Burlington residents are raising concerns over flyers that popped up between the Old North End and Hill Section neighborhoods Wednesday night targeting Mayor Miro Weinberger.
The flyer reads “Hurray!!! 3 more years of killing the poor!!! MIRO” over a picture of the mayor’s face. Weinberger won reelection last week, narrowly defeating Progressive City Councilor Max Tracy.
In smaller print below the image are obscenities and a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. It is signed, “Sincerely, an Angry-N—,” employing a racial slur.
The reference to the KKK — a white supremacy group that has inflicted violence against Black, gay and Jewish communities, among others — has former city councilor Ed Adrian concerned that the flyers had an anti-Semitic message directed at Burlington’s mayor, who is Jewish.
According to Adrian, it doesn’t matter what the flyer’s intent was. In his view, referring to the KKK alongside a known Jewish person raises red flags.
“Whether it’s a crime or not, it’s disgusting on multiple different levels,” Adrian said. “I mean, it uses language that’s offensive to Black people. It uses language that’s offensive to Jews.”
Adrian posted the images of the flyers to Twitter. He said he saw about 20 of them while walking Thursday morning on North Willard Street and other nearby streets. The former councilor said they also appeared near a rabbi’s house and near Weinberger’s home.
Michelle Hobbs, who also lives in the area, said she saw the flyers while walking her dog Thursday morning and began ripping them down.
“I’ve been a Miro supporter since he ran and I know him personally. And it just really disgusted me because I felt like it was hateful,” Hobbs said. “It frankly surprises me because I feel like Miro is the most peaceable, down to earth [person], always willing to listen to every perspective. I’ve not seen anything hateful about his policies.”
Hobbs said the flyers go well beyond political debate and should be investigated as hate speech.
She has lived in Burlington for 21 years and said the political discourse has grown more and more divisive and cruel.
“Anyone can come into an election cycle and critique actions and have opinions about them,” Hobbs said. “But if you’re actually trying to do character assassination or make claims that are just untrue, really, I just think that that’s crossing a line.”
Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad told VTDigger he does not think the flyers violate any laws. Police have not received any complaints.
“There is no overt, explicit threat against any person,” Murad wrote in an email. “There is profane, obscene, derogatory language, but that in and of itself is not criminal.”
Weinberger’s spokesperson, Olivia LaVecchia, said in a statement provided to VTDigger that it’s troubling to see this language “directed at local public servants or at anyone.”
“It is wrong and outside the bounds of the long tradition of respectful and inclusive civic engagement in Burlington,” LaVecchia wrote. “An anonymous flyer that uses hateful and obscene language is corrosive to our local democracy and hurtful to many members of our community.”
This is not the first time Weinberger has been targeted by flyers seen as anti-Semitic. In 2016, a woman with a history of mental illness distributed flyers referring to Weinberger’s “Jewish demolition team,” and she wrote that Weinberger was urbanizing Burlington as a part of a “White Christian genocide.”
