( Just a little comment – when I read this headline I wondered where
this was. Rutland VT – the heart of Democrat Leftist liberalism? Are you
kidding? YESSSS!!!!
This is NOT about liberalism or conservatism – it’s plain American
familism! We have been too long deluded by our political MASTERS! (Spelled –
BASTURDS!)
I have been wondering for some time when our folks would wake up.
Well, by golly, I believe this is the beginning of a political EARTHQUAKE! No,
it wasn’t Trump – he just responded to a DESIRE.
This is the beginning of a DESIRE turned to ACTION! We are now
carrying out our desire – and Trump can’t do it – WE have to do it – starting
NOW! - CL)
'We defeated this, and it should be used as a template for the rest
of country'
Syrian
passports are available on the black market and easily obtained by
so-called ‘refugees.’
The
people of Rutland, Vermont, have gained a measure of revenge against former
President Obama’s forced influx of Syrian refugees, voting out the five-term
mayor who helped negotiate the controversial resettlements with a federal
contractor.
Rutland
is Vermont’s third-largest city, but still very small with a population of
16,500.
The
candidacy of Mayor Christopher Louras went down in flames in Tuesday’s election
as he was defeated by the refugee program’s most ardent opponent on the board
of aldermen. David Allaire won with 52 percent of the vote to 34 percent for
Louras.
“That’s
not just a win, that’s a drubbing,” said Don Chioffi, an activist who supported
the upstart candidate Allaire.
Louras
came out last April and “announced,” much to the surprise of his residents,
that the city would be taking in up to 100 Syrian refugees in fiscal 2017 along
with others from Iraq. The announcement divided the city among those who wanted
to welcome the refugees – no questions asked – and those who thought the
refugee program was being dictated without any local input and with very little
information. Protests and counter protests were organized, attracting national
media attention.
Unfazed
by the division it caused in Rutland, a State Department contractor opened an
office and started placing Syrians into the community.
More
than 98 percent of Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslim while about 75 percent of
Iraqi refugees are either Sunni or Shiite, and they’re just now starting to
show up in a small town that hasn’t a single mosque.
On
Tuesday, Louras paid a price for his role in inviting the refugees to Rutland.
City
Councilor David Allaire won a four-way race for mayor, stopping Louras from
gaining a sixth term.
Both
Rutland and Rutland County went for Clinton in the November presidential
election, with Clinton winning in a landslide in the city but more narrowly in
the county with 13,635 votes to Trump’s 12,479.
Local
activist Don Chioffi, an ACT for America chapter leader in Rutland, said
Allaire got no help from the local media. But supporters bypassed the
newspapers and TV stations by using social media, meetings and one conservative
radio host to get their message out.
“The
people we talk to always react positively, but you would never know that from
the media coverage we get,” Chioffi told WND.
“In
their sacrilegious and diabolical effort to squelch the truth, they won’t put
it out there, so it’s hard to emphasize how important this victory is because
the leftist media just doesn’t give you a fair shake, and we went into it
expecting that. We knew we wouldn’t get a fair shake.”
Mayor
Louras had negotiated an unpopular refugee deal behind closed doors with the
United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. USCRI is one of nine
exclusive contractors that get paid by the U.S. State Department for every
refugee they place into U.S. cities and towns.
Watch
local TV coverage of Rutland’s surprise election blow-back against refugee
resettlement:
Ann
Corcoran, who writes the blog Refugee Resettlement Watch, went on a
fact-finding tour of cities receiving refugees last summer. She said it’s the
mayors who often work quietly behind the scenes with the feds to seed their
communities with refugees who will eventually become a politically active
voting bloc for the Democratic Party.
“One
of the things I came to see in my travels around America last summer is that
mayors in many cities with refugees, or about to get refugees, seemed to be
quietly (so as not to tip off citizen critics) working behind the scenes for
the federal pro-refugee resettlement contractors, and/or the businesses looking
for cheap migrant labor,” Corcoran wrote. “I often referred to those mayors as
having been ‘captured.'”
Rutland
was one of those cities with a “captured” mayor, she said, much like Sterling
Heights, Michigan; Twin Falls and Boise, Idaho; Clarkston, Georgia; and many
other cities.
After
the protests last spring, the Rutland Board of Aldermen voted 7-3 in July to
send a letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry saying the city did not
support the resettlement plan with USCRI because it had been hidden from public
view until finalized.
The
letter was ignored, and USCRI opened an office in Rutland, sending the first
two Syrian families to the city around the first of the year.
The
mayor had won. But the political fallout was yet to come.
The
mayor’s race became a referendum on the refugee program, said Chioffi, a
72-year-old retired English teacher who also helps lead Rutland First, a group
that worked to shed light on the program when the mayor and USCRI refused to
provide answers.
Louras,
like so many mayors, sees refugees as a way to boost his city’s declining,
aging residential base with young, non-English speaking, low-skilled migrants
who tend to be Muslim and will work for minimum wage. The hotel industry, the
meatpacking and food-processing industries are notoriously fond of refugee
labor, Corcoran said.
Rutland
may not have a single mosque, but those opposing the resettlements said it came
down to economics and transparency in government – not religion.
“That
[religion] is the flash point that gets everyone’s dander up,” Chioffi told
WND. “And it takes too long. There are so many ignorant people, not stupid but
ignorant, who don’t know anything about this religion. They have never read the
Quran or hadiths. I don’t have any problems with people wanting to worship
their gods as they see fit, I’m not Islamophobic, but teaching the whole
history of Islam in 10-15 minutes is a little daunting, so I shy away from
that.”
Concentrating
on principles of freedom and democracy are more effective, said Chioffi.
“What
won this race in Rutland is we concentrated on principles of democracies and
how far we’ve strayed from those principles when a private, nonprofit agency is
taking people’s rights away from them, using secrecy, getting government
funding, all of the things about this refugee program that have been taken away
from the people.”
Chioffi
said his group’s requests for public-record documents were rejected by USCRI,
which claimed the information was proprietary, even though it was doing the
government’s work as a contractor.
“We
said we have questions and we want answers,” he said.
The
group’s big break came when the USCRI director of the state resettlement
program stumbled in trying to answer a question about why the refugee plan for
Rutland was so secretive.
In
an April 14 email to Mayor Louras, USCRI Director Amila Merdzanovic wrote in an
email “if we open it up to anybody and everybody, all sorts of people will come
out of the woodwork, anti-immigrant… anti-anything.”
“When
they came out and said they don’t’ think this should be made public because
‘too many people would come out of the woodwork,’ we just pummeled her and
branded her,” Chioffi said.
Chioffi
said Rutland is a microcosm for what happened nationally on Nov. 8
with the election of Donald Trump.
“We
the people spoke, and we were sick and tired of being dictated to and people
making decisions on our behalf. And we’re certainly sick of being dictated to
by a private, nonprofit agency,” he said. “Since when do you turn over your
local government to a 501c3 private contractor, which then denies you public
information? So the lack of transparency was the focus of our campaign against
this mayor.”
Rutland
is the type of all-American small-town that the Obama administration was
actively trying to transform through refugee resettlement, bringing in up to
100 Syrians a year and possibly more from other countries, said James Simpson,
author of the “Red-Green Axis” who made two trips to Rutland to advise local
townspeople on how to oppose the resettlements.
He
noted that Tim Cook, another candidate who ran on a “Rutland First” platform,
won a seat on the local board of alderman.
“It
was an overwhelming victory,” Simpson said. “I was thrilled to see this
unscrupulous mayor go down to defeat.”
Mayor
Louras was quoted from the start in local media last year saying that those
protesting the resettlement of Syrians were but a small minority and “did not
represent Rutland” in its overall welcoming attitude toward refugees.
NPR
and other national media ran reports on Rutland, casting protesters as outside
the mainstream when, in fact, they were nothing if not every-day patriotic
Americans, Simpson said.
“This
election shows you just what the true sentiments were in that town. As part of
their whole Astro-turf campaign, the Rutland pro-refugee advocates started a
Facebook site called Rutland Welcomes. It claimed a thousand members, but the
Rutland First people examined it and found that only 100 or so were actually
Rutland residents. The rest were just activists who hit the Facebook site and
tried to make themselves bigger than they were.”
As
soon as Rutland First confronted the mayor and his federal contractor, USCRI,
the group was met with “disdain, derision and with hateful comments,” said
Chioffi.
“We
were received with the same Saul Alinsky tactics that are used all across this
country. But we’ve developed a model here,” he said. “The fact is that Rutland,
Vermont, should be used as a template for the whole country, because what
happened here in Rutland, it already has a drug problem that’s pervasive and
growing, unemployment is up, population in decline, and this was foisted upon
us behind our backs by politicians against every principle of democracy I
learned growing up. And we defeated this, and it should be used as a template
for the rest of country.
“We’re
in serious trouble, because if it can happen in Rutland, Vermont, it can happen
in anywhere USA,” Chioffi added. “The government can come in under the guise of
a nonprofit contractor and use dirty tricks, classic fascist tactics to
transform your community behind your back. You can’t deal with this as a
flamethrower. You have to go into it calmly and rationally and being a teacher
helped me with that.”
Like
Chioffi, Simpson sees the election outcome in Rutland as a template for other
towns being run by mayors whose idea of “inclusiveness” is to invite the Third
World into their towns and worry about the problems later. He said the mayors
of Sterling Heights, Michigan; Twin Falls, Idaho; and other places where the
refugee issue has boiled over should take notice.
“I
am thrilled at the results in Rutland and gratified to have had at least some
small impact on the ultimate outcome that saw this very unethical, unscrupulous
mayor roundly defeated,” he said. “And perhaps this election is an object
lesson in what is happening all over the country where Americans are fed up
with dishonest, self-serving politicians and the results of that is being seen
in the election outcomes.”
Allaire
will take over as mayor March 15. He told the Burlington Free Press a change in
leadership is needed to heal the city that has been divided by Louras’ plans to
bring up to 100 Syrian refugees per year to the community.
“What
I’ve been telling people is one of the first things I want to do is open up the
doors to city hall and the mayor’s office and make sure that they feel
comfortable and they know that the mayor is going to be acting out in the
open,” Allaire said.
“It’s
Christmas in Rutland again,” said Chioffi.
