Montpelier, Vermont, population 8,000: This is the smallest state capital in the country. If you have seen a postcard of a downtown in Vermont, it’s almost certainly Montpelier.

When I rolled into town in a U-Haul 23 years ago and came through a mountain pass and saw the town, I thought Disney rolled out a series of false fronts of Victorian Americana, because it looked like a movie set.

She was genuinely sweet, polite, and helpful. And she was so obviously a girl on the cusp of a womanhood I fear she will never have.

But when you get out of the car and look closely, you see the cancer. Like most Vermont towns and cities, “woke” has infected the shared public brain. Montpelier is bedecked with trans/queer flags, BLM signs, graffiti exhorting people to “fight the man.”

The city clerk posts on local online forums about how oppressed the “undocumented neighbors” are and how important it is to let them vote in city elections. Until recently there was an upscale, overpriced Marxist (heh) coffee and dessert shop named “Delicious Dissent.” Clenched-fist graphics sat alongside messages like “for the workers” in flowing, girly script painted on the windows.

Meeting 'Johnny'

But the people are even sadder, and “Johnny” is the saddest. She was the teen girl who checked out my order at one of the local markets. “Johnny” is not the name on her tag, but it’s a close approximation. She wore the name tag next to a series of buttons telling onlookers that her pronouns were “he/him” and that “nonbinary identities are valid.”

Readers, I had to leave quickly after my order, because I was tearing up, wishing this poor girl had better influences in her life.

We’re used to young wokesters being snide and socially aggressive; they’re often loud and insufferable. Not Johnny. I didn’t even notice her strange name badge and buttons at first because I was thinking about how unusually polite she was for a store clerk in 2026. Where I live, you are lucky to get eye contact from a clerk. More often, they ignore you, leave you to bag your own order, and stare at their phones while fiddling with the metal bull rings hanging from the middle of their noses.

Johnny was different. “Hi, how are you this evening?” she asked me. I perked up, eager to have that rare pleasant business transaction. We chitchatted about the coming snowstorm as she went through my items. But as I looked at her, my heart got soft and the sadness came.

She was morbidly obese, as are so many people in this town. Not just chubby, but dangerously fat. Heart-attack-by-30 fat. Her breasts were smashed down in a binder (a strap confused women wear when they’re trying to look like a “man”). Her hair had four inches of natural color and bright blue ends that had grown out. It wasn’t washed. Her face was covered with cystic acne, and her uniform hadn’t been cleaned.

Girl, interrupted

“Johnny.” “He/him.” A blind man could not have mistaken this girl for a man. Her voice was a girl’s voice. Her demeanor was feminine. She was genuinely sweet, polite, and helpful. And she was so obviously a girl on the cusp of a womanhood I fear she will never have. How long will it be before she gets “top surgery” — a cosmetic mastectomy — funded by Medicaid through the state? How long until she starts taking testosterone and permanently turns her voice into that frog-kazoo croak that “trans men” develop?

I don’t know anything about Johnny’s home life, but I can make some educated guesses. At absolute best, whatever parents she has neglected her. More likely, they have been actively abusive. No sane, moral parents allow or encourage their teen girl to strap down her breasts, eat to the point of dangerous obesity, never shower, and try to tell the world that she’s a male.

It’s not unlikely that her parent(s), however, actively encourage these morbid choices. Too many people in Vermont are in a state of actual psychosis. They are literally disconnected from reality. They actually believe girls can become men. They genuinely believe that most of us are white supremacists just waiting to lynch one of the approximately seven black people in town.

Bad education

And anyway, once the kids are in the public school system, their glazed-eyed “Karen” teachers encourage their self-destruction.

In 2021, the Burlington School District surveyed the sexual orientation and gender identity views of high school students. Yes. Teachers and adults are asking children who they want to sleep with and whether they believe they’re the opposite sex. Yes, this is child sexual abuse. Yes, they get away with it. Yes, everyone acts as though this is normal and not predatory.

The results, proudly published on the state health department’s website, are shocking. Fully 30% of these kids told survey-takers that they were “LGBTQ+.” Really? Nearly one-third of the students are either homosexual, bisexual, “transgender,” “nonbinary,” or “queer” (whatever the hell that means)?

Between parents who ought to be in prison and teachers, administrators, and health officials, kids like “Johnny” don’t have a chance.

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Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

Someone cared

Had I been born three decades later than I was, I would have ended up the male version of Johnny. I grew up fatherless, with only a temporary stepfather who beat me senseless and tried to murder my mother after molesting my sister. My mother was deranged with borderline personality disorder and tore through the house like a trailer-park version of Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest.”

Unsurprisingly, I turned out to be a homosexual beset with intractable PTSD. By the time I was 13, I had been placed in an institution for being “incorrigible.” That was no day in the park, but it was better than remaining at home with a gorgon wearing a mother mask.

In sixth grade, I remember walking to school one day in an almost catatonic state. I felt nothing. I thought nothing. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but I think “dissociation” is closest. For no reason I can remember, I pulled a red crayon out of my backpack and colored in my lips as if I were a stripper getting ready to perform.

Then I sat down in class and stared at the blackboard. I could hear Ms. Haag’s voice as she gave the lesson, but I heard the mush-mouth of the teacher’s voice in the old Charlie Brown cartoons. When class was over, Ms. Haag pulled a chair up in front of my desk and sat down, looking me in the eye. She held onto my hand and asked, “Josh, why did you put that on your mouth? Is something wrong that you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know” was all I said. And I didn’t know. I still don’t know. But someone cared. My teacher cared. Someone noticed, and someone said something.

A blind eye

There will be no Ms. Haag for today’s Johnnys. When society has been turned upside down, nothing is normal. Beauty is called ugly. Violence is called love. Men are called women. Abuse is called care.

Some grown-up somewhere in Johnny’s life has looked at her and felt what I felt. She wanted to ask Johnny what was wrong, because she could see that something — many things, probably — was terribly wrong. But she can’t. Because if you notice the horror, you are targeted. You’re called a child abuser for objecting to child abuse. You’re called a predator for wanting to shield the innocent. Any genuinely caring teacher who tried to intervene would be fired and then held up for public scorn as a bigoted tormentor of children.

I know how insane this reads, but it’s true. I live here, and I’ve been targeted for speaking out. This is the end-state of a society that runs on boundless narcissism and pathological lying. It’s satanic.

When I left the store with the bag that Johnny packed my order in, I put on my seatbelt and waited for a few minutes because I needed to cry. I wanted to be Johnny’s dad and save her. My God, won’t somebody help her?

All I can do for Johnny is pray, and I have been, even though I confess I’m not sure anyone is listening. Would you pray for her, too?