The Cultural Appropriation (and Destruction) of Vermont

Carpetbaggers denigrate Vermont while appropriating its culture as their own

Vermont boasts an iconic, if ironic, roadside landmark: a pair of twelve-foot-tall whale tails carved from 36 tons of African black granite and erected on a Green Mountain hilltop in Randolph, Vermont in 1989. The oddly contrasting sculpture, entitled “Reverence,” unintentionally mirrors the collision of non-native social justice warriors with the local culture. Like carpetbagging fish out of water, schools of these Vermont-condemning intruders have infested the Green Mountain State.

Native Vermonters are (pejoratively?) monikered “Woodchucks”: urban transplants are derogatively condemned as “Flatlanders” (regardless of how high the elevation from which they immigrated). This mostly playful rapport has persisted for decades, but the once Red State of Vermont is now decidedly Blue – in mood as well as politics. The distinction and division has amplified in tandem with the nation’s growing cultural rift. 

The incongruous, conflicted Vermont “culture” this has engendered has created a rural/urban patchwork of attitudes that mirrors the whale tails of African granite. Vermont mines granite in its historic quarries, yet the “Reverence” statue utilized imported African stone (not very “Green,” given the fuels absorbed in transport). The incongruity is as stark as the Green Mountain culture war: Vermonters are condemned for their whiteness, and told by newcomers that the first state to abolish slavery was just not free enough. A Constitutional amendment was pushed through in 2022 by the locust swarms of SJWs that “corrected” the native Vermonters’ alleged 1777 error.

But who exactly is a “Native Vermonter”? How is Vermont’s culture defined, if not by the new arrivals who condescendingly condemn its people and history? The native Abenaki tribe taught colonists how to make maple syrup, which is today a thriving industry that some Flatlanders would label as wrongful cultural appropriation, while themselves gracing their hippie yurts with Buddhist flags and dreamcatchers – and now calling themselves Vermonters. Somewhere between those indigenous Abenaki and newcomer progressives stands the traditional, and until recently respected, Vermont Yankee culture.

(This barn dates to about 1850, and was built by the Trask family).

I self-identify as a Vermonter even though I was not born here. My mother is a sixth-generation Vermonter who moved to Connecticut just prior to my birth, so I jokingly prefer to define my Vermont origin at my conception (just a short walk from where I write, and where our family has lived for more than two centuries). But it is not my birthplace – or anyone else’s – that defines Vermont culture. 

I grew up around Vermont Great Depression survivors who farmed. My grandfather and great uncles all spoke little. Their worn clothes smelled of cow manure, cow milk, pipe smoke, and human sweat, blended into a unique aroma of Vermont culture. They were extremely frugal, humble, hardworking, and gently reserved. My grandmothers and great aunts were similarly humble, nurturing, resourceful, and hardworking (though they smelled differently). The common themes were poverty, independence and dairy farming: that is what defined Vermont for most of the twentieth century. The Green Mountain State was similarly defined for the century previous, except that sheep scoured the landscape prior to the advent of bovines.

In contrast, out-of-state opportunists have long smelled real estate profits, tourism, and exploitation, and gradually insinuated themselves past the rutted, infamously-muddied and perpetually deteriorating Vermont roadways to shift the demographic as well as physical landscape. Vermont’s cultural character has transformed under the influences of many who now “identify” themselves as Vermonters. They are techno-dependent, commute in EV or other costly new cars, spout anti-racist slogans, and pridefully display their solar panel arrays beside BLM and Gay Pride flags. 

In the 1970s, liberals targeted the Green Mountains for an easy socialist occupation. In a 1972 Playboy article titled “Taking Over Vermont,” the would-be invaders boldly proclaimed their plans for the new utopia they would craft:

We see the best way out in rededicating this nation to its heritage: reopening the frontier, where alienated or deviant members of society can go to live by their new ideas: providing a living laboratory for social experiment through radical Federalism; ….The goal of this takeover would be to establish a truly experimental society to which new solutions to today’s problems could be tried, an experimental state which would serve as a new frontier.

Proponents dubbed themselves invaders, and Vermont the “frontier.” The plan was to usurp the land, locust-like; to storm into Vermont “[w]hile Vermonters oil up their muskets and contemplate reactivating the Green Mountain Boys….” The acronym “MOVE” was proposed: “Mobilization to Open Vermont for Experimentation”:

What we advocate …is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process….

Even then the contempt for “musket-oiling” Vermonters and their traditions was overt – those Green Mountain Boys fought valiantly in the Civil War, and are here mocked. Ice cream magnates Ben & Jerry exploited the Vermont brand for millions, condemned Vermont’s dairy farmers in favor of illegal migrant workers, and then cashed out to international conglomerate Unilever for $326 million. Many more locusts have since invaded the state, generally with similar haughty enlightened superiority, echoing the eugenics movement of the Progressive Era that they never quite left behind. During COVID, thousands more have descended on Vermont to devour its housing and its culture.

But once they land, they immediately appropriate the Green Mountains, and proclaim that THEY are the true Vermonters. They become school board members, join the selectboard, or run for state offices. A 2022 Vermont law was enacted to create a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to:

….examine and begin the process of dismantling institutional, structural, and systemic discrimination in Vermont, both past and present, that has been caused or permitted by State laws and policies.

It is intriguing to those of us who identify as native Vermonters that not a single instance of present systemic discrimination has yet been identified, that Vermont banned slavery from its formation, and that the past discrimination of the eugenics movement was promulgated by the very progressives who now seek to take over the state to throttle the natives with responsibility for what progressivism inflicted. It is also noteworthy that eight out of ten of the sponsors of this sham law seeking to denigrate and dismantle Vermont are not originally from here, and display ignorance of that impoverished homesteader farming legacy that defines Vermont’s traditional culture.

Of the eight carpetbagger legislative sponsors of the Truth and Reconciliation Bill (which achieves neither), two stand out with particular hypocrisy: Brain Cina and Hal Colston. Both seem to hate the Vermonters who have welcomed them; both claim they are Vermonters. Both are culture appropriators.

Cina hails from “northeast New Jersey” and is a proud socialist. In one shamelessly self-elevating interview, he claims:

If we’re going to save species that are on the verge of extinction, if we’re going to preserve our ecosystems, as well as preserve culture, we’re going to need to drastically change the way that we’re doing things.

How has Brian Cina done anything to “preserve Vermont culture” by denigrating and dismantling it in the name of saving humanity from extinction?

Hal Colston, who locust-landed from Philadelphia before recently rolling up his carpet bag and retiring to Aruba, inflicted much damage on the state via his migratory exploitation. In a piece titled “I am a Vermonter,” he both praised Vermont’s rural way of life and condemned it as racist based on anecdotal claims of microaggressions:

When we arrived in 1989, there were less than 2,000 blacks in the whole state. It’s different now, but at that point, many Vermonters had never seen a person of color, much less worked or conversed with one. It was new and novel.

When we first came here, we knew we were heading into the frontier, but we said let’s give it a shot, we can be trailblazers if we have to be. I still feel that way. 

Hal praised himself as a trailblazer, even as he blazed away at Vermonters on his way out the door, condemning white people and Vermont as systemically racist, and using a Legislative “devotional” to lecture Vermonters about how evil white people have been to blacks. 

Hal’s diatribe was tame compared to former African American Vermont legislator Kiah Morris, who infamously intoned "[u]nless you are First Nations, you have no right to claim who are real Vermonters. Nativist platforms are the basest level of discourse." Ms. Morris, who hails from Chicago, culturally appropriates Africa and Vermont, while telling others they are not entitled to any cultural identity at all because they are neither Natives nor Africans. She outlandishly claims Vermonters who wish to preserve their traditional culture employ "political tactics [that] are historically consistent in the acceleration of increased discrimination, bias, and hate crimes against ethnic minorities and other marginalized people."

As with hate speech, these progressive self-styled justice warriors condemn others for allegedly doing what they themselves do. As Douglas Murray explains in The War on the West, it escapes the Marxist ideologues that they are the flip side of the white supremacist coin – black people are “people of color” instead of “colored people”; whites are “privileged” and thus the “superior” race. It is bold-faced racism only one step away from eugenics determinism (as Thomas Sowell explains). The rest of us are pincered between the KKK and BLM.

Hal, Brian, and Kiah have zero authority to declare who is a Vermonter, and must work out the woke racist logs in their own ideologically-glazed eyes. So too must the bevy of invasive Vermont-haters look more kindly upon their indigenous white rural neighbors. Vermont is not about race, and has always welcomed others to move here and partake of its beautiful scenery, fresh air and water, and rugged individualism. But not to destroy and reshape those things into a false utopian uniformity under the yoke of the new woke religion.

Back to that incongruous whale tails statue. It was relocated in 1999 along the highway into Burlington, Vermont. One flatlander site describes the sight: “No trip through Burlington has ever been complete without competing to be the first person to yell “Whale Tails” as they come into view.” 

Trips to Burlington were once to a wooded frontier, led by Samuel de Champlain. The new frontiersmen self-identified by the flatlander urban justice locusts (led by Bernie Sanders at a commune; not to omit faux Vermont welcher Peter Welch) fail to perceive their own incongruity, competing to be the first to yell “White supremacists!” as soon as the Welcome to Vermont sign comes into view. But they lack reverence. They are as out-of-place as chunks of imported African granite carved into prosthetic body parts of sea creatures and planted in the gray clay mountain soil. They have no business tarnishing Vermont’s proud, rich history, let alone appropriating it.