Tuesday • January 20 • 2026
Vol.XVIII • No.IV
Manchester, N.H.
We announced it live on the air during day one of Radio Row, but if you missed it, Gov. Ron Desantis, just days before the NH Primary, has dropped out .. and Endorsed Donald Trump.
I’ll have more to say when I have more time, but my first thought was wow. My second was I know a few not-very-Trump-freindly DeSantis supporters who will be less than pleased. They can’t be taking this news well.
Here are Gov. DeSantis’ remarks and why he is supporting Donald Trump for the GOP nomination.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/ECoR8YeiMm
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 21, 2024
The post ICYMI – DeSantis Drops Out – Endorses Donald Trump appeared first on Granite Grok.
The Emmy Award-winning television show Survivor will be headed to the Green Mountain state to film their latest installment, “Survivor: Burlington,” this month. Airing its forty-second series since it debuted in 2000. The producers were looking for a location that could provide a unique set of challenges not yet faced by previous contestants.
Survivor has been known to fly its team to remote tropical locales, typically islands, where contestants need to work as a team in order to win the competition. This will be the first time they compete in an urban setting in winter.
As they scoured the world looking for the best urban challenge, they were shocked to find Burlington, VT, had a D- rating for crime, putting it in the top 10% least safe cities in the United States.
“We were tired of always shooting in the tropics. You can only get so tan and eat so many fish tacos before you feel like you’re going to lose it” remarked the show’s co-founder and host Jeff Probst.
“We knew we wanted somewhere cold to mix it up, and it came down to Chicago or Burlington. We were shocked and pleasantly surprised Burlington had the worse crime rate.” said the Emmy award-winning host.
Pleasantly surprised?
“I drive a Tesla, and I love to ski,” remarked co-producer Mark Burnett, who also declared his love of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.
The series usually has two or three tribes, but will be adding a fourth this year. Contestants were chosen at the Texas border, where their airfare and rooms were already paid for, saving the production team tens of thousands of dollars.
The emphasis on true tribal allegiance has been set by choosing undocumented migrants to represent their respective nations: Venezuela, China, Syria, and California.
The tribes will be released into one of the following hi-crime locations: City Hill Park, Ethan Allen Park, Battery Park, or Church Street. The contestants will begin the game wearing a pair of Darn Tough socks, a backpack, and a ski cap, yet otherwise completely naked so as not to arouse suspicion from locals.
Per the game’s format, the tribes will be given a series of tasks in order to win immunity, while the losing tribes will have to face secondary challenges to remain in the game. Bananas Media was able to get a glimpse of the list of competitions and immunity challenges, some of which include:
Team challenges:
Immunity challenges:
Hidden immunity idol:
Also seeing a return will be the Survivor feature Exile Island challenge. Each week, at least one castaway will be sent to Isle La Motte (pop. 488), where they will be given a pair of ice skates, a gallon of maple syrup, and a Jeremiah Johnson Hawken muzzle-loaded rifle with one live round pre-loaded to survive the week or attempt to skate back over Lake Champlain to the mainland.
Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger was surprised to hear of his city being chosen for this unique event. When not engaged in acts of white supremacy, Mayor Weinberger spends much of his focus on getting the city to net-zero carbon emissions. After hearing his Queen City ruled over Chicago for crime rate, Mayor Weinberger beamed with delight, noting the hard work and dedication necessary to achieve such a milestone.
“Defunding the police really helped. We also set a standard of excellence for tolerance, which means tolerating things other cities won’t, like crack-heads, vagrants, men in women’s bathrooms, sex workers, and asylum seekers from known terrorist hot spots. We may be a small city, but we’ve got a big city crime rate AND zero-carbon emissions. Can Chicago say that? I doubt it.”
When asked if he’d be willing to fill-in if the show needs a replacement, Weinberger rejected the offer since he will be in Florida during the show’s shooting, where he will be training for his upcoming men’s over 35 baseball league.
*The Centers for Disease Control assert that COVID-19 vaccines are both safe and effective.
The post Bananas: CBS Newest “Survivor: Burlington” appeared first on Granite Grok.
As reported here on Bear Pond Conservative Chronicles and other sources like The Maine Wire, the Chinese Cartel has set its sights on rural Maine and is now operating hundreds of illegal pot farms.
This assault on Maine began a few years ago when folks with Chinese links from New York and New Jersey started to buy properties in Maine and convert them to pot farms. The harvested product was exported up and down the eastern seaboard from Canada to Florida. These properties were bought with cash and modified with high-power electrical and climate control systems. The windows and doors were covered to hide the new purpose of the buildings, and neighbors were traumatized by the latest “industry” permeating their communities. The state seemed stymied to take action, and calls for help by Maine’s Senators and Congressmen remain unanswered by the Department of Homeland Security and Joe Biden’s Justice Department. Even though the Maine Congressional Delegation is predominantly Democrat (except for Susan Collins), the Biden Administration has ignored the pleas for help.
Local and state enforcement has stepped up, and though there have only been eight farms raided, it is a start with a lot of work still to be done. Plants have been confiscated, and the local operators have been arrested and charged. These people are just the foot soldiers in a much larger operation. This Chinese Cartel has money and power, and with over 200 locations statewide, many more sites need to be shut down before they feel the heat.
The biggest question I see in this story is why Maine. Maine is not alone, as this scenario repeats in rural Midwest and West Coast states. Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California have also been targeted. This multi-billion dollar operation is linked to the Chinese and is another example of China infiltrating our country for nefarious purposes. Whether it is buying agricultural land, land around sensitive military facilities and businesses, or setting up illegal pot operations, the members of this Chinese Cartel are not good neighbors or a positive influence in communities. Their actions are allowed because the Biden Administration is powerless due to their indebtedness to the Chinese government.
Like the other states dealing with this situation, Maine is large and predominantly rural, and it is difficult for strapped law enforcement to cover with their depleted staff. These illegal pot growers have space, privacy, intimidation of your neighbors, and a low chance of being caught and paying for your actions. Though marijuana laws are lax in Maine, unlicensed growers and exporters are not.
Recently, the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department led a raid on a property in Cornville, Maine, that led to the discovery of an illegal marijuana growing facility operated by two Asian males and an Asian female who spoke little or no English. Authorities reported it takes about a month to gather information and build a case strong enough to get the approval for a raid. The road is long to eradicate the Chinese Pot problem in Maine, but it must be done. Law enforcement deserves our support, as well as any information about locations you may suspect are being used as growing locations. Step up and say something. Let’s not let up until every one of these sites is closed.
The post Bear Pond Conservative Chronicles: Eight Successful Raids, Hundreds More Needed appeared first on Granite Grok.
On January 10th, Rep. Laura Sibilia (I-Dover) introduced H.634 – An act relating to school closures and the designation of a public school to serve as the public school of the district. It is another salvo against Vermont’s 150-year-old school choice system, “tuitioning,” and the independent schools that thrive – along with their students – as a result of this highly popular and effective program.
The bill is not remarkable as the VTNEA and their allies (like Sibilia) are doing all they can while enjoying supermajority, veto-proof power to eliminate any competition for the public school monopoly – and plunder the spoils of the vanquished. What is more remarkable is Sibilia’s explanations for why she is submitting this bill.
At one point in her testimony she says, “I’m very nervous. I have seen within my district, around the state, rural communities that are in stress contemplating, we’re going to shut down [the failing local public school] and just give our kids choice.”
Well, if that’s what the voters in your district want, why wouldn’t you support the wishes of the people who elected you? And why wouldn’t families want the ability to send their kids to the best school around, public or independent, that fits their child’s and their family’s needs? Not only does this practice lead to better student outcomes, parents being more involved in their kids’ education, and generally more satisfaction with a school, it also increases the property values in the communities that have it.
Sibilia should know this because, as she says, “I represent both choice towns and non-choice towns in my district. And my pledge to my choice towns when I ran was, I will defend what you have.” So much for campaign pledges, as this bill intends to do away with that choice by forcing those districts to designate public schools that the kids would be forced to go to, eliminating options such as Burr & Burton Academy, the Long Trail School – not for nothing, two of the top performing schools in the state – as well as other independent schools in the region.
These are schools Sibilia acknowledges her constituents are “really happy to send their students to.” But, she wants to kill that happiness and force the kids to go to schools the parents would not be really happy to send them to. Why?
Sibila calls the independent schools “aggressive,” whatever that means in this context. I think it means not rolling over to do what she is telling them is best for them, their students and the communities they serve. And she is using this bill to punish the Academies because, she is “extremely [emphasis in the original] disappointed that they have not come to the table [and accept designation]… “which I have districts that will not. They refuse.” For good reason. Let’s hope they continue to stand up to this bully.
Now, the spin Sibilia is trying to put on her position is that expanded school choice would “leave rural communities behind. “We simply don’t have the ability to do that with the number of buildings, with the terrain, with the transportation, with the dollars…. So, I will never support it.” Which begs the question, has the woman ever been to the Northeast Kingdom?
The NEK is the most rural region of our state, with some of the most challenging terrain. It also has near universal school choice, in many parts full school choice from K through 12. They have figured out the transportation. They spend on average less money per student and get better than average outcomes. Parents can choose schools like St. Johnsbury Academy – a top school in the state – Lyndon Institute, Thaddeus Stevens, Riverside, as well as public school options in Vermont and New Hampshire. It works! It works great.
Forcing tuitioning districts to designate public schools creates an issue even the House Education Committee Chair, Peter Conlon (D-Cornwall), certainly no friend of school choice, called out. “If the issue is geography, one could foresee a small high school closing, and the nearest high school is one of the four academies, and this would remove that as an option. And, I guess, some might say that doesn’t seem logical. [It’s not.] How would you respond to that?”
She gave a non-answer, but a revealing one. “This is an extraordinarily challenging opportunity, and if we can agree on what the problem is that we want to solve, and we can all come together we can solve it…. Again, I point to where are the academies? The academies are driving toward market-based solutions. And that doesn’t work for me.”
So that’s the problem she wants to solve: Letting her constituents decide what’s best for themselves and their families doesn’t work for her. She opposes a proven effective model that many of her constituents have and more want because under that model she doesn’t get the control – people do. That doesn’t work for her, and sadly it doesn’t work for most of the lawmakers in that building.
Conlon said he looks forward to discussing the bill in his committee further.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.The post My Constituents Want School Choice and Must Be Stopped! appeared first on Granite Grok.
Hello, Friends of Freedom! This week, we will discover exactly where the phrase “Separation of Church and State” came from. So, let’s dig in!
On October 7, 1801, the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, sent a letter to then-President Thomas Jefferson. They expressed to him their concern with the appearance of religious protection they had read about in certain laws and constitutions being formed. They believed that religious freedom was a God-given right and that no government should regulate religious activities.
They feared because of religious freedom appearing in these documents that the government would one day overstep its bounds and feel it had the power to regulate that freedom.
President Jefferson responded to their concerns with a letter of his own on January 1st, 1802. He reassured them that man is accountable only to God in areas of faith and religious practice. Also, as was understood by all the founding fathers, President Jefferson reassured them that all of man’s inalienable rights, including religious practices, would never be able to be controlled by the new American form of government because, as he states in the LETTER, there is a wall of separation between the two. I emphasized the letter because this was a personal correspondence between men of faith and the President. That phrase was meant to show that they need not worry about the government in America creating the kind of church-state Europe had done.
Note, once again this is a letter, that statement is not found in any of the founding documents.
A direct quote from President Jefferson reads as follows, “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between and his God, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation of Church and State.
Jefferson was making sure they understood that the new American government could not control the expression of religion and that the Constitution was to provide security AGAINST government interference, private or public.
As time moved on and cases were brought forth to challenge this view, several actually prevailed. This occurred in 1947 with the case of Everson v. Board of Education. Here, the court ruled for the first time that the government could remove religious expression from the public square. The court interpreted the word “separation” as a license for them to take some control over religious expression. They did this by separating the phrase from Jefferson’s letter, which shows the clear intention and meaning of what he wrote.
Other cases begin to occur, and finally, today, we have arrived at a place our founding fathers never intended the country to go.
It is sad, but we must believe that this situation can be turned around. It may take years, but progress in the right direction is being made.
We must continue to pray and get good, God-fearing people elected to office. Proverbs 19:2 When good men rule the people rejoice and prosper, when dishonest men rule the people mourn.
Until Next Week
Allen
The post Don’t Blame the Danbury Baptists appeared first on Granite Grok.
Beginning at 10 am Eastern Time, we will be live from Radio Row in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Today’s guests are NH House Jason Osborne, NH GOP Chairman Chris Ager, Nashua Trump Captain Di Lothrop, Rep. Jeanine Notter, from the Free State Project – Carla Gericke and Mike Brakey, and then from the Government Integrity Project – Tom Murray and Ken Eyring.
To tune in we will be streaming live on the Grok Facebook Page (issues with Twitter, sorry no stream there today).
Take Me To The Live Steam
More guests tomorrow and Tuesday, so check back!
The post Live From Radio Row in Manchester! appeared first on Granite Grok.
The world will always be full of problems in your state or county, town, neighborhood, and perhaps even your household. They might not all be as onerous as figuring out dinner every night for the rest of your life. Some will, but most won’t.
And most won’t require the government to get involved.
This one, sadly, must. It can’t be avoided. The problem of public records. They are public. You have the right to see them. But towns and cities are often disinclined to hand them over without what, in divorce court, would be defined as mental cruelty. They’ll spend thousands, even hundreds of thousands, in court to fight that right or to argue they aren’t public or simply can’t be provided rather than just pay someone to find and deliver them.
Court challenges are a huge investment in other people’s money, and it would be fair to wonder if that was to hide misfeasance, malfeasance, common, ordinary, incompetence, fraud, and corruption.
Enter HB1002, which “establishes parameters for when a public body may charge a fee for records provided under RSA 91-A.” Fourteen Republicans sponsored this thing. (Prime) Kuttab (R), Michael Cahill (D), Ball (R), Maggiore (D), Ankarberg (R), DeSimone (R), Dunn (R), Nelson (R), Bill Boyd (R), Edwards (R), Grassie (D), Carson (R), Gannon (R), Watters (D), Lang (R), Avard (R). Its purpose is to assess a tax to access public records, euphemistically referred to as a fee. One that, in the event that the time required to assemble the requested material exceeds ten hours – as if you’d let them figure that out and assume it is both accurate and just – you will be quoted a labor cost for access. Things could, sorry, WILL, get costly and quickly.
Right to know requests as a revenue stream. What could go wrong?
Sadly, I didn’t hear about this bill until after the public hearing, which I do not have time to watch – but I understand that there was a lot of pushback, as there should have been. These are public records. Public employees exist to fetch them when requested. They get paid to do it. If the number of requests seems excessive, too bad. How about paying another staffer instead of lawyers to sue citizens to keep them from accessing … public records? I bet you’d save the taxpayers some money.
Take Nashua, for example. They have wasted hundreds of thousands, losing 91-A records cases in court. It’s gotten so bad that suing seems to be the only way to separate the city from public documents.
One resident informed me that Nashua, to defend its refusal to provide public records, hires outside legal help. For one case, they are paying five lawyers to fight a pro se citizen with a tab that has to be approaching half a million dollars. One case. Public records. How many hours of looking for records, using the 25.00 fee rule in HB1002, does that equal?
For a 25.00 tax “Citizen A” can get ten hours of looking for whatever they requested. In the half-a-million example, you get 200,000 hours. 500,000/25.00 x 10 hours.
There are 8,760 hours in a year, so Nashua has spent the equivalent of 22 years’ worth of Right to Know request “fines” as proposed in HB1002 – to prevent one citizen from accessing some emails or other public documents.
If one city can afford to waste that sort of time and other people’s money to keep public documents private, imagine what the sum would be if we included Rochester, Londonderry, and any of the other cities and towns that are getting to be like or worse than Nashua. Wouldn’t the public interest be better served if that time was used to obtain public records?
The obstruction and lawfare are not about cost or time or labor, but if that is still a sticking point, rather than turn government impedeiment into a revenue stream, why not create RTK donor towns? Nashua has time and cash to burn. Smaller bergs and villages could be reimbursed for the cost of local fulfilling 91-A requests so that residents are not required to pay a tax to see a document they already paid for. It’s a very popular scheme with education funding, and making rich cities pay for poor towns sounds a lot like equity to me. I’m sure the Democrats will find a reason to complain, but this fits nicely in their ideological wheelhouse.
Or, we could trach HB1002 and go back to business as usual, which – in an increasing number of towns – means wasting small fortunes to keep public documents from the public.
If they’ve got that kind of time to waste, and time is money, the problem isn’t burdensome public inquiry. It’s town and city government, and taxing them to access public documents is only going to make that problem worse.
The post Fourteen NH Republicans Sponsor Bill to “Tax” Public Records Access appeared first on Granite Grok.
VT Digger recently posted an article lamenting that we Vermonters are not heeling to the mandate to transition our vehicles to electric. Alas, “As of October 2023, there were just under 11,000 plug-in EVs registered in the state, David Roberts, a consultant for the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, told the House Transportation Committee.
But meeting state emissions goals [under the Global Warming Solutions Act] for the transportation sector would require that there be about 27,000 plug-in EVs registered in Vermont by 2025 (including plug-in hybrids) and 126,000 by 2030.” We’re not going to get there. It’s totally unrealistic.
Why? WE CUSTOMERS/VOTERS DON’T WANT THESE FREAKIN’ CARS!
At least not nearly to the extent the climate alarmists in Montpelier demand. Still, they persist in forcing down our throats this technology that is too expensive and far too impractical for the overwhelming majority of drivers. This is bad policy on so many levels inflicted upon us by people who simply don’t care.
The growth in EV ownership in Vermont, what there is of it, is driven in large part by huge taxpayer and electric ratepayer subsidies that are grotesquely regressive. As VT Digger reports, “In an attempt to meet those targets, the state has introduced a slew of incentive programs in recent years on top of existing federal incentives to encourage Vermonters to go electric. The state programs include the Replace Your Ride program, which grants $3,000 to drivers who give in old cars that use fossil fuels, and the MileageSmart program, which offers Vermonters up to $5,000 to buy a used plug-in EV or hybrid.”
This is on top of government subsidy money doled out directly to auto manufacturers. In 2023, for example, the Biden administration offered $12 billion in grants and loans for automakers and suppliers to retrofit their plants to produce electric vehicles – THAT CONSUMERS DON’T WANT.
That’s all money transferred from hard-working Vermonters’ bank accounts to a politically favored class of drivers – who are by and large wealthier than those paying the bills.
Energy reporter Robert Bryce just published a fantastic article on just how regressive and politically motivated the EV push really is, and who is taking advantage of all this taxpayer-funded largess.
Last October, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, released a remarkable study that found “counties with affluent left-leaning cities” like Cambridge, San Francisco, and Seattle [and Burlington?] “play a disproportionately large role in driving the entire national increase in EV adoption….”
87% are white. Last March, Gallup reported, “a substantial majority of Republicans, 71%, say they would not consider owning an electric vehicle.”
So, what’s happening here is that lower-income tax/ratepayers are being forced to subsidize the climate fetishes and virtue signaling of rich, white liberals.
Beyond these more person-to-person wealthfare transfers, Bryce cites statistics showing that the money is overwhelmingly flowing into wealthier, liberal cities and states — another form of wealth transfer.
Despite all this, Automakers are, according to NASDAQ, “already losing money on their EV investments. Ford, for example, lost about $36,000 for every EV it sold last quarter.” Bryce cites bigger numbers:
Ford reported an operating loss of $1.3 billion in its EV division during the third quarter. That translates into a loss of $62,016 for each of the 20,962 EVs it sold during the period. means that FoMoCo has already lost about $3.1 billion on its EV business this year. As I noted in these pages in July, the company said it expected to lose $4.5 billion on its EV business in 2023.
Honda and General Motors “were ending a $5 billion plan to develop lower-cost EVs together just a year after announcing the effort.”
This is not to use a favorite term on the Left, sustainable.
In other news, the rental car company Hertz just announced that they are dumping 20,000 electric vehicles and switching back to gas-powered vehicles. “Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in a note Hertz’s move was another sign that EV expectations need to be “reset downward”. (Source: Reuters)
Last month, 3900 car dealers sent a letter to President Biden stating, “The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of BEVs arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. BEVs are stacking up on our lots,” and urging the administration to back off unrealistic EV mandates. Further, they state the obvious that such goals “require consumer acceptance to become a reality. With each passing day, it becomes more apparent that this attempted electric vehicle mandate is unrealistic based on current and forecasted customer demand.”
Reality, however, is not a concept the Vermont supermajority in the legislature is familiar with. Nor is any concern for the actual policy preferences of a majority of their constituents. In fact, at the first meeting of the Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee in their discussion of priorities for 2024, Senator Mark MacDonald (D-Orange) expressed his desire to “Stop the practice of selling cars, trucks, and SUVs that burn gas.”
Asked if he thought Vermont joining the California Clean Cars Initiative, which phases out the legal sale of ICE vehicles by 2035 wasn’t enough, MacDonald said no, “I’d like to get ahead of that.” To which his colleague Senator Becca White (D-Windsor) enthusiastically pointed to her own bill to do just that, S.24, An act relating to the Clean Fuels Program.
To which I reply, screw these people and the horses they expect us all to ride in on.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.The post Stop Forcing EVs Down Our Throats appeared first on Granite Grok.
