Thomas Naylor, founder of the secessionist Second Vermont Republic, died this week after suffering a stroke on Sunday. He was 76. Naylor’s friend and ally Rob Williams delivered the news via email on Friday afternoon.
Naylor, a Charlotte resident, founded SVR in 2003. In his Vermont Manifesto, which he self-published the same year, he declared that, “Our nation has truly lost its way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily or environmentally.”
His solution? Secede from the union and create a second Vermont Republic; the first existed from 1777-1791, before Vermont joined the Union.
Secession sounded nuts — until George W. Bush won a second term in 2004. Suddenly, Naylor’s quixotic quest began making headlines, and disgruntled liberals started slapping SVR bumper stickers on their cars.
Some of those supporters abandoned the group, however, after an anonymous blogger raised questions about SVR’s ties to secessionist groups such as the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a racist hate group. Williams, who founded Vermont Commons, a journal devoted to Vermont independence, was one of them. For his part, Naylor disputed the suggestion that SVR was in any way racist.
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Dr. Naylor was a friend, mentor and sounding board. He will be quoted and remembered for generations and not just in Vermont. Rowley can say what he wants. That’s the type of freedom that The Doc was about. But at least The Doc was public about his stance. We knew who he was. Where he came from. Where he lived. What he believed. Agree with him or disagree with him, you always knew where he stood and you always knew where you stood with him. And he was out-front about it. He didn’t hide behind pseudonyms. I am going to miss him greatly.
Lotta assumptions there in service to your desired biases. That being the case, you’re definitely not going to read piece on Naylor at Green Mountain Daily here. It starts near the bottom of the scroll, next to the image of a lump of coal.
Were that all that Naylor had ever said about the matter you might have had a point. The fact is that Naylor has a history of saying hateful, “odious” things about Jews. One of his outlets, in addition to his numerous writings about Jews and their “hammerlock hold” on Congress, the White House, the media, the military and the finance industry, all of which is goes to the very heart of what anti-Semitic conspiracists believe based on the long discredited “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” was Press TV which is operated by the Iranian propaganda ministry and is notorious for its filming of the forced confessions of journalists and others in Iranian prisons. Press TV is also a committed outlet for the views of numerous Americans that support Holocaust denialism and revisionism. In one of his many appearances on Press TV railing on and on about the Union, to the delight of his Iranian hosts, Naylor said, “The problem is that President Obama… and his foreign policy is effectively under the control of the rightwing Likud of Israel with the complete compliance of the United States media.” If you can’t smell the anti-Semitism in that steaming pile of BS, said while consorting with the propaganda ministry of a state that, like Naylor himself, has questioned the very legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel, you may yourself be similarly afflicted but I’ll assume for the moment that you’re not.
Dude,
Hailing Iran’s Mahmoud Admadinejad as a hero?
Defending the League of the South?
Calling the Southern Poverty Law Center “techno-fascist”? http://www.7dvt.com/2007/funer…
The point is this: you can promote Vermont secession without being a racist. Naylor didn’t have to consort with, defend, and idolize racists to promote his cause of secession. BUT HE DID.
That does sound odious but there are actually anti-imperialists who stupidly say things like that not because they are anti-Semites but because the oppose US tax funding of all foreign governments and militaries, including Israel.
The slander that someone is a racist is so overused now, and mainly by people who support the financing of their favored candidates by rounding up poor brown and black kids and selling them to the educrat cartels for campaign donations, that I now assume people are lying when they use it until I see evidence.
It is also the case that the ruling political class will freeze certain viewpoints out of the media, so that people with those viewpoints end up speaking to anyone who will listen, including people with odious associations. The political class then smears the person they were trying to silence for communicating with the only people who were listening to him. Ron Paul for example is smeared in this way by selective use of who he talked to, because he will talk to anyone; though no one ever claims he is a flaming gay Austrian even though he went out to meet an unbeknownst to him fictional person named Bruno for an interview.
I didn’t know about this fellow, but my assumption is that he is being smeared by people who would smear any advocate of secession anywhere. The nit picking over his property tax assessment is just icing on the cake. I live in NW DC, where the ruling class and its minions live, who live off your tax money. In these zip codes “just under $500,000” will buy you one of the cheaper two bedroom condos (not a house) or a really luxurious one bedroom condo. Because all the people here secessionists want to secede from make 6 and 7 figure tax funded salaries as regulators or lobbyists.
SL,
May I call you SL? Identity seems to be an issue for you, although one that you have not raised with any other commenters here, including those of a like mind to you or, not surprisingly, yourself.
First, this article is not in an obituary column, nor did it appear as a paid obit. This piece appeared in a blog on Seven Days that’s called, “Off Message: Vermont’s Politics & News Blog.” Comments on a political blog are to be expected and are encouraged.
Naylor’s residence and finances were not raised by me but by others. I merely provided facts when misrepresentations were made by a supporter of his. He drove a Civic. So what? Billionaire Warren Buffett drives a 42K GM vehicle. Thomas Naylor lived a lifestyle far more comforted than the average Vermonter or, frankly, many of his very few ardent supporters here.
However, I do have my limitations. I’d have thought it crass to post a link to my blog. You didn’t, as nor did one of Naylor’s publishers who posted a link to their website that sells books; didn’t see your affront about that either.
At the risk of being perceived by you of being, how shall we say, harsh perhaps, you don’t know me or my personal views about Naylor’s longtime associations with many racists, anti-Semites or homophobes.
To suggest without basis that I am “joyful” about the death of you buddy, or anyone else for that matter, is despicable but that’s your right. Do I regret that Naylor will no longer around to invite out- of-state anti-gay activists, racists and anti-Semites to Vermont for one of his staged, dog and pony conventions? Not in the slightest.
One of Thomas Naylor’s more egregious offenses in his campaign to silence opposition to his secessionist plot was an attempt early on to have a Vermonter fired from his job and thus lose health benefits for his family. There was an oblique reference to this instance in the article above, but for some reason the writer didn’t link to her own report on this particularly malicious, offensive and unwarranted act by Naylor.
“All I ask is that instead of using” a political blog “post here at 7DVT as a further venue for your views” of Naylor, who is no longer “a person… a public figure” or “a writer and thinker,” that you either pay for or have the funeral home properly submit an obit. You won’t see a comment from me in that case.
No doubt, if the self-professed “Dixie” singer Thomas Naylor is going to “be missed by many,” it will be by his many admirers in the neo-Confederate world. You apparently have no idea how offensive Vermonters found him to be.
Edit: Likewise, I mistakenly transposed your, um, sobriquet as “TL” rather than “SL.” The rest stands.
He was completely contemptuous of anyone and everyone who disagreed with him, or just anyone whom he just didn’t like, (which, as explained above, was pretty much everyone) and he responded by publicly calling them vile names. If racism, bigotry, authoritarianism, hypocrisy, and anti-social behavior are anyone’s idea of “brilliance,” then I guess he was brilliant.
Mr Rowley,
I now understand that your personal views collided with Mr. Naylor’s on a variety of subjects, both personal and intellectual. Your points regarding his affiliation or references to questionable groups and writers, thinkers or leaders, his language when referring to not only persons of repute but when referring to groups as a whole, and his personal and financial life in Charlotte have now been made here and in other forums. They are well taken, and I’ll be the first to state that there were many instances in which I disagreed with Mr. Naylor politically.
As a native Vermonter, I knew Mr. Naylor as a young man. I respect his memory and I refuse to believe that a comment on a blog post made in remembrance of his passing is the correct forum for these comments. I don’t know you or your history, nor who or what you represent other than a closed Facebook profile, but I do know that you have a well-trafficked blog in which to post your thoughts (http://vermontsecession.blogsp…. It seems that you have spent a great deal of time and effort in sharing your (and your associates’) disagreements with SVR and Thomas’s personal and public philosophical beliefs and statements, as is your right as a citizen of this country. I laud you for continuing the discussion that the idea of secession brings to the table in that forum and in the various other public and private means of communication available to you.
To be honest, I was shocked to search for a notice of his death and find this post followed by the comments herein. All I ask is that instead of using an obituary notification posted here at 7DVT as a further venue for your views on Mr. Naylor as a person, as a public figure, and as a writer and thinker, you respect his family, his friends and those who come here to remember Thomas. Let us all agree that however you might argue that that it is “time to let him go,” we all have a right to remember him in our own way.
Rest in Peace, Thomas. I know that you will be missed by many.
Edit: You point is taken, joyful was a poor choice of word and has been amended.
In fact, it was Naylor’s own massive contempt for the vast majority of Vermonters that he has called out repeatedly, like the electorate that voted, all 99.24% percent of them, for someone other than his handpicked gubernatorial candidate; all of Vermont’s elected officials (he called Sen. Leahy a “world class prostitute”); all of Vermont’s congressional delegation; virtually all of Vermont’s clergy and churches; all of Vermont’s schools and institutions of higher learning; all of Vermont’s journalists (even one who he helped to bankroll); nearly all of Vermont’s print, TV and radio media, who, unlike you, weren’t entranced by his Ruritanian fantasy of a breakaway republic or his promotion of racists like George F. Kennan as the godfather of his proposed Vermont republic or his numerous alliances with racists associated with the League of the South or the Lega Nord. “His love of liberty and freedom” did not extend to those who would be caught behind the neo-Confederate lines of his allies. Given his utter lack of success, your bar for brilliance appears to be set rather low.