I received a message from the Florida MAGAnut who wants to be my US Representative

Another MAGA outlier wants to represent Charlestown

By Will Collette

It’s pretty unusual to get an e-mail from a candidate for the US Congress that serves as a rebuttal to a speech by a state Governor, in this case Dan McKee and his State of the State address to the General Assembly.

It’s even more unusual when that candidate doesn’t even live here. The candidate is Victor Mellor, an ultra-MAGA nut who lives in a colony he built to house himself and like-minded rightwing loonies. Mellor went through the motions of renting an apartment in Rhode Island so he could run against our outstanding US District 2 Representative Seth Magaziner.

Mellor was born in Woonsocket but has been living in Florida for the past 30 years. 

In 1994, his ex-wife in Woonsocket filed criminal charges against Mellor for beating and attempting to kill her. After leaving for Florida, Mellor again faced criminal charges in 1998 for allegedly beating his live-in girlfriend with a closed fist on at least 4 occasions.

Mellor was not tried or convicted in either case and told the Providence Journal “My past doesn't define me." Maybe Mellor should hire local attorney Leah Boisclair to help him explain his past. Boisclair calls herself a “Sex Crime Defense Attorney” and wants to unseat our state Representative Tina Spears (Democrat, District 36) in the upcoming Democratic Primary.

Mellor was a January 6 insurrectionist and told the Providence Journal that January 6 was among the “top 5” moments of his life.

I make no secret of my dislike for Dan McKee, but in my opinion, Mellor doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His news release proves it: Mellor seems to have no purpose in making this statement against McKee’s speech other than to allow him to tout his undying loyalty to Donald Trump and his hateful MAGA policies.

Here is Mellor’s statement. I added my own notes in Bold Red.

Mellor: “Rhode Islanders Need Results, Not Rhetoric.”

Victor Mellor, U.S Congressional Candidate, gives response to Rhode Island’s State of the State Address.

Governor Dan McKee’s State of the State address spoke at length about programs and promises but failed to acknowledge the real consequences of years of rising costs, shrinking opportunity, and families being pushed closer to the edge every month.

I agree with the Minority Leader that Rhode Islanders are being asked to accept more government while receiving less relief.

Will Collette: Like Mellor would know from his gated compound in Florida. I wonder if he even knows the Minority Leader’s name.

From a congressional standpoint, the path forward is clear.

First, we must restore accountability and results. Under President Trump’s administration, federal policies have already begun moving the country in the right direction, strengthening national security, restoring fiscal discipline, and prioritizing American citizens. The problem is not federal inaction; it’s state leadership that has failed to fully leverage these reforms for Rhode Island families.

WC: Donald Trump himself admits that he is accountable to no one and nothing other than his own “morality.” He’s “moving the country in the right direction?” How? By declaring war on our allies, building gold battleships, running the most corrupt regime in our history, pushing white supremacy and racism? “Fiscal discipline?” Yeah, like destroying the White House to build a $400 million gold ballroom, giving tax breaks and pardons to oligarchs and pedos, imposing a national sales tax (tariffs) and throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. I don’t know if we can stand three more years of such “progress.”

As a member of Congress, I will work directly with state legislators to bring maritime and defense contracts back to Rhode Island, contracts that mean good-paying jobs, skilled trades, and long-term economic stability, especially in a state with deep naval and maritime roots. That’s how we rebuild a working-class economy.

WC: Yeah sure, the same way that Trump tried to strangle those same industries with his relentless attack on offshore wind, a move bitterly criticized by those same construction and maritime workers.

Second, we must be honest about workforce development. Not every child wants or needs a four-year college degree. I strongly support Career and Technical Education and skilled trades programs that prepare students for real careers. Rhode Island should be producing welders, electricians, shipbuilders, technicians, and engineers.

WC: No one disagrees with expanding educational opportunities, except maybe Donald Trump who is destroying public education by cutting funds and killing the US Department of Education. Mellor fails to mention the crippling effect of Trump’s attack on science, research and health care. This not only cost Rhode Island thousands of jobs but also hobbled cancer research and is exposing Americans to preventable, potentially deadly diseases.

Third, our priorities must be clear: Rhode Island citizens come first. Public resources should serve the people who live, work, and pay taxes here, not incentivize illegal immigration while residents are told to do more with less.

WC: Sure, send in the ICE stormtroopers. Beat, pepper spray, arrest and detain without charges or legal counsel anyone, US citizen or not, who can’t produce proof of citizenship that these illiterate goons will accept. These immigrants so hated by MAGA grow our food, build our homes, look after the elderly and pay their taxes. They would love the chance to live here as legal citizens as our own parents, grandparents and great grandparents did.

Finally, we must address energy costs honestly. Rhode Islanders endure some of the highest heating costs in the nation, especially during our frigid winters. Energy prices will not come down by doubling down on the most expensive forms of energy available. Allowing pipeline access for affordable heating fuel would provide immediate relief to families and seniors, while offshore wind continues to drive costs up.

WC: Destroying the renewable energy industry is not the way. Green energy costs are beating fossil fuels. Bringing back coal will cost lives and productivity from pollution-caused illness. It’s a bald-faced lie that offshore wind is raising costs.

Leadership is not about managing decline; it’s about changing direction, when necessary, even when it’s not popular.

As a constitutional conservative and supporter of President Trump’s America First agenda, I will fight to ensure federal policy lowers costs, creates jobs, strengthens national security, and restores common sense. Rhode Islanders deserve leadership that delivers results.

WC: All evidence to the contrary in the first year of Dear Leader’s second term.

Rhode Islanders are hardworking, resilient, and proud of this state. We deserve leadership that lowers costs, creates opportunities, and puts citizens first. As a member of Congress, I will work every day to deliver real results, not rhetoric, and ensure Rhode Island has a stronger voice in Washington.

WC: Rhetoric. Really? How about cutting food prices on Day One? Ending Russia’s war on Ukraine on Day One? Making health care affordable? Making housing affordable? How about defending the Constitution? My advice, Vic: stay in Florida.

Here is a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation Health News on the MAGA cult camp Mellor set up in Florida:

Read on about the cult camp Victor Mellor, carpet-bagging challenger to Rep. Seth Magaziner, runs in Florida:

At The Hollow in Florida, the ‘Medical Freedom’ Movement Finds Its Base Camp

Arthur Allen 

VENICE, Fla. — MAGA and MAHA are happily married in Florida, and nowhere more at home than in Sarasota County, where on a humid October night a crowd of several hundred gathered to honor state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, his wife, and an unlicensed Canadian radiologist who treats cancer with horse paste.

The event, titled “The 3 Big C’s: Courage, Censorship & Cancer,” was sponsored by the We the People Health and Wellness Center, a clinic, funded by a Jan. 6 marcher, where patients can bask in red light, sit in ozone-infused steam baths, or get their children treated for autism with an experimental blood concentrate.

In Venice, in Sarasota County, a “medical freedom” movement forged in opposition to covid lockdowns blends wellness advocates, vaccine-haters, right-wing Republicans, and angry parents in a stew of anti-government absolutism and mystical belief.

Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, a self-proclaimed “spiritual healer” who says she speaks with angels and has prophetic visions, chaired a panel at the event at the Venice Community Center. The keynote speech was by William Makis, a litigious covid conspiracist who, after losing his medical license in 2019, has made a living treating cancer patients with antiparasitic drugs including ivermectin, which was also championed in some circles as a covid treatment during the pandemic.

Clinical trials showed that ivermectin didn’t work, but covid skeptics viewed medicine’s rejection of it as part of a conspiracy by Big Pharma against a cheap, off-patent drug. Some of the patients in his care have what he calls “turbo cancers,” Makis says, blaming alleged impurities in mRNA vaccines that he says have killed millions of people.

For Makis, it’s all one big conspiracy — the virus, the vaccine, and the suppression of his therapies.

Brianna Ladapo has her own take on medicine, based on the idea of good and bad spiritual energy. She wrote in a memoir that as the pandemic began she intuited that it had been planned by “sinister forces” to “frighten the masses to surrender their sovereignty to a small group of tyrannical elites.” She has written that the government hides vaccination’s risks.

She sees “dark forces” all over the place, including, she said in a podcast interview earlier this year, in “chemtrails” shaped like a pentagram. “They’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks,” Ladapo said. The chemtrails “they are dumping on us,” she said, had sickened her and her three sons. “The dark side are no fans of ours.”

(“Chemtrails” are a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists who say they think that contrails, the condensation formed around commercial airplane exhaust, contain toxic substances poisoning people and the terrain. Although there is zero evidence of that, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to look into whether they are part of a clandestine effort to use toxic chemicals to change the weather.)

Ladapo’s husband hasn’t publicly endorsed all her beliefs, but as surgeon general he’s reversing decades of accepted public health practice in Florida and embracing untested therapies. “We’re done with fear,” Joseph Ladapo said after being named surgeon general in 2021. He wants to ban mRNA vaccines in Florida, and on Sept. 3 he announced plans to end childhood vaccination mandates in the state.

A few days after the Venice event, Ladapo said he hoped to support Makis’ work — though his treatments are unproven and potentially dangerous — through a new $60 million cancer research fund created by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey.

Vic Mellor, CEO of a local concrete business, founded and owns We the People. He’s an associate of retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was briefly President Donald Trump’s national security adviser in 2017 before being dismissed for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn since has become a leader of the Christian nationalist movement.

We the People provides vitamin shots but no vaccines. In fact, many of its offerings are treatments for supposed vaccine injuries. Part of the We the People building is a broadcasting studio, where conservatives hold forth on what they see as the villainy of liberals and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Mellor was at the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021 — he said he “just knocked on front doors,” according to a Facebook post described by The Washington Post. He returned home and started building a 10-acre complex that hosts weddings and right-wing assemblies, with playgrounds, a butterfly garden, a zip line over a pond visited by alligators, and an attached, separately owned gun range.

Visitors who travel down a dirt road to The Hollow — named for the hollow-core concrete that made Mellor wealthy — can enter the compound through a dark, cavernous passage lined with neon signs illuminating maxims from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Flynn.

The Hollow has hosted clinics for unvaccinated kids and events for Ladapo, anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny (who in 2021 told legislators at an Ohio House hearing that covid vaccine made people magnetic), and other “medical freedom” advocates. Mellor created a medical home for such ideas by opening We the People in 2023.

The year before, three “medical freedom” candidates had won seats on the board overseeing Sarasota’s public hospital and health care system, after protests over the hospital’s refusal to treat covid patients with ivermectin and other drugs of choice for covid contrarians.

On a recent afternoon at The Hollow, manager Dan Welch was clearing brush when approached by KFF Health News. As a foe of vaccinations, he welcomed Ladapo’s move to end vaccine mandates. “Maybe in their inception, vaccines were created to prevent what they were supposed to prevent,” Welch said. “But now there’s so much more in there, the metals, aluminum, mercury. Since they started vaccination, the autism rate went through the roof, and I believe these vaccines are part of it.”

The theory that vaccines cause autism has been debunked, and manufacturers removed mercury from childhood vaccines 24 years ago, although Welch said he doesn’t believe it.

Vaccination faces additional challenges in a century-old Sarasota County neighborhood of low-slung bungalows called Pinecraft, home to about 3,000 Mennonites — and double that number when Amish snowbirds arrive in the winter. Pastor Timothy Miller said that while Sarasota’s Mennonites are less culturally isolated than the Mennonite community in West Texas, site of a measles outbreak in January, many in his community also shun vaccination.

His cousin Kristi Miller, 26, won’t vaccinate her 9-month-old daughter or any of the other children she hopes to have, she said, because she thinks vaccines probably cause autism and other harms.

As for vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, she doesn’t worry about them. Like the Ladapos, “I don’t live in fear,” she said. “I have a God who’s bigger than everything.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.