Second Vermont Republic

Second Vermont Republic is a secessionist pipe dream founded by Thomas H. Naylor, supposedly on or about October 11, 2003. At least that's what Naylor has said, as recently as November 28, 2012 (or, put another way, at the time of this edit, tomorrow). "...we launched the Second Vermont Republic on October 11, 2003."

"The Second Vermont Republic is a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank committed to (1) the peaceful breakup of meganations such as the United States, Russia, and China; (2) the political independence of breakaway states such as Quebec, Scotland, and Vermont..."

Oddly, Naylor had registered the tradename, Second Vermont Republic with the Vermont Secretary of State's Office nearly four months earlier (file #0134930), describing his group as a "civic club" while making no mention of his intention to break up the entirety of the U.S., Russia and China. Elsewhere Naylor has said he will also break up India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Brazil and other nations that amount to 60% of the world's population. Peacefully, that is. Given that in 9 years Naylor's been utterly unsuccessful in bringing his Vermont secesher plan to anywhere remotely approaching fruition, it is unlikely that the leaders of the world's "meganations", as he likes to call them, are exactly quaking in their boots.

While objecting strenuously to "cyber mania" and "technomania," Naylor, who is said to have made a fortune selling software to the Soviet bloc, and who it is also said to not use email or maintain his own computer setup at home, has a website. As you might expect, it's angry, unhinged, opposed to every real political figure in Vermont, and remarkably anti-Semitic. Naylor's primary means of direct communication is by angry missives written with a (Vermont) green felt tip pen, a companion affectation to his usual green sports jacket and Quaker Oats guy hairstyle. Much as he eschews technology, he manages to post at his website every few days, although it is alleged that it is Patno who actually transcribes and loads onto the website Naylor's incessant green screeds that are routinely ignored by the other 629,950 Vermonters who aren't interested in his delusion. According to Northeast Kingdom Information Associates, a web tech outfit in northeastern Vermont, SVR is part of their portfolio; however, Naylor's anti-technological toolkit does not apparently include an irony meter.

As if anticipating the arrival of SVR and the unnascent, unyet "emerging" Vermont independence movement, almost two years earlier on March 12 of 2001 the government of the State of Vermont adopted a policy for handling what would eventually become the most unsuccessful effort to effect change in the state's history.

The early days
According to one of the historical representations made by Naylor about the launch of the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), in March of 2003 Naylor met with Michael Patno, the leader of the New England Confederation Alliance, a wishy washy, semi-secesher, uh, "group" that seems to have been nothing more than a website maintained by Patno that advocated for "...greater sovereignty and greater autonomy for the region in economic, political and social policy" The region being the six New England states. Patno's plan should not be confused with the New England Confederation of 1643 but much like the earlier group, Patno's scheme has gone nowhere. Naylor claims that he and Patno "launched" SVR on March 5, 2003. This won't be the last time that Naylor's story shifts under the feet of the historical narrative of SVR du jour.

Naylor namedroppingly claims to have received ten letters in the two years prior to his launching SVR from former Ambassador George F. Kennan who he has called the "Godfather of the Vermont Secession Movement." . While he has gone to great effort to establish a non-resident of Vermont as a figure of significance to Vermonters by way of Kennan having written Naylor some encouraging letters about Vermont secession, he failed to disclosed one of Kennan's fundamentally racist motivations for doing so. Kennan, bemoaning the Hispanic influx in the U.S., in particular Mexican immigration, wrote, "... I can see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will not only be endangered but eventually destroyed in an endlessly prolonged association of the northern parts of New England with the remainder of what is now the U.S.A.”

“...unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country, on the one hand,” and those of “some northern regions,” including Vermont. In the former, “the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin-American in nature rather than what is inherited from earlier American traditions.”

“Could it really be that there was so little of merit” in the American Republic, asked Kennan, “that it deserves to be recklessly trashed in favor of a polyglot mix-mash?”

SVR was viewed and applauded by Kennan as a potential antidote to or bulwark against the untidy results of race-mixing. Perhaps Naylor should have called Kennan the Vermont secession movement's Great White Father instead.

The political party
SVR has never registered itself as a political party with the Vermont Secretary of State's Office (VSSO). After being buffeted for years about their ties to out of state white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes and religious extremists, SVR consciously decided in late 2009 to run a small slate of candidates for various statewide and legislative offices as "independents" in an expressed effort to distance their candidates from SVR stigma.

In Vermont a prospective candidate for office may circulate a nominating petition and, if able to get the requisite number of voter signatures on the petition, register with the VSSO as an independent candidate, that is, a candidate not endorsed or nominated by any of Vermont's major or minor parties. Despite it having been noted repeatedly elsewhere that the seceshers have run as Independence Party candidates ''- I'm looking at you Wikipedia! -'' there is no Independence Party registered with the VSSO.

As a group, secesher candidates always come in last or in the single digits percentile, often 1% or less. One such candidate called his 0.76% showing in the 2010 election a "success."