ad hominem attacks on conservative points of view, may I suggest preaching to this different choir. Refugee commentors from Seven Days and VT Digger frequent Walters’ VPO, where they expound on what can only be described as the misguided and misleading perspective they assign to conservative points of view.

    Is it not worth a try? Afterall, my misery on VPO would enjoy some conservative company for a change.

    • P.S. Walters’ VPO response time is nowhere near as immediate as is TNR’s or Vermont Chronicle’s. But, so far at least, I have not been censored – at least not to the extent of VT Digger’s misgivings before it shut down comments entirely.

      https://thevpo.org/

  9. Newly proposed State of Vermont Welcoming Pamphlet

    WELCOME TO THE GRAVE LITTLE STATE OF VERMONT
    HISTORICAL FACTS
    ONCE RECOGNIZED AS THE PEDOPHILE CAPITOL OF THE U.S.A.
    SELF PROCLAIMED MOST DRUG ADDICTED STATE IN THE NORTHEAST.
    WIDELY RECOGNIZED FOR IT’S EMBEZZLEMENT EXPERTISE.
    A STATE SO OUT OFF STEP WITH INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS WE OFFER A $10,000 BRIBE TO ANYONE FOOLISH ENOUGH TO TAKE IT.
    SHOULD you REQUIRE ASSISTANCE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR WHITE SUPREMACISTS STATE POLICE.
    PLEASE DON’T FORGET TO PAY A VISIT TO OUR STATE CAPITOL MOUNTPECULIAR.
    WE PROMISE A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE THAT WILL HAUNT YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!

  10. Neil,

    You clearly state our plight and list the ravages of our state & Nation. We are good people with good intentions, but we have no discipline to adhere to or understand the founding principles of our Republic. This will most certainly be the demise of us all as a free people if we do not soon come to that realization.

    We are truly in a struggle of good vs evil, tempted by the illusion we are doing benevolent work, when really we are being used to further an evil agenda.

    We no longer evolve as a Nation or State from the fruits of our own agendas, but rather those agendas are of others seeking advantage over us and corrupting our system until it emulates their desires.

    As a nation of laws we have abandon abiding by our founding principles and God’s commandments. Yielding instead to a lobby that crafts manipulative legislation in the name of a Democracy that barley allows us access to elect our own representation anymore.

    Our system of governance has been restructured into a parallel universe, creating the illusion that the people are still in charge, this illusion, soon may no longer be required, if we continue turning left.

  11. The Vermont of the 1950s-1960s was virtually paradisaical by world standards. Now look at it.

    The Left have done Vermont precisely zero good. They are rot, and cancer. They have brought nothing here but suffering, diminution of freedoms, and communism.

  12. I had at one time during The Vietnam Era enlisted to protect my country against all “enemies foreign and domestic”, I now have a vow to only protect my family against what this country has become! God, please help us!

  13. Neil, an impressive list of maladies by any standard, yet you have barely scratched the surface of Vermont’s problems. Problems that our legislature has been aware of, but incapable of correcting after years and years of studies, commissions, consultants, expert opinions from activists and spending hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars. …….But all this doesn’t matter if we are now to believe what a majority our elected officials in Montpelier tell us.

    Why doesn’t it matter? Because a majority of our elected officials have told us that we have only nine years to solve the climate change crisis before the planet as we know it is gone. With the Global Warming Solution Act, the Vermont Legislature overrode the Governor’s veto and set the State on a course to spend untold billions of dollars that will do nothing to halt climate change.

    All the best efforts of the GWSA become moot because of China and its 1.4 million people who continue to build new coal fired power plants every day. China now tells the world that it will not not be CO2 neutral until 2060…..That’s thirty-nine years from now……Thirty years after the nine years absolute deadline we’re told we have to solve the climate change problem.

    Based on what our elected officials have told us with the utmost sense of urgency about climate change its too late, we only have nine years……We’re doomed.

    So Neil, don’t worry about all the problems facing the good people of Vermont……We’re doomed.

    I wonder if anyone has told the Chinese they only have nine years before Asia is under the Pacific Ocean?

    • Who in the Vermont political establishment has done due diligence on the science of global warming? Don’t tell me that there’s no need for this because “the science is beyond debate.” I know better.

      Who did due diligence on the science of Covid-19?

      The difference between Governor Scott and Governor DeSantis is that DeSantis called in experts– Atlas, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta– to give him the other side of the “we must lock down everyone” argument, and Scott could care less about what anyone says but Dr. Fauci. DeSantis has the courage to stand up to the bullies who everywhere spout how he is listening to misinformation, when the truth is that we’ve had the most disgraceful pseudo-scientific nonsense imaginable shoved down out throats.

      Control science and you can control the people. The fact that 50% or more of scientific studies can’t be replicated is what honest scientists call the “replication crisis.” This has been going on for years and even though scientists familiar with this say “yes, it’s bad,” this swamp keeps expanding and it’s a free-for-all. The replication crisis has come to Vermont and our leaders are clueless. Florida gets it. Texas gets it. The pseudo-scientific community is scolding them because they don’t want anyone questioning their doctrinal junk.

      Is the expansion of pseudoscience deliberate, or is it an accident of gross incompetence and lack of critical thinking? Who gains if we can put up whatever crap we want to and call it “science,” and thereby control policy that’s supposedly based on “data”? Are we really so dumb?

  14. Hi Neil,

    Thank you for many great points.

    It would be great to re-arrange your article as numbered declarative statements.
    The impact of your summary would be much greater, and easier to digest.

    1. We have poverty…….
    2. We have drugs……
    3. We have a curriculum…….
    Etc.

    Each numbered item would have a statistic ranking VT vs other states.
    That would show VT to be a leader, somewhat similar to Cuba, Venezuela, etc .

  15. I absolutely love what you have written, and my wish would be that the younger generation 18-25 would actually read it and let it sink in. Vote them out, its the only way to save the state….or move somewhere else, perhaps Texas.

  16. Vermont has been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, and it’s called ” Liberal Politics ”
    or the street name ” The Looney Left ” but there may be a cure, Vote these fools out !!

    Yes, Vote these fools out, before Vermont Dies or just becomes another socialist S-hole
    that’s decaying from within !!

    Wake up people

    • They have a “warp speed” antidote against your cure. If S.15, the universal mass, indiscriminate mailing of ballots is enacted, it will be too late. Hopefully, Governor Scott will take the sanctity of our elections more seriously than Mr. Condos does, and prevent this disaster.

  17. “We have perhaps the poorest education about the foundational documents of our nation. We are a state that believes we are a democracy, with little understanding of a republic.”

    Isn’t that it in a nutshell? We want to cancel those people whose brilliant attempt to forge a free republic is seen as the work of slaveholders, but that’s a small part of the story and neglects that, as in any congregation of free-thinkers, there were differences of opinion. John Adams was always and firmly against slavery, for example, and Washington saw it as an evil that he had no choice but to abide with, or sink into poverty. Some have this high ideal of perfection that cancels all that fails to meet it, even though it’s beyond doubt that all of us fail in some regard. We’re human.

    Is ideology replacing humanity?

    I’m encouraged that states like Texas and Florida are rejecting tyrannical measures that follow a totalitarian science, and wish that Vermont weren’t such a crude backwater full of Constitutional hillbillies.

    • Ideology? Ideology is the pursuit of an idealistic goal. What we have are dogmatic cultists. Accept the doctrine, follow the creed – or, heretic, get demonized and cast into cancel culture oblivion. The Progressive orthodoxy is the “truth” of Biden’s Iowa state fair speech: “We choose truth over facts.” Dispute it at your peril. That’s not what ideologists do, it’s what Fascist demagogues do. And as in numerous fanatic religions the promoters do not bind themselves (e.g. jet setting Kerry of the AGW sect) to the rules they would impose upon the proles.

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