Terrorists on the City Council

Burlington, Vermont is governed by actual stochastic terrorists

Two sheets of the actual stickers in question, with some of my LEGO women of NASA holding them in place for me to take the picture. This picture is of my stickers and my LEGOs, taken by me; all the other photos in this essay are courtesy of Christopher-Aaron Felker.

This issue has lots of pictures, so your email client may not handle it well. You can also read this issue at the Substack website.

A Burlington Tradition: Stickering

When I went to school in Burlington, Vermont, I regularly saw stickers on light poles, the backs of road signs, and other pieces of public property, about political and ideological topics of all sorts. Spreading one’s ideas by putting stickers on public property is an expected, normalized part of Burlington culture.

Here are some pictures of random stickers in Burlington.

However, the Burlington City Council recently passed a resolution condemning as “hateful” and “transphobic” one particular type of stickering that goes on in the city.

Here are two sheets of the stickers in question. Kevin Hurley gave them to me (at my request) but I’ve never felt physically safe attempting to use them. They are among the condemned messages:

Two sheets of the actual stickers in question, with some of my LEGO women of NASA holding them in place for me to take the picture. This picture is of my stickers and my LEGOs, taken by me; all the other photos in this essay are courtesy of Christopher-Aaron Felker.

Here are a few pictures of these and other “hateful” and “transphobic” and “harmful” stickers out in the real world.

Here are pictures of stickers in Burlington that the mayor and city council have never passed a resolution to condemn, denounced as hateful and violent, decried as dangerous, nor investigated whether state law would allow them to selectively prosecute the ones doing the stickering:

“TERF” is a peculiar slur that gets hurled around quite a lot. It's an acronym that stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.” What a “trans exclusionary radical feminist" is involves a bit of history, but the slur TERF has lost connection to most of its origin and is just now a catch-all for "anti-trans bad person.”

Radical feminism does not mean “really intense feminism.” It uses “radical” in the mathematical sense — the sense of addressing a root cause. The square root of 25, for example, is 5, and the mathematical symbol that expresses this is referred to as a radical.

A mathematician would look at this and say that “radical 25 equals 5” or “root 25 equals 5.” Radical feminism is about perceived root causes, not relative intensity of feminist activism. Illustration from WikiHow.

Radical feminism is a type of feminist philosophy that calls for a radical re-structuring of society to eliminate “male supremacy” or “patriarchy.” Many women, including me, have been called TERF many times despite sharing none or almost none of the political philosophy, views, or policy aims of actual radical feminists. It is an epithet wholly disengaged from what the acronym is meant to indicate.

Essentially, to call a woman a TERF is to indicate that she is a “woman I want to call a c*nt but that’s not quite socially acceptable—yet.”

Thus, these stickers call for the death of everyone who disagrees with the activists about transgenderism and related issues.

Targeting By Name

The City Council are attempting to find a way to prosecute the stickerers posting the anodyne, truthful messages shown above, so I want to show you the full extent of rhetoric that they are willing to ignore. The activists sometimes spell his name incorrectly (it’s “Felker”), but there are many stickers directly targeting Christopher-Aaron Felker, a married gay man who is chair of the Burlington GOP.

A Resolution Condemning “Transphobia”

On Monday, March 13, 2023, the Burlington City Council passed a resolution condemning transphobia and specifically the gender-critical stickering, expressing such horrifying, hateful messages as support for Fred Sargeant, a 75-year-old gay man who was physically assaulted for his gender-critical views and a belief that no one was born in the wrong body.

They did not condemn the stickers declaring that TERF blood is yummy, that TERFs should be killed, that TERFs are preferable to chickens for consumption, or that Christopher-Aaron Felker should eat shit and die.

Among other histrionics, the resolution calls these stickers “harmful” and “transphobic,” cites men like my friends as “hateful” and “transphobic,” and mentions that the Burlington Community Justice Center has made “a significant effort to bring community members together and offer space to talk about the harms caused by these hateful acts.”

As a woman who has been called TERF many hundreds of times, I assure you that the BCJC has never made any effort to offer space to talk about harms, fears of violence, or other issues I have experienced that were caused by activist rhetoric.

Perhaps most chilling, the resolution indicates that they are trying to find a way to shut down only the stickers they disagree with: “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the City Council’s Ordinance Committee shall, in coordination with the Burlington Police Department and the City Attorney’s Office, examine Burlington’s graffiti ordinance and consider changes that address continued defacement of public property, and graffiti that spreads hateful and harmful messages.”

That leftist governments practice viewpoint discrimination isn’t surprising.

That they are willing to publicly announce a collaboration with law enforcement to do so openly and in public should be terrifying.

The Public Speakers Said More Than They Meant To

My friend Josh covered the resolution, and the March 13, 2023, meeting at which public comments were heard on his show: Disaffected. It was a jaw-dropping display of how thoroughly the activist rhetoric has taken over an entire American city government. Speaker after speaker made outrageously hyperbolic claims and some told outright lies. For example, one speaker claimed that a member of the stickering group brandished a gun at a protest. This is provably false, as he responsibly, and in front of witnesses, went to great lengths to have his weapon secured, off his person, before heading to the protest.

Speakers declared my friends a “public health threat” and “menace.” Nobody on the City Council spoke up to calm such exaggerated and inflammatory rhetoric.

The histrionics and drama demonstrated how fully this movement is based on lies. When people have actually harmed you, exaggeration and drama are unnecessary.

As always these days, it’s best to have multiple ways to get the content of any content creator who tells the truth, so here are all the ways to find Josh’s content: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube channel, and Substack.

One Speaker Gave A Serious Warning

Mark Montalban spoke at the meeting. He is in favor of many aspects of the trans activist agenda, but is an honest reporter of his own experiences. As a businessman in Burlington, he is hearing things that are scaring him, particularly in the neighborhood of the New North End:

“There are people in our part of town who actually would like to eliminate transphobic people, who have told me that because I am supposedly one of them. I was even called a traitor because I am considered a heterosexual male. So let’s really look at what’s going on. There are, I would say, at least a couple hundred people within our city who want to eliminate folks they are in fear of. I will say this is a pandemic and as in a health pandemic this city better take this pretty damn serious because I’m hearing language that those in my grandmother’s generation heard in the 1930s.”

Indeed, everyone at the meeting, and everyone who has heard the recording of the meeting, has heard that language now: the gay men involved in the stickering campaign were identified as threats to public health.

Mr. Montalban’s warning went wholly unheeded by the mayor and city council, who passed the resolution.

Unanimously.

What Are the Mayor and City Council Doing?

I believe that the mayor and city council are consciously, with knowledge and malice aforethought, hoping to cause an activist to commit an act of violence against Josh, Christopher, Kevin, or one of the other gay men involved in the stickering campaign. I believe they are consciously and deliberately trying to signal to the angry activists (particularly the ones that Mr. Montalban is hearing from) that if and when they commit violence, they will be met with support and leniency.

The rhetorical asymmetry between what they condemn and what they refuse to condemn leads to an inescapable conclusion.

On this issue, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and the Burlington City Council are engaging in stochastic terrorism.

What Is Stochastic Terrorism?

This definition is from dictionary.com:

Stochastic terrorism describes a rhetorical tactic designed to dehumanize and demonize a group of people in such a way that people who oppose the group will feel emboldened and empowered to attack that group. Stochastic terrorism leads people to believe that attacking the disfavored group is morally righteous and ethically justifiable.

The mayor and city council of Burlington are engaging in stochastic terrorism against a group of gay men who hold and express gender-critical views, and express their views by putting stickers on public property—a longtime tradition in Burlington, Vermont, about topics of all sorts, especially political.

Actual Stochastic Terrorism

“Stochastic terrorism” is a recently popular term that is mostly aimed at people expressing centrist or right-of-center views. Like racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and many other words, it describes something real, important, and necessary to oppose. And like those words, it is thrown around so capriciously that it risks losing all meaning.

What the mayor and City Council of Burlington did on March 13, 2023, is actual stochastic terrorism. This is demonstrated by the stark contrast between what they condemn and what they refuse to condemn—the contrast between the rhetoric they nod approvingly at, calling gay men “threats to public health,” and the rhetoric they condemn, statements of fact about biological reality.

Stochastic terrorism is an extremely important topic to have a clear understanding of, as it’s quickly becoming an ever-present part of our discourse.

Here is a fabulous essay on stochastic terrorism that goes into great depth about how the media’s rhetorical asymmetry paints people in the center and right of center as terrorists while facilitating equal, or worse, levels of rhetoric from people left of center.

Everyone Has To Do What They Can

My therapist and I discussed, a few days ago, the extent to which I am afraid for my friends’ safety, and to what extent that fear is reasonable. I count Josh as one of my dearest friends and consider the other men involved to be, variously, friendly acquaintances or somewhat more distant friends. I go out in public with Josh regularly and with the other men occasionally. As a person living with PTSD, I would not be able to do this if I thought that violence was an imminent and immediate risk. As the definition of stochastic terrorism states, it is something “whose specifics cannot be predicted,” and any particular day is not likely to be all that dangerous. When Josh and I go out, I am more aware of our surroundings than usual. My phone is charged, ready to take video in the event of a confrontation. I am hypervigilant and hyperaware, but not terrified. At least, not yet.

I do not go near public protests. If violence is going to happen, in my judgment, that is the most likely scenario. Further, what happened to Fred Sargeant shows that activists can pour liquid on the heads of members of disfavored groups without consequences, and if that happens to me I will need to replace my very expensive hearing aids. So I stay home.

Everyone has to contribute to these fights in whatever way they can. When these brave men are out in public doing front-line battle, I know that arrest is a very real risk. My way of contributing is to sit at home, by my phone, on call to bail Josh out of jail, with all the necessary paperwork and the ATM card that is tied to my emergency fund in an envelope under my keys…just in case.

That’s what I can do.

What can you do?

If you can’t fight directly, you can support those who do. You can support Josh and the Disaffected Podcast on Substack or SubscribeStar.

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