The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman: Recent Episodes
David Goodman
The Vermont Conversation is a VTDigger podcast hosted by award-winning journalist David Goodman. It features in-depth interviews about local and national topics with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and ordinary citizens. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.
Few people have turned adversity into opportunity as dramatically as Kelly Brush.
Brush was on the Middlebury College ski team when she was paralyzed in a ski racing accident in 2006. Twenty years later, Brush is a leader of a national movement to empower people with spinal cord injuries.
“I'm so glad that I'm able to do that and support … thousands of other people that I don't even know and their families and create things that just feel a little bit better,” Brush told me.
I asked Brush what enabled her to stay positive following her accident.
“Whenever something happens in life, you have a choice on how you respond,” she replied. “Even when there's things that are really hard or really sad, you feel that, and then you make the choice to move you forward in a good direction.”
Brush has mixed feelings about people calling her an inspiration. If “an understanding of who I am and what I've done creates inspiration, that's great. But not the inspiration that comes just because I exist and I'm in a wheelchair.”
Brush is concerned about how people with disabilities are especially vulnerable to delays or cutbacks in health care. She has personal experience of this: she recently had to undergo major back surgery and had to seek care in an emergency room when her primary care provider couldn’t see her for several weeks.
“People with disabilities have greater health care needs,” she said. “When the health care system isn't set up well, we are then paying more for those greater needs. I see it time and again with complications that come from spinal cord injuries.”
Brush, who recently turned 40, is the founder and spokesperson for the Kelly Brush Foundation, which grants about $1 million per year to people with spinal cord injuries to purchase adaptive sports equipment and maintain an active lifestyle. Its best known fundraiser is the annual Kelly Brush Ride, which draws nearly 1,000 bike riders and will take place this year on Sept. 12 in Middlebury. There are also Kelly Brush Rides in Park City, Utah, and the Bay Area.
Brush is especially proud of the community that she and her foundation have helped build. “When I got hurt, I didn't know anybody else with a spinal cord injury,” she said. Now her foundation connects people with spinal cord injuries with one another.
“There's something really different about being able to build community with people who are doing things similarly to you, as well as just the ability to feel seen and be seen by other people who are living a similar life to you outside of adaptive sports.”
Brush lives in Charlotte with her two young daughters. She worked for 10 years as a pediatric nurse practitioner, but is taking a break from that to lead her foundation and look after her children.
I asked Brush what she hopes people take away from her story.
“To be excited about the fact that I've been able to live such a full life and continue to have all the same highs and lows that so many people have and I do it from my wheelchair,” she replied.
“I definitely have some more struggles than others. But my life is awesome and really fun. I hope people can see that and see the beauty in life, no matter what comes up and what happens, and find and follow that.”
A teen golf prodigy launches a powerful drive that kills a golf caddy at a tony New York country club. Investigations and hidden scandals soon follow.
So begins best-selling Vermont author Chris Bohjalian’s spellbinding new book, “The Amateur.” His 26th novel is classic Bohjalian: a riveting tale told by a female protagonist that weaves together mystery, intrigue, romance, betrayal and secrets that had me frantically turning the page to find out what happens next.
Bohjalian is among Vermont’s most beloved and prolific authors of literary and historical fiction. His work has been translated into more than 35 languages, and three of his novels — “Secrets of Eden,” “Midwives” and “Past the Bleachers” — have been made into movies. “The Flight Attendant” is an Emmy-nominated series on HBO Max. He has also written three plays. The New York Times Book Review named “The Amateur” one of “The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.”
Bohjalian often writes from the perspective of a female protagonist. “I do it because I think a woman is more likely than a man to go on the emotional odyssey that the tale demands,” he told me. He said he considers it high praise when a reader tells him, “I thought you were a woman.”
Bohjalian, who lives in Weybridge, has won numerous literary awards. He wrote the “Idyll Banter” column for the Burlington Free Press for nearly 25 years, has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and writes periodic essays on his Substack. He is a graduate of Amherst College.
Bohjalian has also been recognized for his efforts to educate Americans about the Armenian genocide. He has family who survived the genocide, which was launched in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.2 million Armenians. He has written regularly on the topic, including his 2012 book, “The Sandcastle Girls,” which is a love story with the genocide as its backdrop. He is keenly aware that history often repeats itself.
“Genocide begins with language, by demonizing the minority, by reducing them to something less than human, something like an insect, a vermin, a parasite, a germ,” he told me. “Just as the Ottoman Empire used that language about the Armenians, or the Nazis used that sort of language about the Jewish citizens of Europe, increasingly in the United States we see immigrants or people from other countries demonized in much the same way.”
He cited the example of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance “demonizing Ohio Haitian citizens, claiming that they were so animalistic they ate dogs and cats.”
“I vacillate wildly between whether I believe that democracy in America is really in jeopardy or simply believing that we are in a cycle right now where there is a stupidity, a cruelty and a savagery that is cyclical, and eventually we will swing back,” he said.
Bohjalian kicks off a national book tour for “The Amateur” with an event at the South Burlington Public Library on Saturday. He has another novel due out in 2028 and is at work on a play.
His advice to aspiring writers?
“Write because you love it. Write in the genre you love to read. Write every day.”
President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is intensifying. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained over 10,000 people just in the last week of June. This month, ICE agents killed two men in less than a week, includinga young Columbian father in Maine who reportedly had legal status. Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that it is only arresting “the worst of the worst,”most of the people arrested by ICE have no criminal convictions.
Fear is now a constant in immigrant communities.
“It's like watching a slow car crash every day,” said Jill Martin Diaz, an immigration attorney and executive director of theVermont Asylum Assistance Project.
VAAP is a rapidly growing legal services and technical assistance organization for immigrants. Since becoming VAAP’s first paid staff member in January 2024, Martin Diaz now oversees a paid staff of 10, a network of 28 volunteer attorneys and over two dozen volunteer interpreters, among others.
VAAP is also the hub of a newly formed network that now offers coordinated immigration legal services throughout the state. The network includes the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, Vermont Afghan Alliance, and Vermont Legal Aid.
“We've seen a really steady stream of people being arrested in Vermont,” said Martin Diaz. VAAP attorneys make weekly visits to Northwest State Correctional Facility and report encountering an average of 12 to 18 immigrants in detention.
Martin Diaz warned that “rights and protections are being stripped away every day in mundane-seeming memos and orders from courts. And we're just watching the system slip between our fingers as we're trying to support Vermonters to access their needs.”
Anxiety has been compounded bya Supreme Court decision that allows the Trump administration to end temporary protected status. The decision may result in the loss of legal protection for over a million immigrants who have fled war or environmental disasters in their home countries.
Martin Diaz said this Supreme Court decision will impact several dozen Haitians, some of whom have lived in Vermont for decades and “find themselves now without temporary protected status, vulnerable to being arrested by ICE and prosecuted for removal proceedings, and most acutely unauthorized to work.”
Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid, and was a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont. In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40 and has received awards from the Vermont Bar Association and American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.
Martin Diaz said “that for every terrifying story about ICE hurting people, killing people in the streets, the stories about unfair things happening in courts of law, there are also stories of hope, of the system working as it should, of things going well, that doesn't make the news.”
The attorney and activist concluded with a message for immigrants who are fearful: “I'm just so sorry that this is happening. I'm sorry that this isn't what we promised.”
Summer reading is often about traveling to far-away places and meeting fascinating people. But for two Vermont authors, the exotic destination for their new books is their home state.
Hardwick author Brett Ann Stanciu’s latest book is “Call It Madness.” It features a young protagonist, Avah Lavoie, who journeys to a remote village in northern Vermont to salvage an old farmhouse that offers answers to mysteries about her family. The book’s title is taken from a David Budbill poem and “reflects the sorrow and stubbornness of family life,” says the author.
Stanciu told me she “wanted to write about a small Vermont village that has people who are very wealthy … people who are in the middle and people who are really scrambling in the bottom.”
If her fictional village sounds suspiciously like the real town of Greensboro, there is a reason: Stanciu is the treasurer and zoning administrator for the Northeast Kingdom town. The Marlboro College graduate is the recipient of two Vermont Arts Council grants and was a 2025 nominee for the Pushcart Prize, the prestigious literary award. She is editor-at-large for Vermont Almanac. Stanciu was a guest on Vermont Conversation in 2021 to discuss her nonfiction book “Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.”
For Corinth author Catherine Tudish, the title of her latest book, “A Thousand Souls,” refers to the population of the fictional village of Neptune, Vermont. The characters include a boy who travels to South Carolina to meet his father for the first and only time, a shy girl who loses her stutter when she befriends a black bear, and a beloved sheriff who breaks up a drug operation only to get arrested himself for helping undocumented workers evade immigration enforcement.
Tudish is the author of three books and has taught writing and literature at George Washington University, Harvard, Dartmouth and the Bread Loaf School of English.
Tudish said she is drawn to writing about Vermont because of “the qualities of observation of the people who live here, a very particular kind of sense of humor, and a great interest in people who come from away and what we're like and how we behave. We can sometimes be objects of humor, but I think that there's also a great kindness inherent in people in Vermont.”
Tudish said her fictional town of Neptune is based loosely on Strafford, which is enjoying a moment of fame for its illustrious son, musician Noah Kahan. It turns out that Tudish knew Kahan as a child.
Kahan “was a very interesting 3-year-old. He seemed very curious and focused and asked a lot of questions in a way that I think other 3-year-olds didn't. So I'm not surprised that he's ended up doing something sort of extraordinary.”
Stanciu said a common thread between the main characters that she and Tudish write about is that “Vermont is a place of multiplicity, that people come from all kinds of walks of life, they do all kinds of different things, have many different skills, lots of different experiences, some joyous, some tragedy. But between that, there's this sense of respect for the individual for what they're doing.”
“It doesn't always mean that the characters in these books are behaving well,” said Stanciu. “But they're struggling in one way or another to try to figure out their lives within this complicated network of the people around them, the village, the rural communities and the influence of the landscape.”
In 2016, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was an insurgent candidate taking on Hillary Clinton, the heavily favored pick of the Democratic establishment for the presidential primary. As Sanders barnstormed the country and brought out millions of people to hear his message, the Clinton machine’s operatives and super-PACs swung into action to stop him by any means necessary.
Tad Devine was deep in the trenches of this fight. He is a veteran Democratic political consultant and was chief strategist for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Prior to that he had been a senior adviser in the presidential campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.
Devine has written an explosive new book about the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.” His inside account comes as a new generation of populist Democrats, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, is once again challenging the Democratic establishment and receiving fierce pushback from the old guard.
Devine writes that “the entrenched leadership of the Democratic Party seems determined to forget the mistakes it made during the primary season of 2016.” He blames the Democratic elite for “two catastrophic defeats in the recent past and who knows how many more to come in the future.”
Devine insists, “The Democratic Party must stop impeding voters from determining the outcome of primaries.”
Could Bernie have beaten Donald Trump in 2016?
“Donald Trump's own pollster showed up at Harvard for the post-election review, and when asked what would have happened if Sanders was the nominee, he said he would have won,” Devine told me. “He understood that those white working-class voters who fled Hillary Clinton would have gone back to Bernie Sanders.”
Devine said the reason the Democratic Party is “completely out of touch with the American people” is because it participates in “a rigged system” in which the richest donors can buy elections. He said that in other countries, “if they threw money into campaigns anonymously, they would go to jail.”
“We have to break from that stranglehold of money in politics and establish ourselves as a party that is willing to seek funding through people at the grassroots level.”
There are two ways to fix the corrupt campaign financing system, Devine said. “One is elections, and the second is the Constitution and overriding the Supreme Court. That is the only way home right now for America.”
Devine said that “overwhelming majorities of Democrats, Republicans, independents support changing the system of campaign finance.” What they need is “a visionary leader or leaders to come out and to move the nation in that direction.”
Is there any particular leader who he thinks has promise? Devine suggested Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or California Gov. Gavin Newsom might emerge. But he noted that Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator until 2004 when he was elected a U.S. senator, and then won the presidency four years later.
“People can come up very quickly in this day of instant communication.”
When that leader emerges, he predicted, “I think politics will change in America and will give it back its soul.”
The Supreme Court ended its term with a series of blockbuster decisions on birthright citizenship, immigration, transgender rights and campaign finance. I spoke with U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who is the vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.
“It's shocking to me that we ever got to this place that we were having the Supreme Court weigh in on birthright citizenship,” Balint told me, sounding incredulous about the decision.
“It's so clear that white nationalism has absolutely taken hold here in D.C. among my colleagues in Congress, certainly in the White House, and on the Supreme Court,” Balint said. “You see that when you don't have a unanimous decision saying actually that the Constitution says what the Constitution says. They're trying to redefine citizenship to leave out a whole lot of people.”
Balint asserted that the Supreme Court “is beholden to white Christian nationalism right now, and it's terrifying to me.”
“It is past time” that the U.S. Supreme Court be reformed, said Balint, who was first elected to Congress in 2022 and is running for a third term. “I want actual ethics with teeth, with consequences. I want term limits. I am absolutely open to expanding the court. I think that when (Democrats) have had power, (they) have not used it to its fullest extent.”
Balint spoke to me after stepping away from a tumultuous scene Tuesday afternoon on the House floor, which was paralyzed by infighting among Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled votes and sent members home for two weeks when far-right GOP lawmakers rebelled over the stalled SAVE America Act, the elections bill that President Donald Trump has demanded be passed despite a lack of votes in the Senate.
The Supreme Court also issued a decision last week revoking temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria who fled violence and political repression. The status has enabled over 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians to live and work legally in the U.S. The specter of mass deportations looms.
“The ending of TPS is a death sentence for some of these people,” said Balint. “The whole point of having this protected status is to protect people from having to go back to a dangerous, unstable, unsafe place for them.”
Many Haitians work in healthcare, especially long-term care for the elderly. “They are doing the hard work of keeping us healthy, and they are already not compensated enough for their labor,” said Balint. “They're starting to feel like Americans see them as expendable.”
“It is heartbreaking and infuriating that we are treating people so poorly that have contributed so much to our communities, to our states and to our nation. I know that we will get through this dark time, but for some people it will be too late.”
Balint also addressed the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran. “We have lost 13 service members, and thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed for no good reason,” she said. “We're in no better position … in Iran now than we were before the war.”
Balint has voted several times to end military aid to Israel. This week she led 75 House colleagues in sending a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemning Israeli military engagement in Lebanon. “I don't know how you can look at what is happening and what has happened in Gaza, and what continues to happen in the West Bank — I mean, it's a bunch of terrorist vigilantes in the West Bank — and now what I see is indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon. I don't know how you can look at that and think that we're on the right track.”
I asked Balint her thoughts on America’s 250th birthday this week. “I've been thinking about this a lot,” she replied.
“Growing up as a gay woman, I always felt like a second-class citizen. I never imagined that there would be a time when I could marry my spouse. I never imagined that I would have employment protections,” Balint said.
“This country is going to break your heart, and also the freedoms that are guaranteed in the First Amendment are an incredible, beautiful thing to behold. There are very few places in the world where you have that kind of freedom. But we have to protect it. We can't accept it as a given. We have to be vigilant.”
“Americans perhaps are understanding in a new way that nobody is coming to save us. That we have to be the ones day in and day out protecting both the beautiful things that we have and also continue to strive for that more perfect union that we give voice to.”
“We all have to have the skin in the game.”
In the early 1800s, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake spent 44 years as life partners living together in the small Vermont town of Weybridge. They are one of the earliest lesbian couples in America whose story is documented, thanks in part to a new graphic novel by Tillie Walden.
Walden is a rising star in cartooning.
She served as Vermont’s fifth cartoonist laureate from 2023 to 2026, following cartoon luminaries such as Alison Bechdel and the late New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren. In 2018 at the age of 22, Walden won the first of her two Eisner Awards, known as the Oscars of cartooning, becoming one of the youngest Eisner Award winners ever.
Walden’s latest book, “Charity & Sylvia,” has been namedthe 2026 selection of Vermont Reads, a program of Vermont Humanities that invites communities around the state to read the same book and hold discussions and events.
Walden moved to Vermont from Texas to attend theCenter for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction and became a professor there in 2022. Walden, now 30, is the author of 16 books. She lives in Norwich with her wife, the cartoonistEmma Hunsinger, and their young son.
Walden faced many challenges in reconstructing the lives of Charity and Sylvia. For one, she did not know what they looked like. The closest image she had was a silhouette of the couple, framed by locks of their hair.
“When it came to deciding their faces, it was mentioned in a letter way back when that Charity looked a lot like her brother, so I went to Massachusetts and found the portrait of her brother, and I based her off of what her brother looked like,” Walden told me. She based her depiction of Sylvia on a photograph that she had of her niece.
Walden also found another source for inspiration: her Vermont neighbors. “I needed actual human beings to populate Weybridge, Vermont, in 1810, but there was nothing to go off of, so I really did just look at my neighbors and I drew their faces and their bodies and their personalities into the book,” she said. “Small town Vermont hasn't changed that much, really.”
Walden wants “Charity & Sylvia” to offer a more realistic view of queer love. “Marginalized groups often have to represent themselves in media as very digestible and very acceptable, because that's how you find mainstream appeal.”
“What I'm actually interested in is how gayness, queerness — whatever you call it — interacts with more complex parts of life, like faith, like conservatism, like being an American, like being a Vermonter. And I was very moved that Charity and Sylvia were not perfect role models,” she said.
“Queer people aren't perfect. No marginalized person is perfect. No person anywhere is perfect.”
For 30 years, journalist Amy Goodman has been “going to where the silence is” to report stories that the powerful would rather you not know about and the corporate media have often ignored. She hasstared down armed soldiers in Nigeria, survived amassacre in East Timor, documenteddogs attacking indigenous pipeline protesters in North Dakota, and been manhandled and arrested whilecovering the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” — the award-winning independent daily news program that she co-founded in 1996. She is also my sister, and we co-wrote four bestselling books. She is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.”
Now a new documentary film called “Steal This Story, Please!” traces Amy’s career and the growth of “Democracy Now!” from a radio broadcast on nine stations into one of the leading U.S.-based independent daily news broadcasts in the world on television, radio and online. The film is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. This week, “Steal This Story, Please!” is showing in Vermont in Burlington, Brattleboro, St. Johnsbury and Montpelier.
Amy has gone to some of the places around the world where the light is dimmest, often putting herself in danger, and has been persistent in her belief that our freedom of the press is critical to a meaningful democracy at home.
“The idea that movements matter, that we have to go to where the silence is as journalists. … It's often not silent. It's raucous, it's rowdy, people are organizing, but it doesn't hit the corporate media radar screen,” she said. “That's where ‘Democracy Now!’ lives, and that's really where the hope is.”
Last week came the development that the U.S. Department of Justice is closing its antitrust investigation into a merger that would allow Paramount Skydance to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion, and with it countless media properties that include CBS and CNN.
“People who care about war and peace, climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, racial and economic equality are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority — silenced by the corporate media, which is why we have to take the media back,” she said. “The media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth.”
The birth rate in the U.S. has dropped by an astonishing 22% since 2007. Are smartphones to blame?
Yes, according to a groundbreaking new study by Middlebury economist Caitlin Myers. Her smartphone study is garnering national attention this week, confirming an idea that people have long speculated about but until now have lacked data. Myers and co-author Ezekiel Hooper showed that from 2007 to 2011, after the iPhone was introduced, there was a sharp decline in births, up to half of which can be attributed to the smartphone. They say that smartphones have led to “reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.”
Myers says a declining birth rate is not necessarily bad, but that there are “many aspects of it that really concern me, aspects that relate to economic growth and supporting older generations, but also questions of what does this mean for humans.”
“Everybody's just doom scrolling on their phone alone and isolated and not forming relationships.”
Myers is the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
She is well known for her research into the effects of abortion policy on people’s lives. She has testified in the U.S. Senate about the economic consequences of the 2022 Dobbs decision ending the constitutional right to abortion, and she spearheaded the amicus brief in the Dobbs case that was signed by over 150 economists, highlighting the negative impact of limiting abortion access. Myers also runs a national database of abortion providers.
Myers said the Dobbs decision has resulted in about 30,000 additional births “concentrated among people who are younger, have less education and have really limited financial resources.”
“The post-Dobbs era is an inequality story,” she told me. “There are parts of the country like ours where the Dobbs decision almost paradoxically expanded abortion access” due to increased availability of telehealth and medication by mail.
But in states like Texas, Louisiana and West Virginia that have enacted near-total abortion bans, only 80% to 85% of people who want an abortion are getting one. That leaves up to one-fifth of people who want an abortion “trapped. They aren't finding the means, the information, the resources, the safety and security to travel long distances or to order pills through the mail, and they're giving birth as a result.”
Myers grew up in rural West Virginia and Georgia. She empathizes with those who don’t think like her. “As a Southerner it breaks my heart when I hear people dismiss the people I grew up with, the places I'm from, the beliefs that they have.”
“We all know it's not just about dismissing far-away Southerners. There are divides within our own state.”
Myers wonders “whether we could potentially bridge these divides rather than saying, ‘Yeah, I just don't think this is going to work out,’ like we're never going to agree.” She wants to do her “tiny little part to create a world where we give each other more grace.”
As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, two veteran activists are celebrating one of the country’s foundational principles: the right to protest, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. But they warn that this right is under attack.
“Our ability to protest is key to moving forward on a whole range of environmental and social issues … which is why I'm so terrified at the thought of losing this democratic right,” said Annie Leonard, who spent 17 years with Greenpeace USA, serving as executive director from 2014 to 2023.
She and André Carothers are co-authors of “Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It.” Carothers spent 13 years with Greenpeace USA and co-founded and led the Rockwood Leadership Institute.
The two have direct experience of the power of the protest and the ferocity of the pushback.
Anti-protest laws are spreading and becoming increasingly repressive. Nearly 400 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 45 states, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law. Activists are now being charged with felonies and accused of terrorism.
One of the most draconian anti-protest tools is known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, as was filed against Greenpeace by Energy Transfers, builder of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The company accused Greenpeace of inciting violence and spreading misinformation during indigenous-led protests in 2016 and 2017 that delayed construction. Last year, a North Dakota jury awarded Energy Transfers $660 million, later reduced to a still-staggering $345 million.
SLAPP lawsuits “are designed to intimidate, silence, scare, distract and bankrupt critics,” Leonard told me. “It's a kind of corporate legal bullying” intended to prevent people from protesting. Forty states, including Vermont, now have anti-SLAPP statutes.
“Protest” describes creative and successful acts of resistance from around the world. Among these are the 2015 protests by “kayaktivists” in Seattle aimed at stopping Shell Oil from drilling in the Arctic. Hundreds of people in kayaks, sailboats and tribal canoes took to the water to block an oil drilling rig, Shell’s Polar Pioneer, as it was being moved to Alaska. The boaters held up signs saying, “Save the Arctic,” “Oil-Free Future” and “Shell No!”
After spending $7 billion on Arctic oil exploration, Shell ultimately canceled the project, citing high costs and “the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment,” which protesters took credit for.
Leonard said that what made the Seattle protest successful was that it was “part of a long intentional escalating campaign” that included family kayak training each weekend and free kayak rentals. “There were community meetings and art builds. It was a very inclusive and participatory set of activities for a couple of years leading up to filling the actual bay with kayaks to try to stop the Polar Pioneer from moving forward.”
Carothers noted that “a lot of these protesters are not honored at the time.” Rosa Parks and her husband lost their jobs and had to leave town after her refusal to give up her seat for a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. It took nearly 40 years before Parks was honored by President Bill Clinton with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“There are so many ways to get involved,” said Carothers, highlighting how citizens have protested the federal immigration crackdowns in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. He said he counted 27 different ways that people in Minneapolis resisted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “from people driving their neighbors' kids to school because they didn't want to leave the house,” to lawyers offering their services in cars, to people delivering food to their immigrant neighbors, to others “who went to the detention center with a blanket and a cup of hot soup when someone was released.”
Leonard and Carothers want their book to be both inspirational and practical. They are speaking at the Patagonia store in Burlington on June 5 and offering a training in nonviolent resistance the following day.
“If you're feeling alone and if you're feeling isolated, don't be alone,” Carothers said. “Find a neighbor, find a mailing list that is describing what's available to you in your community … and do what it takes to support the universe of people who are perhaps more inclined to go in the street, or perhaps more inclined to be arrested because they have the social capital (or) the economic flexibility to risk arrest in a way other people don't.”
“There's lots of ways to be involved,” Carothers added, emphasizing: “Protest works.”
When Ben & Jerry’s ice cream held its annual Free Cone Day in April, it had to contend with an unlikely protester: Ben Cohen, the company’s co-founder, was standing on the site of the original scoop shop in Burlington, urging customers to Free Ben & Jerry’s.
“Ben & Jerry's itself has not given up on” its values, Cohen told me, but its current owner “has prevented Ben & Jerry's from acting on its values and has destroyed the governance structure” of the company.
Cohen founded the ice cream company with his friend Jerry Greenfield nearly 50 years ago. The two men ran the company until 2000, when it was acquired by Unilever, a multinational company that owns Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Vaseline, among other global brands.
Ben & Jerry’s succeeded in getting Unilever to agree that the iconic Vermont company could continue to pursue its social mission, which would be overseen by an independent board. Cohen and Greenfield remained as employees of the company, but they had no management authority. The company continued to be a strong supporter of racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the Occupy Wall Street movement, climate activism and other issues.
But relations between the ice cream company and its corporate masters began to sour, then curdled in 2021 whenBen & Jerry’s announced it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Unilever opposed the move, then sold its Israeli business to an Israeli-owned company that has continued to sell the ice cream in Israel and the occupied territories.
Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever in 2024, accusing it of muzzling the company’s support for Palestinian rights and silencing its criticism of President Donald Trump. In March 2024, Unilever spun off its ice cream businesses to Magnum, which is now one of the largest ice cream companies in the world.
The hippy-themed Vermont brand may be associated with peace and love, but that does not characterize its current relations with its owners. In March 2025, Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Stever was ousted, allegedly over the company’s progressive activism. In September 2025, Greenfield quit the company in protest. Cohen, who is 75, is now waging a battle to save the soul of Ben & Jerry’s and possibly buy it back, though Magnum says the company, which is valued at over $1 billion, is not for sale.
“They've prevented the company from calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. They prevented the company from supporting the student [Palestinian solidarity] protesters, and they've prevented the company from using the word ‘Trump’ in its posts,” said Cohen. “Magnum has become Trumpified.”
“The very thing that has built the brand, this values-led way of doing business, is the very thing that they're destroying. So they're taking this investment and reducing the value of it,” Cohen said.
When I asked him whether Ben & Jerry’s might leave Vermont, he replied, “It’s possible.”
He said that Ben & Jerry’s independent board had earlier prevented Unilever from closing the Waterbury ice cream plant. But Ben & Jerry’s could be moved to a central factory where other Magnum ice cream brands are made. “I don't know what's in Magnum's mind, but I don't think there would be anything to prevent them from doing that.”
Cohen urged concerned consumers to boycott other Magnum ice cream brands, but not Ben & Jerry’s, which he said “would be harmful to the people who work at Ben & Jerry's.”
“We want to support Ben & Jerry's — that's the issue — but to stop buying the other stuff that Magnum makes.”
Cohen continues his brisk pace of activism. He was arrested last year at a U.S. Senate hearing featuring Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing Congress of slashing Medicaid for poor children in the U.S. to pay to bomb children in Gaza.
Cohen said he has given up on the Democratic Party. “Both parties have presided over this system that drives all this money up to the top. The system is working the way it's designed, and both parties are guilty of that.”
But he remains hopeful. “Action is the antidote to despair,” he said, quoting folk singer Joan Baez. “When you're confronted with situations of injustice, you can ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can work on changing it. And personally, I prefer to do that.”
Vermont journalist Jasper Craven has spent a decade investigating and exposing the culture of toxic masculinity that pervades the American military.
In 2018, he wrote a multipart exposé for VTDigger about sexual misconduct and abuse in the Vermont Air National Guard that resulted in hearings at the Vermont Statehouse, reforms in the Guard, and the departure of the adjutant general. His writing on the military and veterans has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Politico and Mother Jones, among other publications.
Craven’s investigation into the Vermont Guard showed him how “the military holds unique elements that can make these problems worse than in civilian life, and also that many of the systems developed to combat that behavior are themselves flawed and easily exploited and can leave women in particular really feeling betrayed by an institution that they've given their lives to.”
Craven, who is 33, has a new book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” He argues that the U.S. military shapes American masculinity, especially through military schools, academies, and programs such as Junior ROTC in middle and high schools and ROTC in colleges. But the form of masculinity that these institutions advance has taken a heavy toll, as evidenced by a suicide crisis throughout the military.
“The idea that the military is the single and most effective reform program for boys is just completely untrue,” said Craven. “Since the 1800s there are many stories of mostly young boys who have been deeply damaged while under the care of military school officials — some have died, some have committed suicide, some have been hospitalized for psychiatric crises.”
Craven points to the chest-thumping hypermasculinity of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as emblematic of how some men are responding to the growing diversity of the military, including the rising status of women. “Women are being elevated for the first time into senior roles where they are often outshining men in both physical and academic pursuits, and that is majorly threatening to people like Hegseth,” Craven said.
“The military response to that is violent subjugation, and that is what we see with Hegseth. … He is just psychically hung up on all of these old school ideas around manliness and military service.”
Craven’s reporting on the military earned him an unexpected visit from the U.S. Secret Service. After he covered protests at West Point during a speech by President Donald Trump for a story for Politico, a Secret Service agent paid a visit to his parents’ home in Vermont.
The agent was “alleging without merit, completely falsely that I was acting suspiciously on campus and that I had been asking around to meet the president — again, not true — though if I had been doing that, (I was) certainly well within my rights as a journalist.” Craven quickly concluded that “it was a pretty clear-cut act of intimidation from West Point.”
Craven has not been deterred. He is moving back to Vermont to continue his work in journalism. He hopes that his work leads to “alternative ideas around shaping American masculinity and aiding American men.”
The documentary "Best Day Ever" features the world's first adaptive mountain bike trail network and the athletes who are changing lives.
In 2022, Allie Bianchi, a 23-year-old outdoor enthusiast and special educator from Richmond, broke her neck while mountain biking. She is now paralyzed below her chest.
In 2025, Bianchi was rolling again, this time on a specially adapted mountain bike. Now, she is the star of a new film.
“Best Day Ever” follows the story of several adaptive mountain bikers — including Bianchi, Greg Durso and Ryan Manning — as they rediscover a sport they love. Central to their return to biking is the story of the world’s first adaptive mountain bike trail network, which was built with the help of volunteers from Richmond Mountain Trails. The Driving Range opened in Bolton in 2024.
Last week, the Vermont Land Trust signed an agreement with the DesLauriers family, the owners of Bolton Valley resort, to conserve the land where the Driving Range is located.
Richmond Mountain Trails and the Catamount Trail Association will hold recreation easements.
Berne Broudy, a veteran Vermont outdoor journalist who is also president of Richmond Mountain Trails, produced and co-directed “Best Day Ever” with filmmaker Ben Knight. The 48-minute film has been winning awards at film festivals around North America since its release last fall.
The film and the trail project it chronicles show how a community can not only open the outdoors to people with disabilities. It can change culture.
Broudy recalled that when a group of local teenagers came to help build the trails, they didn’t know how to interact with people with disabilities. “Within one trail night of digging together, riding bikes together, eating hot dogs together, hanging out together, that dynamic totally changed,” Broudy said.
“It's not so much about the trail as it is about changing the mindset to include everyone and being inclusive and allowing for these small changes that make huge differences in other people's lives,” said Manning, who works as an account manager at Burton Snowboards and has quadriplegia.
Bianchi has seen how her participation in adaptive sports has changed attitudes. “When you spend time with someone with a disability, you learn that there is no difference,” she said. “It's just normalized. And I think we need more of that in this world.”
One of the film's most powerful moments features Bianchi returning to the scene of her accident. She is riding an adaptive mountain bike and accompanied by the two friends she was with when she was injured. Returning to ride the trail again was a milestone for her.
“You're continuing to conquer and do even greater and better things,” she reflected. “It hasn't really stopped you. And I think that is really cool."
When Helen Whybrow isn’t herding her flock of Icelandic sheep or in the paddock with a ewe that’s giving birth to lambs, she can be found writing. This week, this shepherd was awarded Vermont’s highest literary prize.
Whybrow received the 2025 Vermont Book Award for creative nonfiction for her memoir, “The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life.” The book has also been long-listed for the National Book Award and named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker.
“The Salt Stones” tells the story of tending sheep on a 200-acre farm that she and her husband, Peter Forbes, began restoring after acquiring it a quarter-century ago. Whybrow lyrically weaves a tale about the rhythms of life on the farm and how the lessons that she has learned there have informed every aspect of her life. The time span of the book juxtaposes one season of a sheep’s life with 20 years of Whybrow’s life, during which she gets married, has a daughter and cares for a mother with dementia.
For Whybrow, farming has enabled her to fulfill her desire for belonging, which she says has preoccupied her for much of her life.
“I've wrestled all my life with this tension between wanting to be a nomad and wanting to deeply root in a place,” she told me. “What I've come to understand here at Knoll Farm is that the more you participate in your place and your life, the deeper your sense of belonging becomes. It's not something you just step into that was ready made and you have to keep searching until you find it. It's something that you actually create by doing it on your own.”
Whybrow grew up on a small farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire, the daughter of a physician and a social worker. She left home to attend Amherst College and travel the world, and landed back in New England to pursue a career as an editor for W.W. Norton, Orion Magazine and Milkweed Editions, the nonprofit independent press that published “The Salt Stones.”
She is the author of two other books and editor of several anthologies and has been a visiting professor at Middlebury College. She and her husband run Knoll Farm in Fayston, an organic farm and home to purebred Icelandic sheep, and also a retreat center for social and environmental justice.
Whybrow concedes that farming is “a blessing and a curse,” with many farmers struggling to survive and Knoll Farm itself constantly scrapping to make ends meet. But she said, “There's also something incredibly beautiful and rich about staying in one place. And like Richard Nelson says in one of my favorite books, ‘The Island Within,’ ‘There's more to be learned from climbing the same mountain 1000 times than 1000 different mountains.’”
Whybrow’s life as a shepherd helped her deal with the grief of losing her mother. “When you're a sheep farmer, you lose a lot of animals,” she said. It helped her see death “as just part of the cycle and part of the seasonal turn.”
“Having gone through that for so many years helped me let go of my mom and realize she's still there. She's kind of everywhere.”
Whybrow concludes “The Salt Stones” by musing, “You don’t have to become a sheep farmer to cultivate shepherd’s mind, which is about finding a way to listen, to tend, and to immerse in the living world.”
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launchedan immigration raid in South Burlington on March 11, they ran into a wall of resistance. Neighbors linked arms in an attempt to stop the masked agents from entering a house in their effort to arrest and deport a Mexican-born man. Protesters blocked an ICE vehicle and hurled insults and objects.
ICE agents deployed flashbang grenades. Vermont State Police and local police shoved, dragged and even choked some protesters,according to public testimony at the Statehouse. Three occupants of the house who were not named in a warrant were arrested by ICE. Outside, six protesters were arrested — three by VSP and three by Burlington police.
Resistance did not end on the streets of South Burlington. Last week,Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George announced that she would not charge the protesters who were arrested. She stated that they did not have criminal records and it was not solely protesters who “bear the burden of all the harm caused that day.” George also blamed police officers “who agitated, who escalated, and who responded in a way that may be ultimately deemed legal, but was also unacceptable.”
George told me that “there were some protesters that absolutely escalated the situation and made things a lot more dangerous than necessary.” But she added that after watching the police body camera videos, “there was a lot of behavior on both sides that was not necessary and made the situation a lot more escalated than it needed to be.”
George has called for an independent review of the law enforcement response and referred three of those arrested to a restorative justice program.
State police leaders have criticized George in unusually harsh and personal terms, blasting her for “a disheartening decision that sets a dangerous precedent.”
Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison and Vermont State Police Director Col. Matthew T. Birmingham wrote in a statement, “The state’s attorney’s failure to bring charges in this matter is likely to embolden people at similar events in the future to cross the line into criminal behavior, placing the public and law enforcement at greater risk of harm.”
George countered that the situation “was very emotionally charged, and our local law enforcement participated in the unlawful arrest of three of our community members, and I think that there has to be a bit more accountability shared in what happened on March 11.”
In the end,the entire ICE raid was found to have been triggered by a case of mistaken identity. The three occupants of the house who were arrested have since been released.
Asked if she believed that federal agents were breaking the law and not being held accountable, George replied, “Yeah, absolutely. From my perspective, March 11 is an example of that.” She noted that the ICE officer lied on his affidavit to obtain an arrest warrant and “there was no impact on that agent for falsifying a warrant.”
What role should local law enforcement play when federal agents are conducting an immigration raid and community members are protesting?
“I don't know,” George replied. “Ultimately, it's up to communities to decide.” She suggested that local police chiefs ask their town officials for guidance on “what do you want us to do when this happens.”
George added that local police felt that “if they hadn't been present on March 11, that ICE agents would have significantly harmed, if not killed, protesters. That is a terrifying thought.”
“I'm terrified for every brown person in our community,” said George. “I'm terrified that it is OK for ICE agents to do what they did on March 11 and essentially kidnap three people in our community, because they just rounded up the brown people in the house, instead of taking the time to make sure that they were even on the slightest bit of legal ground.”
“We have a lot of people in our community that contribute to our community in an incredible way and are afraid to leave their houses. And that, to me, is an enormous threat to public safety.”
George said her refusal to charge protesters is “about standing up for the three people who (were) unlawfully arrested that day by a federal administration that doesn't care about the law.”
“It has to be more important to every single person in our community and to our law enforcement officers that that be held accountable more than the three people locking arms to try to keep those three people from being kidnapped.”
Millions of Americans have attended “No Kings” protests, voicing outrage that President Donald Trump has turned the presidency into an imperial platform from which to launch wars of choice, levy illegal tariffs, and unleash armed agents against his political adversaries.
Isn’t the American system of checks and balances supposed to prevent this?
“The Kingmakers” is a new podcast hosted by journalist David Sirota that looks at how those checks have been steadily undermined. The podcast explores how the unitary executive theory, once a fringe idea that grants kinglike powers to the American president, was germinated in the Nixon administration, flowered in the Reagan administration, and is now the blueprint for Trump’s power grab.
“The Watergate scandal, where the president is using the various pieces of the political machine and apparatus of the presidency to target his political opponents … is seen as the zenith of the imperial presidency,” said Sirota.
After Nixon’s resignation, Congress tried to rein in executive powers. President Reagan responded by “making a much grander argument that any statutes that come from Congress that constrain the executive’s authority to control the federal government is itself not just illegal, but unconstitutional.”
Reagan’s aggressive assertion of executive power led to the Iran-Contra scandal, when White House officials brazenly flouted and misled Congress. “The ideology (is) that we are above the law, the law does not apply to us. The president is essentially not a co-equal branch of government, but an elected king,” Sirota said.
Sirota is founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, an independent investigative news outlet. He was the screenwriter for the Oscar-nominated film “Don’t Look Up.” His new podcast is the second season of his award-winning series “Master Plan,” which examines how corruption became legal in American politics.
Sirota has also worked for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, most recently as speechwriter and senior adviser in his 2020 presidential campaign. He credits Sanders as a mentor, teaching that “it's not really the two parties. It's really money versus everybody else.”
“If you're an oligarch you try to turn the one-person, one-vote democracy into a $1, one-vote oligarchy … turning elections into auctions. That's one way you deal with the democracy problem,” said Sirota.
His podcasts trace the origins of the “master plan” hatched in the 1970s “to consolidate as much power as you can in the hands of one person so that when you get into power and you use the legalized corruption system to buy that office, then you can do whatever you want,” as he described it.
Sirota believes that “people are disgusted with the endemic corruption that's out there.” He cites as evidence the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who relied on public financing in his campaign.
“The pendulum swings here,” said Sirota. “We are now at a moment where anti-corruption can be a central theme with a real policy objective. We must give people a way to run for office where they can run a robust, competitive and competitively financed campaign without having to rely on oligarch money. That is possible. That is realistic.”
Mohsen Mahdawi has come a long way since being released from a Vermont jail in April 2025. Mahdawi is a Palestinian student at Columbia University and a green card holder who lives in Vermont. He co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union and was president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association.
The Trump administration has relentlessly pursued Mahdawi. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified Mahdawi’s arrest last year by saying that his advocacy of Palestinian human rights could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process.
U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Mahdawi’s release on bail nearly a year ago, comparing his arrest to the unlawful repression of free speech under McCarthyism. The Trump administration appealed, and the case, Mahdawi vs. Trump, was argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in September. A decision is pending.
In a separate ruling in February, an immigration judge in Massachusetts blocked Mahdawi’s deportation. Last week the judge, Nina Froes, was fired by the Trump administration as part of a purge of immigration judges who stand in the way of the administration’s mass deportation program.
Mahdawi said Froes was “courageous” and that her firing is part of “intimidation and … punishment for anybody who disagrees with [the Trump administration], including their own judges.”
“This is reminding me what the Nazis have done to judges who were impartial in Germany,” said Mahdawi.
Despite his arrest and court cases, Mahdawi graduated from Columbia University last spring with a degree in philosophy. Fellow students cheered him as he crossed the stage to receive his diploma. He is now enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is also writing a book about activism.
I spoke with Mahdawi on April 14, the anniversary of his arrest. He told me that the attacks on him were a harbinger of other assaults by the Trump administration.
“The deterioration and destruction of the U.S. Constitution and of civil rights in this country that took place when the government came after me and other student activists are motivated by the same reason that the war is taking place in Iran, and that is shielding Israel from any criticism,” he said.
“The destruction in Iran (and) Lebanon is just the U.S. supporting blindly Israel's agenda and being dragged into a war that it doesn't need.”
“I believe that peace is possible without the use of violence,” said Mahdawi.
Mahdawi said he believes the world is caught in a struggle between “the energy of fear and the energy of love. And the energy of fear is what is motivating Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and … the whole system that is trying to shun people and shut them down and scare them and intimidate them. This is why they basically wanted to make an example of me and many other students and why they are going after journalists and immigrant communities — to incite fear.”
When Mahdawi walked out of jail in Vermont a year ago, he declared to President Trump: “I am not afraid of you.” This week he noted that Pope Leo also said recently, “I have no fear … of the Trump administration.”
“We have to function from a place of love, not a place of fear, and hold those who are causing harm accountable for their actions,” said Mahdawi.
“I am not fighting to stay in this country,” Mahdawi told me. “I'm fighting for justice in this country. And my fight is connected to the fights of so many other people who want to see justice in this country.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision in 2022, it was the culmination of a successful half-century movement to ban abortion.
Despite the fact that60 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases, it is now difficult to nearly impossible to get an abortion in most of the country. Forty-one states now have abortion bans, including 13 states with total bans,according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Vermont is one of just nine states that do not restrict abortion.
Who killed abortion rights?
Journalist Amy Littlefield set out to answer this in her new book, “Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.” In it she chronicles her meetings with key figures in the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade, including a former IRS attorney, a gay conservative disgraced ex-congressman, and true believers who tried to convert Littlefield to their cause.
She also met the families of women who died as a result of not having access to safe abortion.
Amy Littlefield is the abortion access correspondent for The Nation. She has written about reproductive rights for The New York Times and is a frequent commentator for news outlets including MS Now, Democracy Now! and Reveal.
Littlefield said that seeking an abortion in parts of the country where it is restricted “can be a really terrifying and isolating experience.” Some people seeking an abortion are being charged with murder, and in other cases “we're seeing cases of women dying preventable deaths because they can't get treatment for rare and totally treatable consequences of medication abortion or for miscarriage.”
Despite the obstacles,the total number of abortions has risen since Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is partly due to the availability of medication abortion (commonly known as abortion pills), which now comprise over one-fourth of all abortions.
“I did not see that coming,” conceded Littlefield.
“The abortion rights movement had really been in a sort of defensive position for much of its history since the Roe decision, and so I did not see it coming that there was going to be this bold, creative legal experiment happening in real time that people were going to be participating in once Roe v. Wade was gone.”
Littlefield expects that abortion shield laws that protect providers and patients,such as Vermont passed in 2023, will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court and could be weakened or nullified. But she noted, “We're seeing the proliferation of community support networks of activists who are circulating medication abortion person to person or in nondescript envelopes delivered from one post office box to another.”
“Those efforts are pretty much untraceable and happening on a scale that no one has been able to fully measure or document.”
Thousands of Vermonters from nearly every county took to the streets to voice their outrage at the Trump administration on Saturday, March 28, in the third No Kings protest. About 50 rallies were held around the state. Nationally, 8 million to 9 million people turned out to over 3,000 demonstrations in what organizers say was the largest day of protest in American history.
The Vermont Conversation spoke with a number of people at the Statehouse in Montpelier, where thousands of protesters came to rally and listen to speakers. Many expressed their opposition with clever signs, like one with tennis balls attached to it that said, “Free Balls 4 Congress.” Another read, “Sorry for Being Weird. This is My First Dictatorship.”
Barre resident Guy Rock was attending his first protest. He was wearing the military fatigues of his brother, a 16-year service veteran. Asked why he came to the rally, Rock replied, “Donald Trump's a criminal. He's guilty of treason. … He's the greatest threat I've ever seen to our way of life. ICE is an extension of him.”
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., fired up the crowd from the steps of the Statehouse, but he was a little bleary-eyed when I caught up with him. He had debated funding for the Department of Homeland Security into the wee hours of the previous night.
The Senate ultimately voted to fund the department except for ICE. The House later voted down the Senate’s funding bill, leaving DHS partly shut down. I asked Welch what the midnight debate was about.
“It's all about the outrage of what happened in Minneapolis, where we saw an incredible rampage of violence by ICE. They literally murdered two people,” he told me after addressing the crowd. “They should be required to abide by the same rules, the same training as any other law enforcement agency in our country, like in Burlington or in Montpelier.”
The war in Iran “is a disaster,” Welch said. “This could be another forever war. It's $2 billion a day. He's going to be asking for $200 billion. That's $1,400 a household. We should be funding an extension of the health care tax credits. We should be providing workforce training for kids.”
Welch added that he feels the No Kings protests are important. “The rallies allow all of us to come together and share our hope that if we stick together, we keep marching forward, despite a lot of setbacks and despite the odds being against us in many cases, that we can prevail.”
Rep. Anne Donahue, I-Washington-1, was outside on the Statehouse lawn. She has represented Northfield and Berlin for 24 years. Once a Republican, she is the lone member of the Statehouse who left the Vermont GOP because of Donald Trump. She said there wasn’t just one issue that pushed her to leave the Republican Party and become an independent, but “you wake up every day and there's something worse happening.”
“I really fear for our democracy,” said Donahue. “It's at tremendous risk right now, and a big part of that is people not speaking up and not putting that stake in the ground.”
James Lyall, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, said: "There are more of us than there are of them, and as long as people continue to show up for one another, creatively, nonviolently and consistently, there's absolutely no question in my mind that we will overcome what we are facing."
Two young men wearing red “Make America Great Again” caps stood out in the crowd. Seth Fewer, 15, is a freshman at Spaulding High School in Barre. He has tried to launch a chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative student organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, but he was unable to find faculty sponsors in his school.
I asked him how he felt about the war in Iran. “I don't support war, but considering this is a country that's been preaching ‘death to America’ since like the ’80s, people have to realize that this is a country that we really have to deal with strongly,” he said.
Fewer, who was sporting a Charlie Kirk T-shirt, conceded that starting a war “is not what (Trump) promised us … but most of (his) policies are good, and that's what we need for America.”
Dr. Dan Goodyear, a family practice physician in Richmond, was in the crowd, holding an American flag. “This country's democracy is at risk right now, and I think that has a direct effect on people's overall health in the long run, the stress that it causes, the risk with people getting improper health care or subpar health care. We need to stand up and rebuild the democracy back to what it was.”
“It enriches my soul to see people who care, who are believers in truth and democracy and solidarity to come together and have a shared experience like this. It's nothing but empowering,” Goodyear said.
In February, I was surprised to receive a phone call from jail. It was Steven Tendo calling from the Strafford County jail in Dover, New Hampshire, where he was being held after being violently arrested by ICE agents on Feb. 4 at the Vermont assisted living facility where he works.
Tendo was determined that his voice be free even if his body was not. That determination is a throughline in his life. It is why he is alive to tell his story today as a free man, at least for now.
Steven Tendo is a minister, health care worker, nursing student and asylum-seeker from Uganda. He fled his native country in 2018 after the Ugandan government targeted him for the education and voter registration work that he was doing through an organization that he founded. He endured a harrowing ordeal in Uganda: he was abducted by armed men and interrogated and tortured in a secret facility. Several of his fingers were cut off. At another time, he was placed in an underground room with a python. Several members of his family have been killed. He was warned that he was next.
After making his way to the U.S. in 2018, Tendo applied for asylum and spent two years in immigration detention in Texas, where his case drew the attention of Amnesty International. Tendo’s asylum application was denied and he has been fighting deportation in the courts ever since.
Tendo told me that if he is deported to Uganda, “I would definitely die. They would kill me.” He said that Ugandan operatives told his family “that they should prepare my grave because they are ready for me.”
In 2021, after being released from detention, Tendo settled in Vermont, where he works as a licensed nursing assistant at UVM Medical Center and is pursuing a nursing degree at Vermont State University. He is a minister of a small church.
On February 20, a New Hampshire judge ruled that ICE had failed to follow proper procedure and ordered Tendo released after 16 days in jail.
Tendo said that his violent arrest in Shelburne on February 4 “exhumed the trauma that I went through in Uganda.”
He compared what he experienced at the hands of ICE agents in Vermont to Uganda, where justice is “kind of a jungle. There is no process. There is no warning. There is no nothing. They would just pick you up anyhow, anywhere. I thought that the U.S. being a first world country, a super power, a democracy…it would be different. And so when that happened to me, I cried deeply down in my heart. I was like, ‘Why does it have to follow me wherever I go?’”
Tendo remains in constant peril. On March 20, Tendo had to report to the ICE office in St. Albans for what was supposed to be a routine check-in. ICE has periodically used these check-ins to arrest people. In what is now a familiar ritual, some 200 people rallied outside the ICE office in support of Tendo last week and his check-in occurred without incident. He was ordered to check-in again with ICE in a month.
Tendo said that the support he has received from Vermonters throughout his ordeal “means a lot to me, and it sends a message to ICE that I am not a criminal.”
He is motivated to keep going by “the people that benefit out of my voice being aired out there on their behalf. They see me as a beacon of hope.”
“I just can't put up with injustice against anybody, irrespective of their skin color, irrespective of their faith, irrespective of who they are.”
The treatment that he and fellow detainees were subjected to in the immigration jail in New Hampshire was “inhumane,” Tendo said, with 40 men sharing one bathroom and being subjected to constant cold.
“I witnessed a lot of fear and a lot of desperation among most of the people” in the jail, which included primarily Latin American and African immigrants. He asserted that everyone in immigration detention had paperwork such as active asylum cases. No one, he said, was “illegal.”
“Everyone was confused, everyone was scared, everyone was traumatized, because most of them had been picked off the streets.”
I asked Pastor Tendo what keeps him going.
“My faith has brought me a long way. I am someone who sees a light at the end of the tunnel. …My eyes see beyond what people are seeing right now. I am seeing a community where everybody can be accepted and work together and use our unique differences to build each other.”
Tendo said that he uses every challenge “to strengthen myself and push back with kindness, with love and with compassion.”
“I know it may sound weird and not common. But it's who I am.”
When President Trump threatened to annex Greenland earlier this year, the vast Arctic island with a population slightly larger than Burlington was dragged from the periphery of world affairs to the center. The threat that the U.S. might forcibly take Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.
How did Greenland become a geopolitical flash point? What is the experience of traveling through its frozen landscape? And what may be next for the island's peoples?
On this Vermont Conversation, I talked with two people with first-hand experience in Greenland. Vermont journalist Adam Federman has traveled and reported on Greenland for The New Republic and In These Times. Federman, who lives near Middlebury, is Reporting Fellow with Type Investigations. Rob Reynolds is a Los Angeles-based artist who has travelled extensively with scientists in the Arctic gathering images that are currently part of an exhibit called Zero Celsius at Mad River Valley Arts. Reynolds will participate in a public conversation with author Bill McKibben in Waitsfield on March 14.
The Arctic is warming faster than any place else on Earth, and some projections indicate that the Arctic Ocean could have ice-free summers as early as 2030. This will have global ramifications as sea levels rise and inundate low-lying population centers, and new shipping corridors open up.
These climate-driven changes could lead to “the prospect of open military conflict in a part of the world that has been spared. I find that terrifying,” said Federman. The race to exploit natural resources in previously inaccessible landscapes “has tremendously dangerous implications for the people who live in that part of the world.”
For Rob Reynolds, Greenland is “a place of wonder. It's a place of awe. It's a place unlike any other that I've ever been to.”
“The thing that that is most staggering to me about Trump's almost provocative light hearted threat to take Greenland by force … is that people live there. And the great lesson that Greenland has to teach us is that conservation is something that we should be thinking about. We shouldn't be thinking about taking it. We should be thinking about keeping it frozen.”
Federman said that Trump’s Greenland provocations are “a new form of imperialism.” That has unexpectedly led to “greater indigenous power in this part of the world.” Greenland’s parliament “has clearly rejected the notion that the United States could somehow come in and take over.”
“It's taken many, many years, but Greenland does now have a seat at the table and cannot be ignored.”
As the world contends with increasingly destructive and costly climate-fueled disasters, the Trump administration has announced that it is eliminating the government’s ability to fight climate change.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is erasing the scientific finding, known as the “endangerment clause,” that permits it to take action to protect public health and the environment.
“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be,” reported the New York Times.
I turned to Bill McKibben to glean the significance and implications of this latest development. McKibben is arguably the world’s foremost reporter and organizer on the climate crisis. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about climate change, and he has gone on to author over 20 other books.
He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and to his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. McKibben is also the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change.
When cross country skier Ben Ogden won a silver medal in the classic sprint at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, he broke a 50-year medal drought for American men. The last American man to medal in cross country skiing was Bill Koch, Ogden’s Vermont neighbor and skiing mentor. Ogden, who began skiing in Koch’s backyard as a kid, followed those ski trails right into the Olympics. He celebrated by doing a backflip off the podium.
Ten days later, Ogden raced to a second silver medal in the men’s team relay with teammate Gus Schumacher. Ben Ogden is now the most decorated men’s cross-country skier in U.S. Olympic history.
Ogden grew up in Landgrove, Vermont, and attended the University of Vermont, where he was a three-time NCAA cross country ski champion. This was Ogden’s second Winter Olympics.
Less than a week after standing on an Olympic podium, Ogden is back racing on the World Cup circuit in Europe. That’s where I caught up with him.
When Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., traveled to Minneapolis on a Congressional oversight mission several weeks ago, she saw a city under siege. Some 3,000 masked federal agents dispatched by President Donald Trump were roaming the city, snatching people from their homes and streets, often without warrants or explanation.
Balint fears Vermont could be next.
“This is not a law enforcement effort, this is about power and control and submission,” Balint said of what she observed in Minneapolis. She said that the killing of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis “just absolutely shook me to my core, not just because of the violence and the loss of life, but also immediately the lying about these two people” by the Trump Administration.
“This is about the president punishing states and municipalities that he does not feel like give him enough fealty,” Balint said. “Any state that did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, they're in the crosshairs. And we must assume that at some point this President will try to make an example of us, and we can't be caught flat footed.”
Last week, Balint said she and Senators Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., met with Gov. Phil Scott to prepare for that potential day.
Though in another sense, that day has already arrived. Just this week, FEMA denied disaster aid to Vermont for 2025 flooding in the Northeast Kingdom. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “also oversees FEMA," Balint said. "And the President is using FEMA right now to pick winners and losers. And the winners are Republican states, and the losers are so-called democratic states,"
Young Bernie Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964 as part of a counter-cultural wave. The tall Jewish kid with the thick Brooklyn accent who spoke of socialism and revolution fit right in with the communards and hippies, though he was neither. Sanders was then, as now, his own man, raging against the establishment while simultaneously seeking to lead it, albeit in a very different direction.
As author Dan Chaisson writes, the story of Bernie Sanders is also the story of Vermont. “To see how Vermont changed, simply look at how Bernie’s message, reiterated for fifty years, migrated from the fringe to the heart of Vermont’s political discourse.”
In the early days, Burlingtonians knew Bernie “as a perennial political loser” who typically garnered a slim percentage of the electorate in in the 1970s, recounted Chiasson. “But also he was just an indefatigable kind of force.”
Dan Chaisson is a Burlington native and the author of five books of poetry. He is a professor of English and chair of the English department at Wellesley College. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, his new book is Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. Chiasson weaves together his own story of growing up in hardscrabble Burlington in the 1970s with Sanders' own, whom he observed throughout his life go from gadfly to mayor, to the most influential progressive political figure in the country.
Chaisson traces Sanders’ politics to his experience growing up poor in Brooklyn “in an economy that was designed to kill" him and his family. "His mother died in her 40s of a congenital heart condition.”
Sanders attended the University of Chicago where he participated in civil rights protests. “He thought that things like racial and other kinds of traumas in our country stemmed directly from economics,” said Chiasson. “Moving to Vermont was a way of thinking, could we start society over?”
What explains Bernie’s appeal to conservatives in areas like the Northeast Kingdom? Chaisson said that Sanders admired and channeled George Aiken, the Republican Vermont governor and senator who famously opposed the Vietnam War, declaring that the U.S. should “say we won and get out.” Aiken “had a sort of similar kind of flintiness to him, a similar kind of orneriness or cantankerousness,” Chaisson said.
Sanders, a lifelong independent, has long reserved some of his harshest criticism for Democrats. “He feels that the Democrats are the party of the educated elite and he feels much more comfortable among working people.” When he disagrees with someone, Sanders “has a talent for steering the conversation away from those differences and towards places of common interest and common ground.”
Asked what he thought the legacy of Sanders would be, Chaisson said, “Just the tenacity, the temerity, the moral vision that Sanders laid out.” He quoted former Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, who described Sanders as “a moral visionary.”
“Somebody with Bernie's fight in him and with his sense that there are right and wrong sides of the question morally when we engage with politics, that makes me feel pretty hopeful.”
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota has sparked furious backlash. Protests have been held around the country following the killing by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott characterized the immigration raids as “a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans.”
Last week, a group of over a dozen Vermont faith leaders responded to a national call for clergy to come to Minneapolis to bear witness and support besieged local religious leaders. On this Vermont Conversation, I spoke with two Vermont clergy who have just returned from a tumultuous and emotional trip to Minneapolis. Rabbi David Fainsilber is the rabbi of the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe, and Rev. Dr. Becca Girrell is the pastor of United Community Church of Morrisville.
“Minneapolis is serving as a testing ground. That is true both for the operations of ICE and Border Patrol and other federal enforcement (using) pretty brutal tactics, but it's also true of the community response and resilience,” said Rev. Girrell. “What moved me and stays with me the most is the way in which the people of Minneapolis are drawing together peacefully and legally and in strong solidarity and support."
Rev. Girrell said that the brutal tactics of federal agents are “meant as a warning to people like me, to people of good faith or no faith all around the country, that we should not stand up for our neighbors, and we should not protect them with ourselves and our very lives if necessary. And what I saw was the people of Minneapolis will not comply with that order."
Asked whether he saw parallels between the actions of federal agents in the U.S. and how immigrants were rounded up in Nazi Germany, Rabbi Fainsilber said the link wasn't necessary. "You don't need to look far to see slavery, to see genocide. Let's look in our own backyard here and our history to make the point that today is not okay. What is happening feels like a direct line from American history to today.”
Fainsilber added that it is “time for people to raise their voices, to not sit on the sidelines, … to make sure that there's legal accountability when officers kill civilians, that there's no additional federal funding for ICE right now, for corporations to become Fourth Amendment businesses so that they're not aiding and abetting ICE activity.”
Rev. Girrell returned from Minnesota with a warning. “The violence we see in Minneapolis may come here to Vermont. But the strength of community resilience is already here, and we continue to build that, and we continue to know our neighbors well, so that if there is a crisis, we can respond immediately, and we can respond with strength and love for our neighbors.”
Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, was elected Speaker of the House in 2021. It was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and state coffers were unexpectedly flush with federal relief money. But just as that federal pot of dollars has since dried up, property taxes have risen and voters took out their frustration at the ballot box. In 2024, Vermont Democrats lost the most Democratic seats in the country, and with them their veto-proof supermajority in the Legislature.
This month, as Gov. Phil Scott declared his roadmap for the Legislative session, Krowinski’s skills as a diplomat are being tested as never before. Scott unveiled a $9.4 billion state budget this week, and declared that he would essentially hold that budget hostage — that is, unless the Legislature comes up with a plan to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts into a few larger districts.
Krowinski bristled at the governor’s approach. “Our goal here is to ensure that our kids are getting the best education at a price that Vermonters can afford. I will say that threatening a budget veto is really not helpful at this time, we need to be working together to find solutions and not making threats.”
The governor also plans to end Vermont's emergency motel voucher program to combat homelessness, and re-invest in affordable housing development and social services. Krowinski said the move falls short of the current, critical need.
“We don't have the shelter capacity right now to help the thousands of Vermonters that are unhoused, and we have 1,000 kids right now that are unhoused, and that really is going to keep me up at night thinking about this weekend” when sub-zero temperatures are forecasted. She noted that money allocated to nonprofit housing organizations had not been distributed by the Scott administration, and said he House will be investigating the matter to “ensure that we're not leaving money on the table.”
The governor must now win over Krowinski and her legislative colleagues as he attempts to pass his agenda.
"We're not coming in just starting from fresh," Krowinski said. "The progress that we've made on issues like child care that's made a huge difference in affordability for Vermont families, the tax credits that we've put out there to help to help older Vermonters and to help families with kids, looking at our long term investments in housing, how we've been able to bend the cost curve some on health care.”
Krowinski has also seen the impacts of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown across the country. “I am so completely outraged, disgusted, frustrated with what's happening across our country. I actually witnessed an ICE arrest while I was in Washington, DC, and the illegal excessive force used was shocking.” Krowinski said that Vermont is prepared in some ways and unprepared in others.
The turmoil is also personal. Last June, the 45-year old Burlington Democrat was deeply shaken by the politically-motivated assassinations of her friend and colleague, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.
“It is important for Vermonters to know that these threats do happen in Vermont,” said Krowinski, who in 2022 was stalked by a man with a gun in his car at the State House. “I'm just angry about it,” she said of the threats. “I'm not changing anything. … I'm not going to let them control my life or change it in ways that I don't want it to be changed. It took me some time to come to this place, but I'm fired up now, and it's important for me to offer this type of support to other members or elected officials who have gone through it.”
“Who can draw when the world is burning?” asks celebrated Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel in her new graphic novel, Spent.
This tension between the political and personal has been a deep well for Bechdel in her art. Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont, as well as a recipient of a MacArthur "genius award" and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was named Best Book of 2006 by Time. It was adapted into a musical that won five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how, after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide.
The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.
Bechdel is now a professor in the practice at Yale University. She divides her time between teaching for a semester at Yale and living and drawing at her home in West Bolton, Vermont. Bechdel’s wife Holly has been the colorist for her last two books.
This week, she had an op-ed cartoon featured in the New York Times about how to stand up to tyranny.
She spoke to me from her home in Vermont.
President Donald Trump marked the new year by launching a military assault on Venezuela and abducting President Nicolas Maduro. Some 75 people in Venezuela were killed in the Saturday attack and 7 U.S service members were injured, according to the Washington Post. Many Democrats and some Republicans have denounced the act as unconstitutional, while Trump has followed up by threatening more military action against Cuba, Mexico, Columbia and Greenland.
This week also marks the fifth anniversary of the January 6th insurrection on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who were attempting to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.
I spoke with Vermont Sen. Peter Welch about these escalating domestic and international crises under the Trump administration just before he returned to Washington.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
David Goodman
Let's begin by getting your thoughts on the US actions against Venezuela this weekend.
Peter Welch
It's reckless and it's wrong. I mean, let's acknowledge the military did a very professional job, but the decision the President made to depose the leader of another country, authoritarian that he was, and then to say that this is about us running Venezuela, and then to say that he wants our big oil companies like Exxon to take over Venezuelan oil brings us back to gunboat diplomacy. It's very, very dangerous. I’m adamantly opposed to what the President did.
David Goodman
What did you as a United States senator know about this operation in advance?
Peter Welch
Absolutely nothing. I'm a United States senator and the United States Senate is the institution that has the authority to authorize a military action. This was an act of war. We were never consulted. We were never involved. So we knew no more than any other citizen who woke up that morning. And what you're seeing is that the President is completely acting beyond the authority of an executive. In my view, Congress has to stand up and resist that. But we don't have Republican support, and we need that. I am a co sponsor of a resolution condemning this and I'm going to be urging my Republican colleagues that we not relinquish our authority and have a president who is exceeding the powers that the Constitution gives him.
David Goodman
How is this supposed to work? For example, what happened when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003?
Peter Welch
The President comes to Congress and asks for an authorization to use force, and in the case of President Bush, he did that before he went to Iraq. I was opposed to that and many members of Congress were, but a majority supported him. But the President did come to Congress. There's a reason for that. When we're going to put our men and women in harm's way, that's a major decision. Deciding to use military force is an easy decision for a president like Trump, but the consequences of it are paid for by our country and by men and women who are willing to serve at the call of the Commander in Chief. That decision should be deliberated. There should be a discussion, there should be a debate. There should be accountability by members of Congress that they said yes or they said no to this request by the President. What there shouldn't ever be is the arbitrary capacity of an individual who happens to be president to plunge us into a war.
David Goodman
President Trump said in his address to nation on Saturday that this is all going to be free. It's going to be paid for by Venezuela. Do you believe that?
Peter Welch
No, absolutely. He said that about the (border) wall too. Let's just discuss this. There is a decision that only the President made. Number one, the decision was to take out Maduro. Number two, everybody in Maduro's government is still in power. Number three, the President says we're going to run the country. How are we going to do that? Number four, he says our oil companies like Exxon are going to take over the Venezuelan oil fields. None of those things can happen and none of them should happen. So the President is saying, “they're going to pay for it.” This same president won't lift a finger to extend the health care tax credits that have already expired and where we're going to have about 25,000 Vermonters without health care as a result of that. No, this is bogus.
David Goodman
Right now there are Vermonters in the Caribbean, the Vermont Air National Guard. What do we know about the role that they are playing in this operation?
Peter Welch
First of all, we are all so impressed and appreciative of our Guard. They got 11 days notice right around the Christmas holidays and had to pick up and leave their families behind. There was no notice for them. What we do know is that none of them have been injured, and I am so pleased that that is the news that we have, and we are awaiting a report about what role they did play. But of course, we have the Air National Guard and they have air assets, and obviously those were a big part of this operation, so we'll find out. But I don't know exactly what they were requested to do.
David Goodman
The President has described the strategic principle here as the “Donroe Doctrine,” his update of the 200 year old Monroe Doctrine. What do you understand Trump’s doctrine to be?
Peter Welch
The Monroe Doctrine was an assertion by President James Monroe that European powers could not colonize countries in this hemisphere. What the “Donroe” Doctrine is is the United States can impose its will on countries in this hemisphere. Totally different. It's more about gunboat diplomacy. It's more about imperialism. These are the President's words: “we're going to run the country in Venezuela,” “we're going to have our oil companies there.” That has absolutely nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. If the President is, in a kind of pathetic way, trying to make a new word of “Donroe,” the Don is more like a mob boss than it is a diplomat or a statesman.
David Goodman
The United States does not have state-run oil companies, but President Trump is saying that private American oil companies are going to rebuild the infrastructure of Venezuela's oil industry. Does that make sense to you?
Peter Welch
No, absolutely not. I first started getting interested in Latin America during the President Kennedy administration. There had been a history of the United States companies essentially toppling governments to their own advantage. United Fruit in Nicaragua, of course, the United States toppling an elected government in Guatemala in 1954. What President Kennedy did was really started moving us to where we were promoting democracy. The Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps -- they became the United States engagement in Latin America and South America, which were more premised on the ideals of democratic participation and democratic rule. President Trump has repudiated that totally and completely. What he wants to do is have transactional engagements with these countries that benefit him or benefit American companies. The aspiration for democratic rule or facilitating the path to democracy is totally rejected by this President. It is completely the wrong way to go.
David Goodman
In the first year of President Trump's second term, the United States has taken military action against seven different countries, including three that we've never waged war against. After attacking Venezuela, Trump threatened action against Cuba, Mexico and Greenland. What can or will constrain him?
Peter Welch
It has to be Congress and the American people. But right now, the biggest dilemma we have in Congress is that my Republican colleagues have abdicated the constitutional authority that we have as members of Congress in so many areas that the President is acting more like a king. Under Article One of the Constitution, Congress has to vote on war making and authorize it in Appropriations. It's up to Congress, the power of the purse. The President is disregarding that. In area after area, my Republican colleagues have been willing to abdicate their authority and their responsibility and delegate it to the President. So you're having this undemocratic concentration of power in a president who knows no limits and thinks that because he is president, he can do whatever he wants. That's a real threat to our democratic governing system.
David Goodman
This seems to have opened up some cracks in the MAGA coalition. We are hearing about opposition from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Thomas Massie, also Senator Rand Paul, who have opposed this break with the idea of “America First.” Do you think this could cause other fractures within that coalition?
Peter Welch
I do. Americans do not want us getting involved in foreign wars. They support our military, and we need our strong military to make certain that we're defended. But this action in Venezuela is not to protect us from a threat to our country from Venezuela. His talk about taking over Greenland is not to protect us from a threat by Greenland or Denmark, and likewise, Colombia. Most Americans know that asking our citizen soldiers to go to war for presidential preferences is absolutely wrong. We've got to take care of things that are really tough for everyday working people in our country. Right now, Vermonters are losing health care. The President hasn't lifted a single finger to extend those tax credits so that Vermonters and Americans won't lose health care. The president ran as a person who was against these “forever wars” and now he's embracing these wars, not just in Venezuela, but also the threats In Colombia, the threats in Greenland and in Cuba. Why?
David Goodman
Why do you think h...
For 90 years, Yankee Magazine has been telling stories of and about New England. And for more than half of the magazine’s life, Mel Allen has been Yankee’s foremost storyteller. Allen wrote his first stories for Yankee in 1977, then held various editorial roles before becoming Yankee’s fifth editor in 2006. He retired as editor earlier this year after 48 years with the magazine, which is based in Dublin, NH.
I first got to know Mel Allen in the 1980s, when I began writing for Yankee. I had never had an editor quite like him. He didn’t just assign stories. He coached, shaped, cajoled and encouraged me and countless other New England writers to do our best work. He even came to Vermont with his two sons to go backcountry skiing with me. They loved it, (he, not so much) and a friendship was kindled.
Allen has taught magazine writing and creative nonfiction for the past 25 years at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University. In 2018, Mel Allen was inducted into the Folio Magazine Hall of Fame for editorial excellence.
Mel Allen, 79, recently published a book of essays, Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All. The stories take us along on his journey to meet the last horse-and-buggy egg delivery man; the tragic search for a lost boy in Maine; to a town in Maine that refused to die; to meet Stephen King, the “King of Horror”; and to the son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant who graduated at the top of his class at Bowdoin College and worked to bring his mother back home to Arizona where he was raised.
Allen is sometimes a participant observer in his stories, as immortalized by Stephen King. “I may be the only writer who not only helped King round up pigs for the market when they escaped, but who also ended up as a character named Mel Allen from the Portland Sunday Telegram in 'The Dead Zone,'" Allen writes in his book.
Allen believes in the power of stories to build bridges. These “are stories that transcend the current climate of disunity. That's why I believe these stories can connect us,” Allen told The Vermont Conversation. He said that there a “sense of place in New England that I don't know exists anywhere else.”
I asked Allen what makes a good story. “You want to keep turning the page,” he said. “You want to know what's going to happen to this person. You want to care about the person.”
With journalism in a state of upheaval, I asked Allen what his advice is to young journalists. “You are drawn to tell stories because of something in you. It's not something that somebody puts on your shoulders and says, Now I want you to go out and to tell those stories,” he said. “If you're called to do that, you follow that calling.”
“Plastic is everywhere — wrapped around our food, stitched into our clothes, even coursing through our veins.”
That’s how Judith Enck begins her new book, "The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and our Planet Before It’s Too Late," co-authored with Adam Mohoney.
A former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, Enck warns that plastics are a toxic industry that are poisoning people and the environment. Plastic production has gone from two million tons per year in 1950, to 450 million tons per year today.
The plastics industry has spent millions selling the material as safe and sustainable, but only 6% of plastic is recycled. Plastic recycling is a “false solution,” Enck said. “Plastic recycling has never worked. Never will work.”
The plastics industry has “spent millions of dollars advertising, telling us, 'don't worry about all the plastic you're generating,' just toss it in your recycling bin. That is deceptive, and it is so deceptive that the Attorney General of California Rob Bonta sued the nation's largest maker of plastic, the little mom and pop company known as Exxon Mobil, for deceptive claims around plastics recycling and chemical recycling.”
Plastic never breaks down. It breaks up into smaller microplastics, circulating in the environment for centuries, said Enck. “16,000 different chemicals are used to make plastic, and the chemicals will sometimes hitchhike on the microplastics. So we're having the physical presence of microplastics in our bodies, but also the presence of chemicals that are used to make plastic, including PFAS chemicals, lead, mercury, formaldehyde.” Microplastics have been found in lungs, testicles, blood, breast milk and semen. They are associated with a rise in reproductive cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, among other ailments.
The plastics industry has deployed an army of lobbyists to beat back attempts to limit the use of plastics. As an example, Enck cites New York’s effort this year to consider “a comprehensive packaging reduction bill that will reduce all single use packaging by 30% over 12 years.”
“This was the most lobbied bill in the 2026 legislative session in nearby Albany,” said Enck, noting that “there were 106 registered lobbyists against this bill, and 24 in support. I have never seen so many special interest lobbyists wandering the halls of the State Capitol in Albany, including the final night of the legislative session, where they killed the bill on the assembly floor after it passed in the State Senate.”
That experience has led Enck to conclude that "reducing plastic in our bodies, in our environment, in Lake Champlain, in the ocean, is more of a political science issue than a science issue. We have enough science to act.”
Judith Enck was appointed EPA regional administrator by President Obama and she has served as deputy secretary for the environment in New York. She is now a professor at Bennington College and the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, a group that works to eliminate plastic pollution.
Enck insisted that in addition to political action, individuals can take steps to minimize their exposure to plastic. “I suggest that people start with their kitchen, because that's where most of the plastic is, and that's where the greatest risk is in terms of exposure in your food. Do not put plastic in your microwave. Get rid of black plastic utensils in your kitchen drawers, because black plastic is made from recycled electronic waste. Get rid of your plastic cutting board. Replace it with either wood or steel. Do a little audit of what's your heaviest use of plastic. For instance, if you drink a lot of juice, instead of buying it in plastic jugs, buy frozen concentrate and make it in a glass pitcher. There are steps like that we can take.”
Leila Stillman-Utterback graduated from Middlebury Union High School in June and decided to take a gap year to pursue a dream. The 18-year-old Vermonter traveled to Israel to participate in a solidarity program that included volunteering with Rabbis for Human Rights in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help Palestinians harvest olives. She was part of an effort to provide “protective presence” for Palestinians who are under constant attack from right-wing Israeli settlers. She said she wanted to live the Jewish values of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and b’tselem elohim (a belief that everyone is created in God’s image).
On October 29, Stillman-Utterback was detained by Israeli soldiers, spent a night handcuffed in a police station and was accused of violating the terms of her tourist visa by entering a closed military zone. After being hauled before a judge at 3 a.m., she was deported and banned from Israel for 10 years.
Leila’s treatment at the hands of Israeli authorities was deeply personal for her mother. Danielle Stillman is the rabbi of Middlebury College. She teaches the values that Leila is living. Her daughter is now paying the price.
The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu may have hoped that by coming down hard on a young American activist that it would silence her. The opposite has occurred. Stillman-Utterback has spoken out in multiple interviews in the Israeli press.
“My deportation felt like a betrayal,” wrote Stillman-Utterback in a powerful essay about her ordeal in The Forward, an independent Jewish American news publication. “Israel was supposed to be for me, for every Jew. But the settler movement and the current government would like to redefine what it means to be Jewish along political lines.”
Stillman-Utterback rejects the notion that criticizing Israel is somehow antisemitic. “I've grown up my entire life with a connection to Israel, with a love for it even,” she told The Vermont Conversation. “I have also grown up my entire life being allowed to be critical of Israel and … frustrated [and] angry.” She added that it was essential that “in a time of real rising antisemitism globally, that we are able to hold criticism and love at the same time. I really do think that it's possible.”
Stillman-Utterback’s treatment is part of a larger crackdown on Palestinians and Jewish activists by the Israeli government and right-wing settlers who operate with near impunity in Palestinian communities. In October, there were 126 olive harvest-related settler attacks against Palestinians, and Israel detained and deported 32 foreign activists who were accompanying Palestinian harvesters near the town of Burin, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Stillman-Utterback, who two years ago was named a Bronfman Fellow, a cohort of high-achieving Jewish teens, is appealing her ban from Israel and is committed to staying engaged. “We need to maintain our relationships in order to show that there are people who are committed to a peaceful and just future. It doesn't matter what it looks like, whether it's a two state solution, whether it's binational, it only matters that that we end the violence and that we end the occupation, that we move towards equality. Any movement towards equality and towards an end in violence, towards accountability for settler actions, is a move in the right direction.”
Rabbi Danielle Stillman said that she’s “inspired by [Leila’s] principled willingness to hang in with Israel despite this really harrowing, dramatic experience, and that that really comes from her Jewish values … to contribute to building a better society in a place that she's come to really care about.”
Rabbi Stillman said that American Jews are deeply divided about Israel, especially along generational lines. A recent Washington Post survey found that just over half of Jewish Americans — and two thirds of those over 65 — say they are emotionally attached to Israel, but only about one third of those ages 18 to 34 feel that attachment. About half of younger Jews are more likely to say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, compared to about one third of older Jews.
Leila’s arrest and expulsion “just makes me really concerned about the future of the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, between American Jews and Israeli Jews,” said Rabbi Stillman.
Rabbi Stillman criticized how antisemitism is being “used in a certain way to further an agenda of silencing solidarity with Palestinians and silencing speech in general on many college campuses.”
Leila Stillman-Utterback is now back home in Middlebury figuring out what she will do with the rest of her gap year before attending Williams College in the fall of 2026. She expressed gratitude towards her parents.
“I was taught to always stay in a place of not knowing, even if it's uncomfortable, and I feel immensely grateful for never being told that only one answer is right, and for always being taught to live in that liminal space.”
Every week, two local newspapers close somewhere in the country. Some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. That may increase with loss of public media funding.
What is the future of journalism in an age where truth itself is under attack?
Local news is essential because “that's where rebuilding confidence in facts and truth starts,” said VTDigger editor in chief Geeta Anand. We spoke at a public event at the Manchester Community Library on Nov. 11.
“If you've actually gone to a meeting and seen a story based on it and met the reporter and it actually seems the article matches what you heard, then you begin to disbelieve the discrediting of journalism that is happening, led by the leaders of our country, which is having a devastating effect on our democracy.”
Anand’s career as a journalist and author spans the globe. Her stories on corporate corruption in the Wall Street Journal earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was a finalist again in 2003. Her book, "The Cure," about a father’s fight to save his kids by starting a company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, was made into the 2010 movie, Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford. She was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India.
Anand’s roots in journalism are in covering local news. She worked at Cape Cod News and then covered local government and courts at the Rutland Herald. In 2018, she became a professor at the UC Berkeley journalism school, where she was dean in 2020. She was at Berkeley until taking over leadership of VTDigger in July 2025.
Anand spoke about how local journalism is a critical link in the information ecosystem. “Our coverage right now of immigrants getting picked up and spirited off to other parts of the country -- that's the way the world finds out that these things are happening. Our stories get picked up by national media, and the national media hold our national leaders accountable. We matter to you here in Vermont, but we're also a key part of the web of national and international news.”
Anand said that for community and democracy to function, it is critical to support local news. “If we aren't vibrant, if we're not there at the city council meeting or at the school board meeting and telling those stories, government isn't held accountable. It's almost like these things haven't happened if we're not there.”
Thanks to Greater Northshire Access Television for recording this conversation.
The health care apocalypse has arrived.
In the past month, many of the 30,000 Vermonters who get their health insurance through Vermont Health Connect — part of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it's popularly known — are experiencing sticker shock. Average health insurance premiums on Vermont Health Connect are projected to more than double, the highest rate increases countrywide.
This is a disaster foretold. Democrats in Congress have warned for months that unless pandemic-era health insurance subsidies were extended, the 24 million Americans who get their health insurance through ACA marketplaces would see astronomical price hikes. Yet, despite a 43 day government shutdown, Republicans in Congress and President Trump refused to extend subsidies.
The price tag for inaction has just arrived.
Vermonters are now faced with excruciating choices. Middle-income participants are facing additional premiums of $10,000 per year for individuals and $32,000 for a family of four. Others are considering going without insurance all together.
“We can't take out a second mortgage on our house to afford one year of health insurance,” said Arica Bronz, a pilates instructor in Williston, where she lives with her husband, a primary care physician, and their two daughters.
Bronz’s monthly family premium will rise from $1,100 to $2,700 per month in 2026. After factoring in a $15,000 annual deductible, she said that in case of a serious medical event, her family will pay $47,000 before their insurance kicks in.
Bronz feels she has no choice. She is going to cancel health care coverage for her family. “We're trying to get all the scans done and just make sure we're tip-top healthy before we make the leap. I can't tell you how much sleep I've lost considering what it's like to jump in this day and age to no health care for a family.”
If too many people drop health care coverage, experts warn that Vermont’s struggling health care financing system could enter a death spiral.
“I have a tremendous fear that what we are watching before us is the undoing, the dismantling of our healthcare financing system,” said Michael Fisher, Vermont’s chief health care advocate. “This is devastating and it's self-inflicted. And the majority in Congress think it's the right thing to do."
Fisher nevertheless said that those whose income falls within 400% of the federal poverty level — around $130,000 for a family of four — may still qualify for subsidized health care premiums.
As Arica Bronz contemplates a future without health insurance, she said, “We don't have a safety net. Hopefully that will inspire us to just be really thoughtful and careful. ... It's kinda terrifying.”
The No Kings protests in October, which drew over seven million people across the country, were hailed as the largest demonstrations in American history. Now the question for many people is: What works to stop authoritarianism?
Maria Stephan has been studying this question. Her award-winning book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” co-authored with Erica Chenoweth of Harvard, examines a century of resistance movements around the world. They determined that nonviolent protests are more than twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts. Chenoweth went on to coin the widely cited 3.5% Rule, which states that when 3.5% of the population protest nonviolently, the movement will win.
“When you have 3.5% of a population, which in the United States is roughly 12 million people, that means a movement is representative. It's hard to ignore. It's highly disruptive. And behind those 3.5% are many, many more people who support the aims of the movement,” Stephan told The Vermont Conversation.
Maria Stephan was a strategic planner with the U.S. Department of State and founded and directed the Program on Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She is the author and editor of five books on authoritarianism and civil resistance. She was born and raised in Vermont and currently lives in New York City, where she is chief organizer with the Horizons Project, which she describes as “building a strong pro-democracy front that brings people together from different parts of society to effectively counter authoritarianism in the U.S.”
Stephan highlighted the many tactics of the movement against authoritarianism. “We know from studying nonviolent resistance campaigns against authoritarian regimes around the world that it's the organized acts of non-cooperation — when people withhold their consumer buying power, when workers withhold labor, when security forces refuse to use repression vis a vis peaceful protesters — these acts of non-cooperation are what is really key to the success of pro-democracy movements, and we're seeing this across the country.”
She cited examples of “people taking courageous stands both as individuals and collectively.” These include “the powerful image of the Idaho teacher, Sarah Inama, who refused to take down the sign ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ in her classroom, which resulted in the whole community mobilizing in support of inclusive classrooms.”
There was Rachel Cohen, “the young lawyer who left her law firm after it capitulated to Trump. She not only left the firm, she organized thousands of lawyers to similarly commit to not be part of firms that engage in that type of capitulation.”
Stephan said that in the higher education sector, “seven out of nine universities have refused a higher education compact offered by the Trump administration that would have offered access to federal funding in exchange for various forms of censorship on campus.” And the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, she said, refused ICE agents access to their grounds to coordinate arrests of immigrants and undocumented people.
“For all these reasons and all the powerful, joyful, creative acts of defiance and community care I'm seeing across the country. I believe we will prevail.”
On New Year’s Day 2020, Adam Tendler unexpectedly received his father’s final gift: a wad of cash stuffed into a manila envelope handed over in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in West Lebanon, NH. The strangely furtive exchange launched a musical journey.
Tendler, a renowned concert pianist who grew up in Barre decided to use his inheritance to commission an all-star cast of modern composers to compose piano pieces exploring the theme of inheritance. In his pitch to his composer friends, Tendler wrote that he wanted “to plant that cash in the soil of something that may actually grow and — if you'll forgive me — live on.”
To his amazement, every composer he wrote to agreed to contribute. The result is a critically acclaimed album and concert tour called Inheritances, which the New York Times has called a collection of “little masterpieces.” Tendler will perform Inheritances at the Barre Opera House on November 16.
Tendler initially did not know what to do with the money that he received. Taking a trip or paying down a credit card seemed inadequate. “This is an inheritance so something should be done with it that sort of honors the gesture,” he told The Vermont Conversation.
“The thing I do for a living is ideally creating experiences for people … which [are] cathartic and beautiful and [provide] a sense of connection,” he said. “What if I use it to facilitate that experience for people?” Tendler originally told his story in a 2023 essay for the New York Times, “My Father’s Death, An Envelope of Cash, A Legacy in Music.”
Adam Tendler is a Grammy-nominated pianist and a recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the Yvar Mikhashoff Prize. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called him "currently the hottest pianist on the American contemporary classical scene." After graduating from Indiana University, Tendler performed solo recitals in all fifty states as part of a grassroots tour he called America 88x50. He has appeared as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony and at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and other venues. He is on the piano faculty of the Steinhardt School at New York University.
Tendler took a circuitous route from Barre to the concert stages of the world. After college, he worked at the landfill in Coventry and was a substitute teacher at U32 and Twinfield high schools. His relationship to his hometown is both affectionate and ambivalent.
“I love Barre, I love Vermont, but it wasn't really the most easy place to grow up as a queer kid,” he recalled. “Music was a safety hatch … a real place within which I could hide, protect myself, express myself. I created a little fortress within it."
"That vessel motivated me to actually start to really train to the point of getting into conservatory.”
Tendler said that his work on Inheritances transformed his complicated feelings about his “semi-estranged” father “into something that feels like a companion in a good way.”
“This project and having to sort of confront him on a human level, even though we're talking about music, has brought me back to him. I am my father's son. We are family.”
In 2016, Jamie Raskin was elected to Congress from Maryland just as Donald Trump was first elected president. Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, and Trump, a real estate developer who flouts rules and shatters norms, have been locked in a struggle ever since.
When Congress impeached Trump in 2021 for inciting an insurrection, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tapped Raskin to be lead impeachment manager, essentially Trump’s chief prosecutor. He subsequently served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Raskin is now the Ranking Member of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal adversary of the Trump administration. In the past few weeks, he has accused U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem of “unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens,” demanded that Trump explain “a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people” and denounced “military-style tactics” in Chicago.
Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, which borders Washington, D.C. He has authored several books, including the bestseller “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy,” a searing exploration of the death of his son and the struggle to defend democracy under Trump.
I spoke with Rep. Raskin on Tuesday as the government shutdown approached the one month mark.
They are being described as possibly “the biggest ever mass demonstrations in American history.” More than 7 million people participated in No Kings protests on Saturday, October 18 across more than 2,700 events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and in cities around the world.
In Vermont, organizers estimate that some 43,000 people participated in more than 40 events around the state. People came out to protest the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants, LGBTQ+ rights, public education, the government shutdown and more.
At the Vermont State House, where some 6,500 people gathered in cool fall weather, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., fired up the crowd with a call to fight back against Trump’s authoritarianism. Then she talked about the hero’s journey, an archetype in mythology and narrative storytelling (think Star Wars and the Hunger Games) that involves an ordinary person who faces a challenge, embarks on a journey, triumphs over adversity and returns transformed.
“I know that many of you feel anxious, you feel scared, you feel overwhelmed,” Balint told the crowd. “We have to see this as part of a hero's journey that we are all on together. We must shift our thinking into believing that we, each of us, embody that hero is going to lead us to a better day. And what I know is the first step on the hero's journey is answering the call. And that is what you have done today. You are answering the call.”
Asked about the deepening impact of the federal shutdown, Balint told the Vermont Conversation, “Millions of people are at risk of losing their health care, and we know that health care right now is one of the things that is making it incredibly emotionally, psychologically, economically devastating for families. We have to fight for health care, and we also have to say to this President, No, you will not bully us into submission. We're not going to sell out our people back home because we're afraid of your wrath.”
Millions of Americans are receiving notices of soaring health care premiums as Congress remains deadlocked over extending Covid-era subsidies, as demanded by Democrats. Premiums will rise by 18 percent on average, according to the nonpartisan health policy group KFF.
Sen. Peter Welch advised Vermonters to hang in there. “We don't know how this is going to end, but we know that the only real chance it has to end well is if we show that we are committed to democracy and we're willing to act together.”
Welch said that Trump sending troops to cities led by Democrats is “just a lawless exercise. It's a prelude to him potentially sending troops in if he doesn't like the vote outcome in the next election.”
I asked Paul Burns, an attorney and the longtime executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, whether he believed the legal system was up to the task of defending democratic institutions.
“We're seeing a Supreme Court where decisions appear no longer based on legal principles or court precedents," he said. "The court has no compunction about turning its back on long standing principles on any sense of consistency under the law. Absent that, we have to wonder whether the law can be there for us in any way that it has been in the past. And so I am deeply concerned.”
Burns said that what gives him hope is “looking over at my 14 year old son and he and other young people who bring to this an earnestness and an openness and interest in just living their lives in a free way, a belief still that we can and must have a democracy here. They are not tainted or jaded or cynical." He vowed to do "everything that I can to try to make this better.”
Clara White, a 14-year old eighth grade student from Montpelier, had a distinctive voice and message among the lineup of politicians and activists. She said that “people my age, we are not just sitting around waiting. We are more connected than generations before us. We care about each other. We know how to share information, organize online and learn from people all over the world. We are creative problem solvers because we have had to be.”
She cited examples of of how young people in her community “started a Green Up Day program, came together to feed families in need, and volunteered at a summer camp to help other girls feel empowered.”
"I choose hope because I've seen what happens when people come together. I choose hope because giving up is not an option. I choose hope because I believe in us."
The world’s attention is focused on the Middle East this week as a fragile ceasefire takes hold in Israel’s two-year long war in Gaza. Split-screen images show joyous reunions as Palestinians and Israelis who had been held captive greet their families, alongside scenes of shocking devastation in the Gaza Strip.
For Mohsen Mahdawi, this story is personal. In April, Mahdawi sat in a Vermont jail cell for more than two weeks fighting for his freedom. Mahdawi is a Palestinian-born student at Columbia University who was arrested by immigration agents at what he was told would be a citizenship interview in St. Albans. Mahdawi, 35, grew up in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but is now a legal permanent resident living in Vermont. He is a practicing Buddhist, was president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association and co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union.
The Trump administration is trying to deport Mahdawi, claiming that his pro-Palestinian campus activism poses a threat to national security. Vermont federal Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Madahwi’s release on bail on April 30, comparing his arrest to the unlawful repression of free speech under McCarthyism. But the Trump administration appealed, arguing that Crawford did not have the right to intervene in Mahdawi’s detention. Madahwi vs. Trump was argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Sept. 30. Madahwi has a separate deportation case in immigration court that is ongoing.
“It's not my case that is on trial,” Mahdawi said. “It is the constitution that is on trial. One of the most important and significant principles of democracy is the ability of expression and free speech. That's the first amendment right in this country, and what we've seen through targeting me and other students and other even journalists is a direct violation of this principle that every American is so proud of and they hold very dearly.”
This legal drama has not slowed or silenced Madahwi. While out on bail this spring, Mahdawi graduated from Columbia University, receiving a standing ovation from his classmates as he walked across the stage to receive his diploma. This fall, he began a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
“I felt validated, that my efforts and the risk that I have taken is being honored and respected,” he said of the support from his Columbia classmates. “I felt that I'm not alone, and I felt a strong level of solidarity and that the community here made it very clear to the government and to those who have been targeting me that they are standing on the right side of history.”
Mahdawi was just named a 2025 Beerman Foundation Fellow for Peace and Justice for his work that “bridges faith, activism, and dialogue to advance nonviolence and dignity for all.”
Mahdawi is guardedly optimistic about the new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
“While there is a sense of relief and ability to say 'I'm glad this is happening', there is also still suspicion about how long this would last,” he said.
“I pray that the war is over, but at the same time, I see that Israel now is saying that they have a historic right to the West Bank, which would prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, something that the majority of the world, more than 80% of the international community, the states, have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state, except America, and America has vetoed it,” Mahdawi said. “So I don't say the war is over before giving Palestinians their rights, the right to self-determination, the right to freedom, the right of return and the right to live in dignity.”
The Vermont Conversation also spoke with Bernard Avishai, a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College, and the author of four books including “The Tragedy of Zionism.” He writes regularly about Israeli politics for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Politico and other publications. He lives half the year in Israel.
“I do feel much more sense of hopefulness that both sides have learned what losses are entailed by this kind of war, and that it might be time to turn the page,” Avishai said.
Avishai is a strong critic of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who he believes “is slowly converting (the) country from an open society to a closed and authoritarian one.”
“The real divide in Israel is between supporters of Greater Israel," the nationalist movement intent on taking over Palestinian lands — “and supporters of global Israel," or those who want to integrate Israel into the global economy.
Avishai believes that the Netanyahu government must go. “A change of government, a change of face to Israel, will at least begin the process of having Israel kind of rebuild relations with the Western world, but it's a fundamentally dangerous economic situation for Israel to be on the one hand trying to build a global technological center, a hub in the global economy, and at the same time be alienating all the people they have to work with.”
Avishai said that Israeli media largely showed images of Israeli losses over the past two years, not Palestinian suffering.
“It became tremendously numbing, and we have not, with all that numbing and self absorption and grief, really been able to focus on the cruelty and the difficulties we created in Gaza,” he said. “And I would like to believe that over the next five, six years, we will.”
Chuck Collins, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, gave away his millions to progressive political causes when he was in his twenties. Ever since, the resident of Guilford has fought to expose how the rich make themselves richer at everyone else’s expense.
In his new book, "Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet," Collins shows how the actions of the top .01% have dire consequences for everyone else. He argues that when the system is rigged to favor to rich, working people pay the price in higher taxes, fewer affordable houses and a health care system stripped of both health and care.
Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org. He writes the Oligarch Watch column for The Nation. He is the author of a number of books, including "Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good"; and with Bill Gates Sr., "Wealth and Our Commonwealth," a case for taxing inherited fortunes.
Collins says we are living through a new Gilded Age. In the first Gilded Age, which lasted from about the end of the Civil War to 1900, “there were 400 wealthy families that by some estimates may have had 40 to 50% of all the wealth in the country,” Collins told the Vermont Conversation. But from 2020 to 2022, “the flow of billionaire wealth, not just to the 1% but the top one tenth of 1% in the billionaire class, is dizzying.” He said that the combined wealth of US billionaires went from under $3 trillion at the beginning of the pandemic to $7.8 trillion by the end.
“Pretty much everything you care about is undermined by that concentration of wealth and power: your health, your housing, the quality of your environment.”
Collins warned of the danger of “billionaire capture.”
“You have the billionaires lining up behind one particular presidential candidate who has totally delivered for the billionaire class to the point where our political system is captured. ... They are using that government shutdown as a way to shrink government and lay off workers. And we're not even going to publish unemployment rates and the data necessary for us to understand what's happening in the economy.”
Collins believes that change will come from both the grassroots and from “cracks within the billionaire elites that we should be paying attention to,” such as those who want to address climate change.
“As people start to see how their pockets are getting picked, they will wake up and want to push back on this oligarchic capture of our society.”
Collins says that change begins by taxing enormous wealth, reinvesting in social programs, and in grassroots mobilizations such as “No Kings Day” that represent “an awakening that we have never seen.”
“We have to say, Look, we're not going to vote for people who are going to be lapdogs of the billionaires. ... We're going to see people run for Congress and win and run for higher office saying, I want an economy that works for everybody, not just the billionaires.”
The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is the latest in a growing list of incidents of political violence. There have been 150 politically motivated attacks just this year, and a 2000% increase in targeted violent plots over the past two decades.
What explains this surge in political violence?
Extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss confirms that this is “the worst moment of political violence since the 1970s,” adding, "We are in an era of mass shootings."
She argues that rising polarization and “the common thread" of misogyny links many recent attacks. Miller-Idriss is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, where she is also a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education. Her latest book is “Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism.” She is an MSNBC columnist and regular commentator who appears frequently on CNN, PBS and other news outlets.
President Donald Trump has vowed to mount a government assault on “the left” in response to Kirk’s assassination. But a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that despite a small uptick in “left-wing” violence this year, ”right-wing” terrorism has far exceeded all other forms of political violence in the number of fatalities and attacks in the past decade.
Miller-Idriss contends that most mass shooters, terrorists and violent extremists have two things in common: Nearly all are men, and they are almost always “virulent misogynists, homophobes or transphobes.” She says that the media — herself included — have long overlooked this link between political violence and misogyny.
The U.S. now averages more than one mass shooting per day.
“Virtually every mass shooter in the U.S. has a history of gender-based violence in some way,” with 60% of them having documented histories of domestic violence or “stalking, harassment, rape threats, cyber porn, revenge porn, sexual assault, rape, anti-LGBTQ violence,” Miller-Idriss said. “Even when the targets are not very clearly women or the LGBTQ community … gender or homophobia really significantly play a role.”
Miller-Idriss highlighted two factors that make this era of political violence unique — the proliferation of guns and online communities that traffic in hate.
“We have a lot of shootings that don't seem to have any ideological motivation at all but are really at the hands of extraordinarily online young people … who spend a lot of time in online spaces, in gaming spaces, in very meme-driven, irony laden spaces,” she said. Attackers “are kind of communicating, almost in a way that may be detached from reality, with online communities as part of the attack.”
Shooters are “not just highly online but expressing a lot of online misogyny and gender-based harms or harassing teenage girls online,” she said.
Miller-Idriss said that even “everyday forms of misogyny” that she and other women face are linked to more extreme forms. She said she observed that in the hate mail that she receives that there was “a very clear pattern of containment, that what they wanted was for me to not be front and center.”
“There's some sort of anger there about a person, a woman, being in a public space at all, and it makes you realize that phrases like ‘lock her up,’ ‘send them back,’ ‘get back in the closet,’ ‘get back in the kitchen’ (are) containment metaphors (that) are very, very common in everyday life directed toward women or LGBTQ folks who are seen as being too public or too flamboyant or too out,” she said.
Everyday misogyny “can evolve into a trajectory in which some young men are conditioned through online influencers to believe that they have lost their rightful place, that women belong in a more submissive role,” Miller-Idriss said.
“Some men are so easily mobilized to anger if they're denied what they think they're entitled to (and) that might escalate eventually into rage in a more public way,” she said.
Miller-Idriss and her colleagues at the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab work with young people to “off-ramp” violent online hate.
“If you start to recognize that part of the problem of mass shootings and mass violence is rooted in very everyday harms, then you can take action on those everyday harms,” she said. “It should be an empowering message to say, ‘Let's have a conversation about what this looks like, and let's have a conversation about the experience of boys compared to girls.’”
Jeffrey Amestoy, chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court from 1997 to 2004, is best known for authoring the 1999 decision in Baker vs. Vermont that legalized same-sex civil unions. That case laid the groundwork for the legalization of same sex marriage in Vermont a decade later and ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing same sex marriage in 2015.
At the age of 79, Amestoy is still a prolific writer, but in a different genre. His latest book is a true crime legal thriller that he spent years researching. Winters’ Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont, is the story of when celebrity attorney Clarence Darrow came to Vermont to defend a convicted murderer before the Vermont Supreme Court. The book was just published by the Vermont Historical Society.
Winters’ Time recounts the brutal murder of Cecelia Gullivan, who was killed in her home in Windsor, Vermont in November 1926. Gullivan, a single woman, was the treasurer of the Cone Automatic Machine company in Windsor. Police quickly arrested John Winters, a machinist at her company, and he was promptly tried, convicted and sentenced to death. That’s when Clarence Darrow entered the case after the Winters family called in a favor promised by Darrow’s son.
Amestoy, who was Vermont's attorney general from 1985 to 1997, set the scene for what would become one of Vermont’s most sensational trials. “By the 1920s you had the first real mass media with radio and newspapers racing to outdo each other in circulation wars that focused primarily on murders and then a tremendous interest in celebrities," Amestoy said. "Darrow sort of combined two of those: he was an extraordinarily successful defense lawyer, adamantly opposed to capital punishment … And then he was famous for his ability to speak to larger social issues.”
The death penalty was among the issues at play. “There was a tremendous amount of focus on capital punishment in Vermont but not, in fact, from those opposed to it, more about making sure that Vermont had a method of execution that would work,” said Amestoy. Winters would be only the second person executed by electric chair, which had recently been installed at the Windsor prison.
Vermont executed 26 people between 1778 and 1954. The state abolished capital punishment in 1972 following a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The most sensational aspect of the trial of John Winters was the prosecution’s use of the victim’s severed head as an exhibit. “That had never happened in Vermont legal history and as far as I was able to determine, hadn't ever happened in American legal history either,” said Amestoy.
Amestoy said that the Winters case “gave us a lens on Vermont in the 1920s in terms of gender.” Cecilia Gullivan was an “extraordinary single woman, sort of a modern woman of the time.” He noted that Gullivan was “probably the highest ranking female executive in Vermont, a tremendously capable woman who had the authority for managing the plant.” Her murder was “extraordinary because of the status of the victim, and it immediately became front page news, not only in Vermont, but in Boston and really all over the country.”
There were rumors raised at Winters' trial that Gullivan was in a relationship with Frank Cone, the owner of the company, who some thought was a suspect in her death. Amestoy noted that women did not sit on juries at that time. Vermont in the 1920s was "not attuned to issues of gender," said Amestoy.
Clarence Darrow succeeded in winning a retrial for John Winters, who then pleaded guilty to second degree murder on Darrow's advice, though Winters publicly maintained his innocence. After serving 20 years in prison, Winters was pardoned in 1949 by Gov. Ernest Gibson. Clarence Darrow had saved the convict’s life.
Amestoy is no stranger to sensational cases himself. His civil unions decision, which he famously wrote “is simply a recognition of our common humanity,” changed the national conversation about same sex unions.
“I thought that opinion helped move that issue in a way that allowed Vermonters to address a social issue of extraordinary importance in a way that I think stood as an example to the country. So to have been able to play a part in that was obviously something I was thankful for.”
Democratic and Republican political leaders have universally condemned the killing of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But President Donald Trump lashed out at Democrats and other political opponents, charging without evidence that their “rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.” Trump and other top officials are now promising a broad crackdown on the free speech of his opponents.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she would “absolutely target” protesters engaging in what she called “hate speech.”
Critics, including many conservatives, have noted that the first amendment right to speech does not include an exception for “hate speech” and that it would be unconstitutional to target people for their overheated rhetoric.
“So-called ‘hate speech’ is free speech,” asserted Aaron Terr in an essay for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where he is director of public advocacy. FIRE is a national group that advocates for and defends free speech.
“The ever looming threat is that when people are in power, they always are going to have this motivation to crack down on speech that threatens their hold on power, that opposes their policies and their views,” Terr told The Vermont Conversation.
“I'm worried that (Trump) is setting the stage for a broader government crackdown on speech on the administration's political opponents and that will really only make the situation worse,” said Terr. “The remedy that our First Amendment envisions for speech that we find potentially harmful is not to suppress it. It's not to silence the speaker, but to push back against it, to call it out, to counter it with better ideas.”
Notably missing from Trump’s broadsides are actual examples of leading Democrats or liberal organizations “celebrating” Kirk’s murder.
The baseless argument that Democrats and “the Left” are responsible for a violent conspiracy against the country obscures the reality that the overwhelming source of political violence in the U.S. comes from the far right. A study examining terrorism in the U.S. in recent years showed that violent far-right extremists have been responsible for 87% of the terrorism fatalities in the United States and 69% of the attacks.
In a political environment in which the president characterizes his opponents as "evil" and "scum," violence has become normalized. FIRE recently published the results of a survey of college students that revealed that in 2020, about 1 in 5 students said it was "ever acceptable to use violence" to stop a speaker. That number has since risen to 1 in 3 students, a 50% increase in the level of support for political violence among college students over the last 5 years.
“Free speech isn't a conservative or liberal value. It's a constitutional value. It's a check on power," Terr said. "We need the First Amendment because power brings with it the temptation to silence dissent. That's human nature. And the beauty of free speech is it ensures that no single person or administration can declare by fiat what's true or false, what's right or wrong and make it illegal to disagree. And wherever you fall politically, you have a stake in being free from that kind of authoritarian control. My biggest worry is that people are just losing faith in the importance of free speech.”
As President Trump’s immigration crackdown intensifies, many immigrants who have lived, worked and paid taxes in the United States for years are getting snatched by masked agents and disappeared into a vast network of jails across the country.
In Vermont, a small but growing group of young attorneys have thrown themselves into the fight to defend the immigrants’ rights. Newly minted lawyers, including recent graduates of Vermont Law and Graduate School, are now going head to head with lawyers from Trump’s Justice Department.
The attorneys have been going into Vermont’s jails and encountering terrified immigrants, many of whom are being repeatedly shuffled between states in what appears to be a deliberate effort to frustrate their attempts to obtain effective legal representation. Some detainees do not even know where they are.
Vermont Asylum Assistance Project (VAAP), headed by immigration attorney Jill Martin Diaz, has been a driving force behind the effort to mobilize lawyers and defend immigrants. VAAP has grown from one staff member in 2024 to what will be a staff of eight by November, including four new attorneys who are part of the national Immigrant Justice Corps. VAAP recently received a $100,000 grant from the recently established Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund to hire staff, bring in attorneys and train Vermont lawyers to handle immigration cases.
Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid. They currently are a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont. In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40.
I visited VAAP’s headquarters in Burlington, where I interviewed Martin Diaz, staff attorney Leah Brenner and volunteer staff attorney Andy Pelcher.
“I'm looking around at our office that's not even unpacked and we barely have lights and WiFi. How are we holding our own against Trump's Department of Justice that just got a big, beautiful raise?” marveled Martin Diaz, who described fighting the Trump administration as akin to David vs. Goliath.
Martin Diaz said that immigrants are “canaries in the coal mine.”
“People are really starting to look at what's going on in the immigration system as a microcosm for what could happen to our democracy if left unchecked, not just for noncitizens, but for everyone.”
Pelcher, who graduated Vermont Law and Graduate School in 2018 and went on to get an LLM, or master of laws, described a recent visit to Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, where he encountered a Palestinian man who was a survivor of torture who “had been bounced around to a number of facilities during the 14 months that he had been detained.” Somehow he landed in a Vermont jail.
“People are being frequently transferred from facility to facility, seemingly as a means to deny access to counsel, family, local networks of support, and any other means by which these individuals can meaningfully prepare for their defense against removal,” said Pelcher. VAAP, together with the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, took on the man’s case.
VAAP’s experience finding and aiding immigrants in Vermont’s jails has led Martin Diaz to oppose the idea of closing Vermont’s jails to ICE. “I would not advocate for more beds, but I would also strongly caution against a wholesale end to ICE's ability to detain people in our state,” they said. “The truth is that there is no substitute for lawyers getting in their cars, going to a facility with our bodies and meeting one on one in private with our clients directly.”
“It's really, really difficult to provide people with legal help telephonically, when the people who have your clients in custody have no respect for the rule of law and for individuals rights.”
Is America’s legal system up to the task of defending rights and institutions in the Trump era?
“I do have hope that the rule of law will prevail and that this horrible, horrible, tragic moment in our history, this painful moment for our community members who are being directly impacted, can also be a galvanizing opportunity for us to rethink what do we want our laws to say? What do we want due process to look like? What checks and balances do we want?” said Martin Diaz.
The Centers for Disease Control, the nation’s top public health agency, is in chaos following the firing of its director by President Donald Trump and the resignations of its top leaders last week. Nine former CDC directors wrote in the New York Times this week that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who spearhead the purge of the CDC and is a longtime leader of the anti-vaccine movement, is “endangering every American’s health.”
States are increasingly spurning Kennedy and taking health matters into their own hands. Northeastern states, including Vermont, have formed a regional health coalition in response to concerns about federal vaccine guidance. The governors of California, Washington and Oregon declared this week said that the CDC has become “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science … that will lead to severe health consequences.” The three western states are banding together to coordinate their own vaccine policy.
Meanwhile, the state of Florida has just announced that it will become the first state to do away with all childhood vaccine mandates, eliciting strong objections from public health experts.
Can Vermont trust the health advice coming out of the federal government? What are the leading threats to public health confronting the state and country?
“It pains me to say, I don't know that you want to trust the CDC,” said Dr. Becca Bell on The Vermont Conversation. Bell is associate professor of pediatrics at the Larner College of Medicine and a pediatric critical care physician at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital. She is the immediate past president of the Vermont Medical Society and of the Vermont Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Bell noted that she is speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of the organizations with which she is affiliated).
Bell said that “the officials that have left the (CDC) have really raised the alarm that … we shouldn't trust what's coming out of the CDC in terms of some immunization guidance in particular.”
She encouraged families to look to other sources for accurate information, especially the parenting website of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 67,000 pediatricians. She also recommended the Vermont Department of Health and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“Then I ask families to talk to their own child's doctor, because that's going to be a great source as well.”
Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, announced in May that the CDC would no longer recommend a COVID shot for healthy children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued contrary guidance, recommending a COVID shot for all children under the age of 2 since they are “especially vulnerable to severe COVID-19.”
Bell credited Vermont with being proactive “about how we can keep Vermonters safe," but added, “I feel really sad for the future of this country's child's health, because I think that we're going to see a lot of disparities, not just with access to vaccination but access to health care in general, with the big Medicaid cuts that are coming up as well.”
Bell warned that Medicaid cuts, which will result in some 45,000 Vermonters losing health insurance, will fall hardest on children. One third of Medicaid enrollees in Vermont are children.
“What we're about to see with that One Big Beautiful Bill Act (is) a huge transfer of resources from low income folks to the highest earners in this country,” said Bell. “Accessible, affordable health care is what kids need to succeed and for families to succeed, and so we are deeply concerned about the future of pediatric health care because our foundation is Medicaid. This is how we care for kids. It's what supports our clinics.”
“The lack of investment in children is just really concerning and very short sighted.”
Bill McKibben is one of the world’s leading writers and organizers on the issue of climate change. He admits that his message about the perils of a warming planet can leave some people in despair. Now, with the U.S. at an authoritarian tipping point, McKibben has chosen an improbable time to offer hope.
McKibben has a new book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.” He takes readers on a far-flung journey to show how solar and wind energy have suddenly become the cheapest power in the world. People are installing solar panels equivalent to a coal-fired power plant every 18 hours. This is the fastest energy transition in history — and it may just help save democracy.
“There is one big good thing happening on planet Earth and it's so big and so good that it actually has the capacity to help not only with the overwhelming climate crisis, but also with the crisis of inequality and of democracy that we're facing now,” McKibben told The Vermont Conversation. “That one big thing is this sudden surge of clean energy, especially from the sun, that over the last 36 months, has begun to really rewrite what power means on planet Earth.”
McKibben explained that what used to be called “alternative energy” is now mainstream. “Four years ago or so we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning things. And that's a completely epochal moment. Most days, California is generating more than 100% of its power for long stretches from renewable energy.”
“Here's a statistic just to stick in your mind that will give you hope, too,” he offered. “A single boatload of solar panels coming from someplace like China will, over the course of its lifetime, produce 500 times as much energy as that same ship filled with coal. We're not talking about a slightly better version of what we have now. We're talking about a very different world.”
McKibben is currently spearheading Sun Day, which will take place on Sept. 21, 2025. It will be a global day of action celebrating solar and wind power and the movement to leave fossil fuels behind.
“Think about what the foreign policy, the geopolitics of planet Earth would have looked like in the last 70 years if oil was not a valuable commodity,” he said. “Human beings are extremely good at figuring out how to start wars, but figuring out how to start one over sunshine is going to be a trick.”
Vermont is already feeling the impact of this energy shift. “The biggest single power plant in Vermont is now the collection of batteries that Green Mountain Power has helped people put in their basements and garages and that they can call on in time of need to provide power,” he said
Bill McKibben is the author of over 20 books and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He has won the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize.
Alongside his writing, the Ripton resident has founded the global grassroots climate action group 350.org, and Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization now boasts some 70,000 members.
As the country and world teeter on a precipice, what gives McKibben hope?
“Just that we're still here and fighting and that we have this new tool. It's like a Hollywood movie: the bad stuff is happening all around us and here's this new force riding to the rescue over the hills carrying not carbines and repeater rifles but carrying solar panels and lithium ion batteries.”
As President Trump orders federal troops into the streets of Washington, D.C. to “do whatever the hell they want” to stop crime, Sen. Peter Welch is traveling across Vermont to share what he insists is the real news that Trump is trying to divert attention from.
Welch has tallied the impact of President Trump’s economic policies and determined that they will cost families in Vermont an average of $2,120 each year. He says that 99.5% of all Vermont families will lose money as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his budget reconciliation bill, which the Senate narrowly passed in early July after Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote.
The Vermont Conversation caught up with Welch at Snow Farm Vineyard in South Hero, where Welch held a listening session attended by about 150 people.
Welch conceded that even he is “shocked” by the devastating impact of what he calls the “big ugly bill.” His office released a list of those impacts, including:
As many as 45,000 Vermonters will lose health care
As much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue for Vermont hospitals
Over 26,000 Vermonters will lose access to discounted premiums on the Affordable Care Act marketplace
6,000 Vermonters are at risk of losing SNAP assistance
Annual energy bills for Vermonters will rise by $290
The state will lose 1,400 jobs by ending green energy projects
Mortgage payments will rise by $1,060 annually
78,000 Vermonters with student loans will pay $3,694 more over the course of their loans
These cuts will shred the country’s social safety net, undoing social programs that date back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
“There (were) a lot of lies that were peddled by the administration and frankly by many of my Republican colleagues about how great the bill was," Welch said, while "ignoring the concrete reality” of how it will hurt the people they represent. Welch said Trump’s budget will add about $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit.
In a rare criticism of Governor Phil Scott, Welch slammed the governor’s recent decision to provide the Trump administration sensitive data on thousands of Vermonters who receive nutrition assistance. “We should not be providing the private information of our citizens to the federal government,” said Vermont’s junior senator. “We should be protecting the privacy of Vermont citizens.”
All together, Welch said Trump’s actions are part and parcel of an authoritarian push. He accused the president of employing a “dual standard” around crime in the nation’s capital. “You had a riot that was inspired and incited by President Trump and those folks who were intent on doing real violence and hurt many of these law enforcement officers have been pardoned by the president.” Welch was in Congress hiding from mobs of Trump supporters who rampaged through the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Abroad, Sen. Welch was also sharply critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Since the October 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took hostage some 250 soldiers and civilians, Israel has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, detained about 3,000 people — none of whom have been charged with a crime — and waged a campaign of starvation against a desperate population. In response, Welch has called for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and a cutoff of sales of offensive weapons to Israel.
“Being against starvation is not at all being against the endurance of the democratic Jewish state of Israel. It's about being against starvation and that starvation being inflicted by the authority of the state.”
American democracy is “fragile," Welch said.
From the moment that Wilmer Chavarria was pulled out of line by immigration agents at an airport in Houston on July 21, he sensed that he was a marked man.
Chavarria is the superintendent of schools in Winooski. He was returning with his husband from Nicaragua where they were visiting family — a trip they take every summer. Chavarria grew up in Nicaragua, then received scholarships to attend high school in Canada and Earlham College in the U.S. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018, after marrying his college sweetheart, an American citizen.
Without explanation, a federal agent pulled Chavarria out of line at the Houston airport and ordered him into a windowless room. He was separated from his husband and subjected to five hours of interrogation, an experience that he described as “psychological terror.” Agents demanded the passwords to his computers and phones, and he initially refused, since he had his school-issued laptop with student information that is protected by federal student privacy laws. He finally relented after being threatened by the agents.
“You have no rights here,” Chavarria says the agents told him.
Chavarria’s story has made national news. But often overlooked is why Chavarria believes he was singled out.
“I was flagged and put on some sort of list before I even arrived at that airport,” Chavarria told The Vermont Conversation. “When was it that my profile was flagged? And the even better question, why?”
Chavarria has been an outspoken defender of the rights of immigrants, who comprise a large part of the student body in Winooski schools. In February, he led an effort to make Winooski the only sanctuary school district in Vermont.
In April, he publicly refused to sign a certification demanded by the Trump administration that his school not promote diversity, equity and inclusion. When Vermont’s agency of education asked schools to comply, Chavarria responded that the state should “grow some courage and stop complying so quickly and without hesitation to the politically-driven threats of the executive.”
Winooski is Vermont’s most diverse school district, with a majority of families living under the federal poverty line and dozens of languages spoken in the schools. Nearly 800 students attend the Winooski school, which is home to pre-K through high school.
Chavarria said that the effect of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is “instilling fear and making people afraid to just coming to school because they don't want to be separated from their children."
The line the administration is taking is clear to Chavarria: immigrants don't belong here. "Only one type of people, only one type of language, only one type of race, only one type of culture is considered American. Everything else does not belong," Chavarria said. “They want us to feel like we will never be accepted here, and that if we can leave, then we should leave.”
Chavarria said that his experience of being targeted by federal agents was terrifying because it clarified that even U.S. citizen's are not protected.
“This is not North Korea taking you into an interrogation room and doing all that to you. This is your own U.S. government that's supposed to be there to protect you.”
Chavarria noted that he and his family fled a dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1980s. “The fact that I'm terrified what the government is doing to U.S. citizens right now should speak volumes.”
He said that constantly having to defend himself and other immigrants, whether to fellow Vermonters or to federal agents, has left him “exhausted” but committed.
“Vermont is a good state and the majority of people in Vermont are good people but … that's not enough," Chavarrias said. "The times call for more than just being a good person. The times call for more than just being proud of our reputation of being a good brave state. ... The times call for action.”
“Eighty years ago this week,” writes Vermont journalist Garrett Graff, “a group of physicists and military leaders changed warfare — and the world — forever.”
August 6 marks the 80th anniversary of the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which was followed three days later by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. These two bombings are estimated to have killed over 200,000 people.
Graff recounts the scientific and political backstory of the dawn of the nuclear age in his latest book, “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.” This exhaustive work includes testimonies from 500 people who “tell the intertwined story of nuclear physics, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the arrival and advance of World War II in the Pacific, and the tremendous effort of the Manhattan Project to deliver two atomic bombs that helped end the war, as well as the haunting on-the-ground stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves,” writes Graff.
Graff says that the story of what gave rise to the nuclear age is “as important now as ever,” as countries around the world, such as Iran, are racing to start or expand their nuclear arsenals.
“The world actually stands much closer to the edge of nuclear danger than we have for most of the 80 years since the end of World War II,” Graff told The Vermont Conversation. “This year has already seen two major world conflicts set against nuclear tensions. We've seen open warfare between India and Pakistan already this spring, the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict in world history. And we also saw, of course, the US and Israeli strikes against the Iranian nuclear program.”
“There's a possibility, ironically, 15 years after Barack Obama tried to set us on a path toward nuclear abolition, where in the 2020s and 2030s we may actually see more countries join the nuclear club than have ever existed before.”
Garrett Graff describes himself as a historian whose work is often filed under current events. He writes about inflection points in history with an eye towards how they impact the present and future. This includes his 2024 book, “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” and his 2022 book, “Watergate: A New History,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He is also the editor of an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont that was published earlier this year by the Vermont Historical Society.
Graff has had a busy 2025. This spring, his 7-part podcast series dropped, “Breaking the Internet.” In it, he explores how a tool that promised to bring people together has instead driven them apart and has fueled authoritarian movements. This is the fourth season of Long Shadow, Graff’s award-winning history podcast.
Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario.
Graff said that as the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, “We are witnessing an unraveling of our small-d democratic traditions in the United States and sort of backsliding in our democracy and the creeping approach of authoritarianism.”
“It doesn't feel [like] a coincidence to me that we are watching this backsliding in our democracy at the precise moment 80 years later where we are losing the last members of the Greatest Generation,” those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
“There is no preordained rule that America remains a democracy," Graff said. "And there's no preordained rule that we remain an economic hegemon. We let both of those things disappear at our own societal and national peril.”
Vermonters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution in 2022. But what if those rights – to abortion, birth control and other reproductive health services – are nearly impossible to access?
Putting care out of reach appears to be the strategy behind the Trump administration’s relentless assault on Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health care. President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that he signed into law on July 4 includes a provision to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortions. A federal judge has temporarily blocked this provision, but if the Trump administration prevails, Planned Parenthood says that numerous health care centers may close, mostly in states where abortion remains legal.
This compounds a problem in Vermont, since half of Planned Parenthood’s clinics in the state have closed in the last three years due to an ongoing financial crisis with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE).
Medicaid already bans funding for abortions. Most of Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid patients who obtain family planning services receive birth control and STI testing. One in four Planned Parenthood patients in Vermont and Maine are insured by Medicaid, and one in five in New Hampshire.
“The absurdity of all of this is just so transparent,” Nicole Clegg, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, told The Vermont Conversation. “We have long-lasting relationships with our patients. We could be their main provider for years … and to suddenly be told, ‘Sorry, you can't go to that provider anymore because they also provide abortion care’ — that's what's happening here. That's the goal.”
Clegg emphasized that “the overwhelming majority of what we're providing to patients are disease testing and treatment, cancer screenings, wellness exams, birth control. Those are the primary needs that people have during their reproductive years.”
Abortion opponents are “no longer interested in the states where they've been successful in banning abortion. They're now really focused on the states where abortion is still legal, so that includes Vermont, and what they're trying to do is go after providers. So that's the new tactic,” Clegg said.
She noted that people seeking an abortion in states where it is banned are increasingly coming to New England for care. She told the story of a couple seeking an abortion who drove from Oklahoma to Vermont “because they felt like that was going to be the safest option for them.”
“We live in an area of the country where we are a little bit insulated from this fear, but this fear is very real.”
What is motivating the attacks?
“It's about abortion. It's about controlling people and their ability to make decisions and decide when to have a family,” Clegg replied.
A 2024 Pew survey found that two out of three Americans – and 79% of Vermonters – believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
“We needed to sort of wake people up by having them lose these basic rights. That's where we are right now.”
One in three women have received care from Planned Parenthood in their lifetime, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“There's just no other healthcare provider in our country that has that kind of reach and impact,” Clegg said.
I asked Clegg what a world without Planned Parenthood would look like. She cited research on what has happened in areas where a Planned Parenthood health center has closed.
“Worse pregnancy outcomes. Increased rates of cancer. Increased rates of unintended pregnancy. Untreated sexually transmitted diseases. Increased rates of HIV and AIDS.”
Will Planned Parenthood survive?
Clegg noted that this year marks Planned Parenthood’s 60th anniversary. “We have touched the lives of more than a million people” in northern New England, she said.
“I fundamentally believe we will get through this because people support us. People want to come to us for care. We are embedded in our states and a part of our community in deep ways. We matter too much for our states and our communities to just accept that we would close our doors.”
What explains the fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base, even when he enacts laws that hurt them?
Arlie Russell Hochschild has searched for answers in the heart of Trump country. She is one of America’s most thoughtful writers about right wing movements, whose insights are informed by her deep relationships with people on the right.
Hochschild is a renowned professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” is based on her work in eastern Kentucky, where she spent seven years exploring one of the poorest and whitest areas in the country. Her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times, which recently published her essay, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country.”
Hochschild says that communities that have been ravaged by poverty, disinvestment and the opioid epidemic have suffered a deep loss of pride. Trump provides an appealing narrative by telling people that their pride has been stolen from them by undeserving immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and African Americans, to name a few. Trump promises revenge for this stolen pride.
Arlie Hochschild spoke to me this week from her home in Maine.
This week marks the 25th anniversary of civil unions, which were the most sweeping grant of rights to gay couples in the nation when they became law on July 1, 2000.
Civil unions grew out of a lawsuit filed by three gay and lesbian couples who had been denied marriage licenses in Vermont. The lawsuit was known as Baker v. Vermont. In December 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the same benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples. The court ordered the Vermont legislature to craft a law that would satisfy the ruling, either by legalizing same-sex marriage or by creating an equivalent partnership structure.
Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy wrote that the decision, “is simply a recognition of our common humanity.”
It would take until 2009 for Vermont to legalize same-sex marriage.
To mark the milestone, I spoke with four of the key participants behind civil unions. Stacy Jolles and Nina Beck were two of the six plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont. Chief Justice Amestoy wrote the decision. Gov. Howard Dean signed civil unions into law. (Rep. Bill Lippert recounted how the Vermont legislature passed the historic law on The Vermont Conversation in an interview in April.)
Just five months after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump has embroiled the U.S. in a shooting war in the Middle East, a trade war with our allies and neighbors, and a culture war with those who oppose his policies.
Trump has deployed the National Guard and the U.S. Marines into the streets of a major American city over the objections of a mayor and a governor, and unleashed masked agents to snatch unsuspecting immigrants off the streets and ship them off to foreign prisons.
This seemed like a good moment to check in with Rep. Becca Balint. Balint, D-Vt., was elected to Congress from Vermont in 2022 and is a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the Budget Committee. She serves on the Congressional Progressive Caucus as Vice Chair for New Members and as a Co-Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus.
She spoke to me on Tuesday, June 24, from her congressional office in Washington D.C.
What do Nazis, fascists, incels, skinheads, misogynists, insurrectionists and Proud Boys all have in common? Many of them confide in reporter Elle Reeve.
It was around 2015 and Reeve was reporting for Vice News about the rise of the “alt right,” a term coined by its leader, Richard Spencer. She spent time on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan where far right activists communicated, trolled liberals, and began to coalesce as a movement. These were often ordinary people who increasingly embraced conspiracy theories and violence.
This was during the presidency of Barack Obama, when many people were imagining that the U.S. was in the glow of a “post-racial” era. Reeve knew better.
“Racism wasn’t dying off with an older generation,” she told the Vermont Conversation. “There was a strong beating heart right there on the internet.”
In 2017, Reeve was there when the alt right burst out of obscure Internet chat rooms and into public consciousness in a violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her documentary account, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” earned her and Vice News Tonight a Peabody Award, four Emmys and a George Polk Award.
In 2019, Reeve became a correspondent for CNN, where she works today. She was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 reporting on the attack on Congress by Trump supporters, many of whom she knew well.
Why do they talk to her? “They want to tell their story, they want to confess, they want to unburden themselves,” she said.
Reeve has a new book, “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.” The title refers to how far right activists speak of taking the “black pill” of nihilism to justify their cruelty and violence. “It’s this dark nihilism that the world is doomed. There’s nothing you can do to change it, and you at best, can hope for it to collapse.”
Reeve traces how far-right rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance channeling extremist ideas and language.
Vance has denounced the “woke ideology” of “white women who are miserable about their own lives, enforcing codes about racial justice, gay rights on other people to make other people miserable, to account for how miserable they are in their own lives,” Reeve explained.
Vance’s use of the term “childless cat ladies” is another far right meme. “I’ve read that on 4chan six or seven years ago,” said Reeve. “It has trickled upward.”
Another far right notion that is now embraced by mainstream Republicans is that diversity is bad. “They think that racial and ethnic and gender diversity makes us weaker. It makes us fools. This is just something that they ridiculed all the time.”
Reeve explained the far right context of Trump’s attacks on people of color. “If a white person commits a crime in their world, it’s because they’re a bad guy. But if a Black person commits a crime in their world, it’s because they’re Black.”
Reeve warned that many people “are vulnerable to those ideas. I just interviewed a ton of people who were so nice to me at a Trump boat parade. They were so nice to me, and then they started talking to me about how it’s not right to eat people’s cats, and these people do animal sacrifice, and they’re dirty and they bring disease.”
“It’s not all crazy people who believe this stuff. It’s regular people and your neighbors,” said Reeve. “You have an obligation to push back against that, whether or not they’ll listen to you.”
Reeve said about the future, “There has been an escalating radicalization among the Republican elite and a softening among the voters… People speak freely about civil war. That is dangerous.”
“I don’t like it but I don’t know where that balance ends up after the election. You can’t do something like Jan. 6 without a feeling that there’s an army behind you of supporters who will back you up.”
Hunger stalks the Green Mountains like a silent and stealthy predator. Two out of five people in Vermont experience hunger, according to Hunger Free Vermont. And the problem may soon get much worse.
The Trump administration has proposed sweeping cuts to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, the nation’s largest food assistance program. The Senate is currently considering a budget reconciliation bill passed by the House that includes billions of dollars in cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. Up to 13,000 Vermonters may have their food assistance reduced or eliminated if the measure is approved. Many legal immigrants, including refugees and asylees, will no longer be eligible for food benefits, according to Ivy Enoch of Hunger Free Vermont.
To find out what this means to the people who will be directly affected by the potential cuts, I visited the largest food shelf in central Vermont, located at Capstone Community Action in Barre. The food shelf is open three days a week. When I visited, a steady stream of people of all ages came through the doors, quietly but gratefully filling grocery bags of food. Volunteers buzzed about helping.
Emmanuelle Soumailhan, coordinator for Capstone’s food shelf, said that the food shelf gets about 800 to 1,000 visitors per month, double the traffic it received before the Covid pandemic. The potential for federal cuts has her concerned that “we're not going to have enough food and we're going to see a surge of people … (and) we're just going to run out of money.”
Stephanie Doyle came to the food shelf to get food for her family. She said that her SNAP benefits did not cover her family’s food needs for the month. “You just can't afford getting fruits and vegetables and all that stuff that you need to do to be healthy, especially when you have a child that you're taking care of.”
Doyle wants to ensure that her teenage daughter is “fueled really well in school so that she has a chance to thrive and get a good education just like all of the other kids who have more.”
Leslie Walz, a retired school nurse from Barre, was volunteering at the food shelf. She was outraged by the prospect that SNAP funding would be slashed.
“I don't know what's going to happen to these people that are dependent on the food shelf here,” she said. “Many of them don't have a place to live. They're living out of their cars. They were living in motels. It's essential. It can't be cut, not if we have a heart.”
Liz Scharf, director of community economic development and food security at Capstone, insisted that philanthropy and charity can not replace lost federal funds. She is hopeful that the most draconian cuts will be avoided.
“I just hope that in the end we're a country that decides to make sure our people are cared for, rather than giving money to the highest wealth individuals in this country through tax breaks,” said Scharf.
Disclosure: David Goodman's wife, Sue Minter, was the executive director of Capstone Community Action from December 2018 to January 2025.
In 2010, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released a secret video of a U.S. helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians. U.S. authorities charged him with disclosing state secrets and demanded his extradition to the U.S. Assange took refuge inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London and spent a dozen years first inside the embassy and later jailed in the U.K.’s high security Belmarsh Prison. He was released last year after pleading guilty to a single charge under the Espionage Act and now lives in Australia.
Last week, Julian Assange returned to the international stage, walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival alongside Vermont filmmaker Eugene Jarecki. Jarecki’s new film, “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” chronicles Assange’s crusade to reveal inconvenient truths that governments seek to bury. Jarecki’s new film has been garnering awards, receiving the first-ever Golden Globe Award for best documentary, and taking the special jury prize of the L’Oeil d’or, or Golden Eye award, the documentary film prize at Cannes.
At the Golden Globes, the award Jarecki received recognized his work for “combining the skills of a journalist with the voice of a poet.” The statement added, “At a time when truth is under pressure, Eugene’s work reminds us of the power of storytelling to provoke, enlighten, and ultimately defend democracy itself.”
Eugene Jarecki has won Emmy and Peabody awards for his previous films, including documentaries about Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and the military-industrial complex.
Jarecki lives in Vermont and co-founded the Big Picture Theater in Waitsfield. I caught up with him in Europe.
In 1998, brothers Mateo and Andy Kehler bought a piece of land in the Northeast Kingdom town of Greensboro that would become home to Jasper Hill Farm. Within a few years, the brothers were producing award-winning cheeses and had created an iconic Vermont brand. Among the numerous accolades received by Jasper Hill are Best American Cheese from the World Cheese Awards, gold medals from the International Cheese Awards and Best of Show from the American Cheese Society.
Today, Jasper Hill, the largest employer in Greensboro with 85 employees, is confronting headwinds. Its lucrative Canadian markets have completely dried up. Canadians are boycotting American-made products in response to President Trump’s tariffs and his threats to make Canada the 51st state. And Vermont’s housing crisis is making it extremely difficult for Jasper Hill’s employees to live and for the company to grow.
The local housing crunch is so severe that Jasper Hill has bought 11 properties and is subsidizing rent so its employees can afford to live.
"The folks that are living in our houses can't find anywhere to live. There's nothing to buy and there's nothing to rent,” said Kehler.
But despite the town’s dire need for moderately priced housing, Greensboro residents recently voted down a plan to redevelop its derelict and underused town hall into affordable housing. As VTDigger has reported, the plan was for the nonprofit Northeast Kingdom housing agency RuralEdge to invest $10 million in rehabilitating the town hall and create up to 20 units of affordable housing.
Greensboro, with about 800 year-round residents, is one of the wealthiest communities in Vermont. It has the highest rate of second home ownership in the state. In 2019, Greensboro’s town plan and a housing needs assessment detailed Greensboro’s “great need” for moderately-priced housing.
Jasper Hill Farm co-founder Mateo Kehler described his neighbors' rejection of the affordable housing plan as “soul crushing.”
I visited Jasper Hill Farm to talk with Kehler about cheese and the challenges confronting his renowned business. When I arrived, he was outside in large rubber boots washing out a milk truck. Kehler invited me inside for a walk around the creamery. We were soon standing among gleaming stainless steel pipes and large copper tanks. The air was thick with the distinctive sweet and sour smell of fermenting cheese.
Kehler described what has happened to his Canadian sales. “We were expecting to sell nearly $1 million worth of cheese to Canada and Montreal, which is our closest metropolitan market and is the best cheese market in North America.”
“It went from going gangbusters to a zippo in just a few—the span of a month,” he said.
“I don't think you can overstate the consequences for small businesses on the border here,” he said of the shutdown of Canadian business. “It's been a disaster.”
Kehler said that he has received some blowback as a result of his vocal advocacy for affordable housing. “Everybody loves Jasper Hill until we start talking about housing. And everybody wants housing in theory, but almost nobody here wants housing in practice.”
“Families with children … are the way that communities replicate themselves,” said Kehler, “and Greensboro has lost its capacity to replicate itself.” He said that Greensboro has erected a metaphorical gate that keeps out young people.
Jasper Hill Farm is “going to be fine, but … Greensboro is not going to be fine,” he continued. The housing crisis “is not existential for us but it probably is existential for the nursing home, and it is absolutely existential for the school, and it's going to be a huge problem for the town when there's nobody to volunteer for the fire department” and other town organizations.
Kehler is now advocating for affordable housing on a statewide level. He said that Vermont needs a new model of multi-unit housing.
“The days of single family homes spread out and in the middle of nowhere on the back end of dirt roads is basically over,” he asserted.
Karen Kevra was passionate about playing the flute as a child. But in college, she became disillusioned and walked away from classical music. Her long and winding journey brought her back to music, and in the process, transformed the music scene in Vermont.
Karen Kevra is founder and artistic director of Capital City Concerts (CCC), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. It has become one of Vermont’s premier and most beloved chamber music series, holding concerts in Montpelier and Burlington. Kevra is a Grammy-nominated flutist who performs at each of the CCC concerts. She has shared the stage with members of the Emerson String Quartet, the Paris Piano Trio, the Borromeo String Quartet, the Boston Chamber Music Society and Trey Anastasio of Phish.
Kevra has performed throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe, including performances at Carnegie Hall and the French Embassy in Washington D.C. When the Covid pandemic closed down performance venues, Kevra turned to telling stories. She launched a podcast, Muse Mentors, a series of beautifully crafted interviews with artists, activists and thinkers in which she explores the transformative role that mentors have played in their lives. She is on the music faculty of Middlebury College.
Kevra credits her own mentor with changing the course of her life. As an adult, Kevra sought out a teacher, Louis Moyse, a renowned flutist, composer and co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival. She was introduced to Moyse by Jim Lowe, the longtime arts editor of the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, who has advised Kevra over the years. Lowe shared a recording of Moyse with the aspiring young flutist.
“I'd never heard flute playing like that before, and I'd never heard music making like that before, and so that was it," says Kevra. "I finally decided to screw up my courage and pick up the phone and make a phone call to go and play for Louis Moyse, in hopes of being able to study with him.”
Moyse and Kevra instantly bonded. Louis and his wife moved to Montpelier and he encouraged Kevra to launch Capital City Concerts. “Invite your friends to come and play,” he counseled. Their musical relationship blossomed into a lifelong friendship that lasted until Moyse’s death at the age of 94 in 2007.
Kevra says of her 25-year long music series: “These concerts are kind of a respite from all of the difficult stuff that's going on in the world and the news. We're offering a kind of salve for the soul.”
Mohsen Mahdawi is a free man. That has not come easily. It has taken a national human rights campaign to free Mahdawi and keep him free. He is among the first people in the country to be freed from detention under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Mohsen Mahdawi is a Columbia University student and Palestinian activist who was arrested in Vermont by immigration agents last month at what he was told would be a citizenship interview. Mahdawi, 34, grew up in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but is now a legal permanent resident living in Vermont. He is a practicing Buddhist and was president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association and he co-founded Columbia's Palestinian Student Union.
Mahdawi’s immigration interview on April 14 was supposed to be the last step in his 10-year journey to become a U.S. citizen. But it was a trap. Upon completing his interview, he was whisked away in unmarked SUVs by armed and masked federal agents. He was accused by the State Department of posing a threat to national security over his pro-Palestine campus activism.
Mahdawi was keenly aware of President Trump’s ominous crackdown on immigrants. Other international students who were in the U.S. with valid student visas or were legal permanent residents were being snatched off the street and quickly shipped to a prison in Louisiana, where judges were more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s effort to deport them.
Mahdawi alerted Vermont’s congressional delegation to his fear of being arrested and he contacted attorneys to act swiftly in the event he was detained. Just as he anticipated, the federal agents who arrested him hustled him to the Burlington airport where he was to be put on a plane to Louisiana. This followed a well-worn script — until Mahdawi missed his flight. That gave time for his lawyers to make an emergency appeal to Vermont federal Judge William Sessions III, who immediately issued an order blocking the Trump administration from removing him from Vermont. Mahdawi was in immigration custody in Vermont for 16 days. On April 30, Vermont Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Mahdawi’s release on bail, comparing his arrest to the unlawful repression of free speech under McCarthyism.
The Trump administration is continuing its effort to deport Mahdawi. For now, he can continue his fight for freedom outside of prison. (Disclosure: the ACLU of Vermont, where I am a board member, is part of Mahdawi’s legal team.)
Mohsen Mahdawi is planning to attend his graduation from Columbia University next week and to begin graduate studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in September.
I met Mohsen Mahdawi near his home in the rural Upper Connecticut River Valley. He said he preferred to be outside in nature, his sanctuary. He asked me to join him on a favorite hike through a forest and up a hillside with beautiful views.
Following is an excerpt of our Vermont Conversation edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation at the audio link at the top of this article.
Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark recently filed her fourth lawsuit in two weeks against the Trump administration, this one to stop Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from dismantling the health agency.
It is the 13th lawsuit that Clark has filed against the Trump administration in its first 100 days (see VTDigger’s online tracker of Clark’s actions). These are multistate lawsuits brought in conjunction with other Democratic attorneys general.
Clark's lawsuits include challenging the gutting of the departments of Education and Health and Human Services, dismantling AmeriCorps, anti-DEI rules, tariffs, Elon Musk’s unchecked power, and anti-LGBTQ+ rules in the military, to name a few.
Clark, who was reelected in November to her second term as attorney general, accuses President Donald Trump of violating the U.S. Constitution that he was sworn to defend.
“Every single time Donald Trump violates the constitution or federal law and Vermont has standing, we are suing,” she said.
Trump has been on a remarkable losing streak. Nationally, more than 200 lawsuits have been filed against the administration so far, and judges have fully or partially blocked implementation of most of Trump’s actions. During Trump's first term, Vermont participated in 62 lawsuits and won a favorable outcome in 60 of those cases.
What is the point of taking actions that are struck down by courts?
Clark points to Trump’s record as a businessman, in which he declared bankruptcy six times.
“I think some people would feel embarrassed if they had a business model that was going to have a lot of failures,” she said. “And he just doesn't. He's not oriented that way. He doesn't necessarily see a failure as a loss. I think he sees these as tools to understand what his power is and to stretch his power by intimidation.”
“He's using these extreme cases to test the boundaries of his power and also to gain power for himself,” she added.
Clark said she is especially concerned about Trump’s attacks on poor people, such as slashing the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Head Start, the early education program for low-income people, both of which benefit thousands of Vermonters.
“It isn't for the administration, the executive branch, to decide how to spend the taxpayers’ money,” Clark said. She insisted that Congress “created these programs, and they have funded these programs, and Donald Trump needs to deliver the money to the programs.”
What if Trump ignores the courts, as he seems to selectively be doing? Clark has a warning for Trump’s lawyers who defy court orders.
“There are consequences: It's disbarment. It's being in contempt,” she said. “At some point, lawyers who disobey will be punished.”
Numerous Trump attorneys have been disbarred in recent years.
The attorney general said her biggest concerns are apathy and the erosion of the media, which are interconnected problems. “There's apathy because people actually don't understand what's going on from a non-biased source.”
Many people “are getting their news not from journalists, but from entertainers,” she said.
Clark advises Vermonters to "hang in there.”
“Our country is strong (and) was literally designed to protect itself from someone who wanted to be king,” she said.
The attorney general said people must "do our part as citizens: voting, participating in democracy, protesting, speaking up. That's my message to Vermonters.”
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the historic passage of the civil unions law in Vermont.
On April 25, 2000, after a remarkable four-month marathon of public hearings, legislative maneuvering, protests, counter-demonstrations and statewide soul-searching, the Vermont House of Representatives voted 79-68 to pass the civil unions bill, the most sweeping grant of rights to gay couples in the nation.
The law allowed same sex couples to form civil unions, the legal equivalent of heterosexual marriage. Gov. Howard Dean signed it into law the next day.
Rep. Bill Lippert was the lone openly gay Vermont legislator in 2000 and led the fight for passage of civil unions and later same-sex marriage. I was a reporter covering these historic events for Mother Jones. Lippert invited me onto the House floor moments after civil unions passed in 2000 to interview him and other supporters of the bill.
I described how Lippert made a beeline across the House floor to thank Rep. Bill Fyfe, an 84-year-old former jail warden and Republican state representative from Newport City. His wife was in the hospital, and Fyfe was due to have surgery the following day. But he made sure to be in the Statehouse to cast his vote for civil unions.
I asked Fyfe why he had voted for the bill. He looked at me through his thick glasses and his eyes began to water.
“Because he’s one of my better friends here,” he said, motioning to Lippert. “And there were two ladies who were my next-door neighbors for many years …” He broke into a soft sob. “They were treated terrible. I’m just glad I could do something to help.”
Lippert squeezed Fyfe’s shoulder to comfort him, “People can be cruel, Bill,” Lippert said.
Vermont’s civil unions law passed four months after the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Vermont that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the same legal rights and benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples. The court ordered the Vermont legislature to craft a law that would satisfy the ruling, either by legalizing same-sex marriage or by creating an equivalent partnership structure. The decision, wrote Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy, “is simply a recognition of our common humanity.”
Vermont’s civil unions law was a tipping point for the national movement for LGBTQ+ rights. In 2009, Vermont became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage through an act of the legislature, overriding a gubernatorial veto to do so.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, that same-sex couples could wed throughout the country.
Today, LGBTQ+ rights are under attack. President Donald Trump has targeted transgender people with a slew of executive orders. Hundreds of bills aimed at restricting LGBTQ+ rights have been introduced in state legislatures and in Congress. Many people fear that a conservative U.S. Supreme Court could roll back LGBTQ+ rights, including the right to marry.
Bill Lippert was living in Philadelphia when he first visited Vermont in 1972 to hike the Long Trail. He had just come out and recalled that he had trouble finding even one other gay man in the state. Lippert became active in Vermont’s small gay rights movement and went on to serve 28 years in the Vermont House of Representatives from 1994 to 2022 as the representative from Hinesburg. He served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee for a decade and then chaired the House Health Care Committee.
Lippert, 75, is now retired and working on preserving Vermont LGBTQ+ history, including recounting his own experiences as a gay activist and gay legislator in Vermont.
Lippert acknowledged that winning civil unions was viewed by some gay rights advocates — including lead attorney (now federal judge) Beth Robinson — as a defeat.
Lippert said that he knew that “this fight for marriage equality in Vermont was going to be the biggest gay rights fight perhaps of our lifetime.” But he said that as a legislator for six years, “I could tell what was achievable and what wasn't. It was clear (that) full marriage equality in the year 2000 was not feasible. It was not going to happen.”
Lippert insisted that civil unions “was an important step that brought us ultimately to full marriage equality.” And he was determined to build that bridge.
“When civil unions passed, I made a personal commitment to myself that if I could continue to be re-elected, I would stay in the Legislature until we achieved full marriage equality, and that happened in 2009,” he said.
Lippert says that today’s political attacks on trans people has a familiar ring.
“Trans people are being used as a target because it's the ‘unknown,’” he said. “Gay and lesbian people used to be the scary unknown, but that doesn't work anymore in the same way.”
I asked Lippert what concerns him most today.
“The taking away of our basic democratic rights,” he said. “The shocking willingness to detain and deport people who have every right to be here because they've been granted that right.”
“I am an optimist by nature, but this is a frightening time, and I've participated in more protests and demonstrations in the last month than I had in the last 10 years,” he said. “And I think it's important that we do that. We deserve to have the country that some of us have fought for … by fighting for civil rights, for LGBTQ+ rights, rights for women, rights for religious freedom.”
The passage of civil unions came at a price. Seventeen legislators who supported civil unions in 2000 were defeated in elections the following November as part of the “Take Back Vermont” movement. Lippert takes inspiration from those elected officials.
“One of the lessons that I take from civil unions is that there are still people of tremendous personal moral courage and political courage,” Lippert said. He mentioned defeated Republican legislators John Edwards, Marion Milne, Diane Carmolli and Bill Fyfe.
“When you're not part of the same ‘despised minority’ but you say it's wrong to have discrimination against them, it's wrong to be prejudiced against them — you get attacked as well. And they did so,” he said.
“They did the right thing. They chose to stand up,” Lippert said. “That girds my hopefulness.”
Jeff Sharlet spends a lot of time going where most people fear to tread: into the heart of militant right-wing movements, where he comes back with unforgettable stories and personal insights about conspiracy theorists and people who want to shatter modern society and remake it in a Christian nationalist image.
Sharlet is a professor of writing at Dartmouth College, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and the New York Times bestselling author or editor of eight books. His 2023 book, “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,” was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Nonfiction, and his book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” was the basis for a 2019 Netflix documentary series, for which he was narrator and executive producer. Sharlet’s writing on current politics can be found on his Substack, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Sharlet describes his work as “reporting on the intersection of religion and politics.”
He no longer characterizes the current state of politics and polarization as a “slow civil war.”
“When I talk to young trans people, they're not paranoid when they say their state wants them not to exist. They are correct. That's sped up. The removal of books, the erasure of history, the threat to the universities, which is a hallmark (of) authoritarianism — this is textbook.”
“Everything Trump has said he was going to do, he has attempted to do. It's time to lay aside the ‘this is just negotiating tactics.’ He's going to negotiate us right down into full fascism.”
Sharlet has written about the carefully crafted imagery of authoritarianism that is on display right now. He singled out Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's visit to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where she posed "in tight athleisure" outfit while wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch in front of a backdrop of caged shirtless men who had allegedly been deported from the U.S.
"It's very powerful theater," he said. "Authoritarian movements do not make policy recommendations. They put on theatrical productions. They do not persuade with arguments. They bludgeon with images."
Sharlet recently returned from reporting trips to Idaho and upstate New York, in Rep. Elise Stefanik’s district. I asked how MAGA supporters whom he encountered were feeling about Trump’s performance, including the predicted economic impact on red states of tariffs, social security and Medicaid cuts, inflation, government layoffs, and the price of eggs – up 60% compared to a year ago.
“There's a lot of people who are pleased with this and there is an increasing radicalization,” he said.
“There used to be a Q-Anon slogan called ‘trust the plan,’ and that's the ethos of the politics: trust the plan.”
MAGA supporters told him that “they're pleased about crackdowns on trans people. A lot of people are really, really happy about crackdowns on colleges.” He described how a member of a church that he visited in Spokane, Washington, “were thrilled. They feel like religious freedom is finally being established.”
"I think people are taking false reassurance of saying, 'Well, he's hurting his own base'. Of course, he's hurting his own base. Fascism is not a good deal. It's not a good deal for anybody. But you break government, and then you have your complete control over it. The goal is power, and with power comes the ability to enrich those who are close to you. It comes with the power to satisfy both your own ideological projects and those of your allies."
On the left, Sharlet said “there's much more tuning out than the first Trump administration.”
He said that people opposed to Trump “have to build coalitions that are not just the people who have the right political ideas. We have to have coalitions with people who don't normally think about politics, who don't even have an opinion on it.”
“Whatever we're doing, it’s not enough. So good. Let's do more.”
Vermont has been thrust to the center of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
On April 14, Mohsen Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University and a legal permanent resident of the U.S. who lives in the Upper Valley of Vermont, traveled to Colchester for his naturalization interview, the final step in becoming an American citizen. Mahdawi was born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has lived in the U.S. for a decade and holds a green card.
Mahdawi has been a Palestinian rights activist at Columbia, though he did not participate in the student protest encampment there last spring. He is set to graduate next month. He suspected that his immigration appointment was a “honey trap” meant to lure him out to be deported, as happened to his friend, Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and a fellow Palestinian student activist at Columbia.
Before traveling to Colchester on Monday, Mahdawi alerted his attorneys, Vermont’s congressional delegation, and journalists in the event that he was arrested. When he showed up for his naturalization interview, he was taken by hooded plainclothes officers who placed him in handcuffs before he could leave the building.
Mahdawi has not been charged with a crime. According to his attorneys, he was detained under an obscure law that permits foreign nationals to be deported if they pose "serious adverse foreign policy consequences." Mahdawi's attorneys argue that he is being punished for protected speech in violation of the First Amendment and his right to due process. In response to an emergency petition filed by Mahdawi's lawyers, Vermont federal Judge William Sessions ordered the Trump administration not to deport him or move him out of the state while he reviews the case.
A CBS News crew interviewed Mahdawi the day before his arrest. He told them, "If my story will become another story for the struggle to have justice and democracy in this country, let it be."
Also on Monday, attorneys for Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts University, argued before Judge Sessions in Burlington that Öztürk’s arrest on March 25 violated the law. Öztürk, a former Fulbright fellow who is from Turkey and is in the U.S. on a student visa, was grabbed off the street in Somerville, Mass., by masked plainclothes men, a scene that was captured in a now-viral video. She was whisked to Vermont that night before being flown to Louisiana the following morning. A federal judge in Boston ruled that her case should be heard in Vermont. Judge Sessions is now considering the matter.
Öztürk's attorneys assert that the Trump administration secretly revoked her student visa and targeted her for co-writing an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper that criticized university leaders for their response to demands that the school divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Both Mahdawi and Öztürk have been targeted by shadowy right wing pro-Israel groups. Mahdawi was named by the militant Zionist organization Betar US, which placed his name on a “deport list” that it gave to the Trump administration.
Öztürk was targeted by Canary Mission, a right-wing group that claims that she “engaged in anti-Israel activism,” an apparent reference to her op-ed piece.
Vermont’s political leaders denounced Mahdawi's arrest. Rep. Becca Balint, and Senators Peter Welch and Bernie Sanders issued a statement saying that Madahwi’s arrest “is immoral, inhumane, and illegal.” They demanded that he “must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”
Gov. Phil Scott stated, “Law enforcement officers in this country should not operate in the shadows or hide behind masks.”
On Tuesday, Democratic leaders in the Vermont Senate demanded that Vt. Gov Phil Scott terminate an agreement that allows federal immigration authorities to lodge detainees in state prison.
The Vermont Conversation spoke with two attorneys at the center of these cases.
“The larger concern here is one's right to free speech,” said Cyrus Mehta, an immigration attorney based in New York and an adjunct professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. He is part of Mohsen Mahdawi's legal team.
“The Supreme Court has long held … that everyone in the United States, whether they're citizens or non-citizens, including green card holders, have a First Amendment right to free speech. The free speech might not be to your liking. You may not agree with it. But as long as it's lawful, as long as you're not engaging in criminal conduct, that speech should be protected under our First Amendment.”
“It is against the interests of the United States to harshly go against students, treat them like criminals -- even worse than criminals by detaining them, not giving them bond -- and their only offense has been speech that has not particularly been favored by this administration.”
Mehta warned that denying rights to green card holders “will slowly extend to U.S. citizens, we will all lose this cherished First Amendment right to express ourselves.”
Grabbing people off the street by masked plainclothes officers “absolutely bears many of the hallmarks of a kidnapping,” said Lia Ernst, legal director of the ACLU of Vermont, who is on Rümeysa Öztürk's legal team. (Disclosure: I serve on the board of the ACLU of Vermont).
“The notion that the administration — with no due process, with no judicial review — can sneak someone around the country, as happened in our case, and then, as has happened in these other instances, out of the country, and then claim they are powerless to do anything about it, is utterly foreign to the American legal system. It's utterly foreign to the rule of law, and it is abhorrent.”
"It's just horrifying, and I believe intentionally. The government is not trying to just punish Rümeysa for her speech. It's trying to tell everyone else they better only express opinions with which the government agrees. And that cannot be in the United States of America.”
As President Trump and his allies stymie court orders, will the legal system hold?
“I have to believe that it will, but it will not do it on its own,” replied Ernst. She cited the importance of recent protests.
“There is real power in the people standing together and demanding adherence to the rule of law … and to stand up to this administration and to say that its refusal to abide by the constitution and to abide by the rule of law will not be tolerated. But the legal system can't do it by itself.”
Journalist Garrett Graff is sounding increasingly urgent alarms about America’s slide into authoritarianism.
He said that what is happening under the Trump administration is not a constitutional crisis, which “normally means that there's some sort of tension in the system, disagreements between the two branches.” Instead, he insisted that the tension is absent because “what we are seeing is a Congress that is willingly abdicating many of its constitutional and statutory authorities to the President.”
What is happening now is “a constitutional crash. And I mean that in the medical sense, where we are seeing the unwinding of our constitutional system writ large, and sort of a collective failure of checks and balances across the board.”
“Checks and balances only work if Congress actually cares,” Graff continued. “And what we're seeing right now is Congress just not caring what the President does... They seem unwilling to stand up for both their traditional role and also their own personal power in Washington, lest it basically anger Donald Trump's hoards of supporters and turns MAGA against them.”
Garrett Graff, a former editor of Politico and Washingtonian magazines, is a frequent guest on television news shows and a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. His oral history of the 2008 financial crisis, “The Weekend That Shook The World,” was published this week in the Washington Post op-ed section.
“I think the 2008 financial crisis is a moment that we have not fully reckoned with in terms of how it shaped and changed the trajectory of our country,” noted Graff. “It caused an enormous loss of faith in the system and in institutions among voters and Americans. It launched the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, which we have seen go in the years since from the fringe to the mainstream of the party.”
“The fact that there were no Wall Street executives who were publicly held to account in criminal prosecution — basically that there were no CEOs who were perp walked on TV — caused a lot of people to rightly feel that the system was not working for them, that basically the powerful were being protected and they were being made to pay the price as ordinary mortgage holders or shareholders across the country. It also a big part of the rise of Donald Trump, who, in the wake of the financial crisis, begins his regular commentary for Fox News as this businessman and entrepreneur, and begins the way that he moves to the center of gravity in the Republican Party.”
Graff was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his 2022 history of Watergate. He is the author of numerous books about history and national security, including “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9-11,” and “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here ― and Out There,”
Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario.
Recently, Graff, who lives in Burlington, turned his lens closer to home. He is the editor of a new book from the Vermont Historical Society, “Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont.” (Disclosure: VTDigger reporter Erin Petenko was interviewed for “Life Became Very Blurry.”
Graff wrote that “it’s possible that Covid will prove as transformational a moment for the (Vermont) population and culture as the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s.”
He predicted that the “national revolution around remote work” will benefit Vermont in the long term" and bring "a new generation of Vermonters to the state who can make successful careers here.”
Graff notes that nationally, the pandemic gave rise to nostalgia that has fueled Trump's promise to return the country to a mythical past, even to a time when the U.S. was ruled by a king.
"Right now, hour by hour, we are watching the court cases play out about whether the President can rendition people without criminal records to torture gulags in El Salvador and then declare them beyond the reach of US courts for any sort of due process whatsoever. It does not take a law degree to note that that is one of the most fundamentally unconstitutional sentences I could have possibly uttered, and goes against sort of every American tradition in the legal process and due process in our 250 year history. It sounds much more like something King George III was doing to the colonists when they declared independence than anything that we have seen a US president do ever since."
Are we on the road to authoritarianism?
"I think we are in a moment where we are trying to answer that question anew almost every single day."
Dr. Mark Levine retires as Vermont’s health commissioner this week after an eight year tenure marked by historic events. Dr. Levine is best known as the steady hand guiding Vermont’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which by many measures was one of the most successful in the nation. Vermont had the second lowest Covid fatality rate, after Hawaii. According to the Vermont Department of Health, 1,283 people died from the Covid pandemic in Vermont.
During the dark days of lockdown in 2020 and 2021, Dr. Levine stood alongside Gov. Phil Scott and reassured anxious Vermonters about how to stay safe, the need for masking and social distancing, and the critical importance of vaccinations. His grandfatherly baritone voice conveyed wisdom and compassion.
In announcing Dr. Levine’s retirement, Gov. Scott said, “I will be forever grateful for his advice and counsel over the years, but especially during the pandemic, as he appeared with me daily at press conferences during those difficult days, giving much comfort to Vermonters as our very own ‘Country Doc'.”
Sen. Peter Welch said that Dr. Levine “helped Vermont through those incredibly challenging times, and saved many lives.”
Prior to Dr. Levine’s appointment as health commissioner in 2017, he worked as a primary care physician and as a professor and associate dean at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, where he still teaches.
Dr. Levine, 71, steps away from health care leadership at a fraught and uncertain moment. Public health and science itself have come under unprecedented attack by the Trump administration. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the country’s newly appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, has been derided for being a conspiracy theorist and one of the top purveyors of medical misinformation. This week, Kennedy announced the layoffs of 10,000 health workers and $11 billion in cuts to public health grants dolled out to states. This includes a $7 million cut in aid to Vermont that state health officials said would “negatively impact public health in our state.”
All of this comes as measles is infecting unvaccinated children in the U.S. in what is already being described as the worst outbreak of this century.
Dr. Levine reflected on how Vermont compared to other states in managing the Covid pandemic. “Our economy looks like many of the states that had far worse outcomes from Covid and prioritized their economy more in terms of keeping a lot of sectors open. When you look at the bottom line in the end, our economic status and theirs don't look very different, yet our public health status looks much, much better. And I'm going to hang my hat on that as very, very important for the way we approached the pandemic here in Vermont.”
“You know, there isn't a hell of a lot I would have done differently, to be honest,” said Levine.
Levine insisted that there are not many critics who say “you shouldn't have had vaccines. You shouldn't have masked us up. You shouldn't have closed down things. When you close them down, they kind of understand that the major outcome was that Vermont fared much better as a state than many other states. So it's hard for me to have too many regrets.”
Why did Vermont fare better than other states?
“We come from a culture here in Vermont where people look out for their family, they look out for their community, and they work collaboratively,” said Levine. “The second thing is that in public health, we always say, be first, be right, be credible. And the communication that the governor and I and the rest of the team had was frequent, it was with integrity about what we knew and what we didn't yet know, and it was with great transparency … revealing the data every time and showing what we were responding to.”
Levine leaves his post with deep concern about what lies ahead for public health. “When disinformation comes from the top, whether it be the secretary of (Health and Human Services) or the president, it has an impact and it makes our job much harder.”
Levine noted that even when Trump administration officials are trying to control the measles epidemic, “they always manage to sort of agree, but then say the wrong thing and let you know that they really aren't completely aligned, which is a problem I am very concerned about."
Levine says that federal budget cuts could have a serious impact on Vermont, where “40 percent of my budget is related to federal grant money.”
If the latest cuts “are a signal of what's to come, then they are of tremendous concern. And the problem is, of course, we're not seeing broad visions and huge strategic plans with discrete timelines associated. We're seeing abrupt moves by the federal government that basically say, today your grants were stopped, and by the way, we're interested in chronic disease prevention. But they haven't actually shown us the vision and the timeline and what the resources will be and (where they) will come from.”
Dr. Levine said of his legacy, “People will always remember Covid, and I'm fine with that, but I hate for that to be the defining moment because public health is so much more than that. One thing I'm very proud of is work we've done to protect our children's health.”
“I'd like to be remembered that we've now turned the curve on the opioid overdose death rate, and it's clearly on the way down. It's not a mission accomplished. There's still a lot of work to be done. But at least it's going in the right direction.”
As he retires, Levine lamented the rise in the “great anti-science bias” and the movement of those who are “vaccine resistant, or at least hesitant.”
“We do in public health as much as we can to provide what we consider not the alternative viewpoint but the actual evidence-based viewpoint. But the recipients of that have to be willing to receive that information, and we're in a time where many people get their information from one set of resources and they won't veer from those resources to others. So it's a challenging time for public health, indeed.”
This Vermont Conversation was originally published on May 15, 2024.
Nicholas Kristof has been an eyewitness to some of the most iconic political and social transformations of modern times. As a reporter and columnist for the New York Times for the last four decades, Kristof has been telling searing stories about revolutions, genocides, and the impact of global inequality. His work has garnered the top prizes in journalism, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The first was in 1990 for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests in China that he shared with his wife, reporter Sheryl WuDunn, the first Pulitzer awarded to a husband-wife team. They have also co-authored five books.
Since 2001, Kristof has been a regular op-ed columnist for the Times. His powerful dispatches about the genocide in Darfur earned him a second Pulitzer in 2006. The former head of the International Rescue Committee said that Kristof’s coverage saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Sudan.
Kristof has now written a memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” He tells the story of growing up on a sheep and cherry farm in rural Oregon, and then attending Harvard and Oxford. He continues to focus his reporting on human rights, global health, poverty and gender inequality.
In 2021, Kristof left the Times to run for governor of Oregon, but his foray into politics was cut short a few months later when the Oregon Secretary of State ruled that as a result of living and working out of state for years, he did not meet residency requirements. He returned to his job as a columnist for the New York Times.
Despite reporting from some of the world’s grimmest places, Kristof remains stubbornly optimistic. “One thing you see on the front lines, that I’ve seen, is that there has been a real arc of both material and moral progress, and that has left a deep impression on me,” he said. “Side by side with the worst of humanity, you end up encountering the best.”
Kristof has seen authoritarian regimes up close, only to come home to see authoritarianism creeping into American politics. Is he worried about the fate of democracy in the U.S.? “It’s not a binary question, but a spectrum,” he replied.
“I don’t think that the U.S. will become North Korea or China or Russia. But could we become Hungary? Or could we become Poland under the previous government? I think absolutely. I worry about political violence … DOJ, the military could all be heavily politicized, civil service. I worry about all that. I don’t think that I will be sentenced to Guantanamo. But could there be real impairment of democracy, of governance of freedoms? Absolutely. And I, you know, I’ve seen that in other countries.”
Kristof continues to report on human rights abuses and repression, but he insists that he is guided by hope. “I think of despair as sometimes just paralyzing, while hope can be empowering.”
In the late 1960s, Will Patten was living in Berkeley, California, attending antiwar protests and shaking his first against capitalism and greedy businessmen.
Today, at the age of 80, Patten is a true believer in capitalism and a successful businessman.
He tells the story of his odyssey in a new book, “Rescuing Capitalism: Vermont Shows the Way.”
Will Patten grew up on a dairy farm in southern Vermont in the 1950s. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University, Patten attended UC Berkeley to get a doctorate in history. But after participating in the Summer of Love in 1967, he dropped out of grad school and headed back to Vermont to “keep the revolution alive.” He opened a natural foods café in Rutland to serve as a gathering place for like-minded radicals.
“In other words,” he writes, “I became the enemy: a businessman.” But Patten believed in a different kind of business, one that sought to bring about positive social change.
A few years later, Patten met Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who wanted to use their ice cream as a vehicle for social change. Patten saw that they were kindred spirits. He opened one of the first Ben & Jerry’s scoop shops, and soon became director of retail operations overseeing more than 500 scoop shops in a dozen countries. He retired from Ben & Jerry’s in 2007, but quickly unretired to lead Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. In 2012, he unretired again to open the Hinesburg Public House, a community-supported restaurant.
Patten now believes that capitalism has been hijacked by corporate profiteers. What can save it, and us? He insists that democratic capitalism, as he calls it, is the way forward, and Vermont has shown the way.
"(President) Ronald Reagan hijacked capitalism when he proclaimed that government was the problem, and that started a 44 year experiment in letting corporations pursue profits without caring about the earth or its inhabitants. So supply side economics is what hijacked capitalism, and it's been a disaster," said Patten.
Unchecked capitalism has led to "the collapse of our environment, a very hostile climate, and the unraveling of our social fabric. We are in a severe existential crisis, and the time to fix that is getting closer and closer. We're running out of time."
Why does he think that the solution to runaway capitalism is capitalism?
"Capitalism is the only functioning institution there is," said Patten. "Small business is the most respected institution in the country today. I'm not saying that capitalism is going to pull us out of the ditch, but I think — and there are signs that it's beginning — that it is in their own interest to do so."
Patten argues that Vermont's socially responsible businesses, including Ben & Jerry's, Gardeners Supply, and Green Mountain Power, offer a model of how business can support positive change. "The businesses that we have have always revered the environment and the and the communities and the people as much as they've revered profits."
Businesses can do good not just because "it's a moral imperative, but it's also an economic imperative. They're making money finding solutions to the crises we face."
What would Patten tell the '60s radical version of himself?
"I would probably tell him to do what I did, which was to get into the belly of the beast and change it from the inside."
Americans have come to assume that heavy medical debt, unaffordable housing and lack of quality child care are normal features of life. Is there another way?
Journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata traveled the world to find out how other countries are solving problems that plague the United States. From housing, climate change and public education, to addiction and health care, Hakimi Zapata found innovative and affordable approaches that do better. She reports on her globetrotting investigation in her new book, “Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe.”
Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, university lecturer and translator. She is the former foreign editor of Truthdig, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, In These Times and elsewhere.
Hakimi Zapata said she “took a crib-to-crypt approach to policy,” including a look at universal healthcare in the UK, family friendly policies in Norway, "public-housing-for-all in Singapore, universal public education in Finland, drug decriminalization in Portugal, ...internet as a human right policies in Estonia, renewable energy transition in Uruguay, biodiversity protections in Costa Rica, and then finally, sort of the end of a lifetime, with universal non-contributory pensions in New Zealand.”
Hakimi Zapata spoke about Portugal’s decision in 2000 to decriminalize personal drug possession. “Not only did addiction rates fall — overdose deaths fell, HIV/AIDS rates fell, but so did drug use.”
Portugal has demonstrated that “if you treat this as a public health issue … you allow people to reach out for help without the fear of incarceration.”
Hakimi Zapata noted, “There's this myth at the core of American society that somehow places like Norway can afford these great policies because everyone pays more taxes. And the truth is they have a more progressive stepped tax system than we do. They do not have off ramps for the wealthiest Americans or corporations to pay less, or nothing, like we do in the US.”
Hakimi Zapata insisted that progressive social policies often take root in difficult times. The National Health Service in the UK came “out of the ashes of World War II. You have Uruguay’s renewable grid transition coming out of long periods of literal darkness in which they couldn't keep the lights on in their own country.”
“At this moment, remember that things can change for the better nearly as quickly as they can change for the worse, and we can still make things better.”
In Donald Trump’s world, friends and enemies trade places with breathtaking speed. Consider the case of Ukraine.
President Joe Biden hailed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “the man of the year” and pledged that the U.S. “will not walk away from Ukraine” in its war against Russia, which attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, and launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Last week, President Donald Trump called Zelensky “a dictator,” falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and effectively walked away from Ukraine by halting the delivery of weapons and stopping intelligence sharing. Trump has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as “savvy” and a “genius.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed the whiplash that many are feeling about Trump when he said, "Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they are talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense."
Yaroslav Trofimov has long been making sense of a complicated world. He is the chief foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Trofimov was born in Ukraine and has reported from the front lines there. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2023 for his work on Ukraine, and in 2022 for his work on Afghanistan, and won the National Press Club award for political analysis in 2024. He is the author of four books, including “No Country for Love,” a historical novel set in Ukraine that was inspired by his family history, and was published this month.
Describing the disastrous meeting between Presidents Zelensky and Trump, Trofimov quoted Lech Walesa, the former trade union leader and president of Poland, who co-signed a letter with former Polish political prisoners saying that “the meeting in the Oval Office reminded him of the interrogations he had in the communist secret police rooms and in the kangaroo communist courts, where, as he said, we were also told we have no cards.”
“Zelensky told Trump that I'd like to sign an agreement, but what is the guarantee that Putin won’t attack again? And Trump's response was basically, Trust me bro.”
Trump’s “priority is not a peaceful settlement in Ukraine. His main priority seems to be to open up relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, economic, political, geopolitical,” said Trofimov.
“Zelensky is just a chip to be traded, and it looks like the administration will be perfectly happy for the war to end on Russia's terms, meaning that Ukraine will fall back on the de facto Russian rule (under) Russian authority as long as its mineral wealth is sent over the United States.”
What is behind Trump’s warm embrace of Putin?
Trofimov explained that Putin “has always believed that big powers like Russia have the right to a sphere of influence, to arrange things in the neighborhood, and that it's a natural right. And President Putin has described his policy as the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, which is the American version of this 19th century imperialism.”
Similarly, Trump is “laying claims on Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal, which is very similar to the language that Putin is using against Ukraine or the Baltic states. It is also kind of aided by changes inside the American Conservative ... MAGA movement, where a certain fetishization of Russia has taken hold.”
“In the, in the collective imagination of parts of MAGA, Russia is seen as this beacon of Christian family values, traditional values, this antidote to the woke virus. It couldn’t be further from the actual Russia that exists, which is a country with one of (the highest) abortion and divorce rates, with rapidly shrinking population, with endemic corruption.”
What will happen to Ukraine if the U.S. ends its support?
Trofimov believes that “Ukraine will not fold … and Europe, if it really wants to, can sustain Ukraine,” noting that “the European economies are about 12 times the size of Russia.”
“There is a growing realization in Europe that allowing Russia to win in Ukraine will cause much bigger pain in a few years. … Perhaps that will be the end of Europe.”
That is why Europeans are dramatically boosting defense spending. “Obviously, it's much easier with the United States on board, much, much easier. But it doesn't mean that Ukraine or Europe are doomed if the U.S. decides to play for the other team.”
I asked Trofimov whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about Ukraine’s future. He replied by quoting a popular Ukrainian song from the 1920s. “Crying has never brought freedom to anyone. So it's not the time to be despondent or pessimistic. It's the time to do things. Ukrainians are doing things, and the Europeans are starting to do things, and if they keep doing things, then they will be okay.”
Mirna Valerio, aka The Mirnavator, would like you to join her outside her comfort zone.
That’s where I found her when we were both backcountry skiing at Bolton Valley recently. I immediately recognized her from Instagram, where she has 165k followers at @themirnavator. But when I called her an “influencer,” she quickly corrected me. She said she prefers “possibility model.”
Valerio, 49, is a former school teacher and author of the acclaimed blog, Fat Girl Running. The resident of Winooski is now a full-time professional athlete who has attracted legions of fans for her humor and honesty as she takes on big challenges, including multi-day ultramarathons. A self-described large woman and slow runner, she is a champion of body positivity. She hopes that as a Black women participating in what have been traditional white spaces — such as skiing, running and endurance sports — she can show people that being active and joyful do not know bounds of color, size, age, ability or any other difference.
Valerio has been profiled in numerous national news outlets including NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Runners World and the Today Show. She was recognized in 2018 by National Geographic as an Adventurer of the Year.
Valerio has a book, “A Beautiful Work in Progress,” that she also hopes will inspire and motivate people.
Valerio explained that it was 2015 when she started getting attention for her blog “about me being a plus size Black ultra marathoner.” It was “just me doing long distance in the body that I have, and crushing stereotypes of being of a fat person doing sports.”
Valerio has a message to others. “People will always have something to say and an opinion about what you look like, the things that you do, what they think you should be doing, what they think you shouldn't be doing, and all of that's going to keep existing. But you can make a choice as to whether or not you are going to let that run your life.”
“I say, you know, let curiosity be your guide. …And do the things that you need to do for yourself. Even though all of that other negative talk, it might be negative self talk too, even though all of that exists, you go out and do what you need and want to do for yourself.”
Valerio, who is an unapologetic advocate of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), says, “When I show up in a space that has traditionally not seen someone like me in that space, whether it's because of my body size, my gender or my race, I am sending a message, and it's not always easy. …Nature is for everybody. These lakes, these reservoirs, these camp spots, are for everyone. And I want everybody to be able to experience the delight and wonder of being out of nature. So if that means that I step into a space that's primarily white or that has previously been hostile to Black people or people of any other sort of non white identities, then I'm going to keep doing it, just so people can see me and know that they're going to be okay too.”
Is President Donald Trump staging a coup?
“It's certainly an attempted coup, for sure,” Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt, told The Vermont Conversation.
As Trump and billionaire Elon Musk tear through Washington firing thousands of federal workers and shuttering federal agencies, Balint has been drawn out of the halls of Congress to protest in the streets. She joined Congressional Democrats in front of the Department of Education to denounce taking “money away from our kids to give it to billionaires,” and protested in front of the Treasury Department decrying a “hostile takeover.”
Speaking outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week, another agency that Trump is dismantling, Vermont’s second term congresswoman said she was there to “represent rural America” and that the CFPB “is protecting all of us from the kind of fraudsters and scammers that are in the White House right now.”
Balint, who is the vice ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, has implored people to “tune in” to what Trump and Musk are doing. “Authoritarians win when we stop paying attention,” she said at the Treasury.
Balint spoke with The Vermont Conversation while she was in Vermont this week.
“These executive orders, these sweeping orders, many of which run afoul of federal law and the Constitution, it is difficult to look at what is happening and not come to the conclusion that in fact, they are trying to seize power away from everyday Americans, but also power away from the other two branches of government,” she said. “And we saw (Vice President) J.D. Vance this past week making statements that the president actually didn't need to listen to rulings of the court. And of course, if we don't have a checks and balances system here, then we don't have democracy as our founders envisioned it.”
Balint said that her Republican colleagues have acquiesced to Trump’s power grab. “Some of them seem absolutely comfortable with this because they believe in the mission of a Christian nationalist vision for this country. Some of them go along with it because they are afraid of losing their own power.”
Balint bristled at the suggestion that Democrats bear some responsibility for the political turmoil. “It sticks in my craw a little bit when people talk about the Democrats, because we are not a monolith.”
Vermont’s lone congressional representative conceded that Democrats did not effectively address economic disparity in the runup to the 2024 election. “We have a disgusting, unconscionable wealth gap in this country, and I think that we should have been singularly focused on the needs of families who were struggling to make ends meet and continue to struggle.”
Who will lead the resistance? “I understand the frustration and people are looking for one voice, and I think this is a time that is unprecedented. We are trying to fight a battle on so many different fronts right now, and so I'm really putting my head down in my two committees and figuring out how I can continue to push myself, my team, and my colleagues to be much more engaged with the people, because that is how we're going to right the ship right now. As you know, Democrats don't have the House, they don't have the Senate, they don't have the White House. We need three Republicans in the House to have a conscience right now, just three. So we're very focused on that.”
“I can't tell people not to be angry or frustrated. I'm angry and frustrated,” said Balint. “I am absolutely frightened and chilled by where we are right now, and I'm not going to go along as if it's business as usual there.”
Balint urged people to re-engage with politics. “I know people are exhausted. I understand why you just want to take care of you. But as much as we can encourage our friends and family, I always say just to check back in about what's happening because the stakes are incredibly high right now, and it's going to take all of us.”
“I very much fear that we're heading towards a time when Trump is going to openly and actively defy a Supreme Court ruling. And we must take to the streets, all of us, we must. That's why I need people to check back in so they know what's happening.”
“I feel absolutely a sense of purpose and focus right now, and that is helping me. I feel like I know what they're trying to do, and I'm not going to let them.”
Trudy fled her home in Africa in fear for her life. Her “crime” was supporting a candidate for president who was running against the incumbent leader. As her friends and family were being kidnapped, tortured and killed, Trudy decided to save herself and her 1 year old daughter. Seven years ago, she left her country. She arrived in the U.S., applied for and was granted political asylum, and is now a permanent resident in Vermont. Citing concerns about the safety of her relatives, Trudy asked to be identified by her first name.
One of President Donald Trump’s first acts was to shut down asylum and refugee admissions, accusing migrants of staging an “invasion.” The American Civil Liberties Union has since filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of violating legal obligations to offer refuge to those fleeing persecution.
“Those changes were introduced for the purpose of chilling the system, of scaring everyone into hiding, into retreat, into inaction, into panic, into self-deportation or self-harm,” said Jill Martin Diaz, an immigration attorney who is executive director of Vermont Asylum Assistance Project (VAAP), a legal services and advocacy organization. “Even though a lot of these executive actions will not survive scrutiny in court, just having passed them and created fear in our communities is already having a really chilling effect.”
Martin Diaz explained that there have recently been a number of arrests in Vermont by agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Agents have reportedly been showing up at supermarkets, gas stations and Western Union offices where migrant workers are known to frequent. VAAP has a form on its website to report ICE activity.
Vermont is home to several thousand asylum seekers, according to Martin Diaz.
Trudy explained that had she been sent back to her country, she considered giving up her daughter for adoption and then returning to "face the consequences.”
“When I got asylum, I got my life back,” Trudy said. “You have no idea what it feels like to be in a state where you don't know. Because most people who leave their countries to come here don't leave because they want to. For example, for me, I had everything. I had a good job, I'd gone to school. I don't come from a very poor family. I came here because of security reasons for my child and for me.”
Once she received asylum, “a whole burden fell off of me. I started my recovering process.”
Trudy now works as a business office manager and her daughter is in third grade.
“We are moving forward. We are looking towards the future. We are hopeful. We are happy. We are fine. We are really fine.”
President Trump’s gusher of executive orders upending government and targeting vulnerable people is spreading fear and anxiety. In just the last week, Trump has issued orders that would ban gender-affirming health care, effectively close the US Agency for International Development and threaten to close the federal Department of Education, fire career federal prosecutors, freeze some $3 trillion in federal grants, end birthright citizenship, block people from seeking asylum, and construct additional detention centers in Guantanamo Bay for thousands of immigrants to be held.
A headline in today’s New York Times proclaims, “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab.”
Yale historian Timothy Snyder is more direct: “Of course it’s a coup,” he proclaimed in his Substack.
And this is just the third week of Trump’s presidency.
Resistance has been steadily building, especially on the legal front. More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed by Democratic attorneys general, including Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. A number of the legal challenges have succeeded in stopping Trump’s more audacious moves. A federal judge blocked the attempt to end birthright citizenship, declaring that it was “blatantly unconstitutional.”
James Lyall is executive director of the ACLU of Vermont (full disclosure: I am a board member of the ACLU of Vermont). Nationally, the ACLU has already sued the Trump administration over fast track deportation and restrictions on trans youth health care, birthright citizenship and asylum.
Lyall acknowledged the fear that has gripped vulnerable communities including immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and that his office has seen a sharp uptick in calls. But he believes there is reason for hope.
“The fact that so many people want to help and are reaching out to figure out how to support their neighbors and their communities when they feel so threatened right now, that's incredibly powerful,” he said.
“As difficult as it is in moments of uncertainty and fear and even chaos, it's that determination of everyday community members to support one another and to find a way forward that's just really powerful. That is what solidarity looks like.”
“Trump can say whatever he wants. It doesn't necessarily make it so. It's really important to remember that we have strong protections on the books,” he said. He urges people to know their rights.
“For all the progress we've made in recent years in Vermont, legislators can and do more to shore up our state-level defenses,” he advised.
Lyall urged people “not let ourselves or others just be overwhelmed by the chaos. Because that's an intentional part of their strategy.”
“Those who would seek to divide us or sow fear — we know how to get through this, and it's together,” he said. “That is what Vermont — the state of freedom and unity — that's what we are designed for. I just have a lot of faith in the state and its people to come together to get through hard times, and this is certainly one of them.”
Numerous refugees living in Vermont have lost support for food, rent and other basic needs after a funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration. Refugee assistance organizations lost access to federal funds on Monday, only to have a judge block the order on Tuesday, and have the government rescind the order on Wednesday. The situation has caused confusion and panic among newly arrived refugees, who are legal immigrants who often arrive here with nothing.
The federal refugee program assists people who have escaped war, natural disaster or persecution. Refugees typically receive reception and placement (R&P) funds in their first 90 days in the country. Newly arrived families in Vermont receive $1,650 in R&P funds that enables them to pay for initial housing, medicine, clothing and other basic needs.
Last week, the Trump administration halted refugee admissions, stopped R&P payments, and suspended nearly all foreign aid.
The president of Oxfam America denounced the halt in foreign aid as “a cruel decision that has life or death consequences for millions of people around the world."
On Wednesday afternoon, facing furious backlash, the Trump administration rescinded its order that froze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans. But this did not restore the reception and placement funding, leaving 59 recently arrived families with few resources on which to survive. And as of Wednesday afternoon, some Vermont refugee groups were still unable to access federal funds to support their general operations.
On Tuesday afternoon, we spoke about what is happening to refugees in Vermont with Molly Gray, the executive of the Vermont Afghan Alliance, Yassin Hashimi, a program manager at the organization, and Sonali Samarasinghe, Field Office Director for the Vermont office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).
“What we've seen over the last week is a systematic abandonment of Afghan allies and refugees more generally,” said Gray. More than 600 people from Afghanistan, many of whom helped the U.S. in its diplomatic and military missions, have settled in Vermont following the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in 2021.
Samarasinghe said, “It is undeniable that our capacity is being diminished but we are fighting back to continue to support these efforts, to support our clients at least, and we are confident that with the support of Vermonters on the ground here, and we are beyond grateful for their generosity of spirit each and every day, we can meet these challenges.".
Yassin Hashimi was working on a project for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul before fleeing Afghanistan and coming to the U.S. in 2023. His parents have received approval to come to the U.S. but are stuck in Pakistan due to the Trump administration’s freeze on refugee programs. Hashimi has already rented an apartment around Burlington in anticipation of their arrival, but does not know when or if they will arrive.
“Sometimes we have to be ready for the worst situation,” he reflected.
But he added, “We should not give up and we should keep fighting for the things which is right.”
Donald Trump launched his second term as president this week by enacting executive orders authorizing mass deportations, curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, withdrawing from climate accords and pardoning his supporters who assaulted Capitol police officers. Flanked by an assortment of the richest men on Earth, Trump's inauguration vividly symbolized the dawn of a new age of oligarchs.
This has many people — including the nearly two-thirds of Vermonters who voted against Trump — in despair.
Bill McKibben has long found hope and opportunity in the face of daunting challenges. As one of America’s leading climate activists, McKibben freely admits that he has lost more fights than he has won, as evidenced by the inexorably rising global temperatures and the proliferation of climate-fueled disasters, most recently in Los Angeles, where wildfires have burned over 40,000 acres and destroyed over 15,000 structures .
But McKibben keeps writing, organizing, and launching movements. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org that helped to stop major oil pipelines. And he launched a fossil fuel divestment movement that has resulted in more than 1,500 institutions with $40 trillion in assets committing to divesting from fossil fuels.
Four years ago, McKibben launched Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization is now 100,000 volunteers strong.
“It feels to me as if a kind of arc of American history that began with the election of FDR has come to an end,” said McKibben. “The idea that America was a group project that we were working on together trying to make things better, always imperfectly, often dangerously for other parts of the world, but nonetheless a consistent effort to build a country that that worked, that feels like it's over and we're now in some new era where we do not understand what the goals are, what the rules are, what the ideas are, what the etiquette is. I mean, watching Elon Musk throw up a Nazi salute was a pretty breathtaking moment.”
McKibben said that currently immigration is one of his biggest concerns. “The thing that we should be saddest and scared about is what immigrants to this country must be feeling right now. The amount of fear there must be in people's homes every night when they go to bed, just that quanta of apprehension and fright, must be off the charts,” he said. “I don't know quite how we're going to be able to come to the defense of people, but I hope that we can figure out some ways to do it in the longer term.”
McKibben added that his other big concern is “the single deepest problem facing the planet, and that's its rapidly escalating temperature.”
Trump declared in his inaugural speech that he was declaring an “energy emergency.”
“Of course, that's absurd,” said McKibben. “We have no shortage of energy. We're producing more oil and gas than we've ever produced before. The real problem, the real urgency, is that the people who control that oil and gas are worried that we might use less of it someday.”
“We're in an emergency," he continued, "but it's not the one that he's describing. The emergency that we're in, obviously, is the one that drove temperatures higher in 2024 than they've ever been before, and the one that set our second largest city on fire.”
McKibben said that Trump and his oil industry backers hope “that they can get another 10 or 20 years out of their business model even at the cost of breaking the planet, because that's clearly going to be the cost.”
McKibben noted that the fossil fuel industry is losing a race against the burgeoning renewable energy sector, in which China I leading the way with cheap solar panels and electric vehicles. “Every day on this Earth people are putting up solar panels equivalent to a nuclear power plant. ... We've roughly doubled the pace at which we're putting renewables up, and we need to roughly triple it in order to get back on a kind of Paris (climate accord) pathway. But it's a remarkable, remarkable change.”
McKibben observed that even in a hostile political environment “we also need to just celebrate where we are, the fact that we do live at a moment when we could make this decisive turn towards the sun and towards the wind, where we could reconnect with the natural world as the source of our power.”
McKibben is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker at his Substack, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College.
“I don't think that we're actually going to be able in the short term to defy Trump's energy regime. I don't think we can prevent them from doing lots of drilling. I think the place where his ideas are weak and vulnerable is precisely in the fact that now we know how to make the same product — energy — just cleaner and cheaper and more beautifully. And if we can hammer on that, then maybe we'll get somewhere despite it all.”
The 2024 election was a political tsunami that washed across the country and Vermont. The Green Mountain State led the national anti-incumbent wave: More Democrats lost seats in Vermont than in any other state, with more than two dozen Democratic state lawmakers losing their re-election bids. Though Democrats still retain the majority in the State House, the election erased the Democratic supermajorities enjoyed in both chambers of the Vermont legislature.
In addition, Republican John Rodgers won Vermont’s Lt. Governor race, defeating incumbent Progressive/Democrat David Zuckerman. It is the first time an incumbent lieutenant governor in Vermont has been defeated in over two centuries.
The 2024 election has reshaped statewide politics. Republicans now control the top two elected offices in Vermont and Democrats no longer have the ability to override vetoes by Republican Gov. Phil Scott.
Confrontation and stalemate that has often characterized the politics around tax reform, housing, and energy must now yield to compromise.
“One of the things that struck me was that (Gov.) Phil Scott has had pretty much a singular message since he got in, and I do believe that Vermonters have a certain amount of trust in him on the issue of property taxes and the related issue of education finance. And what we had never seen from the governor were detailed proposals on his part,” Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth told the Vermont Conversation.
So Baruth made an offer: he would give the governor the first week of the legislative session to present his ideas to the Senate.
“To his great credit, he has taken us up on that,” said Baruth, noting that this is a departure from the governor’s past practice of “letting us go through an exercise of four or five months work and then vetoing it and demanding that we revise it on the fly at the end.”
“My hope is that we'll take the governor's plan, which is detailed, complex (and) has multiple moving parts, and we will marry it with our own ideas, and we'll reach compromise with not just the governor, but with all three major parties.”
Is Baruth willing to do things that would have made him uncomfortable five or 10 years ago?
“Yes, absolutely,” he replied. He cited as an example his changing approach to education funding. Part of the problem is that “Montpelier has no authority over (school) districts so they make their own budgets. They spend as much as they want, as long as their voters will approve them. They are sovereign in a certain sense. If they don't want to close a building with 22 kids in it, they can have a principal and a superintendent there. But we've reached a point where that doesn't work anymore. The system won't bear that, so we have to have some levers in Montpelier to control spending.”
Democratic House Speaker Jill Krowinski added, “Everything's on the table. We can't come into this with topics that we can't touch or that are off the table … It's gotta be bold, and we have to be open minded about it.”
When it comes to education funding, Krowinski said that she has “been talking with members about showing up wearing our statewide hats, because it's going to have to be a statewide solution, and there's going to be a need for some pretty big compromise here to make a difference.”
“Why I'm optimistic is because everyone is talking about this, everybody is agreeing that we have to tackle it this session and that is the most critical thing we can do right now to support our communities and our families who are struggling,” she added
Regarding the housing crisis, which has left some Vermonters sleeping in tents in frigid winter conditions, Baruth said that Vermont has spent $1.5 billion on housing in the last five years that was enabled by Covid relief money. “That has never been done in Vermont history.”
“There is a small explosion of housing going on,” said Baruth. “It's not going to get us to the ultimate place, but we're about a third of the way there with this last huge infusion of money, and that's no small thing.”
Krowinski said that the House “will be looking at how we can modernize our general assistance program and supporting more shelter capacity. What can we do to ensure that we have the beds that we need for folks that are unhoused? It's been an expensive program and we haven't been seeing the outcomes that we thought we might see and we were hoping for.”
“We're going to have a tough budget year,” she predicted.
Krowinski acknowledged that many Vermonters are on edge about changes and threats being made by President-elect Donald Trump targeting immigrants, abortion rights, and his political opponents.
“My message to Vermonters right now is that we have your back and we will do anything we can within our power if we see threats to Vermonters,” she said.
“We're in this together, and we have a lot of things that we can do to help protect us if those threats come through,” she said.
“So hang in there. We'll get through this.”
Myra Flynn performs on many stages, shape shifting between music and journalism. She is an accomplished songwriter andsinger, performing soul, jazz and indie pop with five albums to her credit. She is also a journalist with a unique voice in Vermont’s media landscape. She is executive producer and host of Homegoings, a program on Vermont Public that launched in 2021 and brands itself as a “righteous space for art and race.” She has also worked as a features reporter at the Burlington Free Press.
Flynn, 40, grew up in Brookfield, Vermont, the daughter of an Irish father and an African American mother. She signed her first songwriting deal at age 16, attended Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and now divides her time between California, where she lives with her husband and 5 year old daughter Avalon, and Vermont, where she works for Vermont Public and does most of her musical performances. I caught her in one of her concerts this summer at a farm in Montgomery, Vermont. Her soulful blues singing is interspersed with a breezy repartee about life, politics, motherhood and relationships.
In her journalism, Flynn fearlessly delves into sensitive topics. She explained about her work in Homegoings, “I wanted to find a way to talk about race that was going to speak in a language that everyone understood and wasn't going to make anyone feel shame or fear around talking about it, that they could boldly participate in the conversation.”
Then she had an epiphany. “That universal language is art. That's how we talk about race. It always has been art that's bridged this gap.”
Last year Flynn did a four-part series on Homegoings on “stereo anti-types,” her term for “the dangerous stereotypes that apply to Black men.” This includes the myth of the scary Black man, the stupid Black man, and the deadbeat dad.
“Black men ..are categorically more harmed in America...by these myths that become real life,” she explained.
Many of Flynn’s stories have an autobiographical component, such a s a show that she hosted about surviving the music industry as a woman of color, a program about preserving one’s culture in a predominantly white state, and another about the “biracial conundrum.”
That conundrum is “just having to choose between the Black or the white race, because it's two of the most opposing races in the world inside of your body. And so you are literally holding history in your blood and in your bones.”
Flynn reflected that in this time of deep polarization, she is “looking forward to whatever personal revolutions for artists come out of this,” such as happened in the 1960s and 70s. “I just want to hear people keep talking about our lives in real time and documenting our history as artists with a sense of responsibility.”
She said that “as a journalist it is my job to be of service to all people who have a story … especially to folks who have less of a voice in all of it. So in some ways, I'm really inspired to get to do the work that I do, and to get to be the person who either has the mic or is passing the mic for really important voices to be heard.”
The acclaimed author Julia Alvarez is the longtime writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her novels include, “How The García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies.” She's also a prize-winning poet, children's author and essayist.
Alvarez’s most recent novel, “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” was published in 2024 and will be published in paperback in April 2025.
Alvarez’s family was forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when her father was implicated in a plot to overthrow the dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez graduated from Middlebury College in 1971 and earned her Masters in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She returned to Middlebury College in 1988 as a full-time faculty member.
Alvarez is a founder of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Alvarez’s work has earned her numerous awards, including a National Medal of the Arts that she received from President Obama in 2014.
I spoke with Alvarez on New Year's Eve 2014. I asked her to share her New Years Resolution.
“Something that I'm really asking myself at this stage of my life with the time left me, with whatever skills I've cultivated over a lifetime of serving an apprenticeship, how do I want to use that skill? How do I want to marshal those resources so that I feel like I'm helping the next generation that is coming after me? … What are the stories we need to be hearing to come together as a human family?" she replied.
"It's those kinds of questions I'm at least asking myself and committed to in the new year and the years to come to try to understand and to work with.”
This Vermont Conversation was originally published on Nov. 23, 2022.
Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick.
“Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to look more like some of the communities that they serve. So they welcomed three new Santas: Chris Kennedy, a Black Santa from Arkansas; Levi Truex, aka Trans Santa, from Chicago; and “Santa Fin” Ciappara, a Santa with spina bifida who communicates via an iPad, joined by his mother Suki Ciappara, both from Barre.
Santa Fin always dreamed of being Santa in a parade. The movie captures the day in December 2021 when his dream came true and he sat in a sled pulled by elves in the River of Light parade in Waterbury.
“Believe in your dreams and don't give up,” he said. "Be kind to people who are different."
For some, diversity is a threat. Kennedy set up an illuminated, inflatable Black Santa Claus display in his yard. Soon after, he received a racist letter. That motivated him to become Black Santa.
“You're not going to steal my joy,” he told The Vermont Conversation.
"I'm appealing to families who want diversity and want to see themselves represented or their adoptive kids want to see themselves represented. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for the naysayers,” Kennedy said said.
The documentary showed the “Proud Boys” protesting Trans Santa Levi Truex outside the Chicago church where he was greeting children last year. Truex talked about violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, which continues to rise. The FBI reported that 2023 was the second year in a row that more than 1 in 5 of all hate crimes were motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias.
“We've always experienced hate. It's what makes us resilient. It's what makes us get louder and push harder,” he said. “The more that we feel the pressure from the hate, the more we're just going to be even more visible and more open. It's just what needs to happen.”
Truex believes that Trans Santa makes a difference, especially for the LGBTQ+ children who visit him.
“I don't have an agenda to make your kids trans or whatever. My agenda is purely to spread joy and just be a good person, to be a good human. And to treat people with respect and dignity and just spread the love of Christmas,” he said.
For Noah Dines, life has been an uphill climb. And that is his dream come true.
Dines, a 30 year-old Stowe local, is in the process of setting a new world record for human powered vertical feet skied in one year. The previous record had been 2.5 million feet set in 2016 by Aaron Rice, another Stowe skier. Dines broke Rice’s record in September, then surpassed his original goal of skiing 3 million feet in October, broke 1 million meters — or 3.3 million feet — in early December, and will wrap up the year having skied 3.5 million feet.
Uphill skiing is known as skinning, so named for the strips of material that attach to the bottom of skis that enable skiers to glide uphill without slipping backwards. They used to be made from seal skins, hence the name skinning. Skinning up ski area trails has become a popular form of exercise in recent years, and backcountry skiers also use skins to travel where there are no lifts.
Dines began his uphill skiing quest on New Years Day 2024 just after midnight. He turned on his headlamp, snapped on his lightweight alpine touring skis and quietly skied off into the night up the trails of Stowe Mountain Resort. He has spent this year chasing snow around the world, from Vermont, to Oregon, Colorado, Europe and Chile. He has skied all but about 30 days this year. A typical day has him skiing uphill about 10,000 feet. At Stowe, that means he skis at least five round trip laps per day, often more. He will finish his quest at the end of this month and will be joined in his last days by his father, who has never skied uphill before.
I met up with Noah Dines on December 17 at the base lodge at Spruce Peak at SMR. It was raining, but Dines was still skiing.
“If you bail when it rains all the time, then you're not getting everything you could,” he said.
Dines explained that his record quest has required “a lot of saying no” to everything from friends’ weddings to having a beer, from which he has abstained. “Your response to anything has to do with, how will this affect my big year?” he said.
Conceding that "the money has definitely been hard," Dines has supported himself during his year of chasing snow through sponsorships from Fischer Skis, Maloja clothing and Plink electrolyte drinks. He also raised $10,000 through a GoFundMe and has drawn down his savings.
What has a year of living strenuously meant?
"Friendships. I've met so many incredible people. It's meant learning how to persevere and work harder than I've ever worked before. It's meant seeing beautiful sunsets in Chile. It's meant cold mornings and crisp Alpine air. In Europe, it's meant croissants on the side of a mountain. It's meant more time with friends in Stowe."
By pursuing a dream, Dines hopes that he can be a model for others. “I have a passion and I pursued it and I've pushed myself as hard as I can, and you can too,” he said. “It doesn't have to be with sports or take a year, but there's no reason that you can't set goals and meet them, that you can't push yourself just because you didn't grow up doing it.”
What will the million meter man do to start 2025?
“Well first and foremost, I'll take a little nap, at least for an afternoon.”
Ben Jealous has a long and deeply personal perspective on the fight for social and environmental justice.
Jealous was elected president and CEO of the NAACP in 2008 at the age of 35, making him the youngest person to lead America’s oldest civil rights organization. Since 2022, he has been the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to lead one of the country’s oldest and largest environmental organizations.
In exploring his own history, Jealous learned that he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee and a former slave. He told this personal story in a memoir published last year, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing.”
Jealous has been working on the front lines of American politics. He was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and in 2018 ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Maryland.
After election day this year, Jealous wrote a letter to his children, nieces and nephews. He reassured them, “All of you descend from families that have been here since the very beginning of our nation and have survived and ultimately triumphed over tougher times.”
Jealous told The Vermont Conversation that he hoped to give his young family members “a little bit of the wisdom I got from my grandparents. Which is, whatever we're dealing with, it's been worse in this country and we still triumph over it. And I also wanted them to understand that our obligation was to fight.”
Jealous was in Vermont this weekend where he spoke at an event sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club.
Jealous blames Kamala Harris’s loss on her failure to champion people’s everyday economic concerns that Bernie Sanders had centered in his presidential campaigns. “What was clear back in 2016 is that Bernie's focus on the betrayal that was NAFTA, on the need for a better health care system, and on the need, most importantly, to really center kitchen table issues that vex all families across this country was something that was having a transformative and realigning impact on the electorate.”
“Corporate Democrats are afraid of that,” Jealous continued. "They are really dominated by a set of consultants who are as addicted to power as they are to corporate cash and they really make it hard for mainstream Democrats to deviate from that.”
Jealous said that under Trump, progressives need to work with people with whom they disagree and who make them uncomfortable. He cited his work with conservative senators to advance environmental issues.
“Hope is a discipline,” said Jealous. “My grandmother, who was the granddaughter of three enslaved people and a white man in Virginia, she would always say pessimists are right more often. But optimists win more often.”
Jealous said that his grandmother “saw life like a boxing match. Any battle usually has like 12 rounds. And if you got in every round expecting to get beat up and knocked down, you probably quit by the fourth.”
“But if you got in every round thinking that this might be the round you don't get knocked down, that you're focused on the victory, and by the time you get to the 12th you realize all you got to do is be the last one standing, at the end of that round, you've won everything.”
John Rodgers is the most interesting man in Vermont politics. And he just may be its future.
The Democrat-turned-Republican who just won the race for Vermont's lieutenant governor did something that has not been done since 1815: he became lieutenant governor by defeating the incumbent lieutenant governor in a general election.al election.
Rodgers’ 6,000 vote victory over sitting Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who ran as a Progressive/Democrat, was part of a statewide backlash that ousted numerous Democratic incumbents. Democrats lost 18 seats in the Vermont House and six seats in the Vermont State Senate, thus ending the Democratic supermajority in both chambers that enabled them to override vetoes by Republican Gov. Phil Scott.
Scott, who endorsed Rodgers and campaigned with him, emerged as the election's biggest winner.
Rodgers’ election as lieutenant governor must still be confirmed by the Vermont Legislature in January, since he won with 46 percent of the vote, just shy of the 50 percent required by the Vermont Constitution.
John Rodgers’ upset win may help explain Donald Trump’s victory nationally. While Rodgers is a vocal Trump critic, both politicians tapped into a deep well of economic anxiety among voters who blamed Democrats for being out of touch with the day-to-day financial struggles faced by many people. In Vermont, those economic anxieties are rooted in double-digit spikes in property taxes and health care costs, compounded by a protracted and worsening housing crisis.
Rodgers is uncomfortable with the comparison to Trump, but he understands it. "There are a lot of the folks that supported me that are Trump supporters, and there were some people who wouldn't vote for me because I spoke outright that I would never support Trump because I value honesty, and the man is totally dishonest ... He's lied, cheated and stolen his way through his entire life, and I can't understand why people cling to him other than the fact that he's not a career politician, and people are so fed up with what's happened in Washington over the last 20 years."
The voter disillusionment that Rodgers channeled was best captured by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who issued a scathing indictment of the Democratic party following the 2024 election: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
John Rodgers said much the same thing throughout his winning campaign. “I think the Democrats in the legislature have lost their way and no longer are taking care of the working class people in Vermont,” he told The Vermont Conversation.
John Rodgers, 59, is new on the statewide political scene but he is a familiar face in Montpelier. He has served in the Vermont State House for 16 years, half in the House and half in the Senate. In 2018, he ran unsuccessfully for governor as a Democratic write-in candidate. He is known for being fiercely independent, often to the frustration of his former Democratic colleagues. Democrat Becca Balint, when she was Vermont Senate majority leader, said of Rodgers, "He sometimes votes with us, he sometimes doesn't, and sometimes we don't know until we get on the floor."
Rodgers lives on the 500-acre farm in West Glover where he grew up. He balances his work in Montpelier with making a living as a stone mason, running a construction company, and growing hemp and cannabis on his farm. He has spoken candidly about his experience growing up poor and the continuing struggles of working class people in Vermont.
Rodgers said that changing parties was a big risk. “I didn't put myself on a glide path in a Democratic state by switching parties to the Republican Party in a presidential year when Donald Trump was running in a state that Kamala Harris won ... It really gives me hope that there are enough Vermonters that are still independently minded that they can pick a person from any party if the message is right.”
Asked whether being a Republican in Trump's Republican Party — which has espoused anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ and pro-insurrection views — was comfortable, Rodgers replied, “Absolutely not. It is terribly hard for me to carry the R beside my name because of national Republican politics. But when I look here in the state, and I look at Phil Scott, and I look at a lot of the moderate Republicans that I worked with for years when I was in the State House and the folks that are new since I left, they are speaking up for working class Vermonters. And so I do not buy into any party platform.”
Rodgers said he is especially concerned by Trump's talk of mass deportation, noting that Vermont’s farms would be crippled without the work of undocumented immigrants. "Our economy can no longer run without them."
How far is Rodgers willing to go to protect the civil liberties of Vermonters if they are threatened in a new Trump administration?
“I'm a bit of a libertarian. I'm willing to go however far as is necessary, absolutely. Bad laws were made to be broken.”
Rodgers said he is often asked whether he is interested in running for governor. He replied that he is not sure he would be ready to run for governor in two years should Scott decide not to run for re-election, but “if it's four years, then maybe I've had enough time to have an impact and convince people of who I am and I'm the right person for the job.”
Rodgers paused, then added frankly, “When I look at the job of the governor, it's not really that desirable a job. It's super hard. I mean, we never have enough money to go around ... So it would take a lot to convince me that that was the next best thing to do.”
Rodgers hopes that his experience in both parties can make him useful in his new role. “When I was a Democrat, the Democrats said, Oh, he's not really a Democrat. Now I'm a Republican (and) there's a bunch of them on the right that say, Oh, he's not really a Republican. But I'm a Vermonter. And what I hope to be is a bridge ... helping in the negotiations between what is perceived as the two sides.”
One year ago, Elizabeth Price was awoken by a phone call with news that every mother dreads: Her son, Hisham Awartani, had been shot, along with his two best friends. It was Thanksgiving 2023, and the three 20-year old college students — all of them Palestinian or Palestinian-American — were taking a walk while visiting Awartani's grandmother in Burlington. The shocking, unprovoked attack against Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad made international news.
A year later, the families are still dealing with the fallout. Hisham Awartani was the most seriously injured. A bullet lodged in his spine, paralyzing him from the chest down. Yet, he has shown remarkable determination and resilience, returning to attend Brown University earlier this year even while undergoing grueling rehab at a Boston hospital. He is now back on campus at Brown, where he is a junior majoring in archaeology and math.
I spoke with Price on Monday, Nov. 25, the one-year anniversary of the attack. That morning, Price mentioned to her sister-in-law that it was “the anniversary of Hisham’s shooting.” She replied, "'No, today is the anniversary of his being alive.' That really is what I have been thinking about."
“Hisham is alive, and that is what we're going to be eternally grateful for ... (He) has demonstrated an incredible strength.”
Awartani now uses a wheelchair and continues to work on his recovery. This fall, he began driving a car outfitted with hand controls. He has finished over 400 hours of rehabilitation. He has moved into a fully accessible dorm room with roommates. He has acquired two cats. And he has returned to Vermont several times to his grandmother’s house, which is now wheelchair-accessible. A GoFundMe established to support his care has raised over $1.7 million from more than 22,000 donors, and it continues to receive donations.
As Hisham Awartani has regained his life, some 45,000 of his fellow Palestinians have lost theirs in a relentless, year-long Israeli assault. Awartani is keenly aware of this dissonance. In May, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he observed that thousands of young Palestinians like him are shot in Gaza and the West Bank but are treated as statistics. Being shot in Vermont was different.
“Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America,” he wrote. “Instead of being seen as Palestinians, for once, we were seen as people.”
Price echoed Awartani's concerns. She insisted that people consider her son’s experience in the larger context of Israel’s ongoing war against Palestinians. “There are still bombs being dropped in Gaza that are being paid for by U.S. tax money,” she said.
“I don't know why the war is still going on. My son is so lucky in everything he has, and I don't understand why Hisham — or anyone else like him — has lost so much.”
The man charged with shooting Awartani and his friends, Jason Eaton, has been held without bail since the attack. Eaton pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder and has been deemed competent to stand trial. Earlier this month, Chittenden County State's Attorney Sarah George announced that she did not have sufficient evidence to add a hate crime charge. The trial will likely be in 2025.
Elizabeth Price has been at her son’s side since last Thanksgiving. I last interviewed her on The Vermont Conversation in February, when she was with Awartani in the hospital in Boston. As Awartani has regained independence and moved back into a dorm at Brown this fall, she was finally able to return to her home in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which is where I reached her on Monday.
“When I look back on this last year, I am just immensely grateful and immensely proud of who (Awartani) is, and immensely moved by all the kindness and compassion and support that we've received. It was a terrible moment. But we've all come out of it healthy, happy and positive about the world.”
Price beamed with pride about Awartani. “I think people will look to him as a thought leader,” she told The Vermont Conversation. “He's so passionate about so many things that he ... will show others that anything is possible.”
“He's a thinker (who) will change the way people see the world and see what people like him can do.”
It has been nearly two decades since a Vermonter won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, widely considered the most prestigious scholarship in the world. The Rhodes Scholarship pays for international students to pursue postgraduate studies for up to three years at Oxford University in England.
This week, Lena Ashooh of Shelburne was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. She is one of 32 Rhodes Scholars chosen from the U.S. from over 3,000 students who applied. According to the Rhodes Trust, Vermont has had 43 Rhodes Scholars since the first cohort in 1903. The last Rhodes Scholar from Vermont was named in 2006.
"It's so special to be named a Rhodes Scholar as a Vermonter," said Ashooh. "People have such a special attachment to Vermont, even if they're not from there, it occupies this really beautiful place in their mind. It's a place of respite and joy and progressivism."
Lena Ashooh graduated from Champlain Valley Union High School in 2021. At CVU, Ashooh was active with 4-H and she founded Mi Vida, MiVoz (“my life, my voice”), a group that brought together the children of migrant farmworkers in Vermont with other youth to share stories and discuss how to make change. In 2020, she was named one of Vermont’s top youth volunteers and was recognized with a national Prudential Spirit of Community Award.
Ashooh is now a senior at Harvard. She is pursuing Harvard’s first major in animal studies, an interdisciplinary program that she designed that combines philosophy, psychology, biology, and political science. She explained that animal studies is a way to study social injustice.
“Looking at the ways that animals were mistreated or their freedom was being restricted also allowed us to attend to ways that people, and specifically vulnerable people, are also being mistreated, being subjected to exploitation or to disease and illness and pollution from farms,” said Ashooh.
While in college, Ashooh has lobbied legislators on environmental justice, worked as an intern for Vermont Rep. Becca Balint, and has done research in Puerto Rico on macaque monkeys. She is co-president of Harvard College Animal Advocates and she also plays the classical harp. At Oxford, Ashooh plans to study animal ethics, and address the question: “What does it mean to respect an animal as an individual?”
“My hope is that working on this question seriously as it pertains to animals might give us better philosophical concepts to be applied with humans as well. That can enable us to ensure that each person's individual value and the valuing of their contributions can be protected.”
Ashooh will pursue a postgraduate degree in philosophy at Oxford and is considering attending law school. She leaves open the possibility of returning to Vermont.
“I've always found Vermont to be a front runner in spearheading progressive ideas that might change the way the country is thinking … I think Vermont would be a very exciting place to return to to try out some progressive policies that might help us head down that path towards a brighter future.”
President-Elect Donald Trump has vowed to take revenge on his enemies. He promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on Day 1 and to further restrict reproductive rights. And he is threatening to overturn longstanding environmental protections and public health measures.
With Republicans now in control of all three branches of government in Washington, state attorneys general are being described as "a last line of defense against Trump."
Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark says she is ready for the fight.
“The federal government can't break federal statute. They can't violate the Constitution, and it's attorneys general like me who will represent the states in making sure that that doesn't happen,” said Clark. During Trump’s first term as president, Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration 155 times, winning 83 percent of the cases.
Clark noted that Trump “has a penchant for breaking the law. He doesn't respect the law in his personal life. He didn't respect it as president, and we can anticipate that he's not going to respect it again.”
“We're going to be ready on day one,” she said.
Clark was first elected attorney general in 2022 and re-elected this November. A native Vermonter whose family owned a popular grocery store in Londonderry, Clark is a graduate of the University of Vermont and Boston College Law School. She went off to New York City to work for a large law firm for six years before returning to Vermont in 2014 for a job in the attorney general’s office. Eight years later, she became Vermont’s top prosecutor. She is the first woman to be elected attorney general in Vermont (her predecessor, Susanne Young, was appointed by Gov. Scott to serve the final six months of Attorney General T.J. Donovan’s term when Donovan resigned in June 2022). Clark is currently one of just a dozen female attorneys general in the country.
“One of the things that I feel almost resentful about is the chaos that a Trump presidency is going to bring on us,” said Clark. “I think about especially my daughter and kids who are in elementary school now and pretty much their whole lives, have had either this chaos or the specter of this chaos and the fear of the second Trump term, and now we're getting it again. …Except this time, we're going to be ready.”
What happens if federal agents attempt to round up people living in Vermont who are undocumented, as Trump has threatened?
“How is he going to pay for it? Who's going to perform the work? How many immigration officers do we even have here in Vermont?” replied Clark “I think we need to sort of stay calm, but we also need to plan and prepare.”
Clark believes that Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, passed in 2022, will protect reproductive rights in the state, but a national abortion ban could upend it.
Abortion is “symbolic of the concept that women are independent human beings who deserve to control their own bodies. And it's appalling to me that we are where we are in this country,” said Clark. “I'm proud of where we are in Vermont, but it is hard to imagine we live in this country where people in Vermont, in every single town, voted to enshrine the right to abortion in our state constitution. And how can our viewpoint be so different from other places in this country? It's honestly disturbing that we are a part of the same union, and yet we have such differing views on this fundamental question of bodily autonomy for women.”
Attorney General Clark concluded with a message to Vermonters.
“I want to reassure them that as their attorney general, I'm going to fight to protect them. I'm going to use every tool in the toolbox to do that.”
“We also have to keep faith in our democracy. And in Vermont, we have a very strong, robust democracy. And we need to keep reinvesting in that vision and participating, even as we look to the future to another four years of Donald Trump.”
America has chosen a strong man — with an emphasis on “man.”
Donald Trump wagered that that a key to victory was appealing to men. His misogynist comments, his contempt for social and political norms, his embrace of authoritarian strongmen around the world was aimed at winning over men, especially young non-college educated men. It worked: the 2024 election results reflected an historic gender gap, in which most men voted for Trump, while most women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The two century-old tradition of electing men to lead the U.S. continues, at least for another four years.
At the age of 91, Gov. Madeleine Kunin has a unique and long perspective on politics. She is the only woman to be elected governor in Vermont, serving three terms from 1985 to 1991. She went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Deputy Secretary of Education under Pres. Bill Clinton. Kunin founded Emerge Vermont to recruit and train Democratic women to run for office.
Kunin’s politics have long been informed by her personal experience with authoritarianism. A Swiss Jew, her family fled Europe in 1940 as Nazism spread.
“I'm inspired in a strange way by my proximity to the Holocaust,” she said the morning after Trump’s election. “We have to speak up. We have to participate. We can't just sit down and shut the door and stay by the fire. We have to fight more than ever and figure out how to be most effective.”
“We will have to fight hard to protect democracy from here on in.”
As a pioneering politician herself, Kunin said she was “very excited about the possibility of electing the first woman president. I hoped I would live that long.”
She mused, “In a time of uncertainty, the public likes a strong man.”
Kunin reflected on the need to “have more of a dialogue with young men so that they begin to understand who we are. That schism, that gap between men and women is not good for democracy.”
In the aftermath of defeat “your first reaction is to retreat,” Kunin conceded, “but I don't think we can afford to retreat. We have to still be activists. We still have to participate and make our voices heard… We just have to force ourselves to keep democracy alive and to express our political and social views and make sure that as women, we remain active.”
Kunin’s advice to women is to “keep on doing what you're doing … I would urge women to continue to strive for top offices and not be totally discouraged by this election.”
Kunin confessed that on the morning after the election, “I felt the real doom and gloom. But as the day goes on and as I'm talking to you, the fighting spirit is fighting its way back into my mind, into my psyche. I know we can't give up.”
As the 2024 presidential campaign hurdles to a climactic finish on Nov. 5, the two major candidates made their closing arguments. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where she promised to be a unifier, casting Trump as a “petty tyrant” who wanted Americans to be “divided and afraid of each other.”
Trump made his final case in a six-hour long rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that featured a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and mocked Jews, Hispanics, Blacks and Palestinians. The New York Times described it as a “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” Many observers and historians have noted that Trump's rally evoked memories of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden that was captured in an Oscar-nominated film, “A Night at the Garden.”
The 2024 presidential race remains razor close. But longtime campaign strategist Stuart Stevens is confident of the outcome.
“I think Harris is going to win easily. I don't think it's going to be particularly close,” said Stevens.
“It's the most stable race I can remember. 47% of the country is either MAGA or open to MAGA and 53% isn't. So the Harris campaign's goal, task, challenge has been to get as much of that 53% as they can and get them to vote. So we wake up in a world where our Senator Bernie Sanders and my old friend Liz Cheney are on the same side. That's not a bad coalition.”
Stevens was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.
Stuart Stevens now contends that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian movement. Vanity Fair recently described him as “the campaign cowboy who famously left the GOP to turn his fire on Trump.” He has written several bestselling books about his political conversion, including his latest, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy To Autocracy.”
Stuart Stevens is now a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. He grew up in Mississippi but has lived for many years in Stowe.
Stevens pointed out that early voting turnout, especially by women, is breaking records. “What is striking about the early vote is that women are voting at 10% higher than men ... (and Harris) is winning women by 14 points ... Even I can do that math," he said.
“When this race is done, it's going to be seen as the women of America spoke,” Stevens asserted.
What happens to Trump if he loses?
“Trump is never going to concede,” Stevens predicted. “They will attempt to have the House (of Representatives) not certify. I think the period from election night until January 20 is going to be the most dangerous period in America since the Civil War.”
Stevens anticipates that if Trump loses he will quickly declare that he is running for president again. “No question. That’s all he does. It's his business. He's not going to go out of business.”
Stevens rues that “Trump didn't hijack the (Republican) party. He revealed it. And the reason that Trump is popular in the Republican Party is because he's what Republicans want.” Even if Trump loses, “it's not going to be the end of Trumpism."
Stevens said that he is not optimistic about the Republican Party, “but I'm very optimistic about America. I just don't think that this is what the country is.”
America is drowning beneath a tsunami of lies.
The 2024 presidential campaign may be distinguished by the sheer volume and audacity of lying. Donald Trump has made embracing The Big Lie—the false claim that he won the 2020 election—a condition of entry into the MAGA universe. Once you accept The Big Lie, similarly brazen but smaller lies flow easily. And so Trump falsely claims that immigrants are eating pets and that disaster relief money is being stolen by Democrats and given to immigrants.
Lying is a bipartisan phenomenon, but Republicans dwarf Democrats in the number of lies that they tell. In September, New York Times fact-checkers analyzed a single stump speech made by both presidential candidates. Former President Trump made 64 false or inaccurate statements in his speech, while Vice President Kamala Harris made six such statements. In October, CNN determined that Trump made 40 false claims in just two speeches.
During the course of his presidency, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day, according to the Washington Post.
“This is the flood-the-zone concept that … Steve Bannon articulated early in the Trump presidency,” said Bill Adair, who founded the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization PolitiFact in 2007 when he was Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). “The other practitioner of this is Vladimir Putin.”
Adair is now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. He has a new book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”
“I think the consequences (for lying) are minimal, if any, now for Republican politicians, because the echo chamber repeats the lies so easily and Republican politicians are not held accountable,” explained Adair.
Fox News has shown that political lying can be profitable. “Conservative media not only has looked the other way when Republican politicians lie, but conservative media has echoed the lies brought in by commentators that have repeated the lies, and conservative media, interestingly, has found there's money in those lies,” said Adair. “Fox found if it did not repeat the lies about the 2020 election, that it lost viewers.”
There is also a price for lying: In 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $788 million for peddling phony conspiracy theories claiming that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden.
Adair argued that the disparity in political lying between Republicans and Democrats “has serious consequences. It not only makes it impossible for us to have a serious conversation about climate, to have a serious conversation about immigration, but it threatens our democracy. Because we can very easily envision not just a rerun of 2020 come the results of the November election. We can see that this time it could turn into a real crisis for our country all because of li
Can social media bring people together rather than divide and deceive us?
In the world of corporate social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, the notion of a nontoxic public forum seems quaint. These are places where political and personal brawling goes on 24/7 and disinformation flows as freely as cat videos. The platforms rely on high conflict to attract eyeballs and make money.
Vermonters have another option. Front Porch Forum (FPF), co-founded in 2006 by Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife Valerie, is a decidedly friendly online place where neighbors go to interact civilly with one another, and do what neighbors do: seek advice, buy and sell things, and discuss local issues without resorting to personal attacks. The site is heavily moderated by real people who read each posting and filter out items that offend, incite or misinform. It operates in every town and has nearly 235,000 members, including nearly half of Vermont’s adults.
The discord common on conventional social media is “not an accident,” said Wood-Lewis. "Another way of saying people are attacking each other and acting cruel is Ooh, member engagement is up. We can sell more ads. We can collect more data to sell to huge data brokers who do God knows what with people's private information. That's the business model of Twitter and Facebook and all these others.”
The idea of an online forum that builds community instead of dividing it is attracting national attention. The Washington Post recently reported, “At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community — and what Big Tech could learn from it.”
The best indication of FPF’s influence is the way that it builds civic engagement. According to a new study by the nonprofit New_ Public, 61 percent of FPF users reported that they had attended a local event or public meeting as a result of something they read on the forum, over half reported that they had discussed issues with a neighbor and one fifth of users said they had volunteered locally in response to a posting on FPF.
FPF, which is headquartered in Burlington, employs 30 people, including many content moderators. Wood-Lewis said that a “critical part of our model is that each member-submitted posting is reviewed by our professional staff before publication (which) is absolutely not how any other social media works.”
FPF enforces a strict set of rules in its online public square, including no personal attacks. “We're not going to let people basically weaponize Front Porch Forum to do harm to our democracy, to our public health, things like that,” he said.
Elon Musk, who owns X, and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg insist that the unfettered exchange of views on their platforms is just free speech. Wood-Lewis begs to differ.
“I do not think the folks you mentioned have any real interest in protecting free speech. They have an interest in amassing power and money.”
Front Porch Forum “has felt better and better as the divisiveness in our national scene has gotten worse, and as the isolation brought on by the pandemic and social media and smartphones and so many different things in modern life has gotten worse,” said Wood-Lewis.
Despite requests to expand to other states, Wood-Lewis insisted that FPF will stay local. The online forum proved its value by connecting people impacted by flooding in Vermont in 2011, 2023 and 2024 with help and resources.
“As long as Vermont communities are struggling in significant ways, Front Porch Forum wants to be there as an ally and a partner.”
The war between Israel and Hamas is now grinding into its second year. The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking civilian hostages. In retaliation, Israel launched a devastating bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The toll of the war is staggering. In the past year, some 42,000 people in Gaza have been killed and nearly 100,000 injured, according to the Gaza health ministry, and about 8,700 Israelis have been injured, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.
Gaza is now experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The health care system has collapsed and a “full-blown famine” is occurring in parts of Gaza, according to Cindy McCain, head of the United Nations World Food Program.
Now Israel’s war in Gaza is threatening to spiral into a regional conflict. In recent weeks, Israel assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese political party and militia, launched a ground invasion of Lebanon and attacked Syria and Yemen. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at Israel, many of which were intercepted by Israeli and U.S. military forces.
The war in Gaza has led to the biggest displacement in the region since the creation of Israel in 1948. That event is known by Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe, when there was a mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians by Israeli forces.
The current war in Gaza is now the deadliest and most destructive of the five wars fought between Israel and Hamas since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
That’s right, five wars in 16 years.
What is the deeper story behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? When did the Occupied Territories become occupied? What is Hamas? What is Zionism? Who are the Jewish settlers? How did the violence begin, and how does it end?
For answers to these and other questions, we turned to two experts at Dartmouth College, one Egyptian, the other American Israeli, who teach a course together on “The Politics of Israel and Palestine.” Ezzedine Fishere is a senior lecturer in the Middle Eastern Studies program and a former Egyptian diplomat. Bernard Avishai is a Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth and a journalist. He lives half the year in Israel. Shortly after I spoke to them last year, Fishere and Avishai were featured on CBS 60 Minutes, NPR, PBS and other media outlets.
As the world marks the first anniversary of the war in Gaza, we are rebroadcasting the 2023 discussion with Fishere and Avishai about the roots of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
“I'm deeply concerned that Israel's actions may create a larger conflagration,” Avishai said last year. “The radical zealot minorities in each people are like tails wagging the dog… People committing atrocities have kept the moderate center of each people away from each other.”
Fishere said that he wavers between being a realist who sees no end to the conflict and a dreamer who believes that a peaceful solution is within reach. “Bring the parties together around a political solution that number one, gives Israel security so that this doesn't happen again. Number two, gives Palestinians hope so that they have something positive to look to… a Palestinian state that garners support, that becomes a beacon of hope for those people, that allows them equality and dignity.”
In the last week, Israel bombed Beirut, assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, and launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Israel claimed that its attacks were a response to rockets being launched by Hezbollah into northern Israel. The invasion of Lebanon marks an escalation of Israel’s year-long war in Gaza that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians. In the past few days, Iran fired missiles at Israel in retaliation for the attacks on Hezbollah, and there are now fears that these conflicts will spiral into a regional war.
For Tarek El-Ariss, the scenes of devastation in Beirut and civilians fleeing fighting are eerily familiar. El-Ariss grew up in Lebanon and survived its 15-year long civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. He is now James Wright Professor and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College.
Prof. El-Ariss has been deeply engaged in facilitating dialogue in the Dartmouth community around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past year. This campus-wide conversation was featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes, in the New Yorker, and other national media. But these peacemaking efforts fractured on May 1, when Dartmouth’s president called in riot police to break up a small student encampment protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. This resulted in the arrest of 89 students, faculty and community members, some violently.
“I don't think police has any room on campuses,” said El-Ariss, who said that members of his class went out to support the protesters. “I think campuses are places of intellectual engagement and dialog. This is what I do and this is what I focus on.”
Prof. Tarek El-Ariss has a new book, “Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.” He writes that he had “to learn to cohabit with war,” but that the experience continues to live inside him like a bullet buried in his body.
“The war is in us. It manifests itself in different shapes and forms and pain,” said El-Ariss. “Sometimes the bullet burns you, and sometimes you forget about that pain, and then it comes back. But you're always reminded of that which you have experienced, and you take this experience with you wherever you go, both with its bad parts, like the pain and the anxieties, but also in the survival mechanisms that you develop in order to survive this experience.”
El-Ariss said that to find a solution to the conflict in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, “You need to begin to acknowledge the humanity of the other and not think that I can eliminate the other so that I can preserve myself.” Attempting to wipe out a perceived adversary has “led to more instability and to more long term danger for those who are applying this model.”
“It's been 75 years at least, and that model is not working.”
El-Ariss said that as he views the spiraling Middle East conflict, “the despair and the hope coexist. There is the pain and the possibility of overcoming the pain. And these two things I have to hold on to, both at the same time.”
In 2017, Timothy Snyder wrote a short book, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” It was a cautionary tale drawn from Snyder’s studies of totalitarian regimes. He mused about how lessons from foreign regimes like Hungary, Russia, and Eastern Europe applied to the U.S. The lessons were warning signs that signaled when a country was veering toward totalitarianism. “On Tyranny” was the New York Times bestelling nonfiction book of 2017 and stayed on bestseller lists for years.
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The Guardian wrote, “In the years since the 2016 U.S. presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder.” This year, he has testified before Congress about foreign influence in the U.S. and has campaigned tirelessly in support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Snyder has a new book, “On Freedom,” in which he reflects on what it means to be truly free. He talks about the difference between “freedom from” – or negative freedom – and “freedom to,” which he says is what a free society must embrace.
Snyder said that “freedom from” leads to “a clash of all against all. Because if freedom is just me against other stuff and I never have to ask who I am or what I want, then eventually I start to see you as a barrier.”
Sen. J.D. Vance is an example of someone who espouses negative freedom. “His view is that government can't do anything and therefore it won't do anything and therefore my oligarch friends get to run everything. And the only task that I have as a politician is a kind of performer who makes up stories that get people angry at one another and fight one another. Negative freedom leads …to a moral vacuum. It leads to political helplessness, and eventually it leads to social self-destruction.”
By contrast, “freedom to” is “not just a matter of … women not being oppressed, it's also a matter of their having health care so they can be free.”
“There's a positive feedback loop between doing things together and being more free as individuals.”
Is the U.S. on a glide path to fascism?
“Not a glide path, because I think history is made up of the structures and the trends but it's also made up of the funny little bumps that nobody expected,” Snyder replied. “I think it's fair to say that we are at a moment where things can go either way, and I think it's quite clearly defined now, precisely because the way Kamala Harris is talking about freedom. She's very much in a future orientation.”
By congrast, Donald Trump “is a guy who, facing prison and thinking about nothing except himself, needs to die in bed and that bed has to be in the White House and the rest of us be damned,” said Snyder. “He's also a person who's filled with grievance about a story that he made up himself. The internet is full now of people who use AI to generate fake images and then get mad at the fake images.”
“This is not a time to be unaware of choices or to be cynical about voting or to imagine that history or something is going to take care of us. Only we are going to take care of this for us.”
Snyder writes that “being joyous is the first step to freedom.”
“Freedom should make us happy because freedom is about caring about the little things that people care about and about being able to put those things together in our own unique ways and maybe to bring them to life, whether that's a family or whether that's a hobby or whether it's a profession or whether it's a sport or whether it's a getaway,” said Snyder.
“Freedom is the condition in which we're actually able to bring other values together. So it's inherently a happy thing.”
What do Nazis, fascists, incels, skinheads, misogynists, insurrectionists and Proud Boys all have in common? Many of them confide in reporter Elle Reeve.
It was around 2015 and Reeve was reporting for Vice News about the rise of the “alt right,” a term coined by its leader, Richard Spencer. She spent time on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan where far right activists communicated, trolled liberals, and began to coalesce as a movement. These were often ordinary people who increasingly embraced conspiracy theories and violence.
This was during the presidency of Barack Obama, when many people were imagining that the U.S. was in the glow of a “post-racial” era. Reeve knew better.
“Racism wasn't dying off with an older generation,” she told the Vermont Conversation. “There was a strong beating heart right there on the internet.”
In 2017, Reeve was there when the alt right burst out of obscure Internet chat rooms and into public consciousness in a violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her documentary account, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” earned her and Vice News Tonight a Peabody Award, four Emmys and a George Polk Award.
In 2019, Reeve became a correspondent for CNN, where she works today. She was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 reporting on the attack on Congress by Trump supporters, many of whom she knew well.
Why do they talk to her? “They want to tell their story, they want to confess, they want to unburden themselves,” she said.
Reeve has a new book, “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.” The title refers to how far right activists speak of taking the “black pill” of nihilism to justify their cruelty and violence. “It's this dark nihilism that the world is doomed. There's nothing you can do to change it, and you at best, can hope for it to collapse.”
Reeve traces how far-right rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance channeling extremist ideas and language.
Vance has denounced the “woke ideology” of “white women who are miserable about their own lives, enforcing codes about racial justice, gay rights on other people to make other people miserable, to account for how miserable they are in their own lives,” Reeve explained.
Vance’s use of the term “childless cat ladies” is another far right meme. “I've read that on 4chan six or seven years ago,” said Reeve. “It has trickled upward.”
Another far right notion that is now embraced by mainstream Republicans is that diversity is bad. “They think that racial and ethnic and gender diversity makes us weaker. It makes us fools. This is just something that they ridiculed all the time.”
Reeve explained the far right context of Trump’s attacks on people of color. “If a white person commits a crime in their world, it's because they're a bad guy. But if a Black person commits a crime in their world, it's because they're Black.”
Reeve warned that many people “are vulnerable to those ideas. I just interviewed a ton of people at a Trump boat parade. They were so nice to me, and then they started talking to me about how it's not right to eat people's cats, and these people do animal sacrifice, and they're dirty and they bring disease.”
“It's not all crazy people who believe this stuff. It's regular people and your neighbors," said Reeve. “You have an obligation to push back against that, whether or not they'll listen to you."
Reeve said about the future, “There has been an escalating radicalization among the Republican elite and a softening among the voters… People speak freely about civil war. That is dangerous.”
“I don't like it but I don't know where that balance ends up after the election. You can't do something like Jan. 6 without a feeling that there's an army behind you of supporters who will back you up.”
The much-anticipated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took place on Tuesday night. It was the first time the two politicians had met.
With national polls showing the race for the White House a tossup, this debate, currently the only one that is scheduled, has outsized significance. In a CNN flash poll following the debate, 63% said that Harris performed the best. This flipped the script from the Trump-Biden debate in June, when 67% of respondents said that Trump outperformed President Joe Biden.
In other breaking news following the debate, pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. In a post on Instagram to her 283 million followers, Swift wrote, “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them." She highlighted “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.”
Vermont Sen. Peter Welch spoke this morning about his thoughts on the debate, the 2024 election, cutting off arms sales to Israel, voter suppression and election violence, and his reflections on the 9/11 attacks.
In July, the Democrat sent shock waves through the political establishment when he became the first U.S. senator to call for Biden to withdraw from the race. Eleven days later, as other Democratic leaders made similar calls, Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. The vice president officially became the Democratic nominee in August, launching one of the most compressed presidential races in history.
“I was just saying out loud what many of my colleagues and many Americans were saying privately,” Welch said.
After watching the Biden-Trump debate in June, Welch concluded, “It was terrible, and it was not about a bad night. It was about an apprehension that there was a serious condition that was affecting the president who served us very well.” Welch insisted that he was neither asked nor dissuaded by his colleagues or the White House when he told them what he was going to do.
Welch had a very different reaction to Harris’s debate performance against Trump. “I thought she did absolutely everything she had to do,” he said. “She was strong. I love the way she started out by crossing the stage, extending her hand to Trump, taking over the physical space and not letting him do his physical intimidation moves that are his favorite.”
Welch said that Harris “was able to parry his attacks, and she had a capacity to do something effectively, and that's ridicule and belittle a guy who is well deserving of ridicule and belittling.”
Vermont’s junior senator said that the most memorable part of the debate was the discussion of abortion rights. Harris, Welch said, “combined clarity with compassion and a deeply grounded, deeply felt moral sensibility about the right of women to make their own decisions. And she did that in a way where she was rightly and justifiably condemning a totally incoherent policy by Trump, somebody who bragged about getting the Supreme Court stacked to get rid of Roe v. Wade.”
Welch said the race for president is too close to call. He believes that if Trump loses, he will once again declare that the election was stolen. “That's the pitch he's making to prepare his voters for an explanation of his loss as fraud,” he said.
Welch, who was in the House chamber when Trump supporters attacked on January 6, 2021, asserted, “I don't think you'll get away with that kind of insurrection again.” But he warned against a raft of voter suppression efforts, such as in Georgia “where that very Trumpish legislature is stacking the deck with partisan folks on their election commission.”
Voter suppression and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power is “a real live issue for us. When I say us, I mean our country,” he said.
When Corinne Prevot was attending high school and ski racing at Burke Mountain Academy in 2008, her colorful hand-sewn hats were an instant hit with her friends and fellow racers. As she moved on to attend Middlebury College, where she raced on the ski team, her stretchy form-fitting hats continued to be a hot item both around campus and on the ski racing circuit, where she sold them from a shoebox.
With lots of enthusiasm but little business acumen, Prevot turned her side hustle into the clothing brand Skida (Swedish for “skiing”). Her signature hats and neck gaiters can now be found everywhere from New York City to California to the Green Mountains. A Skida neck gaiter was recently featured in a New York Times Wirecutter column about the best sun-protective clothing.
Prevot, 32, now has more than two dozen employees, mostly young women. Skida has expanded to make pants, running wear, and even mittens. The business is headquartered in Burlington but much of the clothing is sewn by women working from their homes all around the Northeast Kingdom and beyond.
Just down the road in Randolph is another young entrepreneur who is innovating with a traditional brand. Sam Hooper is the 30-year old owner and president of Vermont Glove in Randolph, the century-old business that he bought in 2018.
Vermont Glove is one of the last glove companies left in the U.S. It makes high quality hand-stitched goat leather gloves. The gloves are considered the gold standard among utility lineman who use them to handle powerlines. The company also makes popular gloves for gardeners, skiers, and others.
Prevot said that the key to Skida’s success is that the brand conveys a “sense of joy and self-expression. And I think that that's kind of what propelled us forward year after year, especially as our market becomes more crowded.”
Skida also distinguishes itself by its public stance in support of abortion rights, including donating to national abortion access funds and the campaign for Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which passed in 2022 with 77 percent of voters in support.
Prevot said that her business is “value aligned. And I think just when we look at the makeup of our team and our organization and our culture, women's rights is a really important thing for us to stand behind.” More recently, Skida raised money for Vermont flood victims.
Vermont Glove is also mission driven. When the Covid pandemic hit, Hooper transformed his manufacturing facility to make masks and personal protective gear, which were distributed free to towns and hospitals around Vermont.
“There was a need, and we had a skill to meet it, so we wanted to step up and do our part,” said Hooper, adding that his goal was also “to keep people employed.” At one point, Vermont Glove’s mask making operation was threatened by a shortage of elastic for ear loops. Skida “saved the day” by providing the elastic. Hooper and Provot have lately collaborated on a line of Skida mittens that are made by Vermont Glove.
Vermont’s labor and housing shortages have impacted both businesses. For Vermont Glove to grow, new employees needed housing, which is in short supply in Vermont. So Hooper recently bought a former inn and converted it into 10 units of affordable housing for his employees and the community. “It's given us the ability to hire new employees and it creates a stepping stone for current and future employees,” he explained.
What does success look like for these young entrepreneurs?
“Sustainable growth where we can still have a significant impact on our local community through meaningful job creation, and continued product quality (compared) to what is out there,” said Hooper.
For Prevot, “Success would be for the Skida brand to be cherished and loved and that people continue to find joy in our products, and that it keeps them warm in the winter -- and that we still have winter.”
What used to be called 100-year floods are now annual occurrences. Summer 2023 was the wettest ever in Vermont, with 2 feet of rain falling on the state. One storm submerged the capital of Montpelier. This July saw towns such as Plainfield ripped apart by raging rivers. In Connecticut this month, a storm dropped more than a foot of rain, leading to deadly and destructive flooding.
Author Porter Fox says the source of these deluges — as well as heat waves, fires, and floods — is the ocean, where about 90% of global warming is occurring. This is the inexorable consequence of human-caused climate change. The top layer of the ocean has warmed about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is “large enough to transform marine biodiversity, change ocean chemistry, raise sea levels, and fuel extreme weather,” reports the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Fox explains the connection between oceans, climate change and extreme weather in his new book, “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them.”
Fox has a personal connection to the ocean. He grew up on Mount Desert Island in Maine, home to Acadia National Park. His father was a renowned boat builder, and Fox learned the craft of ocean sailing by trial and lots of error.
He later attended Middlebury College and wrote about skiing adventures all around the world as an editor of Powder Magazine but has now returned to his first love, the sea. Fox’s other books include “The Last Winter” and “Northland.”
In “Category Five,” Fox captures the awesome power of the ocean by profiling a legendary storm sailor, a mapmaker and a maker of sailing drones, among others.
“The ocean is the mother of all weather. It's like a battery that is getting charged up by this excess heat that we have,” Fox said. This is creating squalls and hurricanes with “metrics that we've never seen before.”
These monster storms are “traveling farther while moving slower, thus dumping more water and the ferocity of their winds has more time to wreak havoc as they go,” Fox said.
“A full throated ocean gale is absolutely terrifying,” he said. These storms have an “explosive sound and shrieking and raging wind and waves that are so powerful they can toss around a 30,000 pound boat like it's a little toy.”
Even landlocked places such as Vermont are experiencing the power of the ocean.
“Most of the rain that you see in Vermont comes off of the ocean and evaporation. So we have a hotter climate over the ocean. We have more evaporation. We have more energy being infused into the atmosphere,” Fox said. “So every front, every thunderstorm, every squall, every rainstorm is directly connected to the ocean.”
The warming ocean has transformed how and when storms occur. “Hurricane season used to be roughly from June to November,” Fox said.
Hurricanes have recently occurred in January and May. "Now there is no off season,” he said.
What would it take to fix what is broken?
“It's kind of an obvious answer: just a little bit of everything,” Fox said. That includes “changing how we create and consume energy around the world, closing down coal-fired power plants, changing from gas cars to electric cars or hydrogen batteries.”
“Without the ocean, we'd be gone by now," Fox said. "That 90% of the heat that it is absorbed (by oceans) would be right up in the atmosphere. Temperatures would be unbearable. Storms would be so much more powerful. And yet the ocean is this buffer.”
“There's a lot of checks and balances, and it's perhaps the reason that this little blue ball of a planet has maintained life for so long,” he said.
“If we can just be aware of that and kind of nudge some of those balances," Fox said, "you could bring the planet back to the way it was pre-1800s.”
Among the thousands of delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, two dozen represent Vermont.
On Tuesday, these delegates cast their ceremonial votes for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to be the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. The Vermont delegation includes elected officials such as Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint. But the delegation is mostly composed of party activists who may not be well known but are fiercely committed.
On this week’s Vermont Conversation, we speak with four Vermont DNC delegates in Chicago.
Addie Lentzner of Bennington is a rising sophomore at Middlebury College. She has been an outspoken advocate on housing and homelessness since she was a student in high school. At age 20, she is the youngest Vermont delegate.
Lentzner is determined for youth to have “not just a seat at the table, but a leading voice in the conversation.” She said that the climate crisis, structural inequality, racism and abortion bans are a direct attack on her generation. “Young people need to be co-pilots and not just passengers on the plane to our future,” Lentzner said.
The convention has been accompanied by protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Lentzner, a grassroots activist herself, said, “The protesters are doing the right thing.”
“They should be there standing up for human rights,” she said. “I also believe that that is part of our democracy, and the candidates should respond to that.”
C.D. Mattison is a tech adviser to startups and a former candidate for mayor in Burlington. She is a former vice chair of the Burlington Democrats and serves on a variety of nonprofit boards.
Mattison, who identifies as “a biracial, Black, gay woman,” said that following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, “it became incredibly clear that I couldn't just be on the sidelines. I had to be involved.” She said that Trump's candidacy in 2024 “is what I hope will be the end of our civil war. I don't think it ever ended.”
Amanda Gustin is the vice chair of the Vermont Democratic Party and a Barre city councilor. She works for the Vermont Historical Society. Gustin said she was especially inspired by former First Lady Michelle Obama’s invocation to “do something.”
“Stop agonizing and start organizing,” she said, quoting a sticker that adorns her water bottle.
“Get out there, talk to your neighbors, make sure your neighbors are out there and voting,” Gustin said. “This big American experiment works when we all show up and when we all lend our voices and our votes.”
Don Hooper is a former Vermont state representative and was elected Vermont’s secretary of state in 1992. He was a longtime board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
Hooper, 79, is just two years younger than Pres. Joe Biden. He said that Biden should not have run. “I know what it feels like to be older. He still got it, but not every day. It's hard, it's tiring,” Hooper said. But he also said that Democratic fortunes have dramatically turned since Harris became the nominee.
Channeling Michelle Obama, Hooper said, “Hope is making a comeback, and we're joyous.”
Zephyr Teachout has blazed a high-profile path on state and national political stages. But lately, the 52-year-old law professor and politician has been spending her time on a tiny stage in Vermont, directing a play about the saga of Israelis and Palestinians.
Teachout, who grew up in Norwich, gained national attention in 2004 when she was director of internet organizing for former Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, helping to vault the small-state governor to briefly run at the front of the pack.
In 2014, Teachout ran for governor of New York against the powerful incumbent Andrew Cuomo, winning one-third of the vote (Cuomo resigned in 2021 over sexual misconduct allegations). Two years later, Teachout ran for Congress. And, in 2018, she ran for attorney general of New York. She won the endorsement of the New York Times but lost to Letitia James, who later appointed Teachout as a special adviser on economic justice.
Teachout is a professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of "Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money."
Far from the halls of power in Albany or the bright lights of Broadway, Teachout has maintained another passion: acting and directing at Unadilla Theater in Marshfield. When Unadilla founder Bill Blachly, who turned 100 this year, asked if she would direct the play “Returning to Haifa” this summer, Teachout quickly agreed.
“The more intensely one is involved in whatever it may be professionally and certainly involved in politics, the more that I seek and need art, whether that's visual arts or music or theater as a way to be fully human, to experience both the joys and the griefs that we experience,” she said.
“Returning to Haifa” links two tragedies: the Nakba (“catastrophe)” experienced by Palestinians when more than 700,000 of them fled or were driven from their homes following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors moved to Israel, many of them into homes abruptly abandoned by Palestinians.
The play is based on a novella by Palestinian activist and writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated at the age of 36 in an operation by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. The story was adapted into a play by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. It was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York in 2016, but the production was canceled due to political pressure. It finally premiered in the United Kingdom.
“Returning to Haifa” depicts a Palestinian couple returning to Israel in 1967 and visiting their house and their son who they abandoned 20 years earlier in a terrified flight from Israeli forces. The play is described by the Guardian as “a poignant family drama, as a plea for Israeli-Palestinian understanding and as a warning of what will follow without some form of reconciliation.”
Teachout was moved to direct the play by a current catastrophe, Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed some 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel invaded Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.
“It feels very important right now to celebrate Palestinian culture, to introduce people to great writers like Kanafani" who understood "the critical role that literature plays in tying together a community of people,” Teachout said.
On the political stage, Teachout offered insights about the special challenges that Vice President Kamala Harris and other women face when running for high office.
“It is harder to express anger as a woman and not be dismissed,” said the former gubernatorial candidate. “Men expressing anger on behalf of an angry public don't get the same kind of scrutiny and, frankly, sometimes disdain or disgust that women expressing anger get.”
“You've noticed that Harris has chosen to run as a happy warrior,” she said. “If you're in politics, you know these things are choices. It is also a choice that I made in my campaigns and that you see Elizabeth Warren making. There's a lot more comfort with joyful women than angry women … Harris, as a Black woman in particular, faces extraordinary challenges, and she's doing an extraordinary job not letting those challenges define her candidacy.”
Teachout credits Harris’ rise in the polls to the desire that people have “to see past the next two years, to see a collective future. What I think Harris is tapping into in the last few weeks is a sense that a future is possible. … We're not stuck with these frankly ancient politicians. And I also think that is insufficient," she said.
Teachout, who has been a leading scholar and critic of corporate monopolies, said Harris needs to “take on big power.”
People “think everybody's in big money's pockets. There's no point to politics (so) why don't we just cause chaos,” Teachout said. “There's kind of a real nihilism to those who either don't vote or decide to vote for Trump just out of a kind of irritation with what's going on.”
Harris needs to show that she is “willing to fight, to actually make enemies … (and) take on corporate power,” Teachout said. “For Harris to beat Trump, really leaning into that populism is critical.”
For more than a century, New Hampshire sent its troubled youth to the same juvenile jail. It was called the Youth Development Center, or YDC. The young people were supposed to be cared for and then live productive lives. Instead, many of them were physically and sexually abused. More than a thousand people have said that the adults in charge at the YDC abused them. A statewide settlement fund established by NH lawmakers has so far paid out over $95 million to settle lawsuits filed by former detainees.
Jason Moon is a senior reporter and producer on the Document Team at NHPR. Moon’s investigation into the abuse at the YDC is now a three-part investigative podcast called “Youth Development Center.”
Moon’s other work includes “Bear Brook,” an investigative podcast into a brutal murder in New Hampshire that has been downloaded more than 31 million times. He also contributed reporting and music to The 13th Step, an NHPR podcast about abuse in New Hampshire’s addiction recovery centers which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award.
Moon said of his investigation into the Youth Development Center, “A lot of these kids didn't necessarily have very strong advocates for them at home coming to try to find out what they could. So you have that enormous power dynamic, you have the secrecy that's built into the system, where really the only information that can make it out of the system is written by the adults in charge. They write all the reports, they have complete control over the narrative that makes it out of the building, and if anything does make it out of the building that they don't like, there's an easy kind of response to it, which is ‘these kids they lie, they manipulate, that's why they're here.’”
“I would hope that all of us reflect on in the wake of a situation like this the extent to which we as a society sort of buy that argument,” Moon said.
Last week, I received an unexpected call from Bill Mares, an old friend. Bill told me that he had terminal lymphoma and had only days to live. He was home in hospice care, which focuses on a person’s quality of life as they near death. And he had chosen to make use of Vermont’s medical aid-in-dying law, which passed in 2013.
He had a few things on his mind that he wanted to share. He was medicated when we spoke but still sharp, thoughtful and funny.
Bill died on Monday, July 29, just a week after our conversation. He was 83 years old. His wife Chris told me that his final week was filled with visits from over 70 friends. Bill regaled them with stories from his long and colorful life. No matter how serious the topic or dire the situation, he would find the humor in it. He believed deeply in the power of a good laugh.
Bill Mares was raised in Texas and educated at Harvard, where he majored in history, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, where he received a master’s degree. He was a former journalist, state representative and high school history teacher in Vermont. For over a decade, he was a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio.
He authored or co-authored 20 books on subjects ranging from the U.S. Marines, to desert travel, to Vermont humor. His books include Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats (with Frank Bryan), and his latest, I Could Hardly Keep From Laughing: An Illustrated Collection of Vermont Humor (with Don Hooper). His memoir, Better to Be Lucky Than Smart, will be published posthumously later this year.
Among the many nonprofit organizations to which he gave his time and talents, Bill was a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
Bill called me to talk about how he was approaching his last days. He especially wanted others to know that the end of life could be peaceful and beautiful with medical aid-in-dying. Vermont is one of 11 states that has such a law. In 2023, Vermont revised it to become the first state to permit medical aid-in-dying to qualifying patients from anywhere, regardless of the state in which they live. To qualify, a patient must meet strict criteria, including having a terminal illness with six months or less to live and have two physicians sign off.
"I had the chance to drive the bus of my own disappearance," he said of how he was ending his life.
Bill asked me if I would record our conversation. We both knew it would likely be the last time we talked.
"I was never an expert in anything. But I was good enough to pass the giggle test," he told me.
I asked him what his advice was for young people. "Start by serving other people. It said on the wall of my camp as a kid, 'God is first, others second, I am third.' And you can't go wrong with that."
"You just have to remember those two beings, which is you and everybody else. You're sharing this planet with 8 billion other people. And that's enough work to do for anyone."
When the covid pandemic hit in March 2020, stores ran out of toilet paper. Then it was infant formula, personal protective equipment, computer chips and everything else on which our modern lives depend.
What caused these worldwide shortages? In his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” New York Times global economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman explains how and why the global supply chain broke – and why it might happen again. In it, he says that inequality and corporate greed have left the world with a supply chain on the brink of collapse.
“Most of us understood that the businesses that dominated the supply chain were making the economy more unequal, enriching executives who frequently abused the rank and file, poisoning our democracies and sowing toxicity in our political discourse, to say nothing of the natural environment,” Goodman writes. “To the extent to which we thought about it, we generally recognized that our mode of consumerism was threatening humanity with extinction via climate change, while exploiting labor from South Asia to Latin America.”
Goodman has reported from more than 40 countries over the past three decades. He came to the Times from the Washington Post, where he was the Shanghai bureau chief. His work as part of the Times’ series on the roots of the 2008 financial crisis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include, “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.”
Goodman said that when people conclude "that the powers that be don't value them, don't prioritize their needs and the needs of their families, and at the same time you have trade animosities and then migration ...that is a very toxic prescription. That creates opportunities for parties that tend to demonize outsiders, immigrants, or in our case, Chinese workers supposedly stealing our jobs. And that doesn't go well."
"Much of the West is engaged in a kind of process of looking for scapegoats, as opposed to looking at how we have allowed billionaire interests to dominate our politics and deliver scarcity,” Goodman said. “I think that's a very concerning combination."
A political tsunami rolled ashore on Sunday, July 21, in the form of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
This move, about 100 days before Election Day, is unprecedented in American history. Biden’s withdrawal followed his disastrous performance in a debate last month with former President Donald Trump, during which Biden struggled to find words, trailed off mid-sentence and often stared blankly at the camera.
Biden’s meltdown on national TV sparked panic among Democrats, who feared an electoral blowout that could cost them the presidency, Congress and statewide races.
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., participated in three weeks of fraught discussions among her colleagues over whether to urge the 81-year old president to get out of the race.
Balint said that conversations in the Democratic caucus “were raw, they were honest, there was screaming, there was crying, there (were) people trying to see it from every possible outcome, thinking about their constituents and their relationships with both the president and the vice president.” She said that calls to her office ran 10 to 1 in favor of Biden quitting the race, but among her colleagues “there was a strong diversity of opinion. And we all felt an incredible responsibility to bring into the room what we were hearing from rank-and-file voters.”
Balint pushed back against the charge that Harris has not been adequately vetted by participating in primaries. “She was vetted. She was the vice president…for years,” Balint said. “She's been out making the case for a set of policy priorities that she was right by the president's side passing them.”
Balint advised Harris to “articulate a very forward-looking message for the nation. Because what you have in Trump and [Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s newly named running-mate] is this effort to drag us back to another time when people did not have their rights guaranteed. And we see this not-so-coded language in the last few days around ‘DEI candidates.' They are basically coming right up to the line around racism and sexism. And so she is going to channel the anger and frankly the disgust that many American women feel around overturning Roe, trying to restrict access to mifepristone, threatening to enforce the archaic Comstock Laws.”
Balint insisted that the presidential race “is going to be won and lost around bodily autonomy and freedom.”
The first-term representative wanted “to just name the elephant in the room that is kicking around here where people say, ‘Oh, well, America is not ready to elect a woman — America is not ready to elect a Black woman in particular,’" she said.
"Let's not have a failure of imagination here,” Balint said. “Of course we can elect a woman… And of course we can elect a Black woman. We have to stop parroting this notion that we are only as good as the most racist and sexist people in this nation. We're not. We're better than that. And we have to believe in what is possible.”
In April, Balint, who is Jewish, voted against sending offensive military aid to Israel, and she boycotted Wednesday’s address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I am disgusted that he was invited,” she said, adding that Netanyahu leads “the most extremist government that Israel has ever seen.”
“Netanyahu should be spending every waking moment bringing about an end to this horrible war, getting the release of the hostages, getting Israeli troops out of Gaza,” Balint said.
Vermont’s lone congressional representative bemoaned “the cynicism that's taken hold in this country. And the sense that everyone's on the take or everybody's out to get you and that sort of permeates the work that I do here.”
Balint said she is focused on “how to not give in to cynicism. And that's where I get a sense of renewal is thinking about the language that I use and how I interact with my constituents and also my colleagues so that we don't lose hope.”
Ethan Allen is lionized as the founding father of Vermont. But filmmaker Jay Craven has reimagined the story of the Revolutionary War figure and leader of the Green Mountain Boys to tell a fuller story of patriotism laced with greed and ambition.
In Craven’s latest epic film, “Lost Nation,” Ethan Allen meets Lucy Terry Prince, a formerly enslaved woman in Guilford who scholars believe was the nation’s first African American poet. The improbable duo have a shared conviction to protect their land and people. Their fictionalized connection lies at the heart of Craven’s saga.
“Lost Nation” opens with a quote from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who wrote, “All history is current.”
“One of the questions we pose in the film is whether the promise of the American Revolution would be fulfilled,” said Craven. “There was a belief and a hope that slavery would be abolished as a result of the American Revolution. Of course, that did not happen. And some of the racial tensions of that time, unfortunately, have persisted … And today we're facing the problem of even banning African American history.”
“Maybe this film itself would be banned, frankly, because it tells some African American history about struggle,” he mused.
Jay Craven is one of Vermont’s cultural visionaries. He is a founder of Catamount Arts, co-founder of Circus Smirkus, and co-founder of Kingdom County Productions, which he runs with his wife, documentary filmmaker Bess O’Brien. Craven has directed 10 films, including “Where the Rivers Flow North” (1993), “Disappearances” (2006) and “Northern Borders” (2013).
Craven is also artistic director of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival and a former professor of film studies at Marlboro College.
Craven attended Boston University, where he was student body president and led protests against the Vietnam War. He formed a lifelong friendship with radical historian Howard Zinn and traveled with a student peace delegation to North Vietnam.
Filmmaking is an extension of Craven's lifelong social justice mission. Some 45 students from 10 colleges were involved in making “Lost Nation,” part of his commitment to empowering a new generation of filmmakers through Semester Cinema.
Making films “gave me voice, it gave me agency and also instilled in me a certain activism that became a guiding force when I moved to Vermont in wanting to work within the arts to connect communities and to work with this idea of community and culture,” Craven said. “Making movies based on stories from where I lived, as an alternative to the Hollywood narrative, was part of that activism.”
When flood waters tore through parts of Vermont last July, countless lives were upended. Barre, the Granite City, was especially hard hit. Parts of downtown were buried in thick mud, and the city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear them.
This week, virtually everyone I talked with in Barre expressed anxiety about heavy rains and potential flash flooding expected on Wednesday and Thursday.
I stopped by Dente’s Market, Barre’s last corner grocery. The store dates back to 1907. Last year when I visited, the sodden contents of the store were heaped on the sidewalk. I found its owner, Rick Dente, standing on the porch of a house that he owns just behind the market. Locals affectionately call him the Mayor of North Barre.
When I met Dente last year, he told me of his harrowing near-death experience during the flood. He was in water up to his neck, pinned to a door in the back of his market, his legs about to give out. Just when Dente thought it was over, three tenants who lived above his store came down, ropes around their waists. They banged open the door and rescued the exhausted shopkeeper.
“Someone was watching over me,” Dente told me last year inside his mud filled market.
Today, collectible glass milk containers and old Coke bottles once again sparkled on the shelves, and coolers offered an assortment of food and drink. Rick Dente was behind the counter in his usual post where he has been greeting his Barre neighbors for decades.
Dente said that he has had health impacts related to the 2023 flood. “I've had some physical issues that I'm told can be the result of your body experiencing some serious, serious stress.”
“Hopefully I can stay in good health and keep going for at least a few more years,” he said of his 117 year old family business. “Time will tell.”
When I visited Vermont Bicycle Shop, I discovered that it had moved from its location on Main Street. The new store opened this week a few blocks away at a location that did not flood.
“I always describe last year as both the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me,” said bike store owner Darren Ohl, whose basement stocked with over $100,000 in inventory was under 8 feet of water last year. Community members created a GoFundMe for the bike shop that raised over $26,000.
“The flood was terrible to go through," said Ohl. But it "was wonderful was seeing how much our community came out. We had over 25 volunteers with over 20 volunteers for almost 30 days straight. So many people would just come to the shop and just write us a check and donate money. That was astounding to experience as a business owner. And without that we would have folded. We would have gone out of business.”
“That community response is one of the things that holds neighborhoods and communities together,” said Pam Wilson, a founder of Barre Up, a group working on long term recovery. “That's how you survive an unpredictable climate future. It's based in community care.”
Democrats, stop freaking out.
That is the message — or plea — of veteran campaign consultant Stuart Stevens following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week. Numerous pundits on cable news, some Democratic donors and the editorial board of the New York Times have called for Biden to drop out and let a younger candidate take on Trump.
Stevens thinks that dumping Biden is “insane.”
"Is Joe Biden up to being president? I find it sort of an absurd question because he is president,” Stevens said. “And he's probably the most successful first term president since World War Two.”
Stevens is among the most experienced and successful campaign consultants in the country. He was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.
Stuart Stevens has now abandoned the Republican Party, contending that it has become an authoritarian movement. He was one of the most prominent Republicans to come out against Donald Trump in 2016. Stevens has written several bestselling books about his political conversion, including his latest, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy To Autocracy.”
Stuart Stevens is now a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. He grew up in Mississippi but has lived for many years in Stowe.
Stevens says the talk of changing candidates is “fantasy.” Replacing Biden and sidelining Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the position, would "shatter the Democratic Party for at least a generation, maybe permanently," he argued, adding that it was "extraordinarily sexist and racist and offensive.”
Stevens said that Democrats have a history of doubting and undermining their candidates, which he believes has cost them winnable elections in the past. "This sense of doubt, of timidity, of not being willing to rally around your candidate... has been disastrous," Stevens observed.
Stevens noted that presidential debates have historically made no difference in the outcome of a race. He pointed out that "Hillary Clinton won every debate and lost" the 2016 election.
The presidential race is “going to be about the future of democracy and about stability and about what kind of country do we think we are. And I think Trump loses all those,” argued Stevens.
He said the campaign’s outcome will be determined in its final weeks, not in July. He ventured that Biden would win and “the race isn't going to be particularly close.”
Stevens summarized his advice to Democrats in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Suck it up and fight. It’s not supposed to be easy.”
This Vermont Conversation with Jackson Beecham originally aired in July 2022.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion.
Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, though it was not against the law for someone to have one. In practice, this meant that someone could legally self-abort at their own peril, but a doctor who performed an abortion could be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years.
The case that legalized abortion in Vermont featured “Jacqueline R.,” an unmarried server who wanted to end her pregnancy, and an OB/GYN resident at the University of Vermont named Jackson Beecham.
After New York legalized abortion in 1970, Beecham, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, joined a small group of women’s health advocates in Burlington who were exploring ways to legalize abortion in the Green Mountain State. Attorney Willis “Woody” Higgins, a lawyer for IBM who volunteered to argue the case, advised the group that they needed two plaintiffs: a pregnant person who wanted an abortion and “a courageous doctor.”
The prosecutor they faced was a young state's attorney, Patrick Leahy, and the landmark case that legalized abortion in Vermont was known as Beecham vs. Leahy.
“I didn’t even think about winning or losing,” Beecham said of the case. He just felt “this is the right thing to do.”
When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled for Beecham in January 1972, Beecham said, “I was floored.” Within a few months, legal abortions were being performed in Vermont.
Beecham went on to a distinguished medical career as a gynecologic oncologist and cancer surgeon. He founded two gynecologic oncology programs at the cancer centers of the University of Rochester and at Dartmouth College, and he was a longtime associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Beecham, who is now 80 and lives in Shelburne, retired from practicing medicine in 2008. He continues to be a champion of reproductive rights and is a strong advocate for Proposal 5, which would make Vermont the first state in the country to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution if it is approved by voters in November.
Beecham reflected on his role in legalizing abortion in Vermont.
“I was honored to spend four decades in women’s health as a cancer surgeon. But I think … getting this law changed is the single most important thing I ever did. I’m still moved by it. I’m very, very grateful that I could be part of helping others,” he said.
He said that he is “just horrified” that the U.S. Supreme Court has returned the country to where it was before Roe vs. Wade.
“I’ll be on the sidelines, fighting like everyone else that feels in support of women,” Beecham said.
Is our car-centric society ready to ditch automobiles for bicycles?
It is already happening in a number of cities, and it may be part of the solution to the climate crisis. This is the case made by Daniel Piatkowski in his new book, Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. Piatkowski, a former New York City bike messenger, is now a professor of land use and transportation planning at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway.
Piatkowski says that e-bikes have revolutionized the way we think about bicycles. Increasing numbers of people commute on e-bikes, especially when cities provide incentives to reduce auto congestion. Cargo e-bikes are even replacing SUVs and delivery vehicles.
Piatkowski argues that what was once viewed as recreation is now the future of transportation.
“The bicycle is a bridge to help reduce that immediate reliance on a car every day,” asserted Piatkowksi. “Making places more bike friendly makes them more people friendly.
It makes them more transport friendly. “I look at bikes as the necessary first step, but certainly not the last step in that transition that we need to get away from not only driving our cars all the time, but building cities that have to accommodate cars,” Piatkowksi said.
Bikes “are the starting point to …revolutionary changes in how our cities can function.”
In 1969, with the country in the grips of protests against the Vietnam War, Rob Mermin took a different path. He ran off to join the circus. So began his career as a performer that has touched the lives of thousands of people.
For the next decade, Mermin performed in circuses throughout Europe, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union. He studied with the legendary pantomimist Marcel Marceau, who would become his mentor and friend. In 1987, Mermin came to Vermont and founded Circus Smirkus, now one of the country’s top traveling youth circuses.
Over 40,000 people attend Circus Smirkus performances each year, and the troupe has held cultural exchanges with 32 countries.
Mermin, now 74, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease a decade ago. He responded by founding the Parkinson’s Pantomime Project, helping people with movement disorders manage their symptoms with pantomime and circus techniques.
Mermin has won numerous awards, including the Vermont Arts Council Award of Merit, and the 2008 Governor’s Award for Excellence, Vermont’s highest honor in the arts.
Mermin has written a new book, "Circle of Sawdust: A Circus Memoir of Mud, Myth, Mirth, Mayhem and Magic" (Rootstock Publishing, 2024).
“You have to have fun with whatever you're doing, whatever you're dealing with,” said Mermin of his approach to life’s challenges. “What gets me through is a sense of curiosity about it, a sense of humor….(and) a sense of play. You have to keep playing through life.”
Harvard professor Steven Levitsky is the co-author of the 2018 international bestseller, “How Democracies Die.” It’s a book that President Joe Biden has cited often.
In it, Levitsky and fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt documented the rise of authoritarian movements and the decline of democracies around the world. But Levitsky was still shocked when Trump supporters launched a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
He thought it wouldn’t happen here.
The Jan. 6 insurrection inspired Levitsky and Ziblatt to look at why American democracy has receded so quickly. They have a new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that seeks to answer this question.
Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller professor of Latin American studies and professor of government at Harvard University.
Levitsky also did not expect that he would witness a crackdown on civil liberties on his own campus and on universities around the country.
"These were overwhelmingly peaceful protests, and we get an extraordinary wave of police repression and the arrest of 3600 peaceful protesters,” Levitsky said. “And I think what terrified me the most was there was a consensus ... in the mainstream establishment that this was OK. It was appropriate. Because a national narrative had emerged that these protesters were violent, that they were chaotic, that they were antisemitic, that they were pro-terrorist. It was overwhelmingly not the case. But that justified the repression."
Levitsky argued that colleges have long tolerated peaceful student protest but that today’s students were being unfairly subject to a “Palestine exception.” During the past month, he tried to mediate between student activists and Harvard’s leaders to ensure that students were not punished for speaking out. His efforts failed when Harvard suspended five undergraduates and placed at least 20 more on probation, including barring 13 seniors from graduating in late May.
Levitsky says the national erosion of democracy has been accelerated by "the fact that so many mainstream politicians are willing to set aside any commitment to democracy in order to get ahead, to continue their political careers and pursue their political ambitions. That was a terrifying lesson."
Lebistky insists that democracy is threatened by minority rule, which is enshrined in the U.S. constitution and institutions like the Electoral College, which is "biased towards sparsely populated territories, and this is allowing the Republican Party to govern without winning national majorities. And when that partisan minority is an increasingly authoritarian party, watch out. We now have a set of institutions that are protecting and empowering the authoritarian minority party."
Are the kids all right?
This question is foremost on the mind of parents, educators, and young people themselves.
Students today are still grappling with the lingering effects of the covid pandemic, during which their schools closed and their education continued alone — or in many cases, their education and development stalled. Significant covid-related learning gaps continue to pose a challenge for many students.
As graduation and summer approaches, the Vermont Conversation wanted to hear from students in their own words about their lives, concerns and challenges. We spoke with four high students from around Vermont, all of whom volunteer with Up for Learning, a nonprofit that brings together youth and adults to transform education with a focus on equity and justice.
The student guests are: Auishma Pradhan, a junior at South Burlington High School who is a member of the Winooski Antiracism Steering Committee; Harmony Devoe, a freshman at Harwood Union High School, who was recently named Vermont’s first Youth Poet Laureate; Jacoby Soter, a sophomore at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans who is a student member of the Maple Run School Board; and Mea Ree Jan, a junior at Winooski High School and the Center for Technology at Essex who is also a member of the Winooski Antiracism Steering Committee.
The students made clear that the problems of the world do not stop at the school house. Failed school budgets, racism, and Israel’s war in Gaza were top of mind for many of them.
Soter said the effects of covid on learning “is honestly much bigger than the actual covid crisis that was two years long. We're going to be feeling this for the next 10 years.”
He said he sees a “disconnect between (students) that were that were able to have people in the house and help them with covid learning and everyone else. …There are a few kids who are really thriving and excelling socially, emotionally and in their academic career, and then there is everyone else who is really far behind.”
Among the problems Soter sees are an increase in vaping and substance abuse that contribute to “behavioral problems inside school and many students not feeling safe around their peers because of those behavioral problems.”
Auishma Pradhan said that she is deeply concerned about and affected by Israel-Gaza war. “This is the type of education that should be taught in school where it's very immediate and it's happening right now.” She said that “students would want to know about" it. "It's not okay.”
“We should be able to show support,” she added.
Mea Ree Jan agreed and said that she empathized with suffering Palestinians. She noted that her family “comes from a long history of ethnic cleansing from Myanmar.” She is now studying health care and hopes to work with a group like Doctors Without Borders. “I would like to be able to directly help.”
Several of the students attend schools that have had their budgets voted down multiple times. Soter said that people are protesting rising taxes by voting against school budgets but “it only affects students because people in Montpelier, they don't take those no’s as negatively as the students do.”
Vermont Youth Poet Laureate Harmony Devoe read one of her poems. “It's about being Asian and being proud of my heritage,” she explained. “I wrote it when there were a lot of Asian hate times in the news. And that just affected me mentally.”
Almond Eyes
By Harmony Belle Devoe
You are born
And into this life of
Almond eyes
Caramel skin
Dark chocolate hair
A trifle of color
You grow
And into this life of
Switching of tongue
Beads of phrases strung
“Where are you really from?”
You hear of gunshots
In the streets
Adzuki bean sweets
The surrenders and defeats
Bow down to the white man’s feet
They gave you your life
Now you pretend
You don’t feel the cuts of the knife
They colonize their Asian wives
Now we rise
They must do more than just apologize
Their wrongs will never be rights
We realize
We must fight for these rights
We descend
Like the gods
And we grow
Like the cherry tree
We dissent
We’re not robots
And we know
We cannot be controlled
We die
And from this life of
Almond eyes
Caramel skin
Darkest chocolate hair
We leave
Our legacy;
Be proud
Of your Asian heritage
We will build the bridge
You will tread it
Might have to mend it
Mentally
But eventually,
This will be
Our legacy
I stand in my Asian soul
Full
Of the foods and smells of the kitchen
Kare-kare
Scallions
Halo-halo
Perfume
Golden sun medallions
Sesame oil
We toil
Endlessly
Relentlessly
For the Western’s greed
Now
For equity, equality, and peace
I stand in my Asian soul
My head held high
My almond eyes
“Imagine one day you receive a letter in the mail that informs you that a large energy company is planning to build a massive pipeline through your property. That surveyors will be coming out soon. That they have the legal right to do so, whether you like it or not, because this project is in the 'public interest.'"
That’s how journalist Jonathan Mingle describes the letter that people in rural Virginia received in 2014 from Dominion Energy, one of the biggest power companies in the country. Dominion was planning to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry natural gas over some 600 miles. What happened next is not how most David vs. Goliath stories end. People in the rural communities organized, mobilized, and fought back. The battle raged for six years until the pipeline was canceled in 2020.
Jonathan Mingle tells this dramatic story of climate change and resistance in his new book, “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America's Energy Future.”
Mingle, who lives in Lincoln, has traveled to distant corners of the world to chronicle the impacts of climate change and those who are fighting to stop it. In 2015, he published "Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World,"abouthis travels to the former Buddhist kingdom of Zanskar in northern India. He wrote about what is happening as Himalayan glaciers dry up and drought spreads.
Mingle has also reported on Vermont’s struggle to fund its rural schools and about how the July 2023 floods showed that Vermont is not immune from climate chaos.
“This idea that you could somehow escape the impacts of climate change is a delusion,” he said about Vermont’s recent experience with flooding.
Mingle said that the people who fought and won against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline demonstrated that “the most overlooked climate solution is solidarity. And we're going to need it to adapt to climate change.”
Nicholas Kristof has been an eyewitness to some of the most iconic political and social transformations of modern times. As a reporter and columnist for the New York Times for the last four decades, Kristof has been telling searing stories about revolutions, genocides, and the impact of global inequality. His work has garnered the top prizes in journalism, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The first was in 1990 for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests in China that he shared with his wife, reporter Sheryl WuDunn, the first Pulitzer awarded to a husband-wife team. They have also co-authored five books.
Since 2001, Nick Kristof has been a regular op-ed columnist for the Times. His powerful dispatches about the genocide in Darfur earned him a second Pulitzer in 2006. The former head of the International Rescue Committee said that Kristof's coverage saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Sudan.
Kristof has now written a memoir, "Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life." He tells the story of growing up on a sheep and cherry farm in rural Oregon, and then attending Harvard and Oxford. He continues to focus his reporting on human rights, global health, poverty and gender inequality.
In 2021, Krsitof left the Times to run for governor of Oregon, but his foray into politics was cut short a few months later when the Oregon Secretary of State ruled that as a result of living and working out of state for years, he did not meet residency requirements. He returned to his job as a columnist for the New York Times.
Despite reporting from some of the world’s grimmest places, Kristof remains stubbornly optimistic. “One thing you see on the front lines is that there has been a real arc of both material and moral progress. And that has left a deep impression on me,” he said. “Side by side with the worst of humanity, you end up encountering the best.”
Kristof has seen authoritarian regimes up close, only to come home to see authoritarianism creeping into American politics. Is he worried about the fate of democracy in the U.S.? “It's not a binary question, but a spectrum,” he replied.
“I don't think that the U.S. will become North Korea or China or Russia. But could we become Hungary? Or could we become Poland under the previous government? I think absolutely. I worry about political violence ... The DOJ, the military could all be heavily politicized, the civil service. I worry about all that. I don't think that I will be sentenced to Guantanamo. But could there be real impairment of democracy, of governance of freedoms? Absolutely. And I know I've seen that in other countries.”
Kristof continues to report on human rights abuses and repression, but he insists that he is guided by hope. “I think despair is sometimes just paralyzing, while hope can be empowering.”
Annelise Orleck did not expect that protecting her students would result in getting assaulted and arrested. Orleck is a professor of history and the former chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. On May 1, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock called police to break up a peaceful student protest on the Dartmouth Green. The students were protesting Israel’s war on Gaza and calling on Dartmouth to divest from companies that support Israel’s military occupation. This was one of many such protests sweeping college campuses.
New Hampshire state troopers in full riot gear arrived with armored vehicles in response to the Dartmouth students. Orleck joined other faculty and community members to stand between the police and students. The 65-year-old professor was body slammed to the ground and was one of 89 people arrested. Two reporters for the campus newspaper were also arrested, provoking national outrage from press freedom groups.
The police assault of Professor Orleck made national news and the videos went viral. Orleck was charged with criminal trespass and temporarily banned from portions of Dartmouth’s campus. The ACLU of New Hampshire issued a statement saying, “Use of police force against protestors should never be a first resort. Freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are foundational principles of democracy and core constitutional rights.”
Dartmouth President Beilock apologized in a letter to Dartmouth students on May 7, “No one, including me, wanted to see heavily armed police officers in the heart of our campus… I am sorry for the harm this impossible decision has caused.”
Orleck has been a professor at Dartmouth for 34 years and is a renowned historian of labor, women’s issues, and Jewish history. She lives in Thetford Center.
The crackdown on peaceful student protest is often being characterized as a response to antisemitism. On May 7, President Biden denounced a “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world.”
“There is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind,” said Biden.
“I'm not seeing a wild rise of antisemitism on this campus,” countered Orleck. “My friends who teach at Columbia who are Jewish are not seeing it on the Columbia campus. I am seeing some Jewish professors and students saying that these words, ‘Free Palestine,’ make them uncomfortable. But I've been telling people this week since I was attacked, please can we keep separate uncomfortable from words, and uncomfortable from being slammed and harmed by men with guns who then drag you off to jail? That's uncomfortable. That's unsafe.”
Orleck says, "What is real is the surge of antisemitism that's come out of Trumpist America and the January 6 protesters when they were storming the Capitol."
“It's a really frightening moment. I'm speaking out not just because I and my students were unnecessarily brutalized …but because I want to break that narrative about the protesters that's appeared in very mainstream media outlets.”
Orleck sees the current crackdown in historical terms. “This is part of a 40-year right-wing attack on higher education as an institution that seems to be controlled by people of more progressive political ideas,” Orleck told The Vermont Conversation.
Orleck asserted that today’s student protesters are part of “a remarkable generation.”
“They feel like [the war in Gaza] is the moral issue of their time because this is a genocide. And I agree with them.”
College campuses around the country have been rocked by protests against Israel’s war on Hamas, which has claimed the lives of some 35,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in Gaza. Students have established tent encampments and are calling on their universities to divest from companies that support the Israeli occupation. Some universities have cracked down on protesters. Since encampments began at Columbia University on April 17, over 1,000 students have been arrested around the country, and numerous students have been suspended.
In Vermont, protesters have formed encampments at Middlebury College, University of Vermont and Sterling College. Both Middlebury and UVM students are demanding financial transparency and calling for their institutions to divest from Israel.
Among their other demands, UVM students are calling for the cancellation of the commencement speaker, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Middlebury students are calling for their school to bring students and academics from Gaza, where many universities have been destroyed. In response to student demands, UVM leaders met with protesters and agreed to disclose its endowment investments and discuss the commencement speaker.
Leaders of both institutions have so far permitted the protests, though students told me they worried about potential disciplinary consequences. Erica Caloiero, the vice provost for student affairs at UVM, told VTDigger that tents are a violation of university policy but that the school is working with students “to make sure that temporary structures exist in a way that is safe and allowable.”
Middlebury College released a statement saying, “As an educational institution, Middlebury values and encourages free expression and the peaceful exchange of ideas—including peaceful protest.”
On this Vermont Conversation, we hear voices from the student protest encampments at Middlebury and UVM.
Middlebury senior Joshua Glucksman is due to graduate in a few weeks but said he can’t think about that. “Every single university [in Gaza] has been rendered dysfunctional by the ongoing Israel campaign of genocide,” he said. “There's no way that in my privilege as a student at Middlebury College, graduation is on my radar right now.”
“It just is inconceivable considering the amount of damage and destruction being done right now in Gaza, especially in my name for the perceived idea of Jewish safety, that Israel is waging this genocidal campaign,” said Glucksman, who is Jewish.
“This has been the most powerful three days of my career at Middlebury College,” said senior Oliver Patrick. “I feel like I have grown as a person, as an organizer, as a leader, more than I have in my last three years here. But that can't take away from the very serious fact of why we're here, which is that last night, missiles killed children in Gaza. And our university is complicit with that. And I'm willing to perform whatever action or whatever role to help stop that.”
UVM senior Lillian Farah, who is from Massachusetts but is of Palestinian descent, was quietly writing with chalk in Arabic, “Free Palestine,” on the sidewalk in front of the UVM protest encampment. A large pole with surveillance cameras loomed overhead, which many students nervously pointed to. Farah said she was unafraid.
“Watching people be able to come together for something that they actually believe in, despite threats of suspension, threats of arrest, threats of trespassing citations, it's not enough to scare people away. And I think that that's a very real, very lasting impact of all of this that maybe some people are starting to understand,” she said.
“Maybe this is what people need to see that we're not going anywhere. And our voices aren't stopping, and they matter just as much as anybody else's.”
In August 2000, 23-year-old Tamara Mathieu and her husband left good jobs, gave up everything, and joined a cult. For 14 years, they were members of Twelve Tribes, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a Christian fundamentalist cult” that has been accused of child abuse, child labor, racism and misogyny. The Twelve Tribes made national news in 1984 when their Island Pond community, which was then known as the Northeast Kingdom Community Church, was raided by Vermont State Police and 112 children were detained in response to allegations of child abuse. A judge later dismissed the cases, ruling that the raid was unconstitutional.
The Twelve Tribes “sees persecution as proof that they're God's people,” said Mathieu.
Mathieu, her husband and four children left the Twelve Tribes in 2014. She now works for Northwestern Counseling and Support Services in St. Albans as a facilitator of day programs for adults with developmental disabilities. She has just written a book, “All Who Believed: A Memoir of Life in the Twelve Tribes.”
The Twelve Tribes attracted “people who don't want to fit into the 9-to-5 rat race of society, and they want this life of love and caring for each other and community,” explained Mathieu. “Suddenly, you're surrounded by this group of people who are just enamored by you who are giving you all this praise and encouragement.”
Leaving the cult “was terrifying,” said Mathieu. “We had lived in this bubble and raised our children in this bubble. And then to come out, it's like you are bombarded with stimuli that haven't been a part of your life. I felt like a new parent. All I had done all those years was just spank my children for everything they ever did wrong. And I knew that we didn't want to continue on that practice, but what do you do? Like, a timeout?”
Mathieu hopes that people who read her book see it as a cautionary tale. “Your personal freedom and your ability to make decisions for you and your family is really a priceless thing. I wouldn't give that up for anything anymore.”
She also noted that cults are everywhere. “People might not really even realize what's going on right next door.”
In 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, hopes were high that apartheid was in its dying days. Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and a chaplain to the African National Congress, had been living in exile in Zimbabwe. He thought he might soon return to South Africa to begin building a new post-apartheid nation. But apartheid’s henchman would not go quietly. Three months after Mandela’s release Lapsley received a letter bomb that blew off his hands and an eye and nearly killed him.
Lapsley has gone on to transform his tragedy into a global message for healing and social justice. He founded the Institute for Healing of Memories in South Africa and worked alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help victims of apartheid. He is now the president of the Healing of Memories Global Network and has run workshops for genocide survivors in Rwanda, indigenous people in Australia, and combat veterans in the U.S. He has received numerous international awards and wrote a memoir, “Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer.”
I met Father Michael, as he is known, in 1984 in Zimbabwe, where I was a young reporter covering the South African liberation struggle. He was the hip activist priest who everyone sought out to get information and contacts. He taught me about South African history and politics from the perspective of someone who was shaping it.
I spoke with Lapsley this week while he was in Iowa where he was speaking, teaching and leading a church service.
“I'd quite like to meet the person who sent me the bomb and say, ‘Thank you very much, you sent me a letter bomb,’” Lapsley reflected. “Of course it was an act of evil. But thanks to you, I now have a worldwide ministry, I've been able to set up an organization that has a small footprint across the world, for which I am very grateful. I've been able to create spaces where healing happens, where people are able to have their pain heard and acknowledged. So thank you, sir. What about you?”
Lapsley said of his own journey, “I realized that if I was filled with hatred and bitterness, they would have failed to kill the body (but) they would have killed the soul, and I would remain their permanent prisoner. And I wasn't interested in being anybody's prisoner.”
Lapsley said that soldiers are “all damaged by war.” The workshops that he runs encourage them to share their stories with one another. “That helps them to recover their own humanity. Because one of the terrible things about war is the way you see two totally dehumanize the other.”
Trauma and recovery are part of the human condition. “Healing is difficult, but it's possible,” said Lapsley. “We don't have to be prisoners of the past.”
Even if you don't know Jules Rabin, there’s a good chance that you have seen him protesting or read one of his many letters to the editor or commentaries in local publications. Rabin is Vermont’s most tenacious and dedicated peace activist. He celebrated his 100th birthday on April 6 by asking friends to join him in downtown Montpelier to protest Israel's war on Gaza.
Rabin grew up in Boston, the youngest of five children. His father worked in a junkyard sorting metal and the family struggled to get by. His experience living in poverty in a working class community during the Depression made him a lifelong crusader for social justice.
Rabin attended the Boston Latin School, then went on to get a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and studied anthropology in graduate school at Columbia University. He lived in Greenwich Village where he met his wife Helen. In 1968, he moved to Vermont to teach anthropology at Goddard College, where he taught for nine years. After Goddard downsized and he lost his teaching job, Jules and Helen started Upland Bakers, baking sourdough bread for 35 years in a wood-fired oven that they built. Their bread earned such a loyal following that a local store posted a sign to customers: “To prevent RIOTS and acts of TERRORISM, we ask you to please limit your purchase of Upland French Bread to no more than three loaves.”
Jules Rabin attended his first protest at the age of 8, and has protested wars in every generation. From 1960 to 1961, he participated in a 7,000-mile march from San Francisco to Moscow to promote nonviolence and nuclear disarmament. He spent years protesting against the Vietnam War, and in the early 2000s, just as the Iraq War was starting, he could be found in a weekly peace vigil in front of the Montpelier Federal Building in a protest that continued uninterrupted for nine years. Rabin, who is Jewish, has long protested Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.
“How could the Nazi genocide of Jews 1933-45 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians today?” asked Rabin. He held a sign with a similar message at a recent protest. “I feel so strongly that what Israel is doing today to Palestinians so much resembles what Germans did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and everywhere else in Europe and World War II. It's kind of a pitiless wrecking of human flesh.”
Jules and Helen Rabin have lived in Marshfield in the same house for 56 years, where they raised their two daughters, Hannah and Nessa. They have three grandchildren.
I asked Rabin what keeps him protesting. “It's not that I'm a morbid person always looking for the darkest corner of the room to squat in and be miserable in,” he replied. But he added, “One can't look the other way when something dreadful is going on.”
Jan Reynolds just wanted to be “one of the guys.” Growing up as one of seven children on a dairy farm in Middlebury, Reynolds thought nothing of a tough physical challenge. This propelled her to record setting high-altitude adventures in the company of some of the world’s top mountaineers, often as the only woman on expeditions on the highest summits.
Reynolds attended the University of Vermont, where she was a top cross-country ski racer and was part of a team that won an NCAA championship. In 1980, Reynolds set the world high altitude skiing record for women when she skied off the summit of 24,757-foot Mustagata Peak in western China. She soared in a hot air balloon at 29,000 feet over Everest (and then crashed) and led the first U.S. women’s biathlon team. Esquire named her its Athlete of the Decade in the 1980s, Ultrasport dubbed her “Indiana Jan,” and she appeared everywhere from the cover of Outside Magazine to the “Today” show to National Geographic.
Reynolds chronicled her adventures in her book “The Glass Summit: One Woman's Epic Journey Breaking Through.” She writes about her exploits as well as the power and importance of women throughout the world. She has also written and photographed over 20 books mainly documenting vanishing cultures.
“All the women in the Amazon territory survive and do everything men do, right? So why do we think a woman cannot live in a triple canopy jungle or at high altitude — the Sherpas and Tibetan women are there — or the Inuit, they have babies in igloos. Think about that: they do everything men do in a frozen environment and they have babies.”
Women “can do everything men do. We just have different skills and different approaches.”
Reynolds was inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 2021 and was inducted into the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2008. These days she travels the world photographing and writing about indigenous people for her award-winning children's book series, "Vanishing Cultures."
Earlier this winter I skied with Reynolds at Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, where she still teaches cross-country ski lessons. She showed me a trailside bench with a plaque that honors her and her two sons and led me on a high speed adventure on and off groomed trails through her favorite mountains.
“Adventure is where you wish you weren't when you are, and you wish you were when you aren't,” said Reynolds.
Some people make films to entertain or inform. Bess O’Brien makes films to change the world.
"I'm very committed as a documentary filmmaker to not only make the movie but to try to use the film to create change," the award-winning Vermont filmmaker said.
O’Brien's work has raised awareness about vulnerable people and social justice. Her 2013 documentary, “The Hungry Heart,” about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont, sparked a soul-searching conversation about opioids.
The following year, Gov. Peter Shumlin dedicated his entire State of the State address to the topic, which received national attention.
“Every state in the Union should be so lucky to have Bess O’Brien working for them in support of children and families,” Shumlin said.
O’Brein’s 2016 documentary, “All of Me,” focused on the lives of women, girls and boys who have eating disorders. Like many of her films, they were shown in schools and communities throughout the state.
Her other films include “Coming Home,” about five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison. And she produced “The Listen Up Project,” an original musical based on the lives of Vermont teens.
O’Brien’s is now touring with her latest film, “Just Getting By,” which is about Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity. O’Brien has once again put a human face on an issue that is now at the top of the political agenda in Vermont and the country.
Bess O’Brien is the founder of Kingdom County Productions with her husband, filmmaker Jay Craven.
O’Brien said that she learned from spending time with people in poverty that “it's not only about the scarcity of money and not having enough money or availability of food or housing. It's also just the constant uncertainty of living your life. Am I going to have enough food to feed my family? Can I get to the food shelf? … Am I going to get that apartment that I applied for? This is the fifth apartment I've applied for and all the other ones fell through. Constantly living in that space is really intense and it takes a toll.”
O’Brien shines a light on issues that are hiding in plain sight.
“Food insecurity is not just about people who are desperately hungry and starving,” she said.
Often it’s invisible, including “the parents don't eat breakfast or dinner because they don't have enough food and they give it to their kids instead,” she said. “That is food insecurity. And poverty is not necessarily living in a tent. It can be living in a hotel and not having a place to live because … even if you look for a place there is nowhere to go.”
O’Brien’s latest film “is about the scrappiness, the courage, the ingenuity, the incredible forthrightness to get up every day and get through your day and make it work for your family when you have very little.”
This Vermont Conversation originally broadcast in April 2015.
Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He went on to serve 18 years in the California legislature. He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and was described by the NY Times as “the single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement.” Hayden died in October 2016 at the age of 76.
During the Vietnam War, Hayden made controversial trips to Hanoi with his former wife, actress Jane Fonda, to promote peace talks and facilitate the release of American POWs. He helped lead street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, where he was beaten, gassed and arrested twice. Hayden was indicted in 1969 with seven others on conspiracy and incitement charges in what eventually became the Chicago Seven trial, considered one of the leading political trials of the last century (the trial began as the Chicago Eight but became the Chicago Seven when the case against codefendent Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was severed from the others).
The trial was the subject of the 2020 Hollywood movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” in which Hayden was played by actor Eddie Redmayne.
Hayden was Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California, and advised former California Gov. Jerry Brown on renewable energy. He was the author and editor of 20 books.
I spoke with Hayden in March 2015 at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where Hayden spoke at the 50th anniversary of the first Vietnam War teach in held on a US college campus.
I asked Hayden what he was proudest of in his long career of activism. "Living this long and being able to have children and grandchildren, and to observe the spread of participatory democracy and to see — despite all the failures of the left and the lack of organization, the infighting, the sectarianism, the feuds — that wave after wave of young people keep coming," he replied.
"I'm proudest of the fact that there's some instinct in being human that aspires to greater things than your parents had, a better world than the one that you were born into."
Laura Waterman has been described as “mountain royalty.” With her late husband, Guy Waterman, she has written numerous articles and books on the outdoors, including the definitive 900-page classic, “Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains.” The Watermans were pioneering philosophers of wilderness ethics and are often credited as the inspiration for the modern Leave No Trace movement of low-impact camping and hiking.
Laura Waterman may seem like an improbable crusader and chronicler of wilderness. She grew up on the campus of the Lawrenceville School, an elite prep school in New Jersey where her father taught English and was a renowned scholar of Emily Dickinson. In the early 1960s, Laura got a job in publishing in New York City, where she met her future husband, Guy, who had been a speechwriter for Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford and for General Electric. In 1973, the young couple left the big city and became homesteaders on a 27-acre plot of land in East Corinth. Together, they wrote books and were stewards of the Franconia Ridge, home to a spectacular and popular skyline trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
In 2000, Laura’s life changed forever when Guy died by suicide. He was 67. Five years later, Laura wrote a memoir, “Losing the Garden: A Story of a Marriage,” in which she tried to make sense of it. But it has taken more than one book for her to understand what happened to Guy, and to her. Now at the age of 84, Laura Waterman has a new book, “Calling Wild Places Home: A Memoir in Essays.”
I recently visited Laura Waterman in her log house in East Corinth to talk about her books and her life. Her home is full of pictures of her and Guy in the mountains and living their off-grid Vermont homestead, which they called Barra. It is obvious as we walk around the house that Guy continues to have a strong presence in her life.
"I needed to write the second memoir to understand better my role in Guy's suicide," Waterman explains. "I needed that 20 years to live with that and basically grow into the person that I needed to become."
Midway through her ninth decade, Laura Waterman is still summiting mountains. "I just feel so fortunate. I'm fortunate to be able to climb mountains, smaller ones. I'm very fortunate to be writing what I'm writing."
A note for our listeners and readers: This Vermont Conversation discusses suicide. If you are in crisis or need help for someone else, dial 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.
On Tuesday, Burlington voters elected Emma Mulvaney-Stanak to be the Queen City’s next mayor. The 43-year-old Progressive/Democrat who grew up in Barre City succeeds Democrat Miro Weinberger, who has been mayor since 2012 and did not run for reelection.
Mulvaney-Stanak will be the first woman and the first openly queer person to serve as Burlington’s mayor when she is sworn in on April 1. She is also a state representative from Burlington and has served on the Burlington City Council. She has directed the Vermont Livable Wage Campaign, been an organizer with Vermont-NEA and was chair of the Vermont Progressive Party. She runs a social change strategy consulting business whose clients include labor unions, nonprofits, municipalities and school districts. She lives with her wife and two children in Burlington’s Old North End.
Growing up in Vermont, Mulvaney-Stanak said, “I did not see leaders who held identities that I hold. And that really matters because there was a subconscious level where you don't think that's possibly something you can do.”
“The historic nature of this race — the fact that after 159 years, we finally have a woman mayor, after 159 years, we finally have an out LGBTQ+ mayor — that really matters,” she said. “And I'm pretty darn sure that I am the first queer mayor in the entire state of Vermont.”
"The fact that I am a mom of two small kids, the fact that I am a woman, the fact that I am a queer person, it brings a very different perspective to the decision making table and also the leadership role in the city,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
Twenty years ago, Gov. Howard Dean ended his run for president. His campaign concluded with a scream – the fabled Dean Scream – but not before it changed the face of modern campaigning.
The Deaniacs, as his legions of young followers came to be known, proved that small dollar internet fundraising and organizing could help vault the governor of a small state who was little known outside of New England into a powerful insurgent candidate. When Dean split from his fellow Democratic candidates and denounced the Iraq War in the fall of 2003, he became a populist hero and frontrunner in many polls for the Democratic nomination. He poured everything into winning the Iowa caucus, only to come in third behind John Kerry and John Edwards, who would end up as the Democrat’s 2004 presidential ticket that would lose to incumbent President George W. Bush.
The Dean Scream was a viral clip of Dean shouting hoarsely to thousands of followers to rally them to keep fighting as they left Iowa and traveled to New Hampshire. The clip was used by his opponents to portray him as hot headed and angry. It has been described as the first viral political meme.
Dean, a physician and Vermont’s longest serving governor, would go on to be elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005 where he championed the 50 State Strategy. Rather than focusing only on swing states, Dean insisted that Democrats contest every single district in the country. The strategy proved itself in 2006 when Democrats won control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Dean also launched Democracy for America, a progressive political action committee, which folded in 2022.
Dean has been a consultant focusing on health care and grassroots organizing and teaches foreign policy and public affairs at Yale, his alma mater. He is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC and other networks.
On The Vermont Conversation, Gov. Dean had plenty to say about every issue (edited for length):
On lessons learned from his 2004 presidential run: I wish I had put together a campaign operation that was better organized (and) that I wasn't so outspoken. But actually, that's what made the campaign. I'm incredibly glad I did it. It was an unbelievable experience.
On the Israel-Hamas War: Israel has a right to exist. There needs to be a Jewish state. But the leadership in Israel has been a disaster. I've met Netanyahu. And I can assure you that he is just Trump with brains. All he cares about is Netanyahu, and he doesn't give a damn about anything else or anybody else. I think that includes the State of Israel.
How President Biden should deal with Israel and Hamas: What Hamas did was a horror show. They had no right to do that. I mean, they tortured people. But what's going on in Gaza now is also a horror show. And nobody has the right to do that and murder 30,000 individuals or civilians, mostly women and children. So there's no right on either side. Both sides need to be pushed. We need to be even handed: we need to be tough on Hamas, but we need to be tough on Netanyahu as well. …And I'd cut off arms sales to Israel if we have to.
On conservatives: The conservatives have lost their mind. They're really not conservatives at all anymore. They're just lunatics.
Why Republicans win: Clausewitz said that politics is war by another means. Republicans understand that. They're ruthless. They govern from the top down, they're incredibly well organized. They can't govern as a result, because this is a democracy, which is no doubt why they want to get rid of democracy. Democrats are intellectuals. We think that the argument is going to win the day. We don't pack the Supreme Court, we don't have corrupt justices in the Supreme Court. We play nice because we believe in democracy, which the Republicans basically don't, unless they can get votes from it. We are lousy at winning elections because we want to play nice. So we don't want to do anything that's going to offend anybody. I don't want to be as offensive as the Republicans are, but I think we’ve got to be a lot tougher and a lot better organized.
On reproductive rights: The right wing basically hates the idea that women are equal to men. (Aborition) is one right you can take away from women and have them less equal. That's what this is about. All these men, these Secretaries of State and these Supreme Court (justices) in Alabama, they would like to go back to the old days where women are in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Not anymore, it's too late. You let them out. And we ain't going back in.
On the future of the Republican Party in Vermont: I do think there's a future of the Republican Party. It'll be the Phil Scott Republican Party. It certainly isn't going to be the Donald Trump (party). Donald Trump is just mean. And there are not a lot of mean people in this state.
What concerns you most right now: I think what Trump's legacy will be is the same as Orban's legacy in Hungary, or the PIS (Law and Justice Party) legacy in Poland. It'll be very hard to reverse. The damage to higher education (and) to the economy will be huge. Trump talks all about these people who are aggrieved — they're going to be the first ones that get screwed if he wins, because all he cares about is rich people and his own balance sheet. So I think the country's in deep, serious trouble. It'll be the end of America as the major world power. We may not be perfect about human rights, but we do the best job of any of the major countries and the major powers.
Hisham Awartani didn’t expect to become the focus of international news when he went for a walk before dinner at his grandmother’s house in Burlington on Nov. 25. Awartani was with his friends Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad, who are all of Palestinian descent and attend colleges in the U.S. They were speaking a mix of English and Arabic and two were wearing kufiyahs, the traditional Palestinian scarf, as they often did.
Without provocation, Jason Eaton, a man they did not know, allegedly stepped off his porch and shot the three 20-year old men at point blank range. Eaton was charged with three counts of second degree attempted murder, and the state is still deciding whether to add a hate crime charge. The trial will likely be in 2025.
Awartani, a student at Brown University, was the most gravely wounded of the three friends, who were classmates at the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker high school in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. A bullet lodged in Hisham’s spine and he is now paralyzed below the abdomen. He has spent the last two months at a rehab hospital in Boston. He recently fulfilled his goal of returning to study at Brown, where he is an archaeology and mathematics double major.
Elizabeth Price, the mother of Hisham Awartani, confessed that she “didn't think that would be possible” that her son would return to college for the second semester.
“He's resolute and he's steadfast,” Price told The Vermont Conversation. An international development consultant, Price said that Hisham exemplifies the Palestinian philosophy of samud, “just getting on with it, just continuing to do what you can do, despite what the world throws at you.”
A gofundme established to raise money to support Hisham's recovery has so far raised $1.7 million.
Price said that her son’s assailant is less important than his motivation. “He chose to shoot because of a larger cultural political mindset that is still endangering Palestinians in America.”
“He was motivated by hateful, dehumanizing speech by elected representatives and media. And since he shot them, it's become much worse. The actions of the U.S. government, both the Biden administration and elected officials in Congress, have shown over and over again, that Palestinian life is not valued.”
The toll of Israel’s war on Gaza has been staggering. Some 30,000 Palestinians have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry. “I think Israel is committing genocide. It's committing a domicide, which is a total destruction of a city. It's committing culturicide — they have destroyed the intelligentsia and the professional classes. They have bombed all universities, they devastated schools, all the National Archives, archaeological sites, museums — it's all gone.
“The extermination in Gaza is being done with American weapons with our taxpayers money.”
Hisham returned to Brown as 17 students were participating in a hunger strike to pressure the university to divest from companies “associated with human rights abuses in Palestine.”
Price said that such protests are “an incredible boost, an incredible gift to the Palestinians. Seeing the Jewish groups who are against the war occupying Grand Central Station, that was incredibly moving. And I think so many Palestinians were touched by that. …[It] means that Palestinians feel like they are not being forgotten.”
Hisham "is going to be an amazing person in this world," said his mother. "I'm just really glad that he still is in this world because ultimately that's the gift that we never stop being thankful for, that he didn't die that night."
When Mia Schultz became president of the Rutland branch of the NAACP in December 2020, she became one of Vermont’s most visible and important racial justice advocates. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the U.S. with more than 2,200 branches.
Schultz hails from Arizona and moved to Bennington in 2016. She is the first Black woman to chair the Bennington Democratic Party and serves as one of three commissioners on Vermont’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Among the issues that Schultz and the NAACP are tackling is overpolicing.
“Vermont is not exempt from this culture,” she wrote in an op-ed for the Bennington Banner. “Black adults enter Vermont correctional facilities at more than seven times the rate of white adults. Compared to white drivers, Black and Latinx drivers are four times more likely to be pulled over, and nearly three times more likely to be searched. By contrast, they are half as likely to be found with contraband, which means the over-stopping and over-searching is simply because of their skin color.”
"What is happening to really ensure that black lives matter?" Schultz asked. "Are you changing laws and policies that will actually affect black lives when it comes to policing? What are you doing to really affect the lives of marginalized people in our laws and systems and legal avenues to ensure that they're protected?"
Schultz told The Vermont Conversation that she is given hope by the “people who are now out there starting community conversations and their own initiatives in their towns, gathering people, having those difficult conversations.”
“Having an interpersonal relationship with people and being able to move them into action, that means other people are moved. That is the most profound thing,” she said.
VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation. This episode with Matthew Desmond was originally published in April 2023.
Why does the U.S. — the richest country in the world — have the most poverty of any advanced democracy? Why are homeless encampments popping up from Seattle to Burlington?
The answer is that, knowingly or unknowingly, many of us benefit from keeping poor people poor.
That is the argument made by Matthew Desmond in his bestselling new book, “Poverty, by America.” Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which was named by Book Riot as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last century. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and was named by Politico in 2016 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
He argues that regulations ranging from zoning to environmental laws are being used to block affordable housing, a key factor that is driving the homeless crisis. He says that this problem is often especially acute in communities known for their otherwise progressive politics. Low wages are kept low for the benefit of the more affluent.
“In most residential land in America, it's illegal to build anything except a single detached family home,” Desmond told The Vermont Conversation. “That little regulation buried inside of our zoning codes really means that the only place poor families can live are neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and that creates a level of disadvantage of a whole other order. I think that we need to think about our role and our complicity in maintaining those walls around our communities.”
Desmond intends his work to be “a call to action. It means that we need to get our tails down to that zoning board meeting on a Thursday night at eight o'clock and stand up and say, Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids receive living here. Let's build [affordable housing].”
Matthew Desmond’s work is grounded in his own experience growing up in poverty. He started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, when he lived among poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee. He now directs the Eviction Lab at Princeton, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where “Poverty, By America” was recently excerpted.
Desmond wants to inspire a new abolitionist movement. “Poverty abolitionists view poverty not as a minor social issue or an inevitability, but as an abomination,” he said. “It shares with other abolitionist movements — the movement to abolish slavery [and] prisons, for example — the recognition, the conviction, that if my gain comes at someone else's loss, that's corrupting in a way."
"A poverty abolitionist divests from exploitation even if it benefits us. We try to shop and invest in solidarity with poor workers," he said. "We want a government that has a balanced and sensible welfare state, a government that does much more to fight poverty than to alleviate the tax burdens of the affluent. And we are for integrated communities and open, inclusive neighborhoods.”
Poverty abolitionism “is a political mission,” said Desmond, “but it's also a per
On a cold winter day in 1984, three skiers pushed off from the Massachusetts border with an audacious plan to ski the length of Vermont. They named the 300-mile route the Catamount Trail. It is now the longest ski trail in North America.
On Feb. 8, those same three skiers, Ben Rose, Paul Jarris, and Steve Bushey, who are each now in their 60s, will set off to once again ski the length of Vermont to mark the 40th anniversary of the Catamount Trail. They plan to ski all 31 sections of the trail in five weeks.
The Catamount Trail was originally conceived by Steve Bushey, a geography major at the University of Vermont, and his high school friend Ben Rose, who had just graduated from Yale. They had recently biked across the country together and were searching for their next big adventure. Jarris, who had been Bushey’s UVM classmate and regular outdoor partner, was a fourth-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. Bushey mapped out the ski trail as his masters geography thesis at Carleton University in Ottawa. Skiing it would provide proof of concept and be a grand adventure. But the trail was also about connecting people and building communities.
After skiing the Catamount Trail in 1984, the three friends have gone on to have rewarding careers. Rose served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Catamount Trail Association, later went on to lead the Green Mountain Club, and is now the recovery and mitigation chief at the Vermont Department of Emergency Management. Jarris was a family doctor for 20 years and also served as Vermont’s Commissioner of Health under Gov. Jim Douglas, then played a national role in public health. Bushey and his wife founded and run Map Adventures, which makes popular recreational maps and guides.
Today, thousands of skiers use the Catamount Trail each winter, including Vermont school children who are introduced to skiing through the association’s youth programs. “It’s a trail for everybody,” said Matt Williams, executive director of the Catamount Trail Association.
“This is a 40-year movement … to build backcountry trails and access throughout the length of Vermont to bring people into the state to enjoy that resource,” reflected Jarris.
Climate change poses a threat to the future of the Catamount Trail. A study sponsored by the climate action group Protect Our Winters projects that the average number of days with snow cover in New England will decline by 50 to 75 percent in the coming decades, depending on greenhouse gas emissions.
Rose said that the Catamount Trail and its association have “an important role to play as a canary in the coal mine, and as a group of people who refuse to give up on the value of winter, the possibility of winter, the future of winter.”
Skiing the length of Vermont and seeing how the Catamount Trail has grown "made me an optimist for life," said Rose.
Driving around rural areas of the Northeast, it’s not uncommon to see an occasional home or vehicle displaying a Confederate battle flag. Look closer, and you might find symbols of far right groups like the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters, both classified as hate groups.
Reporters Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch decided to dig further. They spent months investigating the reach of the far right movement in rural upstate New York. They found law enforcement officers who are members of the extremist “constitutional sheriffs” movement who vow that they will not enforce state laws with which they disagree. These include laws relating to gun rights and public health. And they found a man who went to prison for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and anticipates a military takeover during the 2024 election and a third world war.
Russell and Hirsch also crisscrossed the district represented by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY. Stefanik has amplified far right views, such as the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory and the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Stefanik is frequently mentioned as a potential vice presidential running mate for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
This investigation into the far right extremist movement in upstate New York is the subject of a remarkable five-part podcast from North Country Public Radio called “If All Else Fails,” which is hosted by Russell and Hirsch.
This Vermont Conversation includes the first episode of If All Else Fails, broadcast by permission of North Country Public Radio, followed by a conversation with reporters Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch.
“As we saw on Jan. 6, it only took a couple thousand people to suspend our democratic process for hours and force an evacuation from the Capitol,” Russell told the Vermont Conversation.
“Even if folks who have gone down these rabbit holes may be a minority in this country, if you get enough of them riled up, they can do a tremendous amount of damage to our democracy in the U.S.,” Russell said.
Katherine Paterson is one of America’s most celebrated writers for children. The author of more than 40 books, she is one of just six writers who have twice won the prestigious Newbery Medal, for “Bridge to Terabithia” in 1978 and “Jacob Have I Loved” in 1981. She has also won the National Book Award twice. In 2000, Paterson was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
Paterson frequently writes about children confronting difficult issues. At 89 years old, the Vermont author shows little sign of slowing down. She recently published a new book, “Birdie’s Bargain,” about a child with a parent heading off to fight in Iraq.
Paterson’s books are among the most beloved in children’s literature. They are also among the most banned. Book banning has lately been enjoying a revival, as books are being pulled from library shelves in “unprecedented” numbers, according to the American Library Association.
Among the latest crop of books to be yanked from library shelves are “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman; “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison; and “The 1619 Project,” a bestselling history of slavery in the U.S. that grew out of a special issue of The New York Times Magazine.
“Bridge to Terabithia” rose to No. 8 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books for the 1990s. Her book “The Great Gilly Hopkins” was No. 20 on that list. Only a handful of authors had their books banned more often in the 1990s, including Maya Angelou, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.
“If you write a book that has any power in it, it has the power to offend,” Paterson said. “I don’t want to write a book that has no power in it, so I have to run the risk of offending.”
This January marks the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion. But 18 months ago, the Supreme Court took away that right in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, the landscape of reproductive rights around the country has sharply fractured. Fourteen states have enacted total bans on abortion, and seven more severely restrict access, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which describes the status of abortion rights in many states as “dismal.” One in five abortion patients now travel out of state for care.
Vermont is one of seven states that have protected the right to abortion since Dobbs.
Felicia Kornbluh has chronicled the rise and fall of reproductive rights in essays for the Washington Post, Time and other publications. Kornbluh is professor of history with appointments in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Vermont. She is also vice president of the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund and was a signatory to a “friend of the court” brief in the Dobbs case on behalf of the American Society for Legal History.
Her latest book is “A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice,” which was released in paperback this month.
Kornbluh is critical of the state-by-state approach to protecting abortion rights. In Ohio, where voters approved an abortion rights amendment in November, advocates for and against abortion spent a combined $70 million.
“That's crazy,” said Kornbluh. “Thinking about political strategy, I just can't imagine how we can keep going. …We need a national solution.”
Kornbluh said that the Women's Health Protection Act, which would expand abortion rights, could be that solution. It was originally proposed in Congress in 2013 and was reintroduced following the Dobbs decision. It passed the House in 2021 and narrowly lost in the Senate in 2022.
“If we were able to have robust Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, then we would be able to pass that and we would be able to protect people's rights on the national level and do something different with that millions and millions of dollars…. to get us back to some kind of humane baseline in terms of abortion rights.”
Medication abortions now account for more than half of abortions, and many states, including Vermont, are making plans to stockpile the medication in the event of a national ban.
Kornbluh asserted that "what will continue to happen on the ground is far outpacing the effort of anti-abortion people and crotchety conservative judges who were trying to control it."
She conceded, however, "They can still do damage."
On a drizzly day in late October, a strange looking truck pulled over on a dirt road in Hinesburg. The truck had electronic billboards attached to three sides that displayed the smiling face of a young woman. The neighbors knew the face well — it was Eva Frazier, whose family lived on the road. Eva was a top student at nearby Champlain Valley Union High School, from which she graduated in 2022. Eva has long been passionate about social justice issues and was involved in CVU’s chapter of Amnesty International. She is also a competitive swimmer. Eva is now a sophomore at Harvard.
The truck with the illuminated billboards had a different description of Eva, who is 19. It showed her face under the banner, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemite.” The truck, which was paid for by the right-wing group Accuracy in Media, had traveled from Cambridge, Ma., where it had spent several weeks circling Harvard Yard displaying the faces of numerous Harvard students beneath the same banner. This was an effort to dox students and faculty who were allegedly sympathetic to Palestinians or who had expressed any opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. "Doxxing" is publicizing personal information about someone without their permission.
This doxxing effort is part of a national campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian speech that is led by Canary Mission, a shadowy group linked to Israel. Canary Mission now lists Frazier on a website of people that it claims “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” This campaign against students and faculty has received national media attention but its work in Vermont has not been documented until now.
The pressure campaign against universities may have claimed its biggest prize with the resignation on Jan. 2 of Harvard President Claudine Gay. She stepped down after a monthlong backlash following her testimony in Congress about antisemitism on campus, and allegations advanced by right-wing activists that some of her scholarly work had been plagiarized, which Harvard’s governing body refuted.
Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik celebrated Gay’s resignation, calling the former Harvard president “morally bankrupt” and vowing “this is just the beginning.”
Gay’s defenders included Boston University professor and bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote on X that Gay was a target of “racist mobs.”
Harvard Professor Albert Guzetti said of the campaign against Gay, “This recalls the worst days of McCarthyism.”
Eva Frazier refuses to be silenced. On this Vermont Conversation, Eva talked about her experience getting doxxed and speaking out for Palestinian rights.
Frazier said that the doxxing campaign’s “larger goal is to silence all students, and especially people who are thinking about being vocal or visible about support for Palestine.”
The attacks on her and her friends have had the opposite effect. “It is even more important to continue to advocate for justice in Palestine especially as genocide in Gaza continues,” she told The Vermont Conversation.
James Bamford, an award winning investigative journalist, recently wrote an expose for The Nation, “Who is Funding Canary Mission? Inside the Doxxing Operation Targeting Anti-Zionist Students and Professors.” He explained that Canary Mission “is a very well organized, well financed operation run by a foreign country to intimidate Americans.”
Frazier believes that Gay was forced to resign by “far-right activists and leaders… [who want] to suppress free speech, hurt higher ed and really wage a war against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and affirmative action.”
Frazier said that the attacks on free speech serve a larger purpose. They are “a distraction from the tens of thousands of civilian lives that have been lost in Gaza.”
VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say.
Irving, 81, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the making and at 900 pages, it is his longest work. He says that “The Last Chairlift” will be his last long novel.
John Irving wrote his first novel at age 26. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached wrestling until he was 47. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Irving has won a National Book Award, an Oscar and a Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other recognitions. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He lived for many years in Vermont, first in Putney and later in Dorset. He sold his Vermont home in 2014 and now lives in Toronto. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.
Irving has long tackled controversial issues in his novels. “The World According to Garp” (1978) has a transgender character, “The Cider House Rules” (1985) deals with abortion and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) confronts the fallout from the Vietnam War. His books have periodically been banned.
“What are they banning? They’re banning books about abortion and they’re banning books on LGBTQ subjects,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “What they're saying to young, gay, lesbian, trans kids, they want them to feel even more alone and isolated than they already feel. They don't want those kids to have access to material that will let them know they're not alone. They already feel alone. There's a cruelty to that that is unspeakable.”
Irving is a sharp critic of American politics today. Speaking about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights, he said, “What they did is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Irving’s advice to young writers: “You can't let outside factors get under your skin. You have to stick to your purpose and be a kind of horse with blinders on. … You also can't get down on yourself after somebody's just kicked your tail. You've got to do it again and get better.”
Naomi Klein realized that she had an alter ego, or doppelganger, during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. She was in a public bathroom and overheard people talking about her. The author of numerous international bestsellers including “No Logo,” “The Shock Doctrine,” and “This Changes Everything,” Klein realized that she was being confused with Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author of the 1991 bestseller, “The Beauty Myth.” A decade ago, both authors were writing about the danger of unchecked corporate power and rising authoritarianism.
But in recent years, Wolf has become an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, a leading purveyor of Covid-19 misinformation, and a regular guest of right-wing provocateurs Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Klein was horrified and intrigued about why “Other Naomi” had disappeared down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. She decided to follow her down the rabbit hole and report back.
In her latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” Klein dives deep into the alternate reality of conspiracy theorists and the far right to understand why and how societies have become polarized and democracy has been pushed to the brink. “Doppelganger” has been named one of the year’s best books by the New York Times, Time, Slate and The Guardian. New York Magazine’s Vulture has named it the No. 1 book of the year.
Klein is Professor of Climate Justice and co-director of the Center for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia and is Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. She is a columnist for The Guardian.
“Doppelgangers in art and literature stand in for the way societies can kind of flip into evil twin versions of themselves,” Klein told The Vermont Conversation. “This is what happens when fascism rises: a previously open society suddenly tips into something much uglier. And that that can happen. We're not immune to it.”
Klein explained that “right-wing conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. They're often tapping into a feeling that the game is rigged, that these elites are getting away with murder, there's a whole different set of rules that applies to them."
"All of that is true — it is a rigged game,” she said. “That game is called capitalism.”
Klein said that the notion of doppelgangers helps explain what is happening in Israel’s war on Gaza.
“If you have Israeli politicians openly saying that they want as many people in Gaza as possible to become refugees, then that is a genocidal logic. Some people say that's antisemitic, because how could a Jewish state commit genocide when Israel is itself conceived of as reparations for genocide? Well, victims can become perpetrators. This is where it comes back to doppelgangers.”
Klein said that there is a way out of the mirror world. “If you want to be able to break out of those partitioned narratives, you have to be able to see each other. You don't have to agree, but you actually have to believe that each other are real, that your stories exist. If all you do is just retell and retraumatize and cling to your parallel stories and don't even acknowledge that the other stories exist, we will never ever, ever get out.”
“Maybe,” said Klein, “we'll get to a wiser place out of this extreme trauma.”
VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
This Vermont Conversation with Alison Bechdel was originally published in May 2021.
Alison Bechdel is obsessed. Her passion is exercise — karate, cycling, running, skiing in all its forms, to name a few of her pursuits. This obsession is the focus of Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. A New York Times book review declares, “This is a true delight of graphic literature, and nobody does it better. You feel as if you’re peering through a plexiglass panel right into Bechdel’s marvelous brain. … [It is] a nearly perfect book.”
Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont and a recipient of a MacArthur genius award. She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide. The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.
Bechdel runs, skis and bikes from her home in West Bolton, which she shares with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, who is the colorist for her new book.
Are we alone?
The question of whether human beings on Earth are the only intelligent life forms has long inspired scientists and philosophers. It has also animated generations of conspiracy theorists who believe that the U.S. government has been engaged in a decadeslong coverup about extraterrestrial intelligence and unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.
Bestselling Vermont author and historian Garrett Graff has a new book that attempts to settle long swirling questions and conspiracies. "UFO: TheInside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There," traces the origins of UFO conspiracy theories and takes a serious look at what scientists and the government does — and does not — know.
Graff, a Burlington resident, has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology and national security. He’s the former editor of Politico and a contributor to Wired and CNN. Graff’s previous books include “Watergate: A New History,” which was a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” and “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die.”
“The story of the hunt for ‘them’ is mostly actually a story about us,” Graff writes about the search for extraterrestrial life in "UFO."
Graff conceded that some UFO conspiracies have a basis in fact. “The landscape of UFO history is littered with actual government cover-ups,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “Some cloak of this secrecy is just the government's own projects” such as drones and new aircraft.
“I don't really see any meaningful evidence that the government is knowingly covering up that type of conspiracy” about aliens and other life. “The government is actually covering up its own ignorance, that it doesn't know what these UFOs and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) actually are.”
Graff connected the vibrant UFO conspiracy movement with current politics. “UFO conspiracies in the ‘80s and ‘90s ended up inspiring the first arrival of the deep state in our political discourse. And from there, there is a much more direct line to our modern politics than I think most people realize. I don't think you get January 6 without the foundation of these dark UFO conspiracies in the 1990s.”
Graff said that “the rise of the corrupting influence of myths and disinformation” spread by figures such as Alex Jones and Donald Trump is an ominous portent.
“My concern about Donald Trump is that he is really bad for the longevity of human civilization … His reelection is not just a grave threat to American democracy and system of a functioning constitution and three branches of government as we know it." Graff is concerned about "what he would do to the larger civilizational challenges that we have to confront right now, from climate change, to misinformation, to disinformation, to the rise of AI.”
“We have a lot of questions that we as a species and as a country need to get right right now,” Graff concluded. “And Donald Trump is the wrong answer to all of them.”
In an attack that shocked the world, three Palestinian American college students were shot and wounded while walking in Burlington on Nov. 25. The men were in Vermont visiting family for Thanksgiving.
Police allege that 48-year old Jason Eaton stepped off his porch and shot the three men. The attack appears to have been unprovoked and the assailant said nothing before opening fire, the victims told police. Eaton has been charged with three counts of attempted second degree murder, and authorities are investigating whether to add a hate crime charge. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held as he awaits a bail hearing.
The three victims, all age 20, are Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University in Rhode Island; Kinnan Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania; and Tahseen Aliahmad, a student at Trinity College in Connecticut. They were classmates at the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker high school in the West Bank. Two of the students are U.S. citizens and one is a legal resident of the U.S. They have been treated at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger called the attack “one of the most shocking and disturbing events in this city’s history.”
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., cited the attack when he reversed himself on Tuesday and called for an indefinite cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas War. “The impact of the conflict in the Middle East has reverberated across the world, and we’ve seen the effects here at home in the form of Islamophobia and antisemitism,” said Vermont’s junior senator. “This cycle of fear, intimidation, and violence must end.”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the attack in Burlington was part of “a sharp increase in the volume and frequency of threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities across our country since Oct. 7.” That was when Hamas launched a surprise attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Hamas’ attack sparked a bombardment and ground invasion by Israel that has so far killed some 15,000 Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The United Nations reports that two thirds of the victims are women and children.
The Council on Islamic Relations reported an “unprecedented” 216% increase in complaints of Islamophobic or anti-Arab bias from October 7 to November 4 compared to the previous year. The Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents surged 316% in that same period.
On this Vermont Conversation we speak about the attack on the three Palestinian American young men with Burlington resident Rich Price, the uncle of Hisham Awartani, who was shot in the spine. Doctors have told the family that Hisham may never be able to walk again.
We are also joined by Wafic Faour, a Palestinian who is a member of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, and Fuad Al-Amoody, vice president of the Islamic Society of Vermont.
“This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum,” Hisham Awartani texted from the ICU.
“I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict,” he wrote to a professor who read the statement at a vigil at Brown University this week, according to the Boston Globe. “Any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine. This is why when you send your wishes and light your candles for me today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of a people being oppressed.”
Rich Price told The Vermont Conversation that his nephew and his friends who were attacked “represent the best and brightest of Palestine and what it means to be Palestinian.”
Price said, "It's important that we stop dehumanizing Palestinians, that we create a place where you can both advocate for the rights of Palestinians, stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and not be viewed as antisemitic or anti-Israeli.” He said that is essential to achieve lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Fuad Al-Amoody added that while he was moved by the outpouring of support for the three Palestinian Americans in Vermont, it underscored a painful reality. “If this tragedy happened in Palestine (to) the same three people, I don't think we'll see the same compassion that we're seeing right now here.”
“If you remove that ‘American’ and just the ‘Palestinian’ remains, I wish, I hope (that) the compassion, the solidarity is shown to the same people in Palestine,” Al-Amoody said.
Wafic Faour said that after this tragedy, “I hope people will learn that Palestinians are no different. They are human.”
“We should go after hate crimes if it is against Palestinians, or Muslims, or because of Islamophobia, or antisemitism or anti-black and anti-Brown. We have to teach our kids that racism shouldn't be part of our daily life here.”
Price observed, "To be Palestinian in this world is difficult. You learn how to deal with trauma, you learn how to deal with tragedy, and I'm seeing in these boys resilience and strength that would really just be awe inspiring to anyone to witness."
"They had big dreams to build a bright future. And my hope is that this has pushed pause on that and that they can resume building that bright future sometime soon."
This Vermont Conversation originally aired on January 8, 2020.
A beloved voice of Vermont fell silent with the passing of Kenley Dean Squier on Nov. 15, 2023. He was 88 years old.
Squier is best known as a NASCAR Hall of Fame broadcaster and the owner of radio station WDEV, part of the Radio Vermont Group, which has been owned by the Squier family for over nine decades.
Ken Squier was my friend. A highlight of coming to the WDEV studio to broadcast The Vermont Conversation every week since 2013 was spending time afterward in Ken’s office discussing the news of the day or the latest book of history that he was reading. Ken would also regale me with stories of auto racing, though I never could keep straight the numerous racers who he would name drop. Ken was fiercely committed to featuring a rich diversity of voices on the airwaves. He believed it was an essential part of a healthy society and a functioning democracy.
Ken decried the rise of partisan media such as Fox News. He told me on The Vermont Conversation, “There's got to be places on the radio where you can tune in on one station where there are ideas and philosophies that aren't all the same."
He said he took the same approach to running a radio station as a Vermont farmer. “You don't put down just one crop. That'll put you right over the side of the barrel in no time at all.”
“If we could get in here and talk to each other and listen to each other, that's what we need to do. And Vermonters know it better than anyone else. That's why we have town meetings. And people get up there and by God, they say what they want to say. Isn't that good?”
Squier provided then-Rep. Bernie Sanders his own weekly radio program on WDEV in 2003 and 2004. The program later evolved into “Brunch With Bernie,” a nationally syndicated weekly program with radio host Thom Hartmann.
How was Sanders on the radio at first?
“Awful,” replied Squier. “Because he did the same mantra ... Jesus, we knew his message by heart. We had it memorized if you listened for two days in a row."
Squier insisted that Sanders take listener calls, which the congressman initially resisted. "He said that would take him off his message."
Squier prevailed and "come to find out, he rather enjoyed it." That transformed the program, and Sanders, into a national hit.
I asked Squier why he gave Sanders a platform.
“Because (he) was one of the ones that wasn't being paid attention to. Everybody laughed and giggled. They're not laughing now. He's changing the way America is thinking, and America needs to change some of their thinking. … And I'm very pleased that we had something to do with Bernie."
Sanders paid tribute to Squier following his death. “Vermont has lost a true legend,” he posted last week on X, formerly Twitter. “Ken was an undeniable voice for generations of Vermonters and car racing fans across the country. More than that though, Ken was an irreplaceable part of his community in Vermont.”
Squier implored, “There has to be room in this country to carry on a conversation that does have other ideas and other opinions. Doesn't happen too much. Needs to.”
The war raging between Israel and Hamas continues to take a staggering toll. About 1,200 Israelis were killed and 230 were taken hostage on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants attacked Israel, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry. In response, Israel has mounted a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that has claimed the lives of 1 of every 200 Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and displaced two-thirds of the population.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has called for a cease-fire and said that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children.” Gazan health officials report that 4,600 children have already been killed in the war.
This conflict has reverberated around the world and throughout the Green Mountains of Vermont. Rallies, marches and vigils have taken place around the state, some that are pro-Israel, others that are pro-Palestinian or that simply call for a cease-fire. Protesters recently disrupted a Burlington fundraiser for Rep. Becca Balint, demanding that she back a cease-fire.
On this Vermont Conversation, we hear the voices of Vermonters speaking out about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Host David Goodman spoke with Rabbi David Edleson of Temple Sinai in South Burlington who just returned from Washington, D.C., where he joined a national rally supporting Israel; Wafic Faour, a Palestinian who is a member of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine; Grace Oedel, a rabbinical student who works with the American Jewish organization IfNotNow that is calling for a ceasefire; and Faud Al-Amoody, vice president of the Islamic Society of Vermont, about the impact of the conflict on Vermont’s Muslim community and rising Islamophobia.
Faour said of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, “I wasn't surprised that something (was) going to happen at one point or another. Gaza (has) been living under a complete siege and (been) an open air prison for the last 17 years.”
Faour said he had a “conflicting feeling” about current events. “I had the sadness (about) what's happening over there and my opposing any kind of violence in general, but in another hand, a hope that something better will come out of it.”
Edleson said that Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 11,000 Palestinians according to Gazan health officials, “at least in the near run, it makes Israeli civilians safer. I'm very concerned in the long run that you're just creating more extremism and that that does not make Israel safer.”
More than two-thirds of Americans support calls for a cease-fire, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll this week.
Edleson dismissed talk of a cease-fire. “I think it's ridiculous,” he said. “I think a cease-fire right now is like calling for a cease-fire on D-Day in World War II. You know, war is tragic. But sometimes you have to take the momentum while you have it. It's a terrorist organization. It moves around very quickly. I don't think a cease-fire would do anything.”
Oedel disagreed. “I am calling for a cease-fire unequivocally right now. I believe that we have a moral and ethical obligation to try to do whatever we can to protect human life.”
“I cannot and will not abide immoral violence being done, which is overwhelmingly affecting children and innocent civilians in the name of keeping Jewish people safe,” she said.
Al-Amoody said many Vermont Muslims are refugees from war-torn countries and are afraid to speak out about the war. He said there is a double standard, where expressing sympathy for Palestinians means "you are supporting the terrorists."
"I cannot even talk about humanity, our moral compass," he said. "I can't even come out and say: this is wrong. People getting killed is wrong on both sides."
Oedel said that people caught up in the conflict are desperately searching for safety. “I believe that safety can look like solidarity,” she said of why she stands with those calling for a cease-fire. “We are all safe when we are all safe.”
Newly married couples swear that they will love each other “till death do us part.”
But for many couples, love ends far sooner than life. Half of first marriages and two-thirds of second marriages end in divorce.
Is a happy ending still possible after a divorce?
Collaborative divorce is a process of ending a marriage through cooperation and negotiation. Couples agree to work together with their respective attorneys to resolve differences and not go to court. Collaborative divorce usually includes the help of neutral third parties including a financial advisor and a mental health coach. Some of the advantages of collaborative divorce are that it is typically faster, cheaper and more amicable than traditional divorce.
Burlington attorney Nanci Smith was a typical adversarial divorce lawyer for 30 years — a “shark.” But her combative style made her feel that she was deepening the misery of her already unhappy clients. She decided to change her approach and now specializes in collaborative divorce. Smith is the author of the book, “Untangling Your Marriage: A Guide to Collaborative Divorce.”
“You have to come together to separate well,” insisted Smith. “You have an important primary relationship that was very, very valuable to you for many years and now it's not working anymore. So the question is, how do we untangle that? How do we move forward in a way that offers mutual respect and dignity?”
“A collaborative model is both a mindset and a process. The mindset is that you want to come to it with at least the hope that you could do this well and not screw up your children,” said Smith.
“You can set a new narrative, which is that we are going to be better friends and co-parents than we were a married couple.”
Collaborative divorce is not for everyone. Relationships where there is abuse or child endangerment, or cases in which a spouse is hiding assets may not lend themselves to collaboration.
Martine Antell of Waterbury Center is a mother of two children who recently went through a collaborative divorce with her husband. “You just get to the point where you see the other person as this human being and you just want the best for them, just like you want the best for your kids and you want the best for yourself,” she said.
Asked how she would characterize her relationship with her ex-husband following their collaborative divorce, Antell stopped to consider it. After a long pause, she replied, “I would call him a friend.”
The war between Israel and Hamas reaches new levels of brutality each day. Some 1,400 Israelis were killed and 5,400 injured in Hamas’ surprise attack on Oct. 7, according to Israeli officials. In retaliation, Israel launched a bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip, killing over 8,500 Palestinians and injuring more than 22,000 as of Nov. 1, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
UN Secretary General António Guterres denounced Hamas’ bloody attack on Israel as “appalling” but insisted it did not happen in a vacuum. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” he said. “They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
Israel accused the UN chief of providing “a justification for terrorism and murder” and called for him to resign.
This clash is now the deadliest and most destructive of the five wars fought between Israel and Hamas since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
That’s right, five wars in 16 years.
What is the deeper story behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? How and when was Israel founded and why do Palestinians call this the Nakba, or catastrophe? What are the Occupied Territories and when did they become occupied? What is Hamas and the Palestinian Authority? What is Zionism? Who are the Jewish settlers? How did the violence begin, and how does it end?
For answers to these and other questions, the Vermont Conversation turned to two experts at Dartmouth College, one Egyptian, the other American-Israeli. They each teach and write widely on these issues and have deep personal experience in the Middle East.
Ezzedine Fishere is a senior lecturer at Dartmouth College, where he has taught courses on Middle East politics and culture since 2016. Fishere previously served as an advisor to Egyptian pro-democracy movements and worked in the Egyptian Foreign Service and the United Nations missions in the Middle East. He directed the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, and worked as a counselor to the Egyptian foreign minister. He is a columnist for the Washington Post and a novelist.
Bernard Avishai is a Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth and an Adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University, and formerly taught at MIT and Duke. He is the author of “The Tragedy of Zionism,” “A New Israel,” and other books. He writes regularly on Israeli affairs for the New Yorker, The Nation, and other publications.
“I'm deeply concerned that Israel's actions may create a larger conflagration,” said Avishai. “The radical zealot minorities in each people are like tails wagging the dog… People committing atrocities have kept the moderate center of each people away from each other.”
Fishere said that he wavers between being a realist who sees no end to the conflict and a dreamer who believes that a peaceful solution is within reach. “Bring the parties together around a political solution that number one, gives Israel security so that this doesn't happen again. Number two, gives Palestinians hope so that they have something positive to look to … a Palestinian state that garners support, that becomes a beacon of hope for those people, that allows them equality and dignity.”
“There is nothing unpredictable about this conflict,” said Fishere. “If people are really tired, if people really want to invest in changing it, I think that's the way.”
When Becca Balint ran for Congress last year, she spoke about how her family’s history as Jews who lived through the Holocaust motivated her to “heal divisions.”
Now as a progressive Jewish member of Congress, Balint has been thrust into the center of a raging debate about how to respond to the horrific attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s intense retaliatory bombardment of the Gaza Strip, home to over 2 million Palestinians.
On October 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing more than 1,400 Israelis, abducting over 200 hostages, and injuring more than 5,400 people, most of them civilians. In response, Israel has mounted a brutal assault on the Gaza Strip. As of Tuesday, nearly 6,000 Palestinians had been killed and over 16,000 injured, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Balint recently joined 132 House Democrats, including every Democratic Jewish member of congress, in a statement that endorsed Israel’s right to defend itself and also called for protections for civilians.
“Israel has to protect innocent lives — that has to be a part of the response,” Balint told The Vermont Conversation. “And also, Hamas could end this immediately by releasing all of the hostages and denouncing their position, which is that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth and all Israelis should be slaughtered.”
“Any civilian loss of life is absolutely tragic,” she continued, noting that she is “working very hard with the Biden administration to push Israel to follow all humanitarian and international laws related to this conflict.”
The ripple effects of the Hamas attack and the Israeli assault on Gaza are being felt around the world and throughout Vermont. Rallies have been held in Burlington in solidarity with Israelis, and another calling for Palestinian solidarity. Jewish Vermonters held a prayer service on the rainswept steps of the Vermont State House last Friday and read the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional prayer in memory of the dead, “to honor the loss of both Israeli and Palestinian life,” according to local organizers with If Not Now, an American Jewish group that is calling for a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
Eighteen Democratic members of Congress have signed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Balint has not endorsed the ceasefire resolution.
“If I thought that calling for (a ceasefire) right now would help this situation, would help the hostages, would help the intricacies on the ground, I would do it,” asserted Balint. “I'm doing my level best in this moment to make the right political decision to ensure ongoing peace and security in the region, which is what I want and have always wanted.”
Balint acknowledges that “people are really struggling in Vermont with this issue right now.” She counts herself among them.
"Of course, my family's Holocaust history weighs on me. Of course, the antisemitism and Islamophobia weighs on me. But it doesn't impact the decision making that I do. Because Vermonters want me to be doing my homework. And that's what I'm doing."
“It's not easy to be on the receiving end of people saying that I'm responsible for genocide, or I'm responsible for this humanitarian catastrophe,” she said. “I am making the steps I think need to be made right now to make this situation better.”
Rick Hubbard left his home in South Burlington in October 2022 driving a large RV en route to Los Angeles, where he began walking across the country. The 81-year-old retired attorney says he is walking to fix our democracy.
One year later, Hubbard is still walking.
The Vermont Conversation caught up with Hubbard in Colorado, where he is currently walking. The purpose of the walk, he said, is “to involve other people to help get Americans thinking about how important it is for us to have our system of a republic with representative democracy.” He says that elected leaders should “serve not a few but serve the bulk of all 330 million of us.”
Hubbard was co-founder and director of the Vermont chapter of Common Cause, which advocates for voting rights and government accountability. He was inspired to walk for democracy by Doris Haddock, aka Granny D, an 88-year-old New Hampshire activist who walked across the country in 1999 and 2000 in support of campaign finance reform. Hubbard joined Granny D for a week as she walked across Kentucky, stopping at Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office to demand that he support campaign finance reform.
Hubbard has had to make unexpected detours along his journey. Last December, he had to rush home to Vermont when his life partner of three decades, Sally Howe, was diagnosed with aggressive cancer. Howe died in April.
Hubbard wrote that he had to turn his attention from fixing democracy to “fix my broken heart.”
In August, Hubbard resumed his cross-country walking journey. He conceded in a blog post, “some days may be more putting one foot in front of the other, rather than a crusade to save our Democracy.”
Hubbard walks about 10 miles per day, five days per week. He carries an American flag on his back that flaps behind his head. He engages volunteers and community members along his route. He is pressing for passage of voting rights legislation and celebrating state and local activists along the route.
"All Americans both understand that we've got a problem and (that) the system is not serving us," said Hubbard. "If you can cut out the labels, the left or the right, and you can focus on the job that our electors are supposed to be doing on our behalf, you get widespread agreement from both sides."
You can follow Rick Hubbard’s walk across America at fixourdemocracy.us.
Several decades before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took the notion of "purifying" society to genocidal extremes in the Holocaust, the ideas behind it were enthusiastically embraced in Vermont.
Eugenics is the pseudoscience that humans can be improved through selective breeding. Many American states, including Vermont, used eugenics as the basis for public policies including family separation, institutionalization and sterilization. By 1936, over half of states practiced eugenical sterilization. In the 1920s and ’30s, vulnerable Vermonters were targeted, institutionalized and otherwise separated from their families, and many were sterilized.
Eugenics policies were “designed to break apart entire families and to basically get rid of them over several generations, whether that be segregating them in an institution, whether that be sterilizing them, whether that be inflicting so much trauma that the family no longer comes together,” said Mercedes de Guardiola, author of a new book published by the Vermont Historical Society, “Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State.” De Guardiola originally wrote the book as an undergraduate thesis at Dartmouth College, where she graduated in 2017 with a degree in history and art history.
In 2021, the state of Vermont became one of the few states to formally apologize for the practice. De Guardiola testified about the eugenics movement before the Vermont Legislature in 2021.
The University of Vermont apologized in 2019 for its role in the eugenics movement and removed the name of former UVM President Guy Bailey from its library for his role in promoting eugenics.
Vermont’s eugenics program became national news earlier this year when former Gov. Jim Douglas sued Middlebury College, his alma mater, for changing the name of Mead Memorial Chapel, which was named for John Abner Mead, Vermont’s governor from 1910 to 1912. The college removed Mead’s name in 2021, citing his “central role in advancing eugenics policies that resulted in harm to hundreds of Vermonters.”
“In the cases of these unfortunates there is little or no hope of permanent recovery,” Mead said in his farewell speech in 1912. “And the great question that is now being considered by the lawmakers in many of our states is how best to restrain this defective class and how best to restrict the propagation of defective children.”
Douglas insisted that Mead was a victim of “cancel culture.”
De Guardiola said that Mead’s role is emblematic of “participation at the highest level of government across several decades and a number of state officials, as well as private citizens (who) also (threw) their support in for eugenics.”
De Guardiola declined to weigh in on whether Mead’s name should be removed from the Middlebury chapel, saying simply, “His words speak for themselves.”
“It's important to consider what their words were and what they resulted in,” de Guardiola said, adding that eugenics laws led to family separation and sterilization.
VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
This Vermont Conversation with Jane Mayer was originally published in April 2022.
Jane Mayer has earned a reputation as one of the country’s top investigative reporters. As chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Mayer has been relentless in exposing the hidden forces shaping American politics. Her bestselling book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” documents the vast influence of the Koch brothers and was named one of the 10 best books of 2016 by the New York Times.
In the past year, Mayer has exposed the right-wing funders behind former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election. She reported how Ginni Thomas secretly supported the Jan. 6 insurrection as her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, considered cases that involved her. And this month she exposed the shadowy conservative organization that smeared Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in a failed attempt to derail her Supreme Court confirmation.
Mayer often provokes the ire of those she exposes. The Koch Brothers hired investigators to smear her, and the subject of her most recent exposé tweeted her personal contact information in an attempt to intimidate her.
Mayer worked at the Wall Street Journal before joining the New Yorker in 1995. She has won numerous awards for her reporting. Esquire called Mayer “quite simply one of the very few, utterly invaluable journalists this country has.”
Disclosure: Jane Mayer serves on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
Sixty years ago, a troupe of performers toting giant papier-mâché puppets and art painted on bed sheets made its first appearance in a protest march in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was the Bread and Puppet Theater, founded by Peter and Elka Schumann. In 1970, the Schumanns moved to Vermont, eventually purchasing a farm in Glover, which has been the home of Bread and Puppet ever since.
Peter Schumann told The Vermont Conversation that the large puppets are “so much more persuasive. It's so much easier to make it big, make it humongous. People flocked to us. They wanted not to carry somebody else's slogan, but to be in the puppet (performance).”
Over the course of its six decades, the oversized puppets and art of Bread and Puppet Theater have become the iconic image of protest around the world. It is one of the longest-running nonprofit, self-supporting theater companies in the United States. These days, Bread and Puppet performs in Glover on summer weekends, and tours the country during other times.
In August, I spent an afternoon with Peter Schumann talking about his life and work, and 60 years of Bread and Puppet. Schumann is now 89 years old, his long white hair tumbling out from beneath his trademark hat. We sat in his house, a small wooden structure crammed with books and art. At the center of the house is a cast iron oven where he bakes bread.
Peter has recently experienced some major life challenges. In 2021, Elka, his beloved wife of 63 years and the mother of his five children, died at the age of 85. This spring, Peter suffered two strokes. He desperately wanted to leave the hospital and return home so he persuaded his doctors “by teaching myself to speak as clearly as possible and by repeating myself to have answers” to their questions.
Schumann said that life after Elka has been difficult. “I’m trying to find a way out of the despair,” he said.
One consolation for Schumann is to resume his life of art, protest and performance. He continues to perform with Bread and Puppet each weekend.
Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Silesia, a region that was then occupied by Nazi Germany but is now mostly in Poland. Having seen fascism as a boy, he fears for the future of the U.S. He decried “this primitive herd of strong men methodologies of how to solve problems.”
What is the future of Bread and Puppet?
“This I don’t know,” said Schumann. “There have to be so many people who want to do it (but) it doesn't mean it's the same. It can't be, it won't be. The only thing that can be transported in a reasonable way is the methodology. What do you do? How do you make art? What do you make it for?”
Schumann has made one concession to his advanced age: he has given up walking on stilts. But he added with a mischievous chuckle, “Come this weekend. I will do something like that. But don’t tell anybody.”
Two days later, I returned to see one of the last summer performances of Bread and Puppet. Near the end of the show, Schumann, dressed in the troupe’s trademark white outfit, climbed 15 feet up a ladder that was held vertical by four puppeteers pulling ropes. He stood atop the ladder, seemingly defying gravity, blowing his horn and directing the performers below as they moved dreamily around a meadow.
One of the people who held the ladder told me afterward that the puppeteers pleaded with Schumann to remain on the ground. He dismissed their concerns.
As he approaches his 90th year, Schumann isn’t going to change his artistic vision to make people comfortable.
“The truth isn’t dying. It’s being killed.”
Lee McIntyre argues this in his latest book, “On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth andProtect Democracy.” McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. His previous books include “Post-Truth,” and “How To Talk To A Science Denier.”
The war on truth is threatening to topple democracies around the world, according to McIntyre, and undermining truth is a key strategy of authoritarian leaders.
When it comes to denying that President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, “a belief fervently held like that is a matter of identity. It's not just what they believe, it's who they are,” McIntyre told the Vermont Conversation. “No evidence can convince them.”
McIntyre said there is a key distinction between misinformation and disinformation. “Misinformation is a mistake … Disinformation is a lie. Disinformation is a falsehood that is intentionally shared by someone who knows that it's false and is sharing it anyway because it serves their interests to have an army of people believe that falsehood,” he said.
“Authoritarians thrive on the idea of falsehood or the idea of lying,” McIntrye said. “They understand that if you can control the information source, you can control the population.”
Philadelphia is synonymous with liberty and possibility. It is the city where the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed.
But there is a lesser-known side to Philadelphia. It is the poorest large city in America. Kensington is its poorest neighborhood, a place where “18th-birthday celebrations are not rites of passage but miracles,” writes sociologist Nikhil Goyal. Goyal was a senior policy advisor on education and children to Senator Bernie Sanders.
Goyal has a new book, “Live to See The Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” in which he follows three Puerto Rican children growing up in Kensington. This coming of age story is marked by violence, drugs, homelessness and the fallout from wrenching poverty. Environmental activist Bill McKibben has called the book “an instant classic.”
As an aide to Bernie Sanders, Goyal helped develop education, child care and child tax credit legislation as well as a tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in Vermont. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Goyal is a graduate of Goddard College in Plainfield and received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Goyal will be a lecturer in sociology at the University of Vermont starting this fall.
Goyal attributes the urban decay that he saw in Kensington partly to disinvestment and also to neoliberalism, the notion that social problems can be solved by privatization and deregulation. Neoliberalism “has produced a great level of inequality and suffering. And I think Kensington is one of the greatest physical manifestations of that in America today,” he said.
Goyal also reflected on his time with Sen. Bernie Sanders. He said that Sanders’ ideas such as canceling student debt and tuition-free community college have become part of the mainstream due to “the power of social movements. I don't think you would have seen Build Back Better … if it weren't for Occupy Wall Street, if it weren't for Fight for 15, the Black Lives Matter movement. I think social movements gave us the language to talk about exploitation and poverty and inequality in ways that hadn't been discussed in America for many decades.”
For the fortieth summer, hundreds of Vermont high school students had a different kind of learning experience. They attended one of eight programs of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont.
In 1983, the very first Governor’s Institutes of Vermont program was launched. It was focused on the arts, addressing what advisers to Gov. Richard Snelling felt was a dearth of opportunity in arts education in Vermont.
In the four decades since that first program, more than 10,000 students have attended one of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont, which are now offered at nine locations around the state. Each year, some 500 students attend a governor’s institute. It also runs winter weekend programs, though these were not offered in 2023. The Governor’s Institutes of Vermont has one of the longest running governor’s schools in the country.
On this Vermont Conversation, past and recent alums and their parents talk about this unique enrichment program for Vermonters: Dave Amidon (Arts 1992), his son Nicholas Jamisco Amidon (Arts 2023), River Woods (Arts 2022, Health & Medicine 2023), Jim Michael (whose five children attended the institute) and Elizabeth Frascoia, the executive director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont. We also hear from musician Grace Potter, who attended an arts institute while in high school.
"Never underestimate the power of being completely and utterly embarrassed by the things that you try,” Potter said.
When Champlain College President Alejandro "Alex" Hernandez is asked about the value of an education, he responds by telling the story of his family.
He is the child of immigrant parents who both became school teachers in California. After Hernandez received a masters degree from Stanford, he went into finance, but eventually left to become a high school math teacher in South Central Los Angeles. He went on to become a dean and provost at the University of Virginia, and in 2022, was named president of Champlain College in Burlington.
Hernandez assumes the helm of Champlain after a period of leadership turnover at the 145-year-old not-for-profit private college. He is the fourth president in four years. He has already made his mark as the college has had a record-breaking year in fundraising.
Education has become central to the culture wars. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended race-based affirmative action this June, Hernandez must now craft a way for Champlain to champion diversity without running afoul of the law.
“You're either being intentionally diverse or unintentionally exclusive,” said Hernandez. “Why is it that certain groups are not showing up to college campuses? And what is it about the colleges that we’re creating that make that true?”
“I've spent my entire career thinking about how do you increase access. How do you increase accessibility, and that work is never done. It's an ideal that you need to continue to pursue as a country. And it goes on for generations.”
Stephen Kiernan spent much of his life as an award-winning journalist for the Burlington Free Press and the Boston Globe. In 2013, he made the jump from reporter to novelist with the publication of his debut book of fiction, “The Curiosity.” He has never looked back.
Kiernan has now published five critically acclaimed novels, including “The Baker’s Secret” and “Universe of Two.”
His latest novel is “The Glass Chateau,” which was published in June. It’s a haunting tale set just after World War II in France. The story centers around an assassin for the Resistance who struggles to reckon with the killings he has committed. Around him, a traumatized nation attempts to rebuild after war. The challenge is captured in an attempt to repair the shattered stained glass windows of a grand cathedral.
Kiernan is a graduate of Middlebury College, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“The Glass Chateau,” Kiernan said, is intended to be “a healing book.”
“Covid was underway when I started this book, but also what was happening in the fabric of our culture, our politics and all of that. Why is everyone so angry? And why are so many people also so sad and lonely?” he said,
“This book begins a month after the war is ended. And it's about these people trying to rebuild this really divided nation” Kiernan said.
Scenes of the smoldering ruins of Lahaina, Maui, are the latest evidence that no place, no matter how idyllic, is safe from climate disruption. The wildfires that destroyed the town this week are the deadliest in the modern history of the U.S.
The Maui wildfires were far more lethal but they share common elements with the floods that ravaged parts of Vermont last month. Both disasters were fueled by climate change. And both have displaced numerous people from their homes.
Disasters such as these are expected to force millions of Americans from their homes and communities in coming years. Many residents will never return. In 2021, one in three Americans had experienced some kind of weather disaster.
Journalists Tik Root and Jake Bittle cover climate change as staff writers for Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Root recently reported on how FEMA’s flood maps failed to cover many areas in Vermont that were flooded this July. As a result, many flooded residents falsely believed they were outside the flood zone. The outdated maps reflect past floods and do not take climate change into account.
Bittle is the author of a new book, “The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration.” He said that climate change is forcing a mass migration in the U.S. as people try to escape the next climate disaster. This migration is different than the Great Migration in which Blacks fled from the south to the north to escape political persecution, slavery and Jim Crow laws.
“The migration from climate starts all over the country, it starts in coastal areas, in the desert, in wildfire areas, and the movement is much more chaotic.
“It's not so much that you're picking up in one place and moving all the way across the country to another place. It's that you're being buffeted around by these bigger forces.”
This summer’s floods disabused many people of that notion that Vermont is a safe haven from climate chaos.
“There's a big question about where people will go,” Bittle said. But rebuilding or relocating after disaster opens up new possibilities. “You have an opportunity to build a society that is safer and fairer and more equitable.”
Will it be three indictments and Trump’s out?
Stuart Stevens doesn’t think so.
“The indictments will help (former president Donald) Trump in the Republican primary, of which there’s a certain crazy logic,” he said. “The Republican Party now is pretty much officially a white grievance party. And there's no greater way to prove the grievance than to be indicted by the Deep State.”
Stevens contends that the Republican Party that he spent his career promoting has morphed into an authoritarian movement. Stevens was a former top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns and dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate. Today, he has abandoned the Republican Party and is now doing all he can to stop it. He is a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. Stevens grew up in Mississippi but now lives in Stowe.
Stevens says that the Trump era “is sort of like a pandemic: Whatever you say in the beginning will sound alarmist, but in the end will prove inadequate.”
"I'm working on the assumption that Trump will not be convicted before the election,” he said. “And it'll be sort of a moral test for the country because Trump's basically running — his theme is so I can pardon myself. And by pardoning myself, I'm pardoning you, because you invested in me, and we were right, they were wrong.
"We've never had an election like that."
Stevens has a new book due out in October, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.” This follows his 2020 bestseller, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”
“It's an existential crisis,” Stevens said of the political precipice on which the U.S. teeters. “I can't really tell you by 2028 if we have an election in America, that it will be a democratic election.”
The brick crashed through Lauren Chooljian’s window accompanied by a message scrawled on the side of her house: “THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING.”
Chooljian had a good idea what this attack was about. She is a senior reporter and producer at New Hampshire Public Radio. She had been investigating alleged sexual misconduct by Eric Spofford, the founder of GraniteRecovery Centers, New Hampshire's largest substance use disorder treatment and rehabilitation network. As more and more women told her of being sexually harassed and abused by Spofford, Chooljian has faced mounting threats, lawsuits, and attacks on her home as well as the homes of her parents and editor.
“That’s being a journalist in America today,” Chooljian told the New York Times.
Spofford denies the sexual misconduct allegations.
If the attacks and lawsuits were intended to silence Chooljian, they failed spectacularly. In June, NHPR released a seven-part podcast series, “The 13th Step,” hosted by Lauren Chooljian. The series investigated Spofford and systemic abuse in the substance use disorder treatment industry. New York Magazine recently named “The 13th Step” one of the best podcasts of 2023.
In late June, several weeks after the podcast dropped, federal authorities charged three men for their role in the attacks on Chooljian’s house. The complaint said that “a close personal associate” of Spofford’s solicited the attackers. Spofford has also sued NHPR for libel and demanded that it retract the stories about him. The attacks occurred two days after the news organization refused to take down the story. A New Hampshire judge dismissed the libel complaint last year, but Spofford has now demanded access to Chooljian’s interviews and notes. NHPR is currently fighting the request.
The attacks on Lauren Chooljian take place within a larger context of journalists being increasingly targeted. Former President Donald Trump frequently urges his followers to confront journalists, who he calls "enemies of the people." Last year, 41 journalists were physically assaulted, according to the U.S. PressFreedom Tracker, and there has been a rise in libel and defamation suits.
“We should all see journalism as an essential piece of our democracy,” Chooljian told The Vermont Conversation. “If people are afraid to report wrongdoing, then wrongdoing will never come to light.”
In the early hours of July 11, the rain-swollen Lamoille River rose up out of its banks and tore through the heart of downtown Johnson. Parts of the small Vermont town lay in ruins. Johnson’s wastewater treatment plant was destroyed, and the downtown supermarket, the town offices and fire department, surrounding farms, the Johnson health center, and dozens of manufactured homes all sustained heavy damage.
How do you recover? Johnson may have a homegrown answer as it recovers from twin disasters: the opioid crisis and a flood fueled by the climate crisis.
Jenna’s Promise is a recovery community in Johnson that helps women with substance use disorder. It is named for 26-year-old Jenna Tatro, who died in February 2019 following a drug overdose at her family’s Johnson home. Her grieving parents, Greg and Dawn Tatro, founded Jenna’s Promise as a place they wish had existed for their daughter — a community-based center for women in recovery.
In just a few years, Jenna’s Promise has expanded into a number of formerly vacant buildings in Johnson and now includes recovery housing, a workforce development program, a popular downtown café, a coffee roastery, and a surplus goods and appliances store. The flood damaged one of Jenna’s Promise recovery housing locations and filled the basement of Jenna’s Coffee House, but the café is up and running again.
Are the lessons of recovery transferable from one crisis to another?
Greg Tatro believes so.
“You gotta have hope and keep moving ahead, even if it's small steps every day,” said Greg Tatro, the owner of the 67-year-old family business, G.W. Tatro Construction.
Vermont Sen. Peter Welch spent last week touring his flooded state and assuring residents that help was on the way. Welch has a lot of practice with this. First elected to Congress in 2006, he experienced Vermont’s first so-called 100-year flood following Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
In Irene’s aftermath, Welch fought with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to enable Vermont to rebuild roads and bridges to withstand the new realities of climate change instead of being forced to replace the shattered infrastructure with the same inadequate design and materials.
“This is all about climate change,” Welch said of the flood devastation that he observed last week. “It's astonishing to me, but there's a lot of people resisting acknowledging that we have to act and act quickly to address climate change. And I think that does not reflect denial. I think it reflects desperation to try to hang on to whatever fossil fuel interests that some of my colleagues represent. And (it) reflects a fear about making the transition from a carbon-based economy to a clean energy economy because it is disruptive.”
Welch returned to Washington on Tuesday to give his debut speech on the Senate floor. In that speech, he outlined his two top priorities as senator: “Our challenge is strengthening our democracy and improving the living standards for everyday Americans. … If we don’t do both, we won’t do either.”
In a wide-ranging Vermont Conversation interview with Welch, we discussed his visit to flood-stricken parts of Vermont, the fragile state of democracy and the surprising common ground that the progressive Vermont Democrat has found with far-right Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Welch remains guarded in his assessment of the fate of American democracy.
"It's a jump ball," he said. "Jan. 6 was of course the most vivid manifestation of the erosion of democratic norms. … But you're seeing many of the candidates running for Senate and for Congress — and of course (Donald) Trump running again for president — who were in denial about the outcome of the last election or peddling 'the election was stolen' lie.
"The reason I think is so important for our democracy to work is that's the tool that we use to address the challenges that Americans face."
Rick Dente thought this might be the end. The 77-year-old owner of Dente's Market in Barre was trying to save what he could in his family store as flood waters rose on Monday night. The store has been in business since 1907 and had survived previous disasters. But Dente, the affectionately nicknamed "Mayor of North Barre," didn't realize that this time was different. He was suddenly in water up to his neck, pinned to a door, his tired legs giving out.
Just when Dente thought it was over, three tenants who lived above his store came down, ropes around their waists. They banged open the door and rescued the exhausted shopkeeper.
"Someone was watching over me," Dente told me on Saturday, standing inside his mud filled market.
When the flood waters receded this week, volunteers streamed into Montpelier and Waterbury and other flooded Vermont communities to help muck out. But Barre, the Granite City, has until now been hauling itself back to life largely on its own. The flood left the downtown covered in deep mud. The city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear the mess. Some streets are still impassable. The city is under a boil water notice.
Saturday was the first day that volunteers were invited into Barre. People came in droves. I came to the Aldrich Public Library where volunteers were lined up to get work assignments. Volunteer coordinators were sitting under tents with laptops dispatching people to homes that needed help. One tent was for volunteers willing to do light work, another was for heavy work.
I walked down Main Street in Barre talking to volunteers and business owners. Volunteers carrying mops, buckets, and shovels were moving up and down the street. My final stop was at the beloved Dente's Market, whose owner who, like his city, nearly drowned but now has another chance.
Randall and Elm Streets in Waterbury felt like a raucous New Orleans funeral on Thursday. Residents and businesses lost so much when the waters of the Winooski River inundated parts of the downtown, flooding some 40 homes and six businesses. But scores of volunteers came from everywhere to give so much back.
Prohibition Pig, the popular restaurant and brewery at the corner of Elm Street and Main Street, was the center of cleanup activity. By midday, the staff were serving free food and pizza donated by American Flatbread. A who’s who of Vermont craft beer brewers, including John Kimmich, owner of the Alchemist brewery — which operated a pub that was flooded out of this location when Tropical Storm Irene hit in 2011 — dropped off coolers full of beer for the volunteers. A public works crew from St. Albans drove around with a giant vacuum truck — dubbed the “suck truck” by grateful residents – that pumped out flooded basements, a backbreaking job that took days when Irene flooded these same homes.
Behind the celebratory vibe, there was also a somber reality. ProPig would be closed for the foreseeable future and owner Eric Warnstedt had to tell its 49 employees that they were laid off. The brewery was flooded and 3,000 gallons of their famous craft beer was lost.
But the buzz, enhanced by the excellent beer, was palpable.
I spent Thursday walking around the neighborhood talking to the people who were hard at work and elbows deep in mud.
The rain began on Sunday, and by Tuesday morning, July 11, residents of Waterbury, Vermont, woke up to find the downtown flooded and roads closed.
Waterbury took a hard hit, but the damage and destruction were far greater in other Vermont communities. Montpelier, Barre, Johnson and Ludlow, to name a few, were inundated. All of these communities face a long road to recovery.
Gov. Scott called this week’s Vermont floods “historic and catastrophic.” Climatologists call it “the new abnormal,” another eruption of climate chaos that is sweeping the globe.
For Waterbury, where I live, this was the second so-called 100-year flood in a dozen years. In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene devastated downtown Waterbury, with flooding damaging 222 homes, one third of the structures in the village.
This week, some 40 homes and six businesses were flooded in Waterbury, with most of the flooding occurring in basements. Waterbury may have been spared the worst of the damage thanks to flood resilient measures it took when rebuilding after Tropical Storm Irene.
I spent Tuesday sloshing through flood waters in Waterbury and talking to my neighbors about what they’re going through and how they’re coping.
“I feel a bit out of body, like I'm floating a little bit in this surreal situation and I can't really think too far ahead,” said Georgia Ayers, who had to canoe to her flooded house. “We just need the water to recede so we can get to work.”
This is an audio postcard from one Vermont community rising from a disaster.
The simple version of American history depicts the original 13 American colonies banding together as one, declaring their independence in 1776, fighting and winning an eight-year-long War of Independence against the British, and then triumphantly establishing the United States of America.
But how united was this new nation? Political historian Eli Merritt asserts that despite its harmonious sounding name, the United States was actually more like a shotgun marriage that nearly ended in a quick divorce.
Merritt is the author of a new book, “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.”
“The American Union was an unwelcome alliance formed by bitterly conflictual colonies and regions,” he wrote.
The primary purpose of the original American government, he said, was to prevent the colonies from disintegrating into civil war.
Merritt is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and writes political commentary for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and for his Substack, American Commonwealth.
Merritt said that America’s founders warned of the danger of demagogues.
“The first step in democratic breakdown is the election of a demagogue to power,” he wrote. "The demagogue is someone who wins votes by dividing the people not uniting the people … through fear mongering, through hate mongering, through bigotry. And sadly, it works.
“The demagogue converts into an authoritarian once drinking at the cup of power. … We did see precisely that with Donald Trump.”
Merritt argues that the founding story of the U.S. affirms that “when a government turns unconstitutional and repressive, you have the right of revolution, which means first, the right of resistance.”
Merritt said he believes that Juneteenth is a far more significant day of independence than July 4.
“This is the emancipation of 4 million enslaved people,” he said. “It is clearly the most important event in all U.S. history.”
Brett Forrest has been explaining Russia and Ukraine to the world for two decades. He is an award-winning national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where his investigative work focuses on the former Soviet Union.
It is a dangerous time to be a reporter in Russia. In March, Russian authorities arrested Forrest’s Wall Street Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, on spying charges, which he vehemently denies. Gershkovich is in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison facing a sentence of up to 20 years.
“I never felt like I was in the crosshairs of the state,” said Forrest. The invasion of Ukraine changed all that. “When Russia began enacting new laws about criticizing the war, or even calling it a war in Russia, I began to feel like maybe the state had taken a turn and was now looking at all of us as a target.”
Forrest has a new book, “Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars,” in which he investigates the mystery of a young American, Billy Reilly, who vanished into Russia’s war with Ukraine. Forrest cracks an FBI coverup to learn what happened to the unwitting Reilly.
Forrest said that “what happened in Ukraine can also be traced to the fact that Vladimir Putin has simply stayed in power too long. And this is often what happens when leaders stay in power too long. They begin thinking about their place in history.” Forrest said that other world leaders “think squarely about what's best for the people. And I don't think that Vladimir Putin really has that in mind anymore for Russians.”
Forrest said that Putin has staked his leadership on the notion that he can assure domestic peace. Upheaval at home and in Ukraine, he said, “is the price for the illusion of stability that he’s created in Russia over the years.”
America’s school children are in trouble. Just this week, test scores were released that showed math and reading performance of 13-year olds in the U.S. hit the lowest level in decades. In Vermont, just 27% of eighth graders were proficient in math in 2022, down from 47% in 2013.
This academic decline is compounded by what the U.S. Surgeon General has dubbed “the health crisis of our time” in youth mental health.
What can be done to stop this downward slide?
Around the country and in a handful of Vermont communities, community schools are succeeding against the odds at improving student outcomes and family well-being. In 2021, Vermont passed the Community Schools Act, which provided over $1 million in grants for community school pilot projects in Hazen Union School, Vergennes Union Elementary School, White River Valley Middle School in Bethel, the Cabot School and North Country Supervisory Union.
What are community schools? It is a strategy that encourages deep partnerships among students, schools, families and communities. Schools become hubs of learning and engagement, and a powerful tool to tackle extreme inequality and racial injustice.
Community schools address the needs of the whole child. If a student is struggling because they are hungry or unhoused, they need more than tutoring. That’s why many community schools include partnerships with local health centers, legal clinics, housing assistance and other social services. The schools help the student by helping the family.
For the past two years, I’ve been researching community schools for a book that I co-authored with the founders of this movement, “The Community Schools Revolution: Building Partnerships, Transforming Lives, Advancing Democracy” (free download at communityschoolsrevolution.org). We explored the remarkable impact that these schools have had in thousands of schools, especially in under-resourced communities. For example, at the Oyler School in Cincinnati, once dubbed a “dropout factory,” high school graduation rates rose from around 30 percent to over 90 percent. The entire Cincinnati city public school system has now adopted the community school model.
At a middle school in Brooklyn, math proficiency increased more than seven-fold and English proficiency quadrupled, and the school’s bilingual debate team has won numerous citywide and national debate competitions. The success of this model is why New York City has opened more than 400 community schools in the last dozen years.
At Hazen Union School in Hardwick, Principal Dr. Jason Di Giulio said that “schools have almost put up walls and become fortresses up on a hill and separate from their communities.” This isolation has been exacerbated by the national epidemic of school shootings.
Di Giulio said that Hazen Union, one of Vermont’s pilot community schools, is trying to “break down the walls of school, let the community in, send the students out, have learning happening all over the place and recogniz[e] that learning doesn't just happen sitting in a chair in a classroom.” One result is that Hazen Union is now drawing students from outside its district.
Jane Quinn, who directed the National Center for Community Schools, said that community schools have had a significant impact on reducing chronic absence and increasing student engagement. “Because community schools are involved in the community and are getting students more involved in their communities, we've seen dramatic increases in student engagement, and that is not trivial,” she says. “We have known for 30 years that student connectedness to school is the protective factor against all of the major risk factors.”
On this Vermont Conversation, we discuss the impact of community schools with Hazen Union Principal Jason Di Giulio and community school coordinator Dani Smith, as well as Vergennes Union Elementary School Principal Matthew DeBlois. We are also joined by three founders of the national community school movement, Marty Blank, Jane Quinn and Lisa Villarreal.
“The school isn't just that place on the hill that’s shining, it's really connected," said Di Giulio. "The community's dreams for us are similar to our dreams for us, too.”
Rep. Becca Balint ran for Congress last year as a bridge builder and a peacemaker. But five months into the job, the first-term Vermont representative is appearing on national news and going viral on social media as she slams anti-LGBTQ+ attacks as “garbage” and slaps down far-right trolls such as Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo,
Balint’s willingness to rumble in the culture wars and push back against political opponents has earned her respect from her Democratic colleagues. This week, House Democrats voted to appoint her to the House Judiciary Committee, one of the most high-profile assignments. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that Balint “will be a strong voice on the Judiciary Committee and I look forward to working with her to fight back against MAGA extremism and continue putting People Over Politics.”
Rep. Balint, who is filling a vacancy left by Rep. David Cicciline, D-R.I., on the Judiciary Committee, will be the committee’s sole openly gay member and the only democratic representative from the Northeast. She also serves on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Budget Committee, though she is likely to have to step down from one of those committees when she joins Judiciary.
Balint entered electoral politics after being a middle school teacher in Windham County for 14 years. She served eight years in the Vermont State Senate, including two years as Senate President Pro Tempore.
For Balint, the current wave of GOP attacks on queer and trans people — over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year — is personal and infuriating.
“To bring in queer and trans kids into the conversation [Republicans] have decided that this is a boogeyman that they can use to raise money, turn people out to the polls …something else to rile the base.
“For me, it is so cynical and so cruel to decide that the enemy that you're going after are our children and their parents who are just trying to do the very best they can do.”
Balint said that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 legalizing same-sex marriage spawned a backlash.
“There is always a backlash when Americans gain rights when they are accepted in their communities,” she said. “What I didn't anticipate was that there would be so many bystanders who do nothing.”
Rep. Balint spoke with The Vermont Conversation in the midst of a standoff by far right Republican lawmakers in the Freedom Caucus that paralyzed the House for nearly a week.
Balint called the Freedom Caucus an “extremist coalition.”
“They're not about freedom at all. They are not about giving families the freedom to do the very best for their kids. They're not about women's reproductive freedom. They're not about us being a free society where we can read the books that we want and have them available to us. They have completely and totally — not just co-opted freedom — it's a perversion of freedom and a free society.”
“I really want us as Americans who still believe in a democracy, in a free society, to be much more strong about pushing back about this notion that they are the party of freedom, because it's just not the reality on the ground.”
Balint said that she can be both a fighter and a peacemaker. “I'm hoping that when I'm called upon to be fierce, and to call people on their garbage as I said in committee, or if I'm called upon to have a very heartfelt, deep conversation with constituents or others within my caucus who are still struggling, I want to be both those people. Because we can't be railing at people who are struggling with trying to understand what for them is a hard issue. But we also can't allow these kids and parents to be dehumanized and demonized. And so it is the work that allies need to do right now. And I want to be a good ally.”
On this "Best of The Vermont Conversation," we re-broadcast an interview from 2015 that traced the roots of the marriage equality revolution. The interview was recorded live in the studios of WDEV Radio. The interview marked the first time that Vermont marriage equality pioneers State Rep. Bill Lippert and former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy discussed their roles in the marriage equality fight.
On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, that same-sex couples could wed throughout the country.
The avalanche that swept America actually began as a snowball high up in the Green Mountains in the late 1990s.
In 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Vermont that the Vermont state legislature must craft a law granting all of the rights and privileges of marriage to same-sex couples. In 2000, Vermont legalized civil unions, the most sweeping grant of rights to same-sex couples up to that time.
In 2009, the Vermont state legislature legalized same-sex marriage, making it the first legislature to do so.
On this Vermont Conversation, we discuss Vermont’s role in the marriage equality revolution with some of the pioneers of that effort: former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy, author of the groundbreaking Baker v. Vermont ruling; former State Representative Bill Lippert, who led the fight for passage of civil unions in 2000 and same-sex marriage in 2009; Susan Murray, attorney with Langrock Sperry & Wool, who represented the plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont along with attorney Beth Robinson (now a Vermont Supreme Court judge); and Stacey Jolles and Nina Beck, a lesbian couple who were one of three same-sex couples who sued the State of Vermont in the late 1990s in Baker v. Vermont, catalyzing the fight for marriage equality in Vermont and the U.S.
Chief Justice Amestoy said in this 2015 interview, "I didn't expect to see (marriage equality) throughout the United States in my lifetime. ... I don't think it ever crossed my mind that we would reach a point, only six years later, that the United States Supreme Court would echo the analysis that Vermont used in the 1999 decision."
Plaintiff Nina Beck said, “I feel incredibly proud to have been part of this moment… (and) that I live in a state that wants to create equality for everyone.
“I’m very, very pleased that marriage — our marriage — has been recognized everywhere in the United States. It's an amazing, amazing thing.”
The inauguration of President Joe Biden generated many memorable images. There was the inauguration of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the office. Young poet Amanda Gorman gave a mesmerizing reading of her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
And Sen. Bernie Sanders became an internet icon for his mittens.
A photo captured Sanders bundled against the January cold, sitting alone on a chair, cross-legged, wearing a Burton ski parka and looking cozy in a pair of fuzzy wool mittens. The image instantly became a viral meme depicting him on the throne from Game of Thrones, on Mike Pence’s head and sitting in a row of ironworkers high above New York City.
This viral sensation led reporters to seek out the mitten maker. They quickly found Jen Ellis, a second grade teacher at Westford Elementary School. She sewed the mittens for Sanders after he lost the 2016 Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. She hoped it would cheer him up.
Ellis’s sudden fame turned her life upside down. She was flooded with interview requests and thousands of mitten orders that overwhelmed her. She ultimately struck a deal with Darn Tough, which made the “Jenerosity” socks, which sold out in a day and resulted in thousands of meals being donated to the Vermont Foodbank. She partnered with Vermont Teddy Bear which continues to make the iconic Bernie Mittens.
Jen Ellis has written a book, Bernie’s Mitten Maker, which tells a deeper back story. Ellis is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It was in an elementary school sewing class that Ellis “started to develop the skills I needed to save myself.”
Ellis told The Vermont Conversation that she shared this story in her book because “the longer people remain silent about this, the more it is able to spread as an epidemic.”
“The world might have learned about me because of some mittens I made,” she said, “but there's a whole intricate backstory that people don't know, that is interesting. And that has a theme of empowerment and generosity and kindness, and it has a path in the end to joy.”
The U.S. Surgeon General warned earlier this month that “there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation."
Champlain College professor Sheila Liming has a cure for this social disease. In “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time,” Liming writes that the simple act of hanging out offers connection, intimacy and meaning. It is an act of resistance, she said, against the relentless pull of consumerism, individualism and the encroachment of digital culture in every aspect of our lives.
Hanging out with others does not just make you feel good. It can save your life.
The surgeon general warned that loneliness can increase your risk of premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases your risk of dementia by 50%.
Sheila Liming is an associate professor of professional writing at Champlain College. She previously taught at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of three books, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s and other publications.
Liming described loneliness as “a quiet crisis.”
“It's one that's difficult to diagnose and to see and sometimes even to notice in our own society … (the) things that are sometimes preventing us from just hanging out and making social relationships and building connections with each other that strengthen ourselves in our community," she said.
Liming defined “hanging out” as “daring to do very little and daring to do it in the company of others.”
The “radical” part of killing time, Liming said, is that “you have to say no to something that already exists on your calendar that would be standing in the way of you and this casual social connection. ... Saying no to some things means saying yes to hanging out and spending time with each other."
A war on doctors is underway in Republican-led states, and numerous physicians are fleeing for safer ground.
Thirteen states have criminalized all abortion care. Over 500 bills have been proposed targeting LGBTQ+ care, including many that criminalize gender affirming care. Obstetricians and gynecologists, or OB-GYNs, who routinely perform abortions and provide health care to LGBTQ+ people, have been a particular target of these laws and bills.
Idaho is a case in point. Soon after the US Supreme Court passed the Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, Idaho passed a law allowing family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000. Doctors also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges, and prison.
The fallout has been swift: five of the nine maternal fetal medicine specialists in Idaho who deal with high risk pregnancies will leave the state by the end of 2023, several hospitals have closed their labor and delivery units, and 40 percents of Idaho’s OB-GYNs said in a recent survey that they were considering leaving the state.
As doctors leave, maternity care deserts are expanding. According to the March of Dimes, nearly 7 million people who can become pregnant who are of childbearing age now live in a county with either no maternity care services or with limited services. One-third of US counties qualify as a maternity care desert, more than half of them classified as rural, including parts of Vermont.
On this Vermont Conversation, we speak with physicians on the front lines of providing abortions and gender affirming care. In the first part of our program, we talk with three physicians at the UVM Medical Center who are midway through their four-year OB-GYN residency. Along with caring for patients, Drs. Mackenzie Delzer, Gnendy Indig, and Sarah McShane have already been to the Vermont State House to testify in defense of reproductive rights.
In the second part of the program we speak with Dr. Lauren MacAfee, associate professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Complex Family Planning at University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and the UVM Medical Center. She has been an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights.
For young physicians who are deciding where they will practice medicine after completing their residency, they must each decide whether they are willing to go to states with abortion bans. “I feel the pull of patients in those areas and the huge deficits and care that are going to be created,” said Dr. Sarah McShane, who attended medical school in North Carolina, which this week banned abortion after 12 weeks. “Part of the moral pull is to also be a part of still fulfilling care, even despite this horrible legislation.”
Dr. Gnendy Indig plans to specialize in health care for LGBTQ+ people. “My mentors in very progressive liberal institutions and cities have been dealing with death threats and doxing to the point where some of them have had to hire full time security to protect them,” she said. “Watching their bravery and watching them use that fear as a motivating factor and …keep pushing on, and still saying I will treat a population that needs me … is what keeps me on the path.”
“We all are trying to do everything we can …in a safe state like Vermont to be a beacon of light and hope for other states,” said Dr. Lauren MacAfee.
Vermont is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. Vermont has among the lowest rental vacancy rates in the country and among the highest rates of homelessness. Gov. Phil Schott has announced that he will not extend the pandemic-era emergency hotel housing program now that federal funds for it have run out, and state lawmakers are currently wrestling over its fate. The emergency housing program could end as soon as June, pushing out several thousand people from the hotels and leaving them at high risk of being homeless.
On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people at the center of the housing crisis.
“What's going to happen right now is we're going to have a catastrophic fallout that's going to be …a humanitarian crisis,” asserted Brenda Siegel, a housing advocate and former gubernatorial candidate. “We're expecting our small communities, who do not have the resources, to pick up all these pieces.”
“People think homeless people don't work, and it's not true. They work so hard,” said Brittany Plucas, 29, who spoke to me at the Hilltop Inn in Berlin. Plucas works two jobs, but lost her housing in April. She is frantically looking for affordable housing but has discovered that waiting lists are months and even years long.
“The housing crisis is so bad. There are families here that have lost housing and they are working to provide for the children and for themselves. They're working to keep their kids safe. People just aren't understanding it. Right now, it’s a hard time for everyone.”
Gary Winslett is an assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College. His own challenge in buying a home motivated him to investigate and write about the roots of Vermont’s housing crisis. Vermont “spent a long time just kind of not building any new housing,” he said. He argues that Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law passed in 1970, has had the unintended consequence of blocking affordable housing and must be significantly reformed.
“In the Vermont context, the pro-environment thing to do is to build housing near where jobs are so that people can drive less. It's to build those new homes with modern insulation, so that they're using far less greenhouse gases when they heat their home in Vermont winters. The environmentalism that we need today is not about blocking everything in sight. The environmentalism that we need today is about building things,” he insisted.
Brittany Plucas is now confronting homelessness if the emergency hotel housing is not extended past June. Being homeless “terrifies me. I didn't think it was something that was possible,” she said, choking up. “Because I've worked so hard in my life to try to provide for myself and make myself something. I've worked since I graduated high school. I've tried to keep a roof over my head for years. And I failed. I feel like the state failed me [and] the government failed.”
“I'm not giving up,” she said through tears. “I'm still gonna try my best at making my life better.”
LGBTQ+ rights are under attack throughout the country. Nearly 500 bills targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proposed in the U.S. to date, including in every state in New England. Eighteen Republican-controlled states have so far passed laws banning gender affirming health care, affecting 1 in 4 transgender youth.
In Montana, State Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who is transgender, was ousted from the Republican-led House of Representatives last week for her passionate statements objecting to a ban on hormone treatments and surgical care for transgender children. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law last week, despite pleas from his son David, who identifies as nonbinary.
In Nebraska, state Senator Megan Hunt is being investigated for allegedly having a conflict of interest for her opposition to a law that would ban gender-affirming health care. Her supposed conflict? She is the mother of a transgender child.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and other leading medical organizations support gender affirming care and warn that bans pose serious health risks to young people.
Rep. Taylor Small, 29, is among just 8 out transgender state legislators in the country, and is the first out trans legislator in Vermont. She was elected in 2020 to represent Winooski. A graduate of Colchester High School and the University of Vermont, Small is also education program manager at the Pride Center of Vermont, where we had this conversation. Small was named a 2022 Politician of Year by One Young World, an international youth leadership organization based in the U.K.
Small said that anti-LGBTQ+ laws – from barring trans and nonbinary youth from participating in school sports, to book bans, to criminalizing gender-affirming health care – “are killing our youth. They are showing them that there is no hope for their future where they can be thriving trans adults.”
By contrast, she said that she and Montana Rep. Zooey Zephyr “are trying to show that beacon of hope that you can still be involved, that you do have leadership qualities, and not only can you participate, but you can have a fulfilling life.”
“This is nothing new that we've seen in politics…going after and targeting specific groups of people,” Small asserted. “What group does the general public have a lot of ignorance around and have a lot of questions? That is the trans community. As we see this growing recognition and visibility, it also comes with that backlash of ‘That is not what I grew up with, that is not my understanding of gender.’”
As other states restrict access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care, the Vermont legislature has passed two reproductive “shield bills,” S.37 and H.89, which protect doctors and patients who give and receive this care, respectively.
“Vermont is saying that we're putting this shield around our border, that as long as you are in our state, as a provider or as a patient, that you are protected by our laws and recognizing that gender affirming care and reproductive health care are legally protected,” she said.
Small cautioned that vigilance is required to stop anti-LGBTQ attacks in Vermont. “It absolutely could happen here,” she said, citing anti-trans incidents in Randolph and Burlington.
“As long as we continue to engage as leaders and engage in these difficult conversations, I think we can prevent what is happening in Montana, what is happening in Oklahoma and in Tennessee, from happening right here in our own state.”
Why does the U.S. — the richest country in the world — have the most poverty of any advanced democracy? Why are homeless encampments popping up from Seattle to Burlington?
The answer is that, knowingly or unknowingly, many of us benefit from keeping poor people poor.
That is the argument made by Matthew Desmond in his bestselling new book, “Poverty, by America.” Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which was named by Book Riot as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last century. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and was named by Politico in 2016 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
He argues that regulations ranging from zoning to environmental laws are being used to block affordable housing, a key factor that is driving the homeless crisis. He says that this problem is often especially acute in communities known for their otherwise progressive politics. Low wages are kept low for the benefit of the more affluent.
“In most residential land in America, it's illegal to build anything except a single detached family home,” Desmond told The Vermont Conversation. “That little regulation buried inside of our zoning codes really means that the only place poor families can live are neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and that creates a level of disadvantage of a whole other order. I think that we need to think about our role and our complicity in maintaining those walls around our communities.”
Desmond intends his work to be “a call to action. It means that we need to get our tails down to that zoning board meeting on a Thursday night at eight o'clock and stand up and say, Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids receive living here. Let's build [affordable housing].”
Matthew Desmond’s work is grounded in his own experience growing up in poverty. He started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, when he lived among poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee. He now directs the Eviction Lab at Princeton, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where “Poverty, By America” was recently excerpted.
Desmond wants to inspire a new abolitionist movement. “Poverty abolitionists view poverty not as a minor social issue or an inevitability, but as an abomination,” he said. “It shares with other abolitionist movements -- the movement to abolish slavery [and] prisons, for example -- the recognition, the conviction, that if my gain comes at someone else's loss, that's corrupting in a way."
"A poverty abolitionist divests from exploitation even if it benefits us. We try to shop and invest in solidarity with poor workers," he said. "We want a government that has a balanced and sensible welfare state, a government that does much more to fight poverty than to alleviate the tax burdens of the affluent. And we are for integrated communities and open, inclusive neighborhoods.”
Poverty abolitionism “is a political mission,” said Desmond, “but it's also a personal stance.”
Editor's Note: This Vermont Conversation with Ed Koren was recorded at his home in Brookfield in October 2022. Koren died on April 14, 2023 at the age of 87.
When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.
Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.
Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”
The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.
Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020.
Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.
“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”
I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”
Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”
Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.
“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”
Author Tracy Kidder has been described as a “master of narrative nonfiction.” Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his 1981 book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” about the development of cutting edge computers. He is the author of more than a dozen books including the acclaimed 2003 New York Times bestseller, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about the late global health pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health. The book is often assigned as required reading in colleges.
The Washington Post says that Kidder writes about “the moral value of small victories in a world of big problems.”
Homelessness is the focus of Kidder’s latest bestselling book, “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.” Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell as he worked the streets of Boston. Kidder was moved by the people he met who were experiencing homelessness in Boston and wanted to tell their stories. “If you get to know them, to really look at them — and a lot of people never do — you realize that they're every bit as human as you and I, and that old adage, There but for the grace of God go I.”
“The engine of every good story is human character,” said Kidder. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and the New York Times but he insisted, “I'm a storyteller more than I am a journalist.”
“I stopped thinking of myself as a journalist around the time of the Iraq War. I didn't want to be associated,” he explained. “Because there were so many lies told and so much bad reporting… it starts to taint the term. And then you have Fox News. …It's a wonderful profession, journalism. I believe in it utterly. But I want to see it practiced better.”
Kidder says of his craft that “the techniques of storytelling don't belong exclusively to fiction.” Good writing should “be like a pane of glass. The writing itself should be interesting but it doesn't have to be flashy. I believe in immersion in the story that I've discovered.”
On April 3, social worker Leah Rosin-Pritchard was working at a Brattleboro shelter for people experiencing homelessness when she was killed, allegedly by a shelter resident.
The brutal murder of the 36-year old shelter coordinator shocked the state. It struck especially close to home for Rick DeAngelis, co-executive director of Good Samaritan Haven, which operates shelters and transitional housing in Barre and Montpelier. In February, DeAngelis’s son Gabe was stabbed multiple times while working at a Montpelier warming shelter. He is recovering from his wounds.
Vermont’s system of care for people who are unhoused or in need of mental health services is in a perilous state. This fragile system will be further strained as pandemic funding for emergency housing is about to end for about 3,000 people who are currently living in motels. Affordable housing is in critically short supply, psychiatric beds are scarce, an opioid crisis rages, and homelessness is rising. Vermont has the second-highest per-capita rate of homelessness in the country, behind only California, according to a recent government report.
Rick DeAngelis began working with people who are experiencing homelessness in Boston in the 1980s. DeAngelis went on to work at the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and was the first executive director of what is now Downstreet Housing and Community Development before becoming co-director of Good Samaritan Haven in 2020.
DeAngelis said “there is a perfect storm of factors that have come together over the last couple of years to create this crisis situation.”
Anne Sosin, interim director of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, insists that the shortage of affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness. “The vast majority of people who are experiencing homelessness can be successfully housed.” She said that a strategy “that combines housing with a supportive service model [has] made really dramatic progress” in other cities.
DeAngelis, a lifelong advocate for people experiencing homelessness, said that despite the current challenges, “we have an opportunity in every moment, to try to rebuild, to heal, to start again.”
Vermont journalist Sue Halpern reports on national issues for the New Yorker magazine, where she is a staff writer. Her recent reporting has included stories about the 40-year effort to ban abortion pills, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, and threats to democracy. One topic that she has covered in depth is the effort to subvert elections. She has written about candidates for secretary of state who deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, attempts by election deniers to access electronic voting systems and the Republican war on voting.
Halpern was recently shocked to discover that Vermont is currently considering allowing internet voting, which experts have described as “a security nightmare.” The provision, which is supported by the Office of the Vermont Secretary of State, is tucked into legislation, H.429, that was approved last month by the Vermont House and is now being considered in the Senate. Among those arguing against Vermont’s internet voting provision are the watchdog groups Common Cause, Public Citizen, Free Speech for the People and the Brennan Center for Justice.
Halpern is the author of seven books, including the best-selling “A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home” and “Four Wings and a Prayer,” which was made into an Emmy-nominated film. She was a columnist for Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine and Smithsonian Magazine, and has written on science, technology and politics for the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. She is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, where she directs the program in narrative journalism. Halpern is also a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
Based on her reporting on internet voting, Halpern insisted that “every computer science expert who has looked into internet voting is against it because it is insecure.”
Halpern has recently reported on artificial intelligence engines such as ChatGPT. “My biggest concern is that it's going to be used for disinformation and misinformation as we go forward in our very fractured political life,” she said.
Halpern’s reporting shines a light on the fragile state of democracy in the U.S.
“We have people who are trying to undermine the two parts of our public life that are central to the preservation of democracy, and those are public schools and public libraries,” she said. “I'm deeply worried that the people who are trying to maintain this democracy are kind of working on the case a little bit too late, and they're not quite as wily as the people who are trying to undermine it.”
It’s a tough time for books. A wave of book bannings is occurring throughout numerous states. Last school year, more than 2,500 books were banned, according to PEN America. The vast majority of the targeted books feature LGBTQ+ themes or characters of color. Meanwhile in Vermont, the state colleges announced in February a plan to close their libraries and sell off their books.
Against this backdrop, Duncan McDougall has quietly crusaded to expand literacy and give away books to underserved children and communities throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. Twenty five years ago, McDougall, a former management consultant and wilderness guide, founded the Children’s Literacy Foundation, or CLiF, and ran it out of his home in Waterbury Center. To date, CLiF has donated $10 million worth of books to more than 350,000 children in 85% of the towns in Vermont and New Hampshire. CLiF now runs more than 1,000 programs per year in schools, rural libraries, prisons, and other locations where children and parents are at risk of low literacy.
The literacy gap is wide. Nationally and in Vermont, more than two-thirds of fourth graders read below grade level, according to the Literacy Network.
For children with low literacy, “the probability of them getting through high school is much lower, the probability of them going beyond high school is lower,” McDougall said. “It's a vicious cycle. So what we do at the Children's Literacy foundation is we try to inspire those kids and give them experiences and resources that can help them change that cycle. … For a child who's never had that opportunity to choose a book that's really on a topic that they love, it’s life changing.”
This week marks a milestone in New England's literacy efforts. After a quarter century at its helm, McDougall is stepping down as executive director of CLiF and handing the reigns of the organization to Laura Rice, a nonprofit leader and former CLiF board member. And the organization is moving from McDougall’s garage to a 3,000 square foot new headquarters on Route 100 in Waterbury Center.
“Books can be mirrors and windows,” McDougall said. “What we want to do is for those kids who don't see anyone like them in their world to see a book that reflects characters just like them. For people who have never had a chance to leave their town, or go more than three or four towns away, to see the tremendous variety and magical diversity of this world.”
“Literacy is really a social justice issue,” he added. “We are opening books, opening minds, opening doors, and there are just a lot of folks who have doors closed to them. Helping young kids develop a love for reading and writing can open so many doors for them and for their kids and grandkids too.”
VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
This Vermont Conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) was originally published in May 2022.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin was expecting trouble after the November 2020 presidential election. Raskin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress anticipated that former President Donald Trump would try to subvert the results and try to derail Congress’s normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election.
But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression.
Seven days later — and just a day after burying his son — Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Biden’s election. That’s when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.
Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.”
If there is a conspiracy theory or far right group, Jeff Sharlet has probably hung out with its followers. Sharlet is an investigative journalist and correspondent for Vanity Fair. He is one of the country’s leading experts on religion, fundamentalism and American politics. He is the winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and numerous other awards.
In 2019, Netflix released "The Family," a five-part series based on Sharlet’s reporting about the secretive fundamentalist group that includes among its members a number of the country’s leading politicians. He has attended countless Trump rallies around the country, chronicled people preparing for armed insurrection, and attended gatherings of QAnon followers.
Sharlet is a professor of English and director of creative writing at Dartmouth College. He has a new book out this week, “The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War.”
Sharlet believes that averting civil war will take concerted and sustained action. "We don't think of democracy as something we have, but as something we do. You get up and you do it every day," he said.
"We haven't achieved democracy once yet. But we're going to try again tomorrow."
Are ski bums an endangered species?
The iconic “ski bum” is a romantic character who has forsaken ambition and material comfort for something purer: high mountains, big adventure and the pursuit of the perfect ski run. Vermont is filled with ski bums past and present who live for powder days.
Ski bums have had a tough go lately. Climate change and economic hardship have taken a toll. New England just endured the warmest January in history. Powder days are fewer and farther between. Airbnb and Covid-19 have dealt a blow to many of the affordable crash pads and couches that ski bums once surfed.
Then there is the matter of white privilege.
“There is only one subset of the population who can safely, comfortably, and consistently pull off this lifestyle: white, cis-gendered skiers, usually middle class or wealthier, usually men,” wrote racial equity advocate Mardi Fuller in an essay for SKI Magazine entitled, “Let’s Stop Celebrating the White Male Ski Bum.”
Journalist Heather Hansman explores the modern reality of ski bumming in her book, “Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow.” She journeys from Vermont to Colorado and back to tell the stories of people who have built their lives around snowy mountains. Hansman is the environmental columnist for Outside Online and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic and other publications. She is also the author of “Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West.”
Hansman writes that ski bums are “part of an ecosystem of skiing which encompasses everyone from celebrity vacationers to the undocumented lifties.” A decade after her own ski bum journeys, she hits the road again, this time with existential questions.
“In the face of climate change, economic upheaval, and so much more, I’m trying to figure out if skiing as we know it will survive,” she said.
Ryan DeLena was a “problem child.”
He had frequent emotional outbursts, and his parents’ efforts to control him proved futile. Mental health professionals and teachers said Ryan should be removed from the public schools in suburban Boston where he lived and placed into therapeutic schools. While there, he was subjected to physical restraints and heavy medication.
Nothing helped. At age 9, he landed in a psychiatric hospital. His problems only got worse.
In a desperate attempt to connect with his troubled son, Ryan’s father Rob took his son skiing at a small Massachusetts ski area. That was the beginning of a transformation for young Ryan. He channeled his energies into skiing and climbing, and now nurtures a dream to become a professional ski mountaineer.
Ryan and Rob DeLena have continued to ski together around the world, including in Antarctica. Ryan finished high school and enrolled at Northern Vermont University, where he is a junior studying outdoor education.
Ryan and Robert DeLena co-wrote a new memoir, “Without Restraint: How Skiing Saved My Son’s Life.” It is a harrowing and heartwarming story told by father and son about a misunderstood and troubled boy, and the bond the two forged as they found Ryan’s path.
“Through skiing and the adventures we experienced together, I learned everyone was wrong about Ryan, especially me,” wrote Rob, an attorney who runs a legal staffing agency in Boston.
Ryan, now 21, concluded with an improbable sentiment. “If I was offered the chance to have my childhood over again, growing up like a normal kid, I’d say no thanks,” he wrote.
“Despite all the pain and hardship, I now appreciate that I’m strong enough to handle anything,” he said.
VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
This Vermont Conversation with professor Timothy Snyder was originally published in September 2020.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale and a world renowned scholar of authoritarianism. His 2017 international bestseller, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” is a roadmap to how autocrats rise and democracies fall.
Snyder has frequently appeared in the news to discuss the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and he recently met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rep. Jamie Raskin consulted with Snyder during President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
"Post-truth," Snyder wrote, "is pre-fascism."
In 2020, Snyder published “Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.” He described his near-death experience following a missed medical diagnosis the previous year, and he eviscerated America’s failed coronavirus response.
Snyder calls on us to rethink the fundamental connection between health and freedom.
"Other countries look at us and for the first time ever, they sincerely pity us but also wonder, how can you have so much wealth ... and kill so many people?” Snyder asked.
"We're at a tipping point,” he said. “To say that it can't go on like this is an understatement. Things could get much worse than they are — and they might."
When Laurie Patton became president of Middlebury College in 2015, it marked the beginning of a quiet transformation at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. Patton is the first woman to lead Middlebury in its 223-year history.
Patton is changing the face of Middlebury. In more than a decade, Middlebury has roughly doubled the number of domestic BIPOC — Black, Indigenous and people of color — students, who comprise almost 40% of the class of 2026. The number of first generation college students at Middlebury has also nearly doubled, and now represent about 1 in 5 students admitted to the school.
Patton has also led Middlebury to make an about face on fossil fuel divestment. For years, the Middlebury administration rejected student divestment demands. But in 2019, Patton announced the Energy 2028 plan, in which Middlebury would divest its $1 billion endowment from fossil fuels and commit to having the college be completely powered by renewable energy by 2028.
“I feel (it) is something good I did for the world,” Patton told The Vermont Conversation when discussing the divestment and sustainability plan.
Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, who is a distinguished scholar at Middlebury, tweeted at the time that this move placed Middlebury “among the very greenest institutions in the world.”
Patton is now confronting a future in which diversity initiatives at Middlebury at other colleges face significant headwinds. A conservative Supreme Court is expected to end or curtail affirmative action later this year.
How will Middlebury maintain its diversity if affirmative action is struck down?
“I feel deeply confident in Middlebury’s commitment to the principles and its savvy in figuring out how we move forward in a new environment,” Patton said. “As we continue to read applications, can we say that this student brings that diversity and can tell a story with us … about their experience that will enrich all of us?”
Soon after Patton became president, Middlebury found itself the focus of a national debate about free speech on campus when a talk by a conservative political scientist was shouted down by protesters, including students. Some five dozen Middlebury students faced disciplinary action after the incident, and the punishment further roiled the campus.
“Holding each other accountable is important,” Patton said, adding that in hindsight, “there are times when we probably could have taken a pause to reflect and talk to each other.”
Last year, Middlebury received $25 million, the largest programmatic grant in its history, to launch a program on conflict transformation.
Patton is deeply concerned about censorship of school curricula — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s rejection of an AP African American studies course on the grounds that it had a “political agenda.” Asked whether students coming from schools with censored history classes are well prepared for a college such as Middlebury, Patton replied, “Absolutely not.”
“There's so much hope in inclusive storytelling, and I really wish that the frame of an uncensored way of thinking about history was about hope. And that is what I deeply believe the power of an education should be,” she said.
Patton is a scholar of South Asian history, culture and religion. In addition to being president of Middlebury, she is a professor of religion. Patton came to Middlebury from Duke University, where she was a professor and dean. She has also been on the faculty of Emory University and Bard College. She is the author or editor of 10 books and has written three books of poems.
Patton has advice for high students who are applying to college. “Think about the place where you want to be next truly as a form of community and of place. And as you are choosing the college, think about the ways in which that community thrives and what makes that community thrive. And then you'll find that when you end up at a college, you will have a sense of belonging that will really drive you and help you ask the most important questions of your life, because that's what college should encourage you to do,” she said.
The anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s spared no corner of the country or the culture. The FBI combed the Green Mountains looking for communists, and the University of Vermont ousted a suspected faculty member. In Hollywood, 10 screenwriters and directors refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, which led to a highly publicized hunt for supposed communist sympathizers and “subversives” throughout the entertainment industry.
The Hollywood 10, as they came to be known, used the HUAC hearings in 1947 to condemn the committee. Among them was Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s highest paid writers. His credits included “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (1944). As result of their defiance and principled stands, Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood 10 were convicted of contempt of Congress, fined, imprisoned and blacklisted from working in the film industry. Trumbo was unable to make a living under his own name for more than a decade, though he continued to write scripts under pseudonyms and use other writers as a front. He won an Oscar for “The Brave One” (1956), which he wrote under the name Robert Rich.
In 1959, former President Harry Truman denounced HUAC as the “most un-American thing in the country today.” The Hollywood blacklist ended in 1960, when Trumbo was publicly credited with writing two films, “Spartacus” and “Exodus.” In 1975, the Academy Awards officially recognized Trumbo as the writer of “The Brave One.”
“Trumbo: Red White & Blacklisted” is a two-person play featuring Trumbo’s letters that was written in 2003 by Trumbo’s son Christopher. The play is being performed in Vermont beginning Feb. 11 in Plainfield, Waterbury Center and White River Junction. It is directed by Monica Callan, narrated by Nick Charyk, and actor and former State Rep. Donny Osman plays Trumbo. Rick Winston, author of “Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960,” is an adviser to the play.
Trumbo served 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress.
“As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had full contempt for that Congress,” he wrote.
When white supremacists launched a campaign of racist and misogynist attacks against former State Rep. Kiah Morris, they hoped to silence her.
They failed.
Morris has continued to fight back and speak out since resigning her seat as a state representative from Bennington. She stepped down out of concern for the safety of her family, but she has not stepped back.
Her story is told in a new documentary, “Backlash – Misogyny in the Digital Age,” which has its U.S. premiere in the Vermont Statehouse on Feb. 7, during Black History Month. Morris is among four women profiled in the film who fight against cyberviolence. The women include “the most harassed politician in Italy” Laura Boldrini, French YouTube personality Marion Seclin and an Montreal elementary school teacher Laurence Gratton.
All four women pursue their tormentors and demand accountability from those who are responsible, ranging from the tech giants, to the state, law enforcement and the perpetrators.
Morris says that the backlash is against women.
“As women are stepping into our own power, as we are continuing to move with a society that's supposed to move with us, there are many who cannot handle that level of progress. There are many who actively want us to retreat back into subservient roles,” she said.
The backlash is also about race. When Morris was elected in 2014, she was the second African American woman to serve in the Vermont Legislature. In January 2019, Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan announced that he would not bring criminal charges against the white nationalist who was harassing Morris and her family, insisting that racially offensive speech was protected. Civil rights groups denounced the decision. Morris has continued to pursue justice.
In 2021, an investigator with by the Vermont Human Rights Commission found grounds that the Bennington Police Department violated the human rights of Morris and her family and endangered their safety by withholding critical information about the white supremacist who had been targeting her. As part of the settlement, the Bennington Selectboard paid $137,000 to Morris and formally apologized to her.
Was justice done?
“Not really,” Morris said. “Nothing has changed in Bennington at all … to this day, not a single sanction, not a single call for resignation.” By contrast, she had to sell her house in Bennington and move to the Burlington area. She describes the settlement as “paltry.”
Morris says her case — and the documentary “Backlash” — have “raised the profile in a way that other people knew that they should try to fight back. And the system is so stacked against anyone who deserves to have justice and who deserves to have peace.”
“We have to continue to fight. I must not leave that legacy to my son to know that we said it was OK because it's not OK,” she said.
Erika Nichols-Frazer was like many kids growing up in the resort town of Stowe. She loved to snowboard and play hockey. But Erika hid a dark secret: She was at war with food. By eighth grade, she had anorexia, an eating disorder. She was starving herself, and her weight dropped below 80 pounds.
Erika ended up in a psychiatric institution as her family worked to help her with her eating disorder. But she continued to face other mental health challenges. Depression and anxiety was a constant. At the age of 29, Erika was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
What Erika guarded as her deeply private struggle is actually common. One in five adults and one in six youth experience a mental health disorder every year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Only around half of people with mental illness receive treatment, and the average delay between the onset of symptoms and treatment is 11 years.
“There's still a huge amount of stigma around mental illness, and many of us are afraid to tell people that we're not doing okay and that we're having a hard time,” Nichols-Frazer said.
Nichols-Frazer, now 34, is a writer, editor, and poet. She is a journalist for the Valley Reporter, a weekly newspaper that covers the Mad River Valley, where she lives. She shares the story of her journey to save herself in a new memoir, “Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness.”
Opening up about her struggles, she said, has been “really important for my own healing process, as well as for others who need to hear that they're not alone in their struggles.”
Nichols-Frazer has transformed her relationship to food. Instead of food being a source of isolation and pain, it is now a way to connect with the world.
“It's been a yearslong process of really coming to a place where I love food. I appreciate it. I appreciate the nourishment and sustenance it gives us, and I think that it really is a way to build community,” she said.
For this 10th anniversary Vermont Conversation, we invited back our first guest. Bill McKibben was on the inaugural broadcast of the Vermont Conversation on Jan. 16, 2013. As a journalist, he has eloquently chronicled the impact of the climate crisis across the globe and put a human face on what too often is cast as a political or scientific problem. He is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker and his Substack site, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.”
McKibben acknowledges that most of his dire predictions about climate change have come true since he first started writing about it three decades ago. And yet he insists “we are actually at a moment of extraordinary opportunity, the convergence of this big mobilization of people around the world.”
McKibben has been a key figure in that grassroots mobilization. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org, and is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people older than 60 for progressive change.
“The remarkable fall in the price of renewable energy has left us in a place where it's possible to imagine, for the first time, really rapid change. Now, whether it'll come or not will depend on how hard we push. But there's nothing far fetched about it. In fact, it's very clear that 40 years from now, we'll run the world on clean energy, because it's cheap.”
Reflecting on key developments of the past decade, McKibben singles out the role of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“I just want Vermonters to be aware and proud of the fact that Bernie (Sanders) played an absolutely pivotal role in the transformation of how this country or large parts of it thinks about itself,” he said
McKibben believes that the failure of a “red tsunami” of Republican electoral victories last fall is an important signal.
“It feels to me like there's people standing up for common sense, for the idea that science is a useful tool, that vaccines were a good development of the 20th century,” he said.
He concedes, "Yes, we're living in a country that still is riven, where there's people constantly trying to foment unpleasantness at all times. But that election result was kind of a quiet testimony to the quiet sanity of a fair number of people in this country. So one takes hope where one can find it.”
The past week has been filled with images of high conflict. There was the shocking violent right-wing attacks on government institutions in Brazil, which appear to be a copycat of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
Then there was the chaotic election of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a madcap four-day, 15-round epic in which a small far-right faction of the GOP held the rest of Congress hostage to its demands.
How do we break out of this cycle in which disagreements quickly spiral into good-versus-evil, us-versus-them battles? And how did we get here?
Journalist Amanda Ripley tackles these questions in her bestselling book, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.” Ripley was an investigative reporter for TIME Magazine and writes regularly for The Atlantic and Washington Post. She is also author of the bestselling book, “The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way,” and she hosts the Slate podcast “How To!” for which she interviewed then-candidate and now Vermont Rep. Becca Balint in a piece called, “How to Run for Office Without Being an A**hole.”
In "High Conflict," Ripley writes about “how good people get captured by high conflict — and how they break free.”
Ripley said there is a time-tested method for generating conflict.
“When I look at mob activity like we just saw in Brazil, what I think most about is the climate of fear and threat and blame that has allowed this to happen,” she said.
Ripley cited the power of “conflict entrepreneurs,” such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News, to incite people.
“Influential voices in the media and in politics (utilize) the same kind of recipe: … generate a feeling of threat, that there's a crisis, identify a villain and then proclaim yourself as the hero who can save the day. That is how, again and again, again, politicians and pundits have managed to cast a sort of spell of high conflict over people.”
She tweeted this week about how to avoid another Jan. 6, based on her conversation with security and democracy expert Rachel Kleinfeld: “For [journalists]: 1. Amplify non-extremists. 2. Report out disagreements within parties/groups, not just between. 3. Correct your audience's mistakes about the other side. They are vast. For Politicians: Call out your own party more — and the other party less. One works, the other doesn't. For Regular People: Don't share violent memes. It might sound kind of funny & not important, but in fact, jokes are one of those things that go beyond our rational brain & allow us to do things we would never normally say or do."
Ripley has also criticized the media for how it has helped stoke conflict. She confessed in the Washington Post that she often avoids the news because it can be depressing and “paralyzing.” She cites studies showing that 4 in 10 Americans do the same thing.
“Almost no one is really happy with the way politics is happening, the way the news is covered, the way we are treating each other,” she said. “I think there's a huge opportunity there.”
From politics to news, “most Americans are yearning for something different. Widespread dissatisfaction is what we need to change this,” Ripley said.
On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy ended his remarkable 48-year career as the senator from Vermont.
Leahy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974 at the age of 34. He is now 82. He was the first Democrat elected to Congress from Vermont, and until this week, the only Vermont Democratic senator, since Sen. Bernie Sanders is an independent. Leahy was also the last of the Senate's "Watergate Babies" elected in the wake of former President Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.
Leahy is the third longest serving U.S. senator in history, after Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV (51 years), and Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-HI (49 years). He has served with nine presidents and has cast more than 17,000 votes as a senator. As a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he participated in some 18 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. His memoir, “The Road Taken,” was published in 2022.
Leahy’s last day as a U.S. senator was historic in another way: It was the first time in a century that the House of Representatives failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot.
Leahy reflected on the political impasse, “This is hurting the United States. It is hurting our sense of democracy. When you have people from the former President (Trump) on say, ‘Well maybe we should just suspend a few of these parts of the Constitution because they're inconvenient for what we want to do’ — they weren't made to be convenient. They're made to hold a country together. And I fear for the country if it continues like this.”
The Vermont Conversation asked Leahy who of the nine presidents he served with were the most consequential. He replied, “It would probably be Trump because of all the things he did that we're still paying the price for.”
During the Jan. 6 insurrection, Leahy was evacuated to a secure room with other senators while police battled with the mob of Trump supporters who had invaded the Capitol. A Senate colleague suggested that the Senate finish its business in the secure room. The suggestion infuriated Leahy. He declared to his fellow Senators, “I'm the dean of the Senate. I'm the longest serving person here. I’m the president pro tem. And I'll be damned if I'm going to meet in secret.”
“Let us go back where the American people can see what we're saying, how we're voting, what we're doing. Don't hide,” he said. He received a standing ovation.
“I leave with pride in what I've done,” Leahy said. “I cast more votes than all but one person in history. I've actually served with 20% of the senators who have been elected in the history of this country. … I felt that gives me a responsibility to do what I think is right. And that's what I've tried to do.”
“But I gotta tell you,” the Vermont senator said after nearly a half-century of service, “Marcelle and I are just looking forward to coming home now.”
As one news outlet after another downsizes and closes, who is going to do the journalism in the future?
That’s the question asked by Ken Tingley, the former editor of the Post-Star, the newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y. Over the last decade, Tingley watched as his newsroom went from a staff of about 50 to just 7 people today. He chronicles what has happened to local news in his new book, “The Last American Newspaper: An Institution in Peril, Through the Eyes of a Small-Town Editor.”
Tingley’s experience in Glens Falls, a city of 15,000 located near the tourist centers of Lake George and Saratoga Springs, is part of a national trend. From 2005 to 2020, about a quarter of local print newspapers ceased publication in the U.S. Half of over 3,000 counties in the U.S. had just one local print newspaper. Only a third had a daily newspaper, and over 200 counties had no newspaper at all. Vast swaths of the country have become news deserts.
The Post-Star was founded in 1904. The daily newspaper in Glens Falls won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for the editorial writing of Mark Mahoney, who wrote about government secrecy and the public’s right to know.
Tingley and his colleagues have reported on the rise of a local Republican member of Congress, Elise Stefanik, who was elected to Congress in 2014 at age 30. Stefanik ran as a political moderate but has since become a staunch acolyte of former President Donald Trump. Stefanik is a rising star in the party who became the third-ranking House Republican after Liz Cheney was pushed out by Trump loyalists in 2021.
The Trump era has been marked by increasing threats against journalists. A pro-Trump protester in Glens Falls pointed a toy gun at one of Tingley's reporters and declared, “We’ve got one coming for you, Post-Star!” After the newspaper reported on the incident, Rep. Stefanik invited the protester to one of her town halls, and her staffer sent him an appreciative message.
An outraged Tingley contacted Stefanik’s communications director. “I asked her to immediately denounce this man, that he had threatened our reporters, he had threatened our editors, he had threatened people at our newspaper and put their lives in danger.”
“Never heard anything,” he said.
Tingley urges people to subscribe and support local news. If local news outlets don’t survive, he said, “the number of people who vote will be less [because] they don't know who's running for office, and …there's going to be less community engagement.” He also predicted that without local watchdogs, “You're gonna see your taxes go up.”
In addition to democracy taking a hit, Tingley predicts that without the public accountability that local media provides, “It's going to cost us all more money.”
“Greed is good.”
That idea was famously uttered by a fictional stockbroker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.”
That line leapt out at Jon Erickson. He was an undergraduate studying economics at Cornell University in the late 1980s and he was coming to believe that the misguided priorities of conventional economics did not lead to prosperity, but to a failed and grossly unequal society and was “a path to planetary ruin.”
Erickson is now an ecological economist, and he champions a new kind of economics that fosters a healthy, balanced relationship between people and planet. Ecological economics has been gaining influence both in academia and in environmental and social justice movements.
“I think of it as 21st century economics. It's an economics that reflects the realities of living on a full planet,” Erickson said.
Jon Erickson makes the case for a new economics in a new book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” Erickson is the Blittersdorf professor of sustainability science and policy at the University of Vermont, a faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment.
Erickson sees the current challenge as “taking power back from the wealthy elite and overturning the idea of a market society, returning back to democratic institutions and systems of trust and community. (It's) about social movement building.”
“The challenge now is that it can't be every four years. It's got to be day to day, week to week, month to month. It's got to be overturning the kind of brainwashing that we've all gone through.”
International human rights lawyer Reed Brody has been dubbed the “Dictator Hunter.” He has helped pursue and bring to justice notorious dictators including Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia.
One dictator became a special focus of Brody’s global pursuit of justice. Hissène Habré was the former despot who ruled Chad from 1982 until he was deposed in 1990. Habré met with then-President Ronald Reagan and was armed and backed by the U.S. Habré, who was dubbed “Africa’s Pinochet,” was accused of ordering the killing of 40,000 people and the torture of 200,000 people during his reign of terror.
“The saying used to be that if you kill one person, you go to jail; if you kill 40 people, you are put in an insane asylum; but if you kill 40,000 people, you get a safe haven and a fat bank account in the country of your choosing,” Brody wrote.
For 16 years, Reed Brody led a team of investigators, lawyers and victims that spanned three continents as they pursued Habré. This global hunt culminated in Habré’s trial in Senegal in 2016. Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. The dictator, who had lived in seaside luxury in Senegal for 25 years, was sentenced to life in prison. Habré died of Covid-19 during his imprisonment in August 2021.
Brody recounts his global quest for justice in his new book, “To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial Of Hissène Habré.”
Brody argues that the precedent of holding dictators like Habré and Pinochet to account can also be applied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine.
But pursuing tyrants requires patience.
“Even assuming that he's indicted for war crimes or for aggression by a special tribunal, which is being discussed, unless there's a radical change in Russia, nobody is going to come in and arrest Vladimir Putin,” Brody said. “That said, these indictments will hang over his head all his life. And we see in other cases like Cambodia and elsewhere that you may not prosecute somebody today or in 10 years, but maybe 20 years or 30 years.”
Brody is critical of the double standard in international law, where human rights abuses by western leaders go unpunished.
"I spent a long time documenting crimes committed against prisoners during the so called War on Terror in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons," he said. "George Bush, president of the United States authorized torture. He authorized waterboarding ... There has never been accountability for that."
Brody has seen the rise and fall of dictators around the world. He knows the fragility of democracy.
“I am very worried about democracy in the U.S.," he said. “It's going to require all of our organizing … to preserve or at least to reconquer our institutions.”
A transgender Vermont high school student who was the target of a transphobic hate campaign is breaking her silence.
“I want to be able to go out there and kind of just say, ‘I am trans, I am here,’” said the 14-year-old first-year student at Randolph Union High School, who asked to be identified as Rabbit in this interview. The Vermont Conversation and VTDigger are protecting the student’s privacy out of concern for her safety.
In late September, Vermont television station WCAX aired a news story about the girl’s volleyball team at Randolph Union High School. Rabbit had recently joined the team, and WCAX featured a single student who objected to Rabbit’s presence in the girl’s locker room.
The story was immediately picked up by right-wing media outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, the British tabloid the Daily Mail and the conservative Heritage Foundation. This unleashed a “wildfire of bigotry and hatred,” according to Rabbit’s mother, and a torrent of transphobic hate messages to Rabbit, her family and the school. The school district website was hacked and forced offline after the site was flooded with transphobic messages. Rabbit temporarily left school in fear for her safety.
In fact, Rabbit was being bullied by a small group of students, her mother said. WCAX soon removed the story from its website.
But the damage had been done.
“I was in danger,” Rabbit said. “And not only me, but the trans youth community of Randolph and of Vermont due to this disgraceful and defaming news article.”
This incident comes as transgender people are under unprecedented attack, especially in Republican-led states. Four states have enacted a partial or total bans on gender-affirming care, and 20 other states are trying to pass such bills. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot declared that parents and health care providers who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth can be investigated for child abuse. Some 85% of trans or nonbinary youth say their mental health has been negatively affected by these laws, and more than half have considered suicide in the past year, according to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
“So much of Rabbit’s story absolutely mirrors what is happening across the country and here in Vermont,” said Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, an LGBTQ+ advocacy and support organization. “There's a continuous barrage of messages that are targeting queer and trans young people telling them that they are not valued, that they're not cared for, that they're not allowed to exist, that they're not allowed to access their joy, and really typical things that all young people need to be able to do to develop self confidence (and) to thrive.”
At the same time, there has also been an outpouring of support for Rabbit from everyone from her volleyball teammates to strangers who sent her letters.
“I just want you to remember that we’re children,” volleyball team captain Lilly Patton said to a crowd of about 350 people who attended a public meeting in Randolph in October. “It’s one child on the receiving end of all this hate. You’re saying all these things to a child who is already at high risk, who already doesn’t feel accepted. This child didn’t do anything to anyone, especially you adults. I was there. She was where she was supposed to be.”
Rabbit said she appreciates these allies.
“Any message of support that you can give to trans youth or trans people in general…make it known because, oh my god, it helps so much,” she said.
“My hopes and dreams are to show people that they can just be who they are and that they don't need the approval of others or the approval of even their family members,” Rabbit said. “You just need to be you.”
Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick.
“Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to look more like some of the communities that they serve. So they welcomed three new Santas: Chris Kennedy, a Black Santa from Arkansas; Levi Truex, aka Trans Santa, from Chicago; and “Santa Fin” Ciappara, a Santa with spina bifida who communicates via an iPad, joined by his mother Suki Ciappara.
Santa Fin always dreamed of being Santa in a parade. The movie captures the day in December 2021 when his dream came true and he sat in a sled pulled by elves in the River of Light parade in Waterbury.
“Believe in your dreams and don't give up,” he said. "Be kind to people who are different."
For some, diversity is a threat. Kennedy set up an illuminated, inflatable Black Santa Claus display in his yard. Soon after, he received a racist letter. That motivated him to become Black Santa.
“You're not going to steal my joy,” he told The Vermont Conversation.
"I'm appealing to families who want diversity and want to see themselves represented or their adoptive kids want to see themselves represented. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for the naysayers,” Kennedy said said.
The documentary showed the “Proud Boys” protesting Trans Santa Levi Truex outside the Chicago church where he was greeting children last year. Truex talked about violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, including the killing of five people at a Colorado Springs gay bar this week.
“We've always experienced hate. It's what makes us resilient. It's what makes us get louder and push harder,” he said. “The more that we feel the pressure from the hate, the more we're just going to be even more visible and more open. It's just what needs to happen.”
Truex believes that Trans Santa makes a difference, especially for the LGBTQ+ children who visit him.
“I don't have an agenda to make your kids trans or whatever. My agenda is purely to spread joy and just be a good person, to be a good human. And to treat people with respect and dignity and just spread the love of Christmas,” he said.
When a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama addressed the 2004 Democratic Convention, he vaulted onto the national stage through the power and grace of his words. In that speech, he challenged Americans to have “the audacity of hope.” President Obama went on to become one of the greatest political orators of our time.
Obama has had a silent partner in crafting his oratory. In 2006, a novice speechwriter named Cody Keenan joined his team. Keenan wrote alongside Obama for 14 years, rising to become the chief White House speech writer. He continued collaborating with Obama, spending four years helping the former president write his memoir, “A Promised Land.” Keenan now runs a speechwriting and communications firm and teaches a popular undergraduate course on speechwriting at Northwestern University, his alma mater.
Obama’s silent partner is now telling his story. Cody Keenan has a new book, “Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America.” The book focuses on a fraught period in 2015 during which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and a white supremacist murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Obama delivered the eulogy at the church following the massacre, famously singing Amazing Grace.
The power of Obama’s oratory, Keenan said, is his ability to reach “into the American people and just talking to folks where they are. That's something too many politicians don't do.”
Keenan described writing for Obama as “f-ing terrifying.”
“I was never nervous being around the most powerful man in the world,” he said. “I was nervous being around a damn good writer, especially when it's your job to write for him when he is on record saying I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.”
Obama’s presidency ended with another famous presidential speech, President Donald Trump’s inaugural “American Carnage” address, which laid out a dark vision of crime and white grievance.
“What a way to set the tone for the next four years, not only just with a president who kind of picked at our wounds until they reopened, but then a pandemic that was mismanaged to the point where it killed more than a million Americans,” Keenan said.
“President's words matter,” Keenan continued. “If you ever need evidence of that, President Trump's probably your best evidence because his words unleashed something primal … and created a permission structure for political violence — to the point where sitting elected officials are advocating for it. It opened up the floodgates to something like Jan. 6. You had people marching with torches in Charlottesville with their hoods off. All this stuff is only possible because of the president's words.”
Abortion was on the ballot in this week’s midterm elections and the results were emphatic: Voters, even in conservative states, want abortion rights over abortion bans.
This election featured the most ballot measures on abortion in a single U.S. election. Vermonters voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. California and Michigan also approved constitutional protections for abortion. Voters in Kentucky and Montana defeated anti-abortion ballot measures. And in August, voters in Kansas rejected a ballot measure that would have amended the state Constitution to say it contains no right to an abortion.
“Abortion won,” said Oren Jacobson, co-founder and co-executive director of Men4Choice, a national prochoice advocacy group that organizes male allies.
Politicians “who attempted to mess around with people's intimate decision making in that way should really take a message here … that people do not want their lives to be interfered with,” said Felicia Kornbluh, professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Vermont and vice chair of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund.
“They want to be able to choose when and whether and under what circumstances to have children. And that means access to abortion. It means access to contraception. It means access to vasectomy procedures if people want that. It means access to a full range of reproductive health care no matter who you are — if you're in a same sex relationship, no matter what your gender identification is. We want that freedom. It's a bedrock freedom, and I think it's time that everybody in the political system recognizes that and take it as the kind of high value that it really is.”
Jacobson argued that it is essential to enlist men and other allies to protect reproductive rights. One in five men in the U.S. have impregnated someone who has had an abortion.
"About half of these men already had children and supported ending the pregnancy to better provide for their existing family," according to one report.
Jacobson said that men are typically passive supporters of reproductive rights, and that has to change.
“The mere act of men speaking up and lending their voices will normalize the idea (of abortion). This is to shift the culture and bring the majority of men who are pro-choice more actively in this fight. So I think it's really important that guys do share their story and do raise their voices.”
Three Vermont men shared their abortion stories on this episode of the Vermont Conversation.
Carl Werth of Waterbury Center recalled when his college girlfriend became pregnant.
“She did not want to carry a baby, and neither of us wanted to be responsible for one. … If we had had to have the child, if it was a forced birth as they say, I think it would have dramatically changed the path of both of our lives.”
Werth said of the role that men should have in an abortion, “100% they should be supporting what the woman wants to do. Because it's her body. Period.”
Jon Williams, a grandfather in Waterbury Center, said he and his wife decided to have an abortion when they were in their 20s. He said the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade is “absolutely nuts.”
“A lot of women and families are in the position where an unplanned pregnancy could be absolutely devastating to the family. It's just such a fundamental right,” Williams said.
David Bolger, a school teacher from Moretown, is unapologetic about the abortions that he and his girlfriend had in college.
“I don't feel regret it at all,” Bolger said.
He and his girlfriend Amy broke up after college but got married 20 years later.
“That was when we were really so ready and able and capable to do a good job … at raising a family,” he said. “And we have.”
“It was Amy's right to choose, and we talked a long time about it. And I absolutely supported her in that decision, and I'm glad. I still have no regrets about that whole thing,” Bolger said.
When Rue Mapp goes for a hike, she does more than smell flowers and enjoy vistas. She breaks barriers.
Mapp is challenging the idea that the outdoors are just for white people. In 2009, she founded Outdoor Afro, a blog to “reconnect Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.” Today, Outdoor Afro is a national nonprofit operating in 60 cities with more than 100 volunteers leading 60,000 participants on everything from strolls in the forest to bird walks to climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
“It was not a part of our national narrative to just even think about Black people and their connection to the outdoors, and so I set about trying to change the narrative of who we imagine gets outside,” Mapp told the Vermont Conversation.
The problem does not lie with nature.
“The outdoors are welcoming. The trees don't know what color you are. The flowers are gonna bloom no matter how much money is in your account. The birds are gonna sing no matter who you voted for. So the outdoors is not at fault. It's just people and policies,” she said.
Mapp referenced the Jim Crow era when public swimming pools and recreation areas had “whites only” signs. One consequence: Black children did not learn to swim and die from drowning at up to 10 times the rate of white children.
“Alongside that exclusion, alongside that blatant racist reality, was a perseverance among Black people to find their places of purpose in nature,” Mapp said. In 2019, Outdoor Afro launched an initiative to teach 100,000 Black children and their caregivers to swim.
Mapp’s efforts have brought her national attention. She was invited by the White House to participate in America’s Great Outdoors conference and took part in the launch of former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative. She has taken Oprah Winfrey hiking and canoed with the interior secretary. Mapp was named a National Geographic Fellow, Heinz Awards Honoree and is a recipient of the National Wildlife Federation Communication Award.
Rue Mapp has a new book, “Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors.” It is a collection of essays and photos of Black people intended to “inspire Black communities to reclaim their place in the natural world.”
When confronting a challenge or just in daily life, Mapp wants Black people "to recognize the power of nature as both a healer and a connector."
"Nature never closes," she said.
In 2016, Sky Yardley, then 66, was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable and fatal condition. Sky and his wife, Jane Dwinell, decided to face Alzheimer’s in their own way. The Vermont couple began blogging and speaking about Sky’s increasing dementia in an effort to reduce stigma about the disease. Their blog was called Alzheimer’s Canyon, which was Sky’s term for a place with “no trails, no landmarks, nothing.” Yardley and Dwinell talked about their Alzheimer’s journey on the Vermont Conversation in 2017.
Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and the leading cause of dementia. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. According to the Vermont chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 13,000 Vermonters have Alzheimer's disease or another form of dementia, and more than 25,000 friends and family are providing care.
Yardley and Dwinell, who were together for 36 years, movingly chronicled Sky’s decline until his death in February 2021. Jane Dwinell has now published this real-time journal in a new book, “Alzheimer’s Canyon: One Couples Reflections on Living with Dementia,” posthumously co-written with her late husband.
Jane Dwinell is a retired nurse, freelance writer and Unitarian Universalist minister. Her 1992 book, “Birth Stories: Mystery, Power and Creation,” described her experience as a labor and delivery nurse at Gifford Hospital in Randolph. Sky Yardley was a family mediator.
Dwinell said that publicly chronicling his illness “was all Sky's idea. He wanted to do what he could to erase the stigma of dementia. … He wanted to meet other people with dementia to be able to talk about it.”
Friends and family often do not know how to respond when a loved one receives a life-changing diagnosis.
“Don't give them advice. Don't leave them, and just be a good listener,” Dwinell said. “Some of our friends and family kind of fell away, and I'm grateful for the ones who stuck around.”
Sky Yardley said on The Vermont Conversation in 2017 that Alzheimer’s taught him to “pay attention to the present. The only thing we have is the present, which is something that I think all humans could benefit from.”
John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say.
John Irving, 80, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the making and at 900 pages, it is his longest work. He says that “The Last Chairlift” will be his last long novel.
John Irving wrote his first novel at age 26. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached wrestling until he was 47. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Irving has won a National Book Award, an Oscar and a Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other recognitions. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He lived for many years in Vermont, first in Putney and later in Dorset. He sold his Vermont home in 2014 and now lives in Toronto. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.
Irving has long tackled controversial issues in his novels. “The World According to Garp” (1978) has a transgender character, “The Cider House Rules” (1985) deals with abortion and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) confronts the fallout from the Vietnam War. His books have periodically been banned.
“What are they banning? They’re banning books about abortion and they’re banning books on LGBTQ subjects,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “What they're saying to young, gay, lesbian, trans kids, they want them to feel even more alone and isolated than they already feel. They don't want those kids to have access to material that will let them know they're not alone. They already feel alone. There's a cruelty to that that is unspeakable.”
Irving is a sharp critic of American politics today. Speaking about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights, he said, “What they did is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Irving’s advice to young writers: “You can't let outside factors get under your skin. You have to stick to your purpose and be a kind of horse with blinders on. … You also can't get down on yourself after somebody's just kicked your tail. You've got to do it again and get better.”
When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.
Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.
Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”
The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.
Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020.
Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.
“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”
I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”
Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”
Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.
“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”
Danielle Prescod is done being the “Token Black Girl.” Prescod was one of the only Black students in her prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was captain of the tennis team, attended Tufts University and New York University, and went on to jobs at prestigious and influential fashion and beauty magazines including Elle, InStyle and BET, where she was style director.
As Prescod grew older, she began to understand that she was molding herself to fit in a world of white supremacy. She had to be perfect — better than anyone else. That led to undergoing painful hair straightening in elementary school and developing an eating disorder when she hit puberty.
The murder of George Floyd was a turning point for Prescod, who is now 34. Following Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, she posted a searing Instagram video that went viral in which she laid out the many ways that white colleagues and media figures had marginalized and ignored her and other African Americans all while claiming to be anti-racist allies.
Prescod has a new memoir, “Token Black Girl.” She has a newly formed consulting agency 2BG (2 Black Girls), which advises fashion and beauty brands and influencers on anti-racism.
Prescod writes: “The Token Black Girl is characterized mostly by her proximity to her white peers and her nonthreatening and friendly nature. She is nonthreatening because she is almost never the romantic interest, and her primary function is to provide ‘attitude’ and ‘sass,’ either as humor or as an attempt to elevate the sex appeal of the otherwise all-white entity. She is a good student because she has to be. She actually feels like she has to be good at everything. She’s almost always a good dancer, and even if she’s not, it doesn’t matter because everyone will still think she’s a good dancer. She either has or can get the requisite social signifiers of acceptance—everything except white skin, of course. She will be well spoken, well dressed, and well groomed. She likes all the things her friends like, including boys, but they will not like her. She almost never acknowledges her position as the sole Black member of a group because talking about race makes white people uncomfortable. She can never make white people uncomfortable. Her most critical responsibility is providing protection against the ‘racist’ label that might otherwise be hurled at a gaggle of white women devoid of ethnic variety.”
“When you are a person of color in these environments, you go into survival mode because you're very convinced that … it's assimilate or die,” Prescod told The Vermont Conversation. “You are not developing into a whole individual because you're so defensive. You're like a caged feral animal. … I don't want kids living like that. It's very stressful.”
Sixty years ago this week, author Rachel Carson published the landmark book, "Silent Spring." Carson argued that pesticides, especially DDT, were poisoning people and the environment. and that the chemical industry was spreading disinformation in order to profit from this disaster. "Silent Spring" inspired the modern environmental movement and led to the banning of DDT in 1972.
Today, DDT is back, thanks in part to a new era of industry disinformation.
Elena Conis argues the current science denialism movement — led by anti-vaxxers, climate deniers and Covid-19 skeptics — has its roots in efforts by industry and right-wing think tanks to cast doubt on science. Conis is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of “Vaccine Nation” and a new book, “How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT.”
“Way back in the 1950s, the chemical companies had employed these PR firms that essentially began to sketch out what's now known as a playbook on how to defend your product and undermine public faith in evidence that your product might be causing harm,” Conis said on The Vermont Conversation. “This involves things like casting doubt on the scientists who are talking about the hazards of a particular chemical or technology. It involves courting journalists and encouraging them to see your side of the story and to cover your side of the story. It also involves creating scientific debate where there is none or making a debate seem consequential even though scientific consensus falls almost entirely on one particular side of the issue.”
The result is the situation today where people say, “I'm only going to trust this, or I'm going to reject that. I'm going to take Ivermectin, or I'm not going to wear a mask or whatever it is. … We've lost sight of the fact that science is a process. It's about experimentation. It's about asking questions about the world we live in, coming up with answers that make sense for the moment and then adjusting those answers when the moment or the situation changes,” she said.
“We've shifted from a country that appeared to trust in science and institutions of science to one that has been encouraged to question everything to the point where … you can readily find the evidence or justification you need,” Conis said.
American democracy may rise or fall on whether or not citizens succeed in preserving the right to vote. The battle to save voting rights has reached a critical phase.
Following former President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, nearly 400 Republican-written bills restricting voting access were introduced in legislatures nationwide. Last year, legislators in every state except Vermont introduced at least one bill restricting voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. By May of this year, 18 states had passed 34 laws restricting voting. These efforts are tied to the false election fraud claims that Trump and his supporters have been spreading since President Joe Biden's electoral victory.
The new voting restrictions threaten to roll back the rights that were secured in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson. The current tsunami of voter suppression laws was triggered in 2013 when the Supreme Court handed down the decision known as Shelby County v. Holder, which “put a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” in the words of the late Rep. John Lewis. Shelby has been used to roll back key rights enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, and the result has been a wave of voter suppression laws targeting communities of color.
Greg Moore has been a key participant in the battle for voting rights. He was the executive director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, coordinating national programs promoting voting rights and registering more than a half million voters nationwide throughout his career. He previously served as legislative director and chief of staff for Rep. John Conyers, where he helped steer the final passage of the “Motor Voter Act” of 1993. He is the CEO of the Promise of Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting democracy, voting rights and civic education. His new book is “Beyond the Voting Rights Act: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Reform America’s Voter Registration Laws.”
Moore argues that because of the Voting Rights Act, “voter registration rolls swelled up all over the country … and it led to a massive turnout that elected the first African American president not once, but twice, in 2008 and again in 2012.”
That sparked a furious effort by Republicans to suppress Black votes.
“The Trump MAGA movement has accelerated that whole process,” Moore told the Vermont Conversation. “The emergence of the Black vote and the youth vote and low income vote created such a powerful force in 2008 and 2012 that it forced the retrenchment from this longstanding law that was 50 years strong.”
Moore contends that federal action is essential to defend voting rights.
“If you take away the federal government's ability to provide that undergirding support for these rights, then you leave it to states to do whatever they want … It's just like the issue of abortion: There'll be states where you can have it, and states where you can’t, states where you have the right to vote, and states where you don't have the freedom to vote.”
“Jim Crow was what happened when there weren't federal guidelines,” Moore added. “If you take away federal guidelines, you return back to that. … Congress needs to put forth a bill that can pass on a bipartisan basis and be enacted in the law.
Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist, an evangelical Christian and a Texan. Those three parts of her identity do not always play well together. That’s why she is determined to find effective ways to communicate with people who do not agree with her.
Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who studies climate change. She is a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. Her latest book is “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.”
She writes regularly for the Washington Post and other publications. Her TED talk, “The Most Important Thing You Can Do About Climate Change: Talk About It,” has received more than 4 million views. Originally from Canada, she is visiting Vermont this month to deliver the keynote address for the 50th anniversary of Vermont Public Interest Research Group.
Hayhoe insists that only about 8% of people completely deny the reality of climate change. She calls them “dismissives” — and she does not waste time trying to change their minds.
“A key hallmark of someone who's dismissive is they literally will not and cannot listen,” she said. “I don't think it's possible barring a miracle to have a positive, constructive conversation with somebody who won't listen.
“With everybody else, there is a secret to a positive conversation. And that secret is to begin with something you agree on, rather than something you disagree on.”
Hayhoe suggests shifting the conversation to asking what people are worried about.
“That's often where we can find sometimes surprising amounts of agreement, or at least empathy. … What would a solution look like that would actually address that without requiring the misinformation or the denial?” she asked.
What most worries a climate scientist today?
“It's the way that climate change is loading the weather dice against us,” she replied. “As the world gets warmer, it's like wherever we live, we have a pair of dice and we always have a chance of naturally rolling doubles.”
Now, she said, “we're rolling double sixes” all the time.
“The headlines around the world this summer have just been off the charts,” Hayhoe said. “Record-breaking heat waves and droughts in Europe and the U.K. followed by record breaking heavy rainfall and floods, record-breaking drought in China, record-breaking floods in Pakistan with over 30 million people affected, the wildfires, and record-breaking heat waves that we're seeing all across the western United States. There's been five 1000-year flood events in the U.S. in five weeks, and we're still getting more of them.”
“Why do they matter?” Hayhoe asked. Because extreme climate events “affect us, they affect our homes, our infrastructure, our transportation, our crops, our water supply, the city of Jackson (Mississippi) not having water to support its population. Things that we took for granted — that you turn on the tap and water would come out — you can't take those things for granted anymore. And the costs in terms of human suffering, the cost in terms of the economic impacts, the long-term costs, in terms of the supply chain disruptions and the need to rebuild all of our infrastructure and the burden on our insurance, and just the personal burden of having two people having to rebuild their homes that they've lost to wildfire, flood or even sell their land that because of drought they can't grow their crops anymore. That is very concerning because it is leading to suffering today. And we know that if we don't tackle this problem at scale, it is only getting worse.”
Ralph Nader is America’s most famous consumer rights advocate. He is a relentless critic of corporate corruption and a former presidential candidate.
Nader, now 88, achieved early fame in 1965 with the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of auto safety problems with Americans cars. He went on to become a key leader in the anti-nuclear power movement. He has run for president several times, most famously in 2000, when critics accuse him of drawing votes from Vice President Al Gore resulting in the election of George W. Bush.
Nader’s influence on Vermont can be found in the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. VPIRG was born out of a meeting at the University of Vermont in October 1971 with student activists. Don Ross, Nader’s top lieutenant, urged the students to form a campus chapter of the national citizen action movement that Nader was spearheading. Ross promised that the new group “could investigate and bring pressure in such areas as the environment, automobile laws, equal employment opportunities for minorities – any area you’re concerned about.” VPIRG was launched the following year. There are now PIRGs in over 25 states.
We spend the hour talking with Ralph Nader about the citizen action movement that he inspired and about his thoughts on politics today. We also speak with Paul Burns, who has been executive director of VPIRG for 22 years.
Nader says that his legacy will be measured by “how many oak trees are planted. Meaning oak trees in the forest of democracy. We can't have enough of them. They're far too few, given the corporate supremacist and the corporate control as never before in our country's history. So we can look back with pleasure as to what has been achieved. But we've got to look forward and be very displeased about how much more there has to occur to subordinate corporate power to citizen power, constitutionally, statutorily, and in the minds of the people everywhere.”
The preamble to the Constitution, Nader says, did “not [say] We the corporations. It was not We the Congress. It was We the people.”
Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann introduced a new segment on his radio show on WDEV in Vermont. He invited then-Rep. Bernie Sanders on for a segment he dubbed “Brunch With Bernie.” The program featured Vermonters calling in to pepper Sanders with questions, and the representative took on all comers and all issues. The program was a hit, and Hartmann took “Brunch With Bernie” national when he moved his show to Air America and SiriusXM. These freewheeling national town halls, which aired for 11 years, introduced many people around the country to Sanders.
“When people called who were hostile to Bernie, he was like, ‘Please, put them on, I want to talk to those people.’ The only people that we ever didn't put on the air where people were just obviously intoxicated or screaming obscenities — that would happen occasionally,” Hartmann said.
“Whatever small role I may have played in not just helping make Bernie a national figure and a serious candidate for the presidency, but also — and I think this is the most important part — I believe that Bernie's candidacy, particularly in 2016, altered the course of American politics as one of the most consequential events of the last two or three decades.”
Hartmann has been broadcasting for the past two decades on the radio, TV, online and satellite radio. He hosts a daily radio program and writes a column at The Hartmann Report, where he recently reported on the “nightmare scenario” of how the U.S. Supreme Court could subvert the 2024 election and the business of tracking and lying to pregnant people.
Hartmann is a four-time winner of a Project Censored Award and he is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 books. His latest books are “The Hidden History of Neoliberalism” and “The Hidden History of Big Brother in America,” which were both published this year.
Becca Balint is on the cusp of making history. On Aug. 9, Balint decisively won the Democratic primary for Vermont’s at-large U.S. House seat, defeating Lt. Gov. Molly Gray by a margin of 24 points. If she wins the general election in November, Balint will become the first woman and the first openly gay person to represent Vermont in the U.S. Congress. Vermont is the only state that has never elected a woman to Congress.
Becca Balint was born in a U.S. Army hospital in Germany where her father was stationed and grew up in upstate New York. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a master’s in education from Harvard and a master’s in history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She came to Vermont in the 1990s to be a rock climbing instructor at the Farm and Wilderness Camp in Plymouth, where she met her future wife, attorney Elizabeth Wohl. Balint went on to become a middle school teacher and in 2014 was elected state senator from Windham County. She served as Senate majority leader and is currently the Senate president pro tempore. She, her wife and their two children live in Brattleboro.
In 2010, Debra Meyerson, 53, was a Stanford professor and avid skier, hiker and biker. But after dropping her oldest son off at college on Labor Day weekend, she had a severe stroke. In an instant, her life and her identity transformed. She could not speak and was partly paralyzed.
Meyerson is one of 790,000 people annually who have a stroke, a leading cause of death and disability in the U.S.
Deb Meyerson has regained her ability to communicate and move, both with difficulty. She wrote a book, “Identity Theft,” and together with her husband, Steve Zuckerman, a nonprofit executive, founded Stroke Onward, an organization that raises awareness and resources for stroke survivors and their supporters.
This summer, Meyerson and Zuckerman took on another challenge: bicycling across the U.S. In June, they set off from California on a 4,300-mile journey that will end in Boston on Aug. 27. They were joined by other stroke survivors and people who have had brain injuries and aphasia, a life-altering language disorder that affects about 30% of people who have strokes. The group calls itself Stroke Across America, and they are riding to raise awareness about strokes and aphasia, and to call attention to the importance of emotional recovery after a stroke.
Meyerson, Zuckerman and Whitney Hardy, a survivor of a traumatic brain injury, took time out during their 100-day ride to talk about their journey.
Life after a stroke “requires an emotional journey,” said Zuckerman (his cousin is former Vermont Lt. Gov. and current candidate for Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman). “A big part of that is identity. It's figuring out who are you. And who do you want to be?”
“This metaphor of cycling is an adaptive activity that enables us to continue to live the kind of life we want to live,” Zuckerman concluded.
Liam Madden handily won the Republican primary for Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat, defeating his two opponents by 8 points and 13 points respectively. He now faces Democrat Becca Balint in the November election.
There’s just one problem: Madden has renounced the Republican party. The Vermont Republican Party has returned the favor and renounced Madden as its candidate.
“The state party would not commit any resources toward (Madden’s) campaign due to his unwillingness to commit to caucusing with Republicans in Congress,” Vermont GOP Chair Paul Dame said.
“I've been very upfront the entire election every single chance I get to speak to the public to say I'm an independent running in the Republican primary,” Madden told The Vermont Conversation. “The entire theme of my candidacy is to structurally, culturally and technologically create an alternative to the two party dominance of our political system, which I think is deeply dysfunctional. It's going to take a departure from this divisive, corrupt, oligarch-controlled and ultimately nonrepresentative and nonfunctional system.”
Madden is a Marine Corps veteran who was a leader in Iraq Veterans Against the War. Since graduating from Northeastern University he has worked in the renewable energy field.
Madden said that if elected, he will not caucus with either party. Asked how he would be effective in Congress, he said, “I would be courted quite strongly, I imagine, from both sides and I will give Vermonters an incredible amount of leverage.”
Madden opposes many of the public health measures used to control the spread of covid, including mask mandates, vaccine requirements and lockdowns.
“I would also question that these methods of protection that you claim are the gold standard are really as effective as this claim,” he said.
Vermont currently limits abortion access. Madden said he is in favor of abortion rights but believes “it's reasonable to have the states make the decisions about what happens after 24 weeks.”
Madden described his opponent, Vermont Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, as “an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful, big hearted person. But she is also putting a kind face on a really broken system.”
Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were leaders of the Weather Underground, the militant group that formed in 1969 to ignite a revolution in the U.S. and fight American imperialism and racism, sometimes violently. The FBI called Bernadine Dohrn "the most dangerous woman in America." The group backed bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and the Department of State to bring attention to their cause. The only fatalities were three members of the Weather Underground who died in 1970 while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn, 45, spent the first five years of his life on the run while underground with his parents. He tells the story of the Weather Underground in a riveting award-winning 10-part podcast, “Mother Country Radicals.” Dohrn is a playwright and professor at Northwestern University.
I asked Dohrn how the Weather Underground differed from the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The Weathermen were actually fighting systemic racism and a genocidal war. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists are white nationalists fighting for an authoritarian president who was literally sitting in the White House at that moment,” Dohrn replied. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists “were not a grassroots movement resisting oppressive government. They were literally a sort of a fascist putsch that was trying to keep this authoritarian president in office, contravening a democratic election. So I think it matters that one group was fighting for racism, one group is fighting against racism.”
Reflecting on how his parents and the Weather Underground changed the country, Dohrn said: “In a broad sense, the American antiwar movement helped end the war in Vietnam. There are some people who think that there were the good activists — the peaceful people marching in the streets — and then the bad activists who were doing more violent actions. I don't really see it that way. I think the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army were on the extreme edge of a vast and powerful movement that was fighting to end an unjust war in America. And I think all of the activists involved in that, the peace activists and the radical activists, can take some credit for ending that war.”
Emi Nietfeld was like many high school seniors, dutifully filling out college applications. But unlike most other applicants, she was trying to get into an Ivy League school while writing college essays in the front seat of her Toyota Corolla, where she was living.
Nietfeld’s family fell apart when her mother, who was a hoarder, could not care for her and put Emi on anti-psychotic medication rather than confront her own mental illness. Nietfeld’s other parent came out as transgender and disappeared from her life. Through a tumultuous childhood that included homelessness, foster care, eating disorders, suicide attempts, abuse and sexual assault, Nietfeld somehow kept her dream alive of attending a top college. She dreamed that it would be her ticket out of misery. She eventually attended Harvard and later worked at Google as a software engineer. She left Google after being sexually harassed by a supervisor, which she wrote about in an op-ed for the New York Times.
Nietfeld — now 29, happily married and writing full time — survived against all odds. But she rejects the easy label of an “overcomer.” She wants her story to highlight the plight of others like her: 1 in 10 young adults experience homelessness, and LGBTQ+ youth have twice the risk of being unhoused.
Nietfeld has a new book, “Acceptance,” which the New York Times describes as “a remarkable memoir” and “a detailed critique of the American fantasy that poverty, illness or any other adversity can be conquered through sheer grit and bootstrapping ingenuity.”
“Instead of making a life that would redeem the past — an impossible feat — I sought out a life that I could live with,” Nietfeld wrote. “For the first time, I felt lucky for the little things: to wake up in the morning in my own bed, to eat breakfast, to do my work. It was no longer so important to me to achieve something great, because I was happy to be alive, which had seemed impossible and tenuous.”
When Michael Colburn was growing up in St. Albans, he dreamed of becoming a euphonium player in a band. He never imagined that the band would be “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band and that he would lead it for a decade, until 2014. As director of the nation’s top military ensemble, Colburn served as music adviser to the White House and regularly conducted the Marine Band and Chamber Orchestra at the Executive Mansion and at the presidential inaugurations of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Colburn is now returning to Vermont for a very different musical mission. He is taking the baton of the Me2 Orchestra in Burlington, which describes itself as “the world’s only classical music organization created for individuals with mental illnesses and the people who support them.” The community orchestra was founded in 2011 by conductor Ronald Braunstein, the first American to win the prestigious Karajan International Conducting Competition in Berlin in 1979. Braunstein was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had to abandon his international conducting career, but he and Caroline Whiddon, co-founder and executive director of the orchestra, have created a stigma-free musical home for others with mental illness. Me2 has received extensive media coverage, including being the subject of a PBS documentary, "Orchestrating Change." Me2 now consists of two orchestras: one in Boston that Braunstein still conducts and the original Burlington ensemble now led by Colburn.
Colburn has gone from conducting some of the finest musicians in the world to leading a Vermont group “that really welcomes all musicians without fear of being judged.”
“Music can be an avenue of healing and a great resource for many who are struggling with mental issues,” he said.
Somewhere in America each week, two more newspapers call it quits. Some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have closed since 2005, and just 6,500 remain. In places where once there was vibrant local coverage, there are now news deserts.
The Community News Service at The University of Vermont thinks it has an answer to this growing blight: student journalists. UVM’s Community News Service, or CNS, partners with nearly half of Vermont’s approximately 40 news outlets to provide them with reporting free of charge, including VTDigger.
Now the Vermont model is going national. Last month, UVM and the Knight Foundation announced a $400,000 grant to launch the Center for Community News at UVM. The idea is for student reporters and other citizen journalists around the country to fill the local news void.
We spoke with Richard Watts, coordinator of the Community News Service at UVM and director of the national Center for Community News; Lisa Scagliotti, founder and editor of Waterbury Roundabout, a new community news outlet; and Dom Minadeo, a UVM senior, assistant editor of The Winooski News and a reporter for CNS.
Watts said that 1,300 communities around the country no longer have any local news coverage.
“That's bad for democracy,” he said. “If you don't have a local news source, you don't know what's going on in your community, and it's very hard to engage … Research shows that losing local news increases divisions and polarization and undercuts all these important institutions that we believe in.”
“Children of sect seized in Vermont,” blared the headline on the front page of the New York Times on June 23, 1984.
The newspaper reported, “About 140 state police officers and social service workers raided 20 homes near (Island Pond, Vermont) early this morning and took into custody 112 children of the Northeast Kingdom Community Church because members had refused to answer complaints about child abuse and neglect.”
The case sparked national outrage and was quickly thrown out by a judge.
Dean Pineles was legal counsel to former Gov. Richard Snelling at the time of the raid. He insists that the raid at Island Pond was justified. Pineles went on to a distinguished career as a Vermont trial judge and later presided over war crimes tribunals in Kosovo. He says that Kosovo provided a precedent that Russian President Vladimir Putin used to justify his invasion of Ukraine. He reflects on his globetrotting legal career in a new memoir, “A Judge's Odyssey: From Vermont to Russia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, Then on to War Crimes and Organ Trafficking in Kosovo.”
Pineles has traveled the world to issue justice, but he continues to grapple with the issues surrounding the infamous Island Pond case that he confronted as a young attorney in Vermont.
“I would sit here with a heavy conscience if we had done nothing and had been faced with a dead child,” Pineles declared shortly after the Island Pond raid.
Four decades later, Pineles stands by that decision.
“I would rather be here defending what we did,” he said.
“Support our troops” is a familiar slogan heard when American troops are deployed abroad.
But are returning soldiers supported when they return home? Nearly half of troops returning from post-9/11 deployments report having reintegration problems, almost double the number reported by earlier veterans. Former President Donald Trump tapped into this vein of discontent and won 60% of the veterans’ vote in 2016. Political radicalization among veterans has been a growing problem, and a shocking number of veterans were among the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Investigative reporter Jasper Craven has been exploring veterans’ and military issues for publications including the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic and VTDigger. In a 2018 investigative series for VTDigger, he exposed the toxic culture of the Vermont Air National Guard, leading to Gov. Phil Scott to call for a review of Guard policies. This spring, he wrote an expose for Mother Jones on neglect and abuse at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, a prestigious school that counts among its alumni Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, architect of the first Gulf War. Craven also writes a newsletter, Battle Borne, about veterans’ issues.
Craven, who is originally from Vermont, has a new book, “Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs,” co-written with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early. The book explores the impact of military service and the challenges that veterans encounter when they return to civilian life.
“The full cost of war has rarely been considered, or properly calculated, by architects of the forever warfare that continues today,” Craven and his co-authors concluded.
You never know where you will hear chamber music in Vermont. You could encounter a string quartet performing in a bookstore. In a café. At a bar. Or a retirement community.
If it’s July, the musicians are likely to be participants in the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. Started in 2005, the festival attracts more than 200 young string musicians from high school to graduate school. The program is based at St. Michael’s College for a monthlong intensive of coaching, rehearsing and performing with a faculty of experienced teachers and performers. Then they take their talents on the road and perform classical music at venues all around downtown Burlington in a series they call Classical Encounters.
The Vermont Conversation spoke with three of the musicians about their musical journeys and their hopes for the future.
Andrés Celis is a 19-year-old cello player from Venezuela whose family fled his home and moved to the U.S. so he and his brother could pursue music.
Jalayne Mitchell, 22, took refuge from a tumultuous home life by teaching herself cello. She then landed a scholarship to study at a conservatory in Scotland.
Layla Morris, 19, is a cello player who grew up in Hinesburg and is now attending the renowned Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.
The Vermont Conversation also spoke with Elizabeth Chang, the artistic director of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival.
For Mitchell, playing cello is about more than just music.
“It meant safety to me. It meant … not having to survive,” she said. “A lot of my life I felt unsafe. The cello gives me that sense of safety that I have not experienced anywhere else. I can just explore what I want. … I can see what I’m capable of.”
Podcast includes musical excerpts.
As countries around the world, including the U.S., confront rising authoritarianism, one country may offer insight into how democracy can triumph over minority rule.
South Africa was supposed to go up in flames when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. White people feared that the Black majority would take their revenge on those who long oppressed them.
Instead, Mandela oversaw a peaceful transition to democracy. A quarter century after that negotiated transfer of power, a multiracial democracy took root and blossomed.
I witnessed this remarkable democratic transformation when I reported from South Africa in the late 1990s and wrote a book about the transition from apartheid.
Evan Lieberman offers a fresh take on South Africa’s journey to democracy in his new book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid.” Lieberman is a total professor of political science and contemporary Africa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“At this time when the idea of democracy is under assault, South Africa shows us that (democracy) is still a really promising and probably our best political solution, particularly in diverse societies,” Lieberman said. South Africa offers “a reminder that we can solve our problems through a combination of elections, good institutions, deliberation and a public spiritedness that is intrinsic to democratic practice.”
“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on the other branches,” retired Justice Stephen Breyer warned last year.
Many Supreme Court observers, and even its own dissenting justices, are wondering if what Breyer forewarned has now come to pass. The court has just issued a series of blockbuster decisions that mark it as the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. In the past month, the court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, weakened the government’s ability to address climate change, undermined gun regulations and enabled public funding of religious schools in a case that will have a direct impact on Vermont. These decisions advance longtime goals of Republicans, who appointed six of the court’s nine justices.
Rodney Smolla has been analyzing and arguing before the Supreme Court for decades. On July 1, Smolla became the inaugural president of Vermont Law and Graduate School, formerly Vermont Law School. A longtime constitutional law professor and civil liberties litigator, Smolla has participated in a number of famous first amendment cases, including Hustler vs. Falwell, which was the subject of the 1996 movie, “The People Versus Larry Flynt.” He is the author of a textbook on defamation, numerous books and more than 100 articles. Prior to coming to Vermont, Smolla was dean and professor of law at Widener University Delaware Law School. He previously served as president of Furman University and was dean of the law schools at Washington and Lee University and at the University of Richmond.
“I honestly never thought I would see (overturning Roe) happen in my lifetime.” Smolla said. The decision will be “enormously disruptive to women across the nation that are now going to be severely hampered in those states that have immediately banned abortion.”
Smolla is concerned with “the willingness to overturn such a settled clinical precedent and to do it so quickly once there was a solid five justice conservative majority, to do it in the face of all of these various statements that some of the more recent appointees made that seemed to signal that they had respect for settled precedent.”
Have the justices become politicians in robes? Smolla replied, “We’re perilously close to that.”
In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion, half of women in the U.S. live in states where they are at imminent risk of losing abortion access.
Against this backdrop, Vermont is moving to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In November, Vermonters will vote on Proposal 5, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which states in part that “an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed.” California voters are also considering a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights this year.
How will overturning Roe v. Wade change the landscape of abortion rights in Vermont and New England?
For answers, we turned to two people who are on the front lines of the reproductive rights movement locally and nationally: Lucy Leriche, vice president of public policy for Vermont at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and James Duff Lyall, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It's pretty devastating to go to bed feeling like a person and wake up the next day and all of a sudden discover that your country does not consider you a person anymore,” Leriche said. “That you are a vessel. That your function is kind of analogous to livestock in terms of the kinds of rights that you have over your own body. It's very personal. It's devastating, and it's infuriating.”
“We can't normalize any of this," Lyall said. Fighting for reproductive rights is "going to take voting. It's going to take organizing. It's going to take local, state and federal activism and engagement, and sustained political engagement.
"That's what the right has done for a very long time and very successfully. … That's the only way forward.”
Disclosure: David Goodman is a board member of the ACLU of Vermont.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion.
Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, though it was not against the law for someone to have one. In practice, this meant that someone could legally self-abort at their own peril, but a doctor who performed an abortion could be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years.
The case that legalized abortion in Vermont featured “Jacqueline R.,” an unmarried server who wanted to end her pregnancy, and an OB/GYN resident at the University of Vermont named Jackson Beecham.
After New York legalized abortion in 1970, Beecham, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, joined a small group of women’s health advocates in Burlington who were exploring ways to legalize abortion in the Green Mountain State. Attorney Willis “Woody” Higgins, a lawyer for IBM who volunteered to argue the case, advised the group that they needed two plaintiffs: a pregnant person who wanted an abortion and “a courageous doctor.”
The prosecutor they faced was a young state's attorney, Patrick Leahy, and the landmark case that legalized abortion in Vermont was known as Beecham vs. Leahy.
“I didn’t even think about winning or losing,” Beecham said of the case. He just felt “this is the right thing to do.”
When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled for Beecham in January 1972, Beecham said, “I was floored.” Within a few months, legal abortions were being performed in Vermont.
Beecham went on to a distinguished medical career as a gynecologic oncologist and cancer surgeon. He founded two gynecologic oncology programs at the cancer centers of the University of Rochester and at Dartmouth College, and he was a longtime associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Beecham, who is now 80 and lives in Shelburne, retired from practicing medicine in 2008. He continues to be a champion of reproductive rights and is a strong advocate for Proposal 5, which would make Vermont the first state in the country to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution if it is approved by voters in November.
Beecham reflected on his role in legalizing abortion in Vermont.
“I was honored to spend four decades in women’s health as a cancer surgeon. But I think … getting this law changed is the single most important thing I ever did. I’m still moved by it. I’m very, very grateful that I could be part of helping others,” he said.
He said that he is “just horrified” that the U.S. Supreme Court has returned the country to where it was before Roe vs. Wade.
“I’ll be on the sidelines, fighting like everyone else that feels in support of women,” Beecham said.
Bill McKibben thought he knew where he came from. He grew up in the tidy, affluent and predominantly white suburban community of Lexington, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he gave tours on the Lexington Battle Green, regaling visitors with tales about the opening shots of the American Revolution. He thought the United States was the greatest force for good in the world.
Fifty years later, McKibben, now 61, has a very different perspective. He sees a world riven by racial and economic inequality. He has dedicated his life to stopping the climate crisis, a human-caused disaster that his generation has done much to create. The big question on McKibben’s mind today is this:
What the hell happened?
Bill McKibben tackles this question in his new book, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben lives in Ripton, Vermont, and is the author of more than a dozen other books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, writes a blog about the climate crisis called The Crucial Years and founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org. He was the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people over 60 for progressive change.
When Erica Heilman heard about the death by suicide of 17-year-old Finn Rooney, she initially recoiled from telling the story. It was too raw. But Heilman, an independent podcaster and the creator of Rumble Strip, lives by the credo, “good conversation takes its time.” So she patiently waited and continued talking with Rooney’s mother. The story that evolved was not about suicide. It was about how the family and the Hardwick community grieved and healed together. The podcast that she crafted is called “Finn and the Bell.” It is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of love and loss.
Last week, Heilman won a Peabody Award for the podcast, the highest award in broadcast journalism.
“A Peabody is like an Oscar wrapped in an Emmy inside a Pulitzer,” said Stephen Colbert, a multiple Peabody Award winner.
Heilman’s award is notable because she is an independent producer who, as she likes to say, makes podcasts in her closet. Rumble Strip, which she founded in 2013, is a one-woman operation. That’s not the typical profile of her fellow Peabody winners this year, who include longtime host of NPR’s Fresh Air Terry Gross, former CBS anchor Dan Rather, and other well-known media figures and institutions.
Heilman has a history of punching above her weight. Rumble Strip was named the No. 1 podcast of 2020 by The Atlantic, ahead of podcasts produced by the Washington Post and the New Yorker, to name a few.
Heilman is a self-taught podcaster. She was born in Vermont but left to study musical theater at the University of Michigan. She then landed an entry-level job at PBS' MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and continued to work as a freelance television producer around New York. That wasn’t paying the bills, so she moved back to Vermont and took a job as a private investigator. She began producing her distinctive Rumble Strip podcasts on the side, relying on listener donations to support it. Rumble Strip podcasts now air on Vermont Public Radio and at rumblestripvermont.com.
The Peabody Awards praised Heilman’s work on "Finn and the Bell" as “subtle, thoughtful, and gorgeous.”
“Heilman’s important work serves as a reminder of what we stand to lose with the ongoing crisis in local news,” the Peabody Award announcement stated. “Local media institutions aren’t just responsible for holding the powerful accountable and shedding light on injustice; they’re also there to simply document life around them, to act as the institutional memory for the people they serve. They reflect communities back to themselves, forging the shared bond felt with each other through joys as much as tragedies.”
Heilman continually looks for ways to build community. Alongside her podcasting, her newest project is to help create a “mobile cultural center” in Hardwick called The Civic Standard.
Heilman wants her work to dignify the lives of ordinary people.
“My hope is that … people I've talked to have felt seen,” she said.
“It makes me very happy to introduce Vermonters to each other who might never meet, where you can see yourself in that person,” Heilman said on The Vermont Conversation. “If I achieve that, I feel I've done something perhaps useful.”
The students graduating from Vermont’s high schools this year are extraordinary in many ways. For most of high school, they have been on the frontlines of a global pandemic. They attended school from their bedrooms. They had to find the strength to forge connection and community while enduring personal isolation. They returned to school wearing masks to keep each other and their families safe as the pandemic raged around them. Now, like young people everywhere, they dream of a brighter future — and are actively building it. They are the ones we have been waiting for.
On this Vermont Conversation, we speak with five remarkable members of the class of 2022. Ava Thurston from Harwood Union High School has been Vermont state champion in both cross-country skiing and running in all four years of high school, won the U18 national championships in cross-country skiing this year, and aspires to ski in the Olympics.
Yahir Ramirez from Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans is the son of Mexican farmworkers in Vermont who volunteers with Migrant Justice, and he soon will attend Harvard.
Addie Lentzner from Arlington Memorial High School helped prod Gov. Phil Scott to extend emergency housing for people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic.
Kiara Mack of Winooski High School is an all-star soccer player and team captain who confronted racism directed at student-athletes.
Sawyer Totten is a transgender student and LGBTQ+ leader who inspired peers from around the state to walk out and speak out to protest the national wave of anti-trans legislation.
These students have made a lasting mark on their communities. Now, they are heading out to change the world.
For Ramirez, who will be a first-generation college student when he attends Harvard, graduating Bellows Free Academy “really means a lot to the family because it really just shows that we're able to do it. … My background or my color, it doesn't limit me.”
Kiara Mack says that she struggled to get through high school until she finally felt she was being heard. Then she emerged as a student leader against racism.
“I'm proud of the impact I have on people. I have a lot of younger students who I try to steer more in the right path because I feel that I can connect with them on a different level,” she said. “I'm really happy with the imprint I've left on my school and who I am being seen as I am graduating.”
How did abortion rights become a battlefront in the culture wars?
Felicia Kornbluh has been a participant observer in the fight for reproductive justice. Kornbluh is a professor of history and of gender, sexuality and women's studies at The University of Vermont. She is also chair of the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund. Kornbluh’s work to advance reproductive justice carries on the tradition of her mother, an attorney and who was a key player legalizing abortion in New York in 1970. Kornbluh chronicles her mother’s activism journey in a forthcoming book, “A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice in New York and the Nation.”
The day after Politico leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion with the bombshell news that Roe v. Wade would likely be overturned, Kornbluh wrote an article for the American Prospect titled “Advice to Progressive Menfolk.” Kornbluh began her piece with the admonition, “Don’t you dare be surprised.”
Speaking of the forces that have aligned to make abortion illegal, Kornbluh told the Vermont Conversation, “This is a crowd of people who really just aren't that happy with the 20th century. … They want to incapacitate the federal government. They don't want to engage in federal taxation that takes money away from some people and gives it to other people. Those were 19th century legal ideas. I think that's very, very dangerous.”
As abortion rights hang precariously in the balance, Kornbluh sees an opportunity.
“I don't want to sugarcoat the situation that we're in right now, but I'm optimistic in two ways,” she said. “One is that in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not easy to win abortion rights or other reproductive rights. It was a very hard fight, but it was an effective fight. And I think every time we look at a really ambitious social movement in American history, we see that the organizing really works. When people come together from diverse backgrounds, and they give it everything they got, they win.”
Has rural America turned a permanent shade of red? Or have Democrats abandoned rural voters, competing only in cities?
Chloe Maxmin has been pioneering a new style of progressive politics in conservative, rural Maine — and winning, earning her national attention. Maxmin is a climate activist who graduated from Harvard in 2015, where she and classmate Canyon Woodward co-founded Divest Harvard, a climate action group.
In 2018, Maxmin returned to her rural Maine county and twice flipped a Republican seat — first for state representative and then defeating the highest-ranking Republican in Maine. She was the youngest female state senator in Maine’s history. Woodward was the campaign manager for Maxmin’s successful 2018 and 2020 campaigns.
Maxmin and Woodward have teamed up to share their story and give some tough-love advice to Democrats about why they’ve lost rural voters and how they can win them back. Their new book is “Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It.”
“We need a Democratic Party that can inspire and support such campaigns in which political power is rooted in community, based in relationships, and built to last,” Maxmin and Woodward wrote. “There is power in the untold stories of rural people, in their frustration and search for a better life, in the wisdom that dwells at the crossroads of independence and interdependence."
A tsunami of censorship is sweeping across America. In 2021, there were attempts to remove nearly 1,600 books from libraries, schools and universities — a four-fold increase over 2019, according to the American Library Association. Censorship typically focuses on books that cover LGBTQ+ issues or race and racism.
But is censorship sometimes necessary? The alleged gunman who killed 10 people in Buffalo used social media to livestream his attack and to post his racist rants. How should social media companies control misinformation and hate speech? Should former President Donald Trump be allowed to use Twitter and other social media platforms even though he has used the medium to spread election lies and stoke violence?
Christopher Finan has been grappling with these issues for 35 years. He is executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship and former president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Struggles over free speech date back to the founding of the country, he said, and he chronicles the changing nature of censorship in his new book, “How Free Speech Saved Democracy: The Untold History of How the First Amendment Became an Essential Tool for Securing Liberty and Social Justice.”
Freedom of speech is an essential part of democracy, according to Finan.
"We will have free speech as long as we're willing to fight for it," he said, "and this is a time to fight."
Abortion may soon be outlawed in much of the United States.
If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, 28 states are poised to ban or further limit abortion access. This would end nearly a half century during which reproductive rights were constitutionally protected.
Melinda Moulton vividly remembers the days before abortion was legal. She was 12 years old when her mother died after a botched hysterectomy, a result not having access to safe abortion care.
Before abortion was legal, people with unwanted pregnancies like her mother “were shamed. They lived in fear. Imagine how that traumatized a woman at a young age. A lot of women died and took their own lives by self-induced abortions or back alley abortions,” she said.
The threat that abortion may once again be illegal in many part of the country “is a blatant attack on the health and safety and welfare and lives of many, many women,” Moulton said. “If a woman becomes pregnant, and she does not or is not able to carry that child for whatever reason, then she's going to probably try to find a way to end the pregnancy. And it's going to be really horrific for women in this country.”
Moulton, now 72, has been a lifelong advocate for women’s rights. Moulton has served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, been a member of the Vermont Commission on Women, helped lead the 2017 Vermont Women’s March and is currently vice president of the board of the ACLU of Vermont. She recently retired as CEO of Main Street Landing, a developer of the Burlington waterfront.
“Women deserve to have the right to determine what happens to their bodies. And what's happening in this country is that we have a political party that is basically saying that as long as it's in your body, we control you,” Moulton said.
“This is not about the unborn. This is about control over women. It just reminds me a little bit of the Taliban,” she said.
Moulton is now working to help pass Proposal 5, which will enshrine reproductive rights in the Vermont constitution.
Moulton said that Prop 5 will send a message to women around the country.
“Know that Vermont is here and we will provide you with safe, affordable … reproductive health care,” she said.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin was expecting trouble after the November 2020 presidential election. Raskin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress anticipated that former President Donald Trump would try to subvert the results and try to derail Congress’s normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election.
But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later — and just a day after burying his son — Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Biden’s election. That’s when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.
Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.”
Could feeling bad be essential to feeling good?
That’s the contention of clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. She is a professor of psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She is the author of a new book, "Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad)."
Anxiety and depression are the focus of intense interest as the country grapples with the mental health fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. The Surgeon General has warned that young people are facing a devastating mental health crisis.
Dennis-Tiwary argues that the anxiety-as-disease story is false. She says that anxiety is not the problem — it’s how we cope with it. She encourages people to embrace “a new mindset about anxiety — a fresh set of beliefs, insights and expectations that allows you to explore anxiety, learn from it and leverage it to your advantage.” She discusses anxiety and how to use it as a tool.
In 1820, The Emancipator became the first newspaper in the country devoted exclusively to the cause of abolishing slavery. It was published in Tennessee, a slave state. Other abolitionist newspapers followed, such as The Liberator, published by famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded and edited by abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.
Today, The Emancipator rises again. This modern version is a multimedia collaboration with The Boston Globe’s Opinion team and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.
“Just as abolitionist publications in the 19th century called for the end of the enslavement of Black people, The Emancipator will amplify big ideas and solutions for achieving a racially just society,” Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, co-editors-in-chief of The Emancipator, wrote in their introductory essay.
Payne tells The Vermont Conversation that there is a difference between reporting about race and journalism that is intentionally anti-racist.
“I think about reporting on racism and race (is) reporting the facts, getting the story down," Payne said. By contrast, "Anti-racist journalism (is) centering the right voices in a story, centering those that are most impacted and empowering them to tell their story.”
“I don't know that we're trying to change people's minds,” Douglas said. “What we're trying to do is have a dialogue to give people the context to think about how they're implicated in the American project. So we can offer information that partially validates some of what they think but offers better information. Or we can just blow them out of the water with straight facts about how it’s different, or we can offer our own personal stories or allow our contributors to offer their personal stories and their own lived experience and just really flood the public conversation with a whole new set of narratives that previously there hadn't been much room made for. By taking up space, and giving people the opportunity to at least hear a different story or a different side of the story, then possibly we can embark upon this narrative change that we hope to effect.”
“We're in this shared mission drawing from that abolitionist spirit of this multiracial and diverse movement where there's shared equity around one focus," Payne said.
She hopes readers of this modern abolitionist newspaper “feel equipped to maybe have that conversation with their neighbor or their father or anybody (who) they felt a bit uncomfortable about and uninformed about when it comes to racial and social justice and equity, but they feel like they can have that conversation and have a better understanding.”
When residents of Wuhan, China, began mysteriously falling ill in December 2019, the Chinese government quickly moved to quash news about the disease outbreak. That crackdown on information proved to be the perfect accelerant for the Covid-19 pandemic to take off and spread throughout the world.
Censorship has been a deadly component of the pandemic, asserts Joel Simon, who is co-author with Robert Mahoney of “The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.” Simon is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School and the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“Instead of communicating openly with citizens, governments suppressed critical information or actively misled or confused their citizens, a strategy that has been dubbed ‘censorship through noise,’” Simon and Mahoney argued. “Alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an infodemic, a deluge of lies, distortion, and bungled communication that obliterated the truth.”
Lois Gibbs knew something was not right when her 5-year-old son began having seizures. She soon discovered the local school and playground in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic waste dump known as Love Canal. It was 1977. Gibbs soon transformed from a suburban housewife into a crusading activist who changed the face of the national environmental movement and whose work led to the creation of the federal superfund program.
Love Canal has become synonymous with corporate greed and toxic pollution. Hooker Chemical, the largest employer in Niagara Falls, had been dumping highly toxic waste in the working-class community since the 1940s. The company covered the polluted landfill with dirt and sold it to the city’s board of education for $1, and a school was soon built on the site. Hundreds of community members and schoolchildren were poisoned, and some died.
Echoes of the Love Canal saga can be felt today in communities including Bennington, where local residents just reached a $34 million settlement with Saint-Gobain, a multinational plastics company which, along with previous owner ChemFab, operated a plant that was responsible for contaminating the soil and water. On April 21, Gov. Phil Scott signed a law giving people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals the right to sue responsible companies for the cost of monitoring their health.
The Love Canal story is told in a new book, “Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe,” by New York Times bestselling author Keith O’Brien, a former reporter for the Boston Globe.
Jane Mayer has earned a reputation as one of the country’s top investigative reporters. As chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Mayer has been relentless in exposing the hidden forces shaping American politics. Her bestselling book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” documents the vast influence of the Koch brothers and was named one of the 10 best books of 2016 by the New York Times.
In the past year, Mayer has exposed the right-wing funders behind former President Donald Trump’s big lie of a stolen election. She reported how Ginni Thomas secretly supported the Jan. 6 insurrection as her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, considered cases that involved her. And this month she exposed the shadowy conservative organization that smeared Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in a failed attempt to derail her Supreme Court confirmation.
Mayer often provokes the ire of those she exposes. The Koch Brothers hired investigators to smear her, and the subject of her most recent exposé tweeted her personal contact information in an attempt to intimidate her.
Mayer worked at the Wall Street Journal before joining the New Yorker in 1995. She has won numerous awards for her reporting. Esquire called Mayer “quite simply one of the very few, utterly invaluable journalists this country has.”
Disclosure: Jane Mayer serves on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
From Brattleboro to Newport and beyond, a crisis is brewing in the Green Mountains. Housing, especially affordable housing, is desperately hard to find.
“The state would have to build a minimum of 5,800 homes and apartments by 2025, and more than triple that to address the broader affordability crisis,” Seven Days reported, noting that the growth of Vermont’s housing stock has fallen to one third its 1980s levels.
Solving the housing crisis is “going to take both public investment to bring the price down and it's also going to take less barriers in terms of our land use policies to get housing built,” said Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.
An unspoken driver of the affordable housing shortage, Seelig said, “has been the growth of income inequality as a key factor in leaving folks behind. … It doesn't take a lot of people coming to Vermont with a ton of money to have a big impact on the housing crisis.”
We discussed the housing crisis and efforts to address it with Seelig and Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust in Brattleboro.
Transgender Vermont educator responds to Fox News attack with ‘love and light’
Laws targeting LGBTQ+ people are proliferating across the country. Some 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have so far been filed — more than three per day — mostly targeting transgender people,.
In Idaho, Texas and Alabama, Republican leaders have passed laws criminalizing transgender health care, while Florida has banned discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary school in a law that critics dub the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Vermont is also under anti-trans attack.
On April 6, conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a segment titled “Groom & Doom,” which singled out a webinar offered in February by the Burlington School District titled “Let’s Talk About Gender Identity and Expression.” The webinar was led by Nikki Ellis, an assistant principal at Edmunds Middle School who is transgender. Ingraham charged that middle school students are “bombarded by efforts to undo any semblance of traditional values that their parents might have taught them.”
In the days following the broadcast, Ellis and the Burlington schools were flooded with hate mail. Burlington School Superintendent Tom Flanagan denounced the attacks, reassuring LGBTQ+ community members that “we care about them and that we are here for them.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks are not limited to schools. The head of the Burlington Republican Party, who has a history of making transphobic social media posts, tweeted out photos of Vermont legislators who support a transgender rights bill and labeled each of them a “groomer.”
On Tuesday, transphobia took a deadly turn when a trans woman was killed in Morristown.
“It's sad and unfortunate that being transgender or being queer is being compared to sexual abuse and pedophilia because being who you are in your identity as a queer person doesn't mean that you're trying to impose on anyone else,” Ellis told The Vermont Conversation. “The reality is that there are traumas and turmoil and abuse that happen for kids across all identities and all experiences and all communities. But that's completely unrelated to, you know, being LGBTQ+.”
Rep. Taylor Small, Vermont’s first openly transgender legislator, said the anti-trans backlash comes at a time when LGBTQ+ people are winning legal protection in Vermont.
“Last year, we were able to pass a bill to ban the LGBTQ+ ‘panic’ defense. And just last week, the governor signed a bill to make it easier for transgender and nonbinary people to amend their birth certificates to see themselves and their identity reflected on their vital records.”
Ellis is unbowed by the transphobic attacks. They responded to critics with an invitation: “Hey, Laura Ingraham, I'd love to take you out for coffee or dinner. And I'd love to be able to have an opportunity for you to see me for who I am, the person that I am, the passions that I have and the way that I care deeply about my community. And to everybody else out there, the love that I have and the love of this work is unconditional. And that means that we will just continue to wrap ourselves, wrap other queer folks up in love and light.”
How did leading Republicans go from being Cold Warriors to apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin?
For insight, we turned to Stuart Stevens, who knows Republican politics from the inside. He was a top Republican political operative who worked on five presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues that the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”
Stevens tells The Vermont Conversation, “I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it's a devastating conclusion. But I think it's the only honest one.”
“We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself,” Stevens said. “They'll be for democracy when they win and they won't be for it when they lose. That means you're not a democracy. And if we don't wake up and face this, we're going to lose democracy.”
The Vermont Land Trust, founded in 1977, is one of the oldest and largest land conservation groups in the country. It has helped protect more than 620,000 acres in Vermont, comprising about 11% of the state.
The land trust began with a simple goal of conserving land and supporting farmers. But with heightened awareness about equity and racial justice today, things are not so simple.
Who can claim the right to land that was stolen from Indigenous people? How has racism shaped who owns land? How can land conservation help combat climate change?
Last year, the Vermont Land Trust received a $6 million grant from the Vermont Community Foundation and High Meadows Fund to diversify farm ownership and address climate solutions, of which $2 million is “to expand land ownership and access among people who have been historically marginalized or oppressed based on their race or ethnicity.”
This grant, the largest of its kind in Vermont, raises challenging questions, concedes Nick Richardson, president and CEO of the land trust since 2017.
“When a white-led organization like ours is the recipient from a white-led foundation of funding that's meant to be directed towards BIPOC land sovereignty work, that's the indication of a problem,” he said, referring to Vermonters who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. “It shows how far we have to go as a state in terms of meeting our goals and … commitments that we should all make around BIPOC racial equity and justice. And that's really uncomfortable and hard work. And we're really committed to it.”
Education is the new frontline in America’s culture wars.
In Florida, teaching about LGBTQ+ issues has become a flashpoint. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently surrounded himself with smiling elementary school children as he signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that bars discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in the state’s primary schools.
Teaching about racism is also now perilous. At least 36 states have passed or proposed laws or policies that restrict the teaching of race or racism.
At the heart of this culture war is a struggle over who controls education. As a result of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions loosening restrictions on funding religious schools, some states are enacting policies permitting public funding of private schools, including religious schools. The Vermont Senate recently passed S.219 to restrict public funding for religious schools. But critics, including former Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, fear that Vermont may unwittingly establish a precedent that conservative legal groups will take to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to knock down the wall between secular and religious education.
I spoke with Holcombe and Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a leading expert on education law and policy, about the implications of allowing public funds to pay for private and religious education.
“The Supreme Court is moving toward a doctrine that suggests … that you can't exclude religion and that the state really can't control its dollars once they enter the private sector,” Black said.
If that happens, he said liberal states may simply end programs to pay tuition for some students to attend private schools, while other states may “run wild” with public support of religious schools.
“We may be leading to a tale of two different countries when it comes to public education and privatization in America,” Black said.
Ski mountaineer Kit DesLauriers skied off the summit of Mount Everest into history.
DesLauriers is the first person to ski from the so-called Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent. Her 2006 descent of Everest capped a string of firsts: She was the first woman to ski the Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica, and Mt. Aspiring in New Zealand. She also made the first female solo ski descent of Grand Teton in Wyoming.
A two-time Freeskiing World Tour champion, National Geographic named her an Adventurer of the Year in 2015. DesLauriers was formally inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame this week, following her election in 2019.
Kit DesLauriers is the mother of two daughters with her husband, Rob DesLauriers, whose family runs the Bolton Valley ski area in Vermont. She is the author of a memoir, Higher Love: Skiing the Seven Summits, which was reissued last year. She is a member of The North Face global athlete team, the board of the Alaska Wilderness League and the riders team of the climate action group Protect Our Winters. I spoke with her from her home in Jackson, Wyoming.
Countries around the world are debating how to respond to the unfolding humanitarian and political crisis in Ukraine. Few people have more intimate knowledge into the thinking of the Washington national security establishment than David Sanger. Sanger is a senior writer for the New York Times covering the White House and national security. He is a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a CNN expert analyst and the author of three bestselling books, the most recent of which is The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was also an HBO documentary by the same title.
Sanger recently wrote about possible end game scenarios in Ukraine. “I think you can make a persuasive case that Vladimir Putin is going to end this conflict in a lot worse strategic position than he began it,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “Three weeks ago, we were thinking that Russia's military was 10 feet tall. We now think they're kind of the gang that couldn't shoot straight. We thought that Putin was a master strategist. We now think he bit off more than he could chew … and underestimated the Ukrainians and overestimated his own power. We thought that he was trying to split up NATO, and he ended up reaffirming NATO's power. These are all pretty big mistakes he made.”
What is the mood among American national security leaders? “Worried that this war is going to spread to involve us,” Sanger said. “Even if the chances are 15 or 20 or 25 percent, that's pretty significant. Worried that the humanitarian disaster is going to continue for some time. Worried the American attention to this could flag.”
Sanger also discussed his 40-year career at the Times and how he has periodically covered Washington from his home in Vermont.
In 2021, the Vermont Legislature issued a long overdue apology forVermont’s early 20th century state-sanctioned eugenics movement, which targeted Indigenous people and other groups. According to VTDigger, “The eugenics movement used forced sterilizations and other practices in an attempt to wipe out targeted populations who were deemed unfit to procreate, including Indigenous people, French Canadians, mixed-race people, people with disabilities and low-income families, among others.”
In issuing the formal apology, Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint declared, “This is a moment for grief, but it’s also a moment for growth.”
The apology left unspoken how to undo the harm. Now, a bill in the Vermont House, H. 96, proposes that Vermont establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine what happened and possible reparations. We talk with Rep. Tom Stevens, chair of the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, and a sponsor of the bill, and Virginie Ladisch, a senior expert at International Center for Transitional Justice.
“We’re trying to build something that represents the beginning of a longer conversation between those of us who are part of the system and the people that we’re needing to listen to during this process,” says Rep. Stevens.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? What motivates Vladimir Putin? What do Russians believe about the war?
To help cut through the fog of war and explain the back story behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we turned to Russia expert Will Pyle. He is Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury College and an affiliate of the programs in International Politics and Economics and Russian and East European Studies.
Pyle says that Putin “viewed the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” He adds that “very rarely do empires break up peacefully … What we're seeing now is the conflict associated with an imperial breakup, where the imperial center says, 'No, we're not going to allow the periphery, these colonies, to go their own way without a fight.'”
Pyle recently wrote in the Washington Post about the attitudes of ordinary Russians. He tells The Vermont Conversation, “Russians’ willingness to sacrifice material wellbeing for national foreign policy goals is much greater than citizens in other countries.” However, he is less optimistic about “their willingness to tolerate body bags and economic costs imposed by the sanctions, [which] are going to be really brutal.”
“That willingness of the Russian public to tolerate sacrifice — it's not unlimited,” he said.
The world has been watching in horror at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben argues that this is a war fueled by fossil fuels. He writes in The Guardian, “If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.”
McKibben is the co-founder of the global climate justice group 350.org, and Third Act, a new group focused on activism by older Americans. He says that the way to bring down “petrostate autocrats” like Vladimir Putin is for the U.S. and Europe to quickly slash their dependence on fossil fuels.
“President Biden should immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power,” urges McKibben.
In the same week that the Russian invasion has been unfolding, the world’s top scientists released a climate change report that it characterized as “an atlas of human suffering.”
I talked with McKibben about the confluence of war and climate change, and ways to confront both urgent crises.
When Alex Belth went on a first date with Emily Shapiro, he was smitten. He had finally met the woman of his dreams, and he imagined a life together filled with romance and kids. The were married in 2007, five years after that date.
Belth, now 50, and Shapiro, 49, remain deeply in love. But their life has been very different from what they first imagined. Shapiro has struggled with chronic illness, and Belth has been her caregiver. At the age of 22, Emily developed Crohn’s disease, an incurable autoimmune condition that affects the digestive system. Shortly after they married, she was diagnosed with chronic migraines and a spatial management disorder in which her eyes don’t work with each other.
Caring for loved ones with chronic illness has taken on new urgency during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of some 80 million Americans – and over 111,000 Vermonters -- who have been infected with Covid-19, some 10 to 30 percent of them will likely experience long-term chronic symptoms known as long Covid. Many people with the condition encounter frustrating barriers to getting effective care. Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said on the Vermont Conversation in December 2021 that he predicts “a pandemic of long Covid.”
Instead of enduring their health challenges in silence, Belth and Shapiro have chosen to live their lives out loud – literally. Belth, an editor at Esquire magazine, and Shapiro, a former emergency room unit secretary who now has a practice in energy healing, have released a new Audible Original audio book, Here I Are: Anatomy of a Marriage. It consists of their candid conversations about love, sex, romance and life with chronic illness. They recorded the book in their home in Bristol, Vermont, where they moved in April 2020 after years in New York City.
“A lot of this stuff isn’t talked about so readily,” says Shapiro. “If someone else can feel a little bit better about themselves identifying with these universal themes, that's potent for me.”
Fifty years ago, a burglary took place at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. What seemed like a petty crime spiraled into a conspiracy and coverup that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. A half century later, the echoes of that scandal still reverberate as Congress investigates the alleged crimes and coverups of another president, Donald Trump.
Vermont author Garrett Graff reexamines the scandal that would shape all others in his new book, Watergate: A New History. Graff is a journalist and historian who has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology and national security. He has served as editor of Politico and Washingtonian magazines, and he has contributed to Rolling Stone, New York Times, CNN and numerous other media. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” and “The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror.” Graff is currently the director of cyber initiatives for The Aspen Institute.
“Watergate is the most fascinating story ever told of how power unfolds in Washington, because no single institution — the media, the Justice Department, the House, the Senate — is able to force Richard Nixon from office,” Graff says. “Instead, it's this incredibly complex relationship of checks and balances … that is required in order to force a corrupt and criminal president from office."
Unlike today, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress played a role in policing the Nixon presidency in order to maintain the balance of power, Graff says. "The Republican Party sort of had a sense of outrage that was not in evidence in either of the Trump impeachments.”
Graff is concerned that the country has not learned the lessons of Watergate. “I think we are headed for a deeply grave crisis in our democracy. And it's not at all clear to me that America has the wherewithal or the courage to avoid that future right now.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic enters its third year, its impacts have fallen especially hard on young people. In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General warned of “devastating” mental health effects on youth, noting that there were significant increases in self-reports of depression, anxiety, and a 51 percent increase in emergency room visits for suicide attempts by adolescent girls in early 2021.
Mentorship programs have long offered a way for young people to tackle challenges with the help of caring adults. Young people with mentors are half as likely to skip school and 55% percent more likely to attend college, according to MENTOR, an advocacy group.
We explore mentorship with leaders of Vermont’s mentoring programs: Chad Butt of MENTOR Vermont, Kimberly Diamond of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Vermont, Beth Wallace of Everybody Wins Vermont, Kim Smith of Girls Boyz First Mentoring, and Pam Quinn of Twinfield Together. We also talk with a mentor and her 15-year-old mentee from Central Vermont about the impact of their partnership.
In a Winter Olympics filled with iconic moments, one was especially poignant: Vermont skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who stunned the ski world by roaring down the mountain to a second place finish in the Super G, FaceTiming with his mother Barbara Ann Cochran at the finish of his run. The two were laughing and crying. Ryan had won his Olympic silver medal almost 50 years to the day after his mother won an Olympic gold medal in slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.
Cochran-Siegle’s feat marks a new chapter in the story of the Skiing Cochrans, Vermont’s First Family of Skiing. Six members of the Cochran family have skied in the Olympics. Mickey and Ginny Cochran opened Cochran’s Ski Area in 1961 in their backyard in Richmond, Vermont. The beloved ski area is now a nonprofit where generations of Vermonters have learned to ski.
Barbara Ann Cochran, 71, watched her son’s silver medal run streaming on her computer at her home in Starksboro. In the hours that followed, the publicity-shy mother and grandmother has appeared alongside her son on the Today Show, among numerous other media. Ryan, 29, is one of Barbara Ann’s two children, and she has two grandchildren by her daughter Cate, one of whom jumped into her lap during her Today Show interview.
Since retiring from ski racing at the age of 23, Barbara Ann Cochran has pursued a diverse career. She wrote ski columns for the Washington Post, has been a performance coach, and has run the ski school at Cochran’s for the past 40 years. She recently announced that this would be her last season directing the ski school.
Cochran says that her father Mickey espoused a philosophy of skiing that he called the Cochran Way. “He was hoping that we would experience skiing as just a heck of a lot of fun. Those were his words. But he also wanted us to learn some life lessons. He wanted us to realize that in order to do well [and] get better at something, you really had to work hard at it and put effort into it. And he felt that it took not only the hard work, but paying attention to details …to get yourself better.”
Mickey Cochran urged his children to not just focus on results, says his daughter. “It was about putting your best effort into it and seeing yourself getting better and better [in] what you were doing.”
On an icy slope in China, Cochran-Siegle demonstrated that the Cochran Way lives on in a new generation. “Regardless of where I finished today I wanted to be proud of my skiing,” the newly minted Olympic silver medalist told NBC. “Even before I saw my time I was like, ‘That was as good as I could have done.’”
Katherine Paterson is one of America's most celebrated writers for children. The author of more than 40 books, she is one of just six writers who have twice won the prestigious Newbery Medal, for Bridge to Terabithia in 1978 and Jacob Have I Loved in 1981. She has also won the National Book Award twice. In 2000, Paterson was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
Paterson frequently writes about children confronting difficult issues. At 89 years old, the Vermont author shows little sign of slowing down. She recently published a new book, Birdies Bargain, about a child with a parent heading off to fight in Iraq.
Paterson’s books are among the most beloved in children’s literature. They are also among the most banned. Book banning has lately been enjoying a revival, as books are being pulled from library shelves in “unprecedented” numbers, according to the American Library Association. Among the latest crop of books to be yanked from library shelves are Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman; Beloved, by Toni Morrison; and The 1619 Project, a bestselling history of slavery in the U.S. that grew out of a special issue of the New York Times Magazine.
Bridge to Terabithia rose to #8 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books for the 1990s; her book The Great Gilly Hopkins was #20 on that list. Only a handful of authors had their books banned more often in the 1990s, including Maya Angelou, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.
“If you write a book that has any power in it, it has the power to offend,” Paterson says. “I don’t want to write a book that has no power in it, so I have to run the risk of offending.”
Student discipline used to be handled by guidance counselors and principals. Today, police are increasingly called upon to respond to children’s behavioral issues, giving rise to the school-to-prison pipeline. Today, over 1.5 million students attend schools with police but no counselors. The consequences can be dire: students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged when they attend schools where there are police, also known as school resource officers, or SROs.
Professor Mark Warren and Jonathan Stith argue that during pandemic-schooling, schools are responding to a student mental health crisis with harsh discipline that has fallen hardest on students of color. This “white lash” has resulted in what they call the “pandemic-to-prison pipeline.”
“The pandemic has really caused a lot of trauma and a lot of stress, economic hardship, family loss for young people and disruption of schooling,” says Mark Warren, Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. “Instead of getting support, and investment of support, what we've been starting to see is the intensification of discipline and policing practices in schools.”
Warren argues that there is no research-based evidence that the presence of police improves safety in schools.
There is now a national campaign to limit the police presence in schools. Since June 2020, more than 138 school districts announced they would remove police from schools. In Vermont, several school boards, including Burlington, have voted to end or reduce their police contracts. A report last year by a task force of the Burlington School District concluded: “The majority of SRO activity is not associated with law enforcement but with mentoring students and connecting them with needed resources…These additional roles fell to the SROs due to social workers being overwhelmed with cases.”
There is “a direct link between that the Black Lives Matter movement and police-free schools,” says Jonathan Stith, National Director of the Alliance for Educational Justice and co-director of the National Campaign for Police-Free Schools. The effort to increase school policing, as well as fights over the teaching of critical race theory in schools is “what we've been calling this ‘white lash’ post the Trump presidency.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in January that for maximum protection against Covid-19 infection, people should upgrade to a N95 or KN95 mask.
For Anne Miller, masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) are very personal. In April 2020, her mother in law was among the first Vermonters to die after contracting Covid-19. After that, the health care consultant and resident of Essex made it her mission to find and disseminate top quality PPE to anyone who wanted it.
Miller is the executive director of Project N95, a “PPE clearinghouse” that connects people who need personal protective equipment to companies that make it. Project N95 has so far delivered over 12 million units of PPE and Covid-19 tests. The U.S. government is now offering a limited number of free N95 masks through pharmacies and other outlets.
When it comes to finding high quality masks, “The big part of this is fit and filtration,” Miller advises. “An N95 has those straps across the back, they mess up your hair. These are the ones that are going to confer the best protection for you.”
Miller warns that when the CDC tested masks, “60 percent of the KN95s that they tested were found to be fake…in the sense that they didn't do what they claimed to do. They didn't filter 95 percent.” She says it’s important to order from sources, such as Project N95, that test and certify that their masks meet rigorous standards.
Vasu Sojitra was an undergraduate at the University of Vermont and wanted to join his friends to go backcountry skiing. But he faced a challenge: Sojitra has only one leg. At the age of 9 months, his right leg was amputated following a serious blood infection. So Sojitra and his friends attached a snowshoe to ski poles to enable him to backcountry ski. Sojitra graduated UVM in 2013, and his remarkable pursuits as an adaptive athlete became the subject of a 2014 film, Out On A Limb.
Sojitra has continued breaking barriers both as an adaptive athlete and as an advocate for racial justice and inclusion. He has climbed the Grand Teton, and in 2021, he and fellow adaptive skier Pete McAfee did the first disabled descent of Denali, the highest peak in North America. The excursion was featured in the latest Warren Miller ski film.
Sojitra is also the first adaptive athlete for The North Face and is a co-founder of Inclusive Outdoors Project.
“I try to pride myself in having a disability,” says Sojitra, who grew up in Connecticut and India and now lives in Bozeman, Montana. “I don't think the word ‘disabled’ is a bad thing. I think it's the lack of access that we have, and the lack of opportunities that disabled folks have when it comes to living a life around well-being. And that's just why I'm very much prideful of having a disability. …Once we start normalizing and representing disabled people in mainstream media, in leadership in all of these spaces, then people are going to start realizing that disability is not a bad thing.”
Sojitra hopes that his ‘firsts’ in the outdoor world create space for people of color and people with disabilities. “As a person of color with a disability, [I’m] trying to really just showcase this is what humans look like. …We are out here, and we're having fun, just like the majority that some in these spaces are.” He intends to “keep expanding this narrative around what it means to be disabled in the outdoors, what it means to be a person of color in the outdoors.”
Jeremy Jones is hailed as the world’s best big mountain snowboarder. He has pioneered first descents on some of the worlds biggest mountains, exploits that have been captured in over 50 snowboard films. He has been voted “Best Big Mountain Rider of the Year” by Snowboarder Magazine eleven times, and in 2013 was named a National Geographic “Adventurer of the Year.” He is also the founder of Jones Snowboards.
As Jones has traveled throughout the world’s snow zone, he has watched with alarm at the ways that climate change has impacted the landscape, people and snowpack. In 2007, Jones founded Protect Our Winters (POW) to mobilize outdoor athletes, businesses, scientists and winter sports enthusiasts to take action against climate change. In 2013, President Obama recognized him as a "Champion of Change" for his climate activism.
Jones believes that outdoor community has untapped political power. POW focuses its climate activism on “what we call the Outdoor State, where there's 50 million people (for whom) the outdoors is a central part of their life. …If we could come together as the Outdoor State and say we want a clean energy future then we would be the most powerful voter bloc in the world. For example, the NRA is basically made up of 3 million really avid loud activists and they wield a ton of power.”
“We have not popped a lot of champagne in the world of climate action," Jones concedes. "We've largely been getting out-executed and out-spent by the extraction industry.”
“We really need a unified voice that says, if you are not doing everything in your power to get us on a clean energy future, embracing the technologies, then we are going to find someone to represent us that will. And sadly, there is not a single lawmaker in Washington, DC, who is afraid of the outdoor industry (who feel) if they take a bad vote on climate, they're going to lose their job. And we need to change that.”
As the Omicron variant spreads with breathtaking speed, the number of people hospitalized in Vermont is hitting record highs. More than half of Vermont hospitals report staffing shortages. Dr. Rebecca Bell, a pediatric critical care doctor at the University of Vermont's Children's Hospital and president of the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that health care providers around the state “feel this is their breaking point.”
Bell works in Vermont’s only pediatric ICU. Even while treating the sickest children, she encounters resistance to having children tested or treated for Covid-19. “Many, many families have chosen to never ever test their child [for Covid]. I have many conversations with children admitted to the hospital that need a test and the families refuse a test.” When children are positive for Covid, some families “don't believe the result.” Bell and her colleagues face “a lot of anger and tension around that.”
Bell is deeply concerned about what she is seeing with her young patients. “What young people tell me now, especially the adolescents, is that it's been a really long two years. …Things have been very tenuous for young people this entire time. The lack of consistency is really hard for younger children.”
She says there is a mental health crisis among youth. “We have families that are really just tapped out in terms of trying to manage their child's mental health and all of the other things that are happening in their lives.” Bell adds that the rates “for self-harm or for suicide attempts … were going up before the pandemic, and they're continuing to go up now. It's very concerning.”
Through the hardship, Bell takes consolation in “just seeing the way people have pulled together and supported each other in every setting, in every sector.” Ultimately, she says, “I keep talking about vaccines -- what an amazing thing that happened over a short period of time. So that gave me great hope.”
President Biden used the F-word — fascism — on Thursday to describe the struggle confronting America as he marked the first anniversary of a failed coup attempt by a pro-Trump mob. Biden said that for American democracy to survive, it must confront and “triumph over the forces of fascism” as previous generations have done.
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the bestselling 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them explains, “Fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by minorities, leftists, immigrants, feminists, and the LGBT community.” A fascist leader, he says, “promises that that only he can protect the nation, protect its traditions from this threat, and restore lost glory.”
Stanley warns that Donald Trump and his followers employ classic fascist tactics to spread their message and secure power. Denying election results, creating alternative realities, attacking science, and even targeting women’s reproductive rights are all pages out of the authoritarian handbook.
Stanley says that fascism has now entered a legal phase in the U.S. “What we're seeing is a slow legalization of things like anti-protest laws. …We're seeing the worst of all situations — like Georgia and Arizona, where the state legislature can appoint its own slate of electors, thereby enabling a stealing of an election. And we've already seen the takeover of the courts.”
Stanley notes that despite the fact that Trump lost the 2016 election by 3 million votes, he appointed “one third of the Supreme Court, [who] are very young, hard-right jurists.” The result is that “the minority of the country is dictating the policy and imposing their will on everyone else.”
“I am extremely alarmed,” Stanley says of the current state of democracy in the U.S. He adds, “I don't want to give this sense that it's out of our hands, because it's not… It's not too late to have a uniform consensus between conservatives and progressives and liberals and libertarians and say, 'Can't we all agree that our democracy should be protected?' I don't think it's too late.”
On January 6, 2021, supporters of former President Donald Trump, who falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, launched a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress’s formal certification of President Joe Biden's electoral victory. Rep. Peter Welch, who has been Vermont’s lone Congressman since 2007, was in the House chamber waiting to vote. As rioters rampaged in the halls, Welch was ordered to lay on the floor by Capitol police who stood over him and his colleagues with guns drawn. Welch heard a gunshot. He thought he might die.
“All of us thought that at some point,” says Welch. “When we heard that gun go off, and we saw that the mob was trying to break the doors down, that this could include violence. So the thought definitely occurred to every single person who was there, including the Capitol police officers. In fact, five officers died as a result of what happened that day.”
Welch notes that many of his colleagues experience post traumatic stress disorder after the terror they endured in the insurrection. Welch says, “My PTSD now…is the reality that our democracy is very much in peril.” He points to what followed hours after the attack on the Capitol: 147 Republicans members voted to overturn the election of President Biden.
“That's a shattering of the Democratic norm of the peaceful transfer of power,” says Welch.
I ask Welch if he believes that the failed coup was a rehearsal for a successful one.
“Yes, I do. It's definitely happening.” He adds, “There are efforts to use through legislation the capacity to overturn a presidential election, rather than the use of violence that failed on January 6. So yes, it's very much a work in progress.”
Welch says that his sense of urgency about defending democracy is what motivates him to run for U.S. Senate in 2022. “It's an all-hands-on-deck moment,” he says. “Our democracy is imperiled. And we have to preserve it….Given my circumstances, given my service in Congress, the decision I made is this is the best way I can help. And I am absolutely all in."
As Covid-19 cases surge to record levels and threaten to overwhelm already strained health care systems, Dr. Mark Levine, Vermont’s Commissioner of Health since 2017, continues to parry and navigate through the pandemic storm.
Vermont has led the nation in vaccination rates, but it has nevertheless endured significant losses. From March 2020 to December 29, 2021, more than 63,000 Vermonters have contracted Covid-19, and 468 people have died from the disease.
“Omicron is an inflection point. We are going to see marked increases in case counts,” says Levine, who was a professor of medicine at the University of Vermont and associate dean for graduate medical education prior to leading the state health department.
In this hour, Levine discusses the contagious new Covid-19 variant, the changing paradigm of tracking the pandemic, and the role of public health in a wide-ranging crisis.
What’s so funny about Vermont?
Vermont political cartoonist Jeff Danziger writes that Vermont humor has a quality of "Yankeeness," characterized by "undemonstrative passions, studied understatement, and a reverence for patient consideration."
Like this exchange, when a stranger stops to ask for directions.
“Does it matter which road I take to Goshen?” asks the lost traveler.
“Not to me it don’t,” replies the Vermonter.
The weighty question of what’s so funny about Vermont is tackled in the new book, I Could Hardly Keep from Laughing: An Illustrated Collection of Vermont Humor. The book is written by retired teacher and journalist Bill Mares, co-author (with Frank Bryan) of a bestselling book of Vermont humor, Real Men Don't Milk Goats, and illustrated by Don Hooper, a former Vermont Secretary of State. (Mares and Hooper also serve on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust.)
On this Vermont Conversation, Mares and Hooper share some Vermont humor and discuss how it has evolved, though some might argue that it never has. And they unsuccessfully attempt to hijack the interview but are rebuffed by host David Goodman.
This week marks a grim milestone in the Covid-19 pandemic as the death toll in the U.S. hit 800,000 people. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus.
Gregg Gonsalves says the Biden’s Administration’s attempt to vaccinate our way out of the problem is not working. Gonsalves, a winner of the MacArthur genius award, is associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and co-directs the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership.
Gonsalves first became involved in public health during the AIDS pandemic when he was a leading member of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group. He sees parallels between the AIDS and Covid pandemics in the way that politics and profiteering have sabotaged public health. He has argued that the Trump administration committed crimes against humanity in its bungling of the early Covid response, especially against vulnerable and marginalized populations. But he is also critical of the Biden Administration’s approach.
Gonsalves has also spoken about the backlash against science and public health, including in Vermont, where Gov. Phil Scott and his staff have attacked a prominent public health critic. “There's been a war on public health. …What politicians have figured out is to point to the other guy and say, Oh, it's their fault. …What this has done is created threats of violence against public health officials who have quit in droves. And it is leading to burnout among health professionals who…just are putting their fingers in dikes as water pours over the edge of the boat. “
Gonsalves is critical but hopeful. “There's so many people …around the country, and frankly, around the world that are fighting this fight right now. There are there plenty of people like [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis and [Texas Gov.] Greg Abbott who preach the gospel of selfishness. But there's really incredibly generous, community minded, civic minded people in our country who really want us to get to the other side of this. And those are the people who give me hope.”
New England is on fire – with Covid infections, not foliage.
All six New England states are now in the top 10 for highest rates of Covid-19 infections. New Hampshire currently has the highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country, followed by Rhode Island (No. 2), Maine (No. 3), Massachusetts (No. 5), Connecticut (No. 5) and Vermont (No. 10), according to the New York Times. Hospitals throughout the region are in crisis as they fill to capacity.
In response to this surge in infections, New York (No. 18) has imposed a statewide indoor mask mandate to tamp down the spread of the virus. But Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has staunchly refused to do the same — and backed his chief of staff, Jason Gibbs, who last week lashed out at a public health critic.
“We should all be open to engaging in debate on policies and the evidence and data that underlie them,” says Anne Sosin, a Policy Fellow at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College who has been the target of criticism from Scott and Gibbs. She adds that personal attacks “erode the will to do the hard work that needs to be done. But I can say that this will not silence me.”
We speak about New England’s deepening pandemic and attacks on science and public health with Sosin and Jon Levy, Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health.
The Earth’s coldest places are a hot mess.
As a result of climate change, studies suggest that most ski areas in southern New England will be out of business by 2040. A recent climate assessment in Vermont says that the Vermont ski season will be shortened by up to a month. In the western United States, high elevation snowpacks have decreased by nearly 50 percent in the last four decades. In the Alps, half of the glacial ice has disappeared.
This matters because when snow and ice vanish, sea levels rise, ocean currents change, wildfires become more intense, and fresh water becomes scarce — to name just a few impacts. Journalist Porter Fox has gone from traveling and skiing the world as a former editor of Powder Magazine to journeying through frozen lands to chronicle the alarming impacts of climate change. His new book is The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World.
"The cool, reflective crust of ice and snow now draped around the poles is the final buffer between us and radical climate change," Fox wrote recently in Time. If we lose the world's cold places, he warns, "we lose the world we know."
Why would a woman walk away from a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home and a good life to become a struggling farmer?
That’s exactly what Beth Hoffman did. She had spent decades as a reporter covering food and agriculture for outlets including NPR and The Guardian and taught at the University of San Francisco. Then in 2019, she and her new husband moved from their home in San Francisco back to his family’s 530-acre farm in Iowa to try their hands at farming. The experience has been spiritually rewarding but financially sobering.
Half of America’s 2 million farms made less than $300 in 2019, according to Hoffman. That’s a recipe for poverty, not success.
Hoffman tells her story in a new book, Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America. She explores issues from how the changing climate is affecting farms, to the financial and emotional toll of farming, to the obstacles confronting farmers of color. She advocates for a new narrative about farming that includes an honest reckoning with the harsh realities that farmers face while feeding the country.
'Tis the season of American capitalism. Online shoppers spent $9 billion on Black Friday and $11 billion on Cyber Monday this year.
What is the impact of all this spending? And while everyone loves a bargain, is it possible that some items are just too cheap?
Author Tanja Hester argues that while Americans buy a lot, we may be leaving something on the table: our power to leverage change based on how we use our money.
Hester is a former progressive political consultant who the New York Times describes as the “matriarch” of the women’s FIRE movement. (FIRE stands for financial independence/retire early, an investment strategy that's gained popularity in recent years.)
Hester's new book is Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change. She contends that where we shop, what we buy, and where we donate can influence the fate of our society and our planet.
"I believe that we can make real change, and it's within our individual power to do so," says Hester.
When the Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, few people knew its author, the Austrian-born physicist Fritjof Capra. That would quickly change. What began as Capra’s passion project to explore the connection between Eastern mysticism and Western science became a global phenomenon. The book sold millions of copies and has been translated into 23 languages.
Fritjof Capra has gone on be a trailblazing thinker and writer about systems theory, deep ecology and Green Politics. He is the author or co-author of about a dozen books, a number of which have been international bestsellers. The main focus of his writing and activism has been to help build sustainable communities. He founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which advances education for sustainability.
Capra, who is now 82 years old and lives in Berkeley, has just published a new book, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades.
Capra that he is “both hopeful and concerned” about the current state of the world.
“I see the coronavirus as a biological response of Gaia, our living planet, to the ecological and social emergency that humanity has brought upon itself,” says Capra. “We need to restore ecosystems to re-establish the balance that we’ve destroyed.”
Vermont author Kekla Magoon has been going where few children’s authors dare to go, tackling topics such as racism and social justice in her books. She is now being recognized as one of America’s top writers for young adults.
Magoon was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, for her new book for young adults, Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People.It is a magisterial 400-page work that explores black resistance starting with colonialism in Africa and leading up to the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Magoon, who is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, said that her new book “carries the weight of history and it carries the power to inspire young people to say, ‘Oh I see myself in this and I’m going to use my voice.’”
Earlier this year, Magoon received the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for “her significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens.” This is essentially a lifetime achievement award that Magoon won at the age of 41. The ALA proclaimed, “Kekla Magoon’s powerful prose and complex characters enrich literature for young adults by bearing witness to the trauma and triumph of the American Civil Rights Movement.” Magoon’s other books include X, a teen novel about civil rights leader Malcolm X that she co-authored with his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, and How it Went Down, about the complicated aftermath of a shooting of a Black teenager. Magoon is also a recipient of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, John Steptoe New Talent Award, NAACP Image Award and other honors.
Magoon told the Vermont Conversation that her writing “is a powerful opportunity to be telling Black history as a Black woman in this country. It’s part of what I value in the world. I want to be an activist. But I’m not the person who marches and protests. I’m really good at writing. So I choose to use the skills that I have to advance the …causes that I believe in.”
Magoon is determined “to push back against everyone who wants to diminish young Black people. Because there are a lot of people out there that don’t want us to recognize and own our power, that don’t want us to have a space and a voice in the world. So the best thing I can do is to model the ability to do both of those things.”
“I try to use my writing skills to make the world a better place.”
When reports began emerging in January 2020 of a mysterious respiratory virus spreading in Wuhan, China, politicians, health officials and scientists were unprepared for the global pandemic that was soon to follow. As the scale of the calamity unfolded, the world’s best known pharmaceutical companies had nothing in their arsenal to deal with it.
The scientists and drug companies that mobilized an effective response were not the usual suspects. They were an untested group, and many operated at the fringes of science. BioNTech and Moderna were unknown to the general public and had not had commercial success with vaccines. But when leaders from the two companies heard about the novel coronavirus spreading in China, each believed that they could crack its genetic code and devise a vaccine based on mRNA technology, which they had been researching. These unlikely scientists were soon on a race to save civilization.
Award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman tells this story in his new book, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine.
“This is an age of outbreaks,” writes Zuckerman. “Each year, humans encroach on nature, increasing the risks that animal-borne diseases will cross over and threaten humanity. Lessons from the vaccine race will inform scientists, politicians, and others if—or perhaps when—we confront another deadly pathogen.”
This week, world leaders are gathered at the United Nations' COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss what to do about the climate crisis. Gus Speth knows what brought us to the edge of this climate emergency. President Carter and all the presidents who followed knew, too.
The United States government knew that climate change was an impending disaster. They knew that burning fossil fuels could drive the world into crisis. And yet for the last half century, American leaders put their feet on the accelerator of fossil fuel consumption and pushed down hard.
The actions of American leaders “on the national energy system over the past several decades are, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic,” writes Speth.
Gus Speth is now telling the story of how and why this happened. Speth, who lives in Strafford, Vermont, is a luminary in the environmental movement. He served as chair of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality during the Carter Administration. He went on to lead the U.N. Development Program, served as Dean of the Yale School of Environment and co-founded the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was a professor at the Vermont Law School and is now part of The Next System Project, which addresses systemic challenges confronting the U.S.
Speth’s latest book is They Knew: The Us Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis. On this week's Vermont Conversation, Speth talks about what radicalized him, leading him to go from government insider to getting arrested in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.
It was the crime of the century.
Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — which is controlled by the billionaire Sackler family — was the hidden hand behind the national opioid epidemic that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The company deceived doctors and patients about OxyContin’s addictive properties and rewarded high-volume prescribers.
In September 2019, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from thousands of lawsuits from individuals, hospitals and local governments. In a settlement reached last month, Purdue Pharma was dissolved, and the Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle claims. But the Sacklers, who remain among the richest families in America, were absolved of opioid-related liability.
It appears that the criminals got away with the crime.
Ryan Hampton knows this story firsthand. An alumnus of the Clinton White House, he became addicted to OxyContin and ended up unemployed and homeless. He has become an addiction recovery advocate and served as one of four victims appointed as a watchdog during the bankruptcy proceedings. He tried to ensure that justice was done but found himself up against powerful interest groups, including representatives of big insurance companies, pharmacies, and state attorneys general. He finally quit as the co-chair of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee and wrote a book, Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis.
"Ignored by a system devised to protect extreme wealth and perpetuate social disparity, Purdue’s victims find themselves doubly victimized," Hampton wrote recently in the New York Times. "I know this because I not only represented the victims; I’m one of them."
What does a performer do when she can’t perform?
For Karen Kevra, she becomes a storyteller.
Kevra is a Grammy-nominated flutist and founder and artistic director of Capital City Concerts in Montpelier. When Covid-19 shuttered performance venues last year, she searched for a new way to connect with her audience. Kevra has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including performances at Carnegie Hall and the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. Last year, she launched a podcast, Muse Mentors, a series of beautifully crafted interviews with artists, activists and thinkers in which she explores the transformative role that mentors have played in their lives.
Kevra credits her own mentor with changing the course of her life. As an adult, Kevra sought out a teacher, Louis Moyse, a renowned flutist, composer and co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival. Their musical relationship blossomed into a lifelong friendship until Moyse’s death in 2007 at the age of 94.
"There’s a difference between a teacher and a mentor," says Kevra. "A mentor is someone who helps to shape you, who becomes a part of your life and really shows you how to live life."
Vermont has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, and to meeting 90 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2050. Are these energy goals a pipe dream, or are they within reach?
The answer depends on where you live. The city of Burlington now gets all of its power from renewable generation. And as President Biden struggles to get a national clean energy infrastructure plan passed, Burlington residents will soon vote on an energy bond that is aimed at making Burlington the first city in the country to be netzero in energy use.
The Vermont Conversation is joined by Darren Springer, general manager of Burlington Electric Department, and Peter Sterling, interim executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, to get a snapshot of where Vermont is now on its green energy quest.
“Burlington is on the leading edge in the country,” says Springer of Burlington’s energy future. “We’re taking an all-in approach to try to reach a reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuel use in the [heating and ground transportation] sectors.”
When Bernie Sanders decided to pursue national politics, one obstacle stood in his way: He had to defeat Vermont’s Republican congressman, Rep. Peter Smith. In 1988, Sanders first ran for Congress against Smith and lost in a three-way race. Two years later, Smith was completing his first term when the former mayor of Burlington challenged him again. This time, the maverick socialist won handily.
Peter Smith occupies a unique place in Vermont’s political history. He is the one-term Republican congressman who in defeat launched Sanders’ three-decade long national political career. And Smith is Vermont’s last Republican congressman.
Smith cites a saying that “if you wanna surf, you gotta get ahead of the wave. In politics, the wave broke right on top of me. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Smith has left the Republican Party and signed a letter in 2016 with other former Republican Congressmen denouncing Donald Trump as “manifestly unqualified to be president.”
Smith says he still occasionally participates in programs in which former members of Congress speak to students and citizen groups. He identifies himself as “R-Vermont in the 101st Congress.” He says with a soft laugh that it is “a little confusing to some people because I’m generally to the left of whoever the Democrat is that I’m traveling with. The truth of matter is when I was in the Congress, I voted to the left of something like 55% of the Democratic Caucus.”
Peter Smith founded and led the Community College of Vermont in the 1970s and went on to serve as a state senator and Lieutenant Governor. After losing to Bernie Sanders in 1990, Smith left politics and Vermont to pursue a career in education. He was the founding president of California State University at Monterey Bay, was dean of the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University, Assistant Director of UNESCO, and is now a professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus. He has written a new book about people who did not attend college but who bring deep experiential knowledge to their work, Stories from the Educational Underground: The New Frontier for Learning and Work.
Smith says, “I couldn’t see it in 1991, but…I think I am doing what I was meant to do. I frankly think Bernie has been doing what he was meant to do. He’s had a major impact on the party and the country.”
As the Covid pandemic grabs headlines, another deadly epidemic is quietly ravaging communities: addiction has led to a record spike in overdoses. Nationally, there was a 29% increase in overdose deaths last year. In Vermont, opioid deaths rose by 38% in 2020, with 157 people who died by overdose.
For town librarian Brett Ann Stanciu, these statistics had a name and a face. In 2016, a local man who broke into her library in Woodbury, Vt., died by suicide after encountering a library trustee. This led Stanciu on a quest to understand opioid addiction in her community and in Vermont. It also led her to reckon with her own addiction. This quest is the subject of her new book, Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.
Stanciu, a graduate of Marlboro College and formerly the librarian in Woodbury, says that her book “looks at our society and how it’s frayed apart, what the ways [are] that we can put our society back together.”
In our second half, we talk with Maia Szalavitz, a New York Times bestselling author of Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction. Szalavitz. When she was in her 20s, Szalavitz struggled with an addiction to heroin and cocaine. She says programs promoting abstinence from drugs have resulted in broken families, mass incarceration and the spread of disease. Szalavitz says a more effective -- but politically controversial -- approach is harm reduction. Examples of this include needle exchange programs and using methadone and buprenorphine to treat addiction.
Szalavitz says that harm reduction is now gaining acceptance—but for dubious reasons. “Our drug laws are racist. The only reason the drugs that are legal are legal and the drugs that are illegal are illegal is racism and anti-immigrant panic. …Now when we see the victims of the opioid problem as being white, suddenly being nicer to them is OK, so harm reduction gets massively adopted all over the place.”
Szalavitz advocates ending the failed war on drugs and de-stigmatizing substance abuse. “When you take away the elusiveness and the cops and robbers, it doesn’t actually make people want to stay addicted forever. It gives them space to make some change…. Overall the picture is extraordinarily positive.”
This week, the U.S. government narrowly averted shutting down. Now, a debt default crisis looms on the horizon. This brinksmanship has been driven by Senate Republicans, who threatened a shutdown and are blocking raising the debt limit as part of a strategy to undermine President Biden’s economic agenda. Unless an agreement is reached by Oct. 18, the U.S. will default on its debts for the first time in its history.
How did government become the enemy? The simple answer is that Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the presidency in 1980 by declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
President Reagan ultimately presided over three government shutdowns, the first time that shuttering the government was used as a political weapon. President Trump took this scorched earth political warfare to a new level, presiding over the longest government shutdown in history – 35 days — which occurred in January 2019 over disputes with Congress about funding his border wall. Trump’s shutdown cost American taxpayers about $5 billion.
According to Yale historian Paul Sabin, the anti-government movement that Reagan rode to victory was actually inspired by citizen activists of the 1960s, such as Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. He describes this improbable connection between 1960s liberal activism and the current anti-government movement in his new book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program.
Sabin is deeply concerned by the authoritarian bent of the current anti-government movement. “We need to actively defend the government and its purposes and the public goods and the role of public institutions.”
“My dream would be we could find a way to… combine active government with the idea of continuous reform and improvement and we could come to terms with complicated, flawed institutions.”
“We’re never going to have a perfect government,” Sabin concludes.
It is the greatest fraud in Vermont’s history.
The EB-5 scandal has the elements of a true crime novel: A shady grifter. Secret meetings. Duped investors. Complicit regulators. A panicked whistleblower. A tenacious journalist. Whispers of blackmail. Millions of dollars lost. A dramatic raid by Federal agents that brings it all crashing down.
In 2012, when VTDigger founder and editor Anne Galloway attended a glitzy press conference announcing plans for massive investments and thousands of jobs in the financially depressed Northeast Kingdom, she smelled a rat. The latest revelations in the unfolding saga include a state attorney who alleged that top government officials knowingly “aided and abetted” the fraud.
In this Vermont Conversation, Galloway offers a primer on the EB-5 scandal, starting from the program’s beginnings in 2006 to the most recent developments. In 2017, Galloway was a finalist for the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors FOIA Award for her EB-5 investigation.
Galloway says that the EB-5 scandal is a cautionary tale in the small Green Mountain state. “We have a situation in Vermont in which we’re not very good about holding people accountable,” she says. “There are companies and entities that operate in this state with impunity because people in power aren’t willing to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that would make their work more accountable to the public.”
Where will homeless Vermonters live?
That question has come to the forefront as more than 540 households were slated to lose their rooms in motels this week. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Vermont’s general assistance housing program has utilized vacant motel rooms for Vermonters who would otherwise be homeless. VTDigger has reported that some 700 people were forced out of the program July 1, while people with children, or with disabilities, or who were fleeing dangerous or life-threatening conditions were allowed to remain. Vermont’s emergency motel stays were slated to end on September 23 – despite the fact that federal funds are available to cover the motel housing until the end of the year.
Vulnerable Vermonters have received a last-minute reprieve. On September 21, Gov. Phil Scott announced a “30-day pause” in the effort to close the motel housing program. His announcement came following criticism from legislators and advocates.
One such advocate is Addie Lentzner, a senior at Arlington High School. She helped organize a letter signed by dozens of owners of emergency hotels around the state that declared: “We as motel owners call on Governor Scott to use the federal money to reinstate the GA Motel Program through December, and ensure that there is safe and consistent housing available when the time comes to transition out. At this point, every available motel room should be used for shelter. Now is the time to act before almost 600 people are kicked out.” The letter pushes back on arguments by state officials that motel owners want voucher recipients gone to free up rooms for leaf-peeping tourists.
On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people who are directly affected by the motel housing program, including Laila Lakshmair and her son, Raj Singh, who operate the Bradford Motel; Olive, a resident of a motel in Morrisville, who asked to be identified by her first name only to protect her privacy; Kim Anetsberger, executive director of Lamoille Community House, a seasonal homeless shelter; and advocate Addie Lentzner.
In the second half of the Vermont Conversation, we talk with longtime advocate for the homeless Rita Markley. For over two decades, Markley has led the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS), one of Vermont’s oldest shelters for people experiencing homelessness. Markley discusses how the homelessness crisis has deepened over the past 30 years as a result of policy choices and the closures of mental health facilities, and how policies must change for homelessness to be eradicated.
John Killacky has had a front row seat in America’s culture wars. As a gay man and a dancer in the 1980s, he lost over 100 friends to AIDS. As an arts administrator in the 1990s and 2000s, he confronted police who threatened to shut down artists who they deemed to be obscene. And as the former director of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vt., he agreed to allow a visit by presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 – and broke down in tears after a night filled with rage, vitriol and protest.
The Trump campaign overbooked the theater, causing overflow crowds to spill onto the streets and confront anti-Trump protesters. As protesters inside the Flynn disrupted his speech, Trump demanded of police, “Get ’em out. Confiscate his coat. It’s about 10 degrees below zero outside. … Tell him we’ll send it to him in a couple of weeks.”
Today Killacky is a Vermont State Representative representing South Burlington and is one of a handful of openly LGBTQ legislators. He has a new book of essays, Because Art.
Killacky was targeted by protesters for giving a platform to Trump in 2016. He remains unsettled by what he saw that night.
“I felt like I experienced fascism from the stage,” he says. He talks about whether he would make the same decision again.
The issue of resettling refugees has been a flashpoint in Rutland. Five years ago, then-Alderman David Allaire fiercely opposed the settlement of 100 Syrian refugees in the city, declaring that the program should be “slowed down, if not stopped.” His opposition to resettling refugees was a central issue in his campaign against Mayor Chris Louras. Six weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Allaire soundly defeated Louras in March 2017 in a vote that was widely viewed as a referendum on refugee resettlement. The refugee controversy and Louras' defeat made national news.
Last week, something remarkable happened at a meeting of the Rutland Board of Aldermen. Now-Mayor David Allaire stood up to speak to the issue of a plan to resettle Afghan refugees in Rutland. Allaire declared, “I want to make clear to everyone that I am supportive of this...” Gov. Phil Scott has also expressed support for bringing refugees to Vermont.
Rutland Alderman Devon Neary noted the results of a recent census. “We lost 688 folks, so honestly, this couldn’t come at a better time,” he told Amila Merdzanovic, director of Vermont’s chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. He encouraged Merdzanovic to look at Rutland as a “big partner, not just as a little partner.”
“For the Love of Rutland” is a new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who grew up in Rutland and is now an associate professor in Film and Digital Media and director of Graduate Studies in the Social Documentation MFA program at University of California at Santa Cruz. The film follows a Rutland woman who is struggling with overcoming poverty and addiction. The film also follows former Mayor Chris Louras during the bitter debate over refugees in 2016, and his electoral defeat.
Bill McKibben has a new target for his climate activism: his fellow Baby Boomers.
McKibben, the founder of the global climate action group 350.org and a bestselling author, announced last week that he will end his weekly “Climate Crisis” column in The New Yorker and instead launch his own Substack newsletter, The Crucial Years, and a new organization, ThirdAct.org. He tweeted: “We're going to try and organize 'experienced Americans' — i.e., people over 60 like me — around issues of climate justice, racial justice, economic justice.”
“Our generations have done their share of damage,” he writes. “We're on the verge of leaving the world a worse place than we found it. But we also have the skills and resources to help make change.”
McKibben also reflects on the perilous state of democracy and on the prospects for his beloved but snakebitten Boston Red Sox.
A Texas law that effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy went into effect on September 1. The law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, known as SB8, bans abortion before many people know they are pregnant. It took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court, flush with three Trump appointees, refused to grant an emergency request to block it.
SB8 has a novel provision that essentially deputizes ordinary citizens to enforce the law and claim a $10,000 bounty on anyone that they think has violated it. The Texas abortion ban is now expected to be replicated in many other Republican-led states.
“It is an all-out attack on the people who need abortions by intimidating and terrifying every person around them who might help them,” asserts Lynn Paltrow, the founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a human rights and civil rights organization focused on pregnant and parenting women.
Paltrow, who is an attorney, tells The Vermont Conversation that the Texas law is “about much bigger issues: white supremacy and male supremacy. It isn’t just criminalizing abortion. It is labeling and surveilling everybody who has the capacity for pregnancy.”
The anti-abortion law took effect the same week that Gov. Abbott signed laws restricting voter access and loosened gun restrictions. Paltrow says all these laws are part of a “strategy of undermining democracy and undermining constitutional review by the Supreme Court.”
Stopping the Texas law is a critical test, she says. “It’s not only a fight for abortion rights. It’s a fight for a true democracy.”
Is Vermont squandering its hard won gains keeping Covid-19 in check?
That’s the argument of Anne Sosin, a public health specialist and Policy Fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. She recently wrote an essay for Time Magazine titled, “Vermont Offered the U.S. a Textbook for Reopening Schools Safely. Why Is It Throwing Out the Lesson Plan?”
“We see a departure from the evidence-based approach that’s been so critical to Vermont’s success in earlier phases of the pandemic,” Sosin tells The Vermont Conversation. “Right now, we need to be prioritizing the health and education of our children. That means aligning what we’re doing with the best evidence, local epidemiology and the guidance coming out. And I’m concerned that we have shifted very far away from that in the last several weeks.”
The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking in schools regardless of vaccination status. Gov. Phil Scott said masks are "a good idea," but he has declined to mandate them in schools or elsewhere.
The Delta variant is now surging in places that were recently hailed as Covid-19 success stories, such as Iceland, Israel and Hawaii. These places are a cautionary tale for Vermont, Sosin said.
“All of these places have very high vaccination rates like Vermont, yet this variant has led to very rapid increases in transmission and has had significant impacts on health systems, schools and businesses,” she said. “We need to learn and be really humble in our approach as we respond to it.”
Vaccines are not enough, she said.
“Employing other tools right now helps us to safeguard the gains that we’ve made as a state. It doesn’t diminish our success,” Sosin said.
Less than a week into the school year, cases of Covid-19-positive students are popping up in schools all around the state. Gov. Phil Scott so far has declined to mandate face masks in schools, but he recommends that students and educators wear masks. It has been left to each school district to decide whether or not to mask.
“We’re going to always do whatever it takes. We’re going to keep kids as safe as we humanly can,” said Brigid Nease, superintendent of the Harwood Unified Union School District, which includes Waterbury, Duxbury, Waitsfield, Moretown, Warren and Fayston. On Sunday, Nease was notified that a student at Crossett Brook Middle School had tested positive for Covid-19. By Monday, 23 middle school students were in quarantine.
Nease said she is concerned by the minimal guidance that schools have received from the state.
“Each superintendent is really feeling … that we are just out here alone trying to determine what we need to do with what our community will support and what the spread looks like in our own community,” she said
Educators are also trying to resist being dragged into the culture wars around masking and vaccines.
“I am hearing direct reports of personal fear from principals and superintendents," Nease wrote in her back-to-school letter to the community on Aug. 19. "One of my superintendent colleagues has received a death threat. Some principals are receiving letters from groups threatening to storm the schools on the first day. Leaders are receiving voicemails from very angry community members screaming at them. Today, when seeking out advice and support we were told to access law enforcement.”
Nease discusses the uncertainty and anxiety around the new school year and how she and other educators are managing a second pandemic school year.
A curious hallmark of the Covid-19 pandemic is the backlash that it has spawned. Right-wing politicians and their media allies are emboldened as they rage against masks and vaccines, spout conspiracy theories and attack doctors and scientists. Republican governors in Florida and Texas, where infections are raging among children, are blocking schools from mandating that children wear masks, a simple public health measure. Those same states are reporting that their ICUs are full, many of them with children.
This type of behavior is not new. The Anti-Vaccination League of America was founded in 1908 just as a vaccine against smallpox — a disease that had killed millions — was being mandated by some states, while mandates were prohibited by others.
The effort to blame China for the pandemic also has a familiar ring. “The idea of looking for scapegoats, of casting blame has taken on new life during Covid,” says Martin Halliwell, professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. “Stigmatizing has a long narrative. There is a constant, the idea of looking for someone to blame.”
Martin Halliwell tells the story of America’s social and political struggles around public health in his new book, American Health Crisis: 100 Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics. He discusses what is new and familiar about our current public health crisis.
An extremist movement led by angry and entitled white men is spreading throughout the country, and Vermont is providing fertile ground for their violent hatred.
That’s the contention of Michael Shank, a resident of Brandon, who says that he is moving in order to escape armed white extremists who have been harassing him and been tolerated by local authorities. Shank made his case in an op-ed article for USA Today on Aug. 4, titled: "White extremism is winning in my Vermont town. I'm selling my animal sanctuary and moving."
On Friday, August 13, 2021, Shank's neighbor, Eric Grenier, a convicted felon, was arrested on weapons charges. Shank has accused Grenier of making death threats.
Shank writes that white extremists have “bullied countless people of color in Vermont, who had to flee their communities because it became increasingly hostile and unsafe for them. And now it’s pushing me out, too.”
Shank tells The Vermont Conversation, “Not only are people unsafe in our communities…but they are unsafe in terms of who they turn to for protection…. The very people who are supposed to protect them aren’t protecting them.” He cites recent reports about racial disparities in policing in Vermont that show that Black and Hispanic drivers are 3 to 4 times more likely to be searched by police during traffic stops — despite having a lower “hit rate” for contraband.
The bias that pervades policing has created a permissive environment for racial harassment and white extremism to flourish, says Shank. “Vermont has a leadership problem on this issue,” he asserts. “We are allowing the racism to metastasize.”
Shank has also worked in Afghanistan as a senior policy adviser to former California Rep. Mike Honda, and he discusses what led to the Taliban retaking the country.
Michael Shank is communications director for the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. He is also an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.
What would you do if you knew that your father fought for the Nazis?
For years, Alexander Wolff harbored this dark family secret. Wolff, a staff writer for Sports Illustrated for more than three decades, longed to know more about his family’s role in Nazi Germany. Was his father, Niko Wolff, involved in the worst Nazi crimes, including the extermination of Jews? How did Niko hide the fact that he was part Jewish? How else was his family involved in the war?
In 2017, Wolff left Sports Illustrated and moved with his family from their home in Cornwall, Vt., to Germany, where he spent a year probing his family’s secrets. He also wanted to learn more about his grandfather, Kurt Wolff, a young German Jewish publisher who published renowned authors including Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth before fleeing the Nazis and coming to New York, where he founded Pantheon Books, a highly regarded publishing house.
Alex Wolff’s tumultuous family saga is the subject of his new book, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home. He is also the author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama and is the former owner of the semi-pro Vermont basketball team the Frost Heaves.
In 2019, producer Bess O’Brien set out across Vermont to capture the stories and lives of teenagers. She wanted to hear about their joys and struggles in their own words.
O'Brien did this in 2005, and the result was an award-winning musical, The Voices Project. This time, following a year-long delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the students who comprise the cast of the Listen Up musical are finally taking their songs and stories to the public from August 4 through August 15, 2021. The students sing and speak their truth about a range of current youth issues ranging from racial justice to mental health, gun violence, sexual identity, disability, family, love and community.
On this week's Vermont Conversation, student cast members Theo Novotny, Miles Novotny and Sadie Chamberlain perform and discuss the issues raised in the musical and the process of making it, and producer Bess O’Brien describes how and why the musical was created.
When 32 year old Peter Fatovich died by suicide in 1994, he left behind his adoring wife, four children under five years of age, and a million questions.
Fatovich’s widow, Jenny Grosvenor, pushed the questions aside — until now. Grosvenor, who lives in Stowe, has spent the past few years pursuing the truth behind what tormented her young husband to take his own life in the waters of Huntington Gorge in Richmond, Vt. She finally discovered his dark secret: In the late 1970s, Fatovich was the victim of sexual abuse by a priest at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY, a Catholic high school.
Fatovich is far from alone. According to BishopAccountability.org, a nonprofit that tracks clergy abuse allegations, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has reported that over 7,000 clergy were credibly accused of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2018. The Conference reports that there have been over 20,000 victims. The Catholic Church has paid out over $4 billion to settle clergy abuse cases.
Last week, Jenny Grosvenor published a searing article in The Daily Beast, “A Widow’s Hunt for the Priest Who Preyed on Her Husband.” It told the story of her years-long pursuit of the truth.
The response has been overwhelming. One email that she received said: “My Dad read your article and finally remembered that Malone had molested him in the early 60s. … Luckily now I think he will get the help that he needs. And as a survivor of priest abuse myself, I can finally understand the turmoil he's been going through.”
Jenny Grosvenor is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Vermont. She has worked at Life Magazine and Sports Illustrated. She is writing a memoir about suicide, priest sexual abuse, and survival.
Grosvenor writes, “I find some consolation in knowing that sharing my story could save other victims of this horrific abuse.”
Could the next presidential election be stolen?
Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, is concerned that that’s precisely what may happen in 2024. Levitsky is co-author, with fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt, of the international bestseller, How Democracies Die. The book argues that modern democracies are subverted not by military coups, but by weakening key institutions such as the judiciary and the press.
Levitsky wrote recently in The Atlantic, “The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election.”
Although Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Levitsky said on The Vermont Conversation, “I see 2020 as a dress rehearsal.” Republicans “appear to not only have the ability, but the interest and the will to overturn an election.”
Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die during the first year of the Trump presidency. Joe Biden carried around a marked-up copy of the book during his 2020 campaign and often cited it. I asked Levitsky, having observed four years of Trump, if he now believes he missed anything when describing how democracies are subverted.
“What we missed was the transformation of the Republican party,” he replied. “We didn’t view the Republicans as an authoritarian party. …We could not have imagined a majority of House Republicans voting to overturn the election…[or] the vast bulk of the Republican party ultimately condoning Trump’s inciting of the January 6 storming of the Capitol. And we could not imagine the Republican party across the country taking steps to prepare in all likelihood to steal or try to steal the 2024 election. That is the behavior…of an authoritarian party.”
“Parties become authoritarian when they really come to fear losing,” he asserts, and “a party based almost exclusively on white Christians has a hard time winning elections.”
“We’re not done with this,” warns Stanford epidemiologist Steven Goodman about the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe my big brother.
In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading and lockdowns were being imposed, I asked Steven to join me on the Vermont Conversation to share publicly what he was telling me privately about this novel virus. While President Trump assured us that the coronavirus would “miraculously go away” with the arrival of warm weather, Steven warned that what was coming would “an impending catastrophe.” He explained the cold calculus of exponential growth and accurately predicted the calamity that soon unfolded.
Steven Goodman, M.D., MHS, Ph.D., is an associate dean at Stanford Medical School, where he is also a professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine.
Today, a fourth wave of Covid-19 is sweeping the country, driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant. While vaccinated Americans are cautiously savoring a return to normalcy, a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is raging, as nearly all new deaths are among the unvaccinated. Yet Republican leaders and right wing media are churning out vaccine disinformation, resulting in vaccination rates of under 35 percent in some states. This large reservoir of unvaccinated people will inevitably become everyone’s problem.
“We’re all connected,” Steven says on The Vermont Conversation. “As large portions of major states go unvaccinated, they will become the factory for infections even among vaccinated people. We’re not immune…to the effects of other states and other people who’ve chosen not to be vaccinated.” Unvaccinated communities “turn into virtual waterfalls of mutations and spread of the virus. We’re going to see far less virus in the highly vaccinated populations than if they weren’t vaccinated,…but at the same time we’ll see far higher rates in those areas than if there weren’t states that were producing this waterfall of cases.”
Covid-19 remains a major threat around the country and the world, Steven insists. "This is still very much a pandemic — the phrase 'post-pandemic' should be banned. [Covid-19] is raging like an intense forest fire across this globe. There are whole countries and whole continents that are absolutely unprepared for the devastation that is about to be wrought.”
How did German democracy collapse and give way to Nazism? Jack Mayer, a recently retired Middlebury pediatrician, has a personal interest in answering that question. His parents were lucky: They fled Nazi Germany in 1939 just as their neighbors were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where most of them died.
Mayer has written two books about Nazi Germany. His first book, Life in a Jar, is a non-fiction story about forgotten Holocaust rescuer Irena Sendler and three Kansas teenagers who tell her story to the world. His latest book, Before the Court of Heaven, is historical fiction that explores the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the democratic government that was in power from 1919, just after Germany’s defeat in World War I, and ended in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor.
Mayer argues that the collapse of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in Germany “is a cautionary tale” for the U.S. today. In the aftermath of WWI, many Germans embraced conspiracy theories and believed that Germany had not lost the war militarily, but because they had been "stabbed in the back" by Jews, socialists and liberals.
"Hitler talked about the usefulness of repeating the Big Lie over and over and over until people believed it," Mayer says.
Can reducing reliance on fossil fuels benefit low-income people?
For Jared Duval, the answer is personal. Duval, a ninth generation Vermonter, grew up shivering around a propane stove in a small apartment because his single mother struggled to afford her heating bills. Duval’s father lived for a time in a tent behind a flea market in Clarendon, using a space heater to survive relentless Vermont winters.
Duval is now executive director of Energy Action Network, a nonprofit organization working to advance Vermont’s carbon emissions reduction efforts. He argues that the climate crisis and fossil fuel dependence disproportionately impact low-income Vermonters, who spend nearly one-fifth of their income on heating fuels and transportation. By contrast, Vermonters earning over $80,000 pay 5% or less of their income for energy costs.
Duval reflects on “how expensive it is to be poor. Lower income folks often face higher costs for energy. It’s the exact opposite of what you would want.”
In its recently released annual report, Energy Action Network calls for Vermont to drastically lower its carbon footprint in the transportation and heating sectors in the next five years to meet its energy commitments and achieve a more equitable energy path. The state has committed to reducing its carbon emissions to 26% below 2005 levels by 2025 and 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. It could be sued if it fails to meet those targets.
Duval shares his own story of reducing his energy footprint and makes the case for an equitable transition that benefits low-income Vermonters. “My hope is in the transformation beyond fossil fuels we can work to make our energy systems more equitable and serve low income Vermonters first, not last,” he says.
“If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism," declared legendary Washington Post political cartoonist Herb Block.
Jeff Danziger has lived on that cutting edge since 1975 when his cartoons skewering the powerful began running in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald. His wit and art have also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, VTDigger and other publications, and his cartoons are syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. Danziger is a winner of the 2006 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning, among numerous other awards.
Fans of Danziger’s cartoons might be surprised to know that a source of his keen political sense and biting commentary was the four years he served as an intelligence officer and linguist during the Vietnam War. In 1970, Danziger was awarded the Air Medal and, to his surprise, received the Bronze Star, though he said he doesn’t know why. Vietnamese translators couldn’t pronounce Danziger’s name, so they came up with a nickname, Lt. Dangerous, which is the name of his new memoir.
In 1971, following his service in Vietnam, Jeff Danziger taught English at U32 High School in Montpelier. He has also worked for the Christian Science Monitor and New York Daily News.
Danziger, now 78, divides his time between homes in New York City and Dummerston, Vermont. He has two books out this year. “In Mob We Trust” is a book of his editorial cartoons from the Trump era. And “Lt. Dangerous” is a memoir about his time as a soldier in Vietnam.
Danziger said the Vietnam War was pointless, and he opens the book with an author’s note stating, “The Vietnamese are among the bravest and most wonderful people on earth.”
He has a message for other young men drafted into a similarly pointless and brutal war: “Don’t do anything you’re told. Disobey everything.”
Is there hope in rural America? Or is it a place in decline that young people just want to flee?
Author Gigi Georges traveled to Washington County in Maine, the remote easternmost county in America, to explore the hopes, dreams and hardships of five young women in high school. Washington County suffers from the problems plaguing many pockets of rural America. It has among the highest per capita rates of opioid overdose in the country. The families of the girls experience drug addiction and domestic violence. But the girls also revel in the thrill of being small town sports standouts in basketball and softball.
Georges tells the story of these five Maine girls in her new book, Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America. As the girls finish high school, they pursue their dreams. One becomes a lobster fisherman, while another studies to become a speech pathologist so she can help children in her home community. Yet another heads off to Yale University.
Georges insists that the stories of these Maine girls are a counter-narrative to the downbeat tales of rural life told in bestselling books such as Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance, who is expected to announce this week that he is running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Georges worked in the White House as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton and has a home near Acadia National Park, just an hour drive from Washington County. She spent four years following the girls who she profiles from high school to college.
“The lived experiences of the young women I follow cut against the dominant narrative of rural America as a place of despair and hopelessness,” Georges argues. She says that the communities in rural Maine “despite many challenges, are thriving, hopeful, and optimistic.”
United States troops are now pulling out of Afghanistan, bringing to a close America’s longest war. U.S. intelligence predicts that the Taliban will take over the country within six months, returning the country to much way we found it when we invaded following the 9/11 attacks. Since 2001, the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan has resulted in the deaths of 800,000 people, including 7,000 Americans, while spawning terror groups including ISIS and other jihadi organizations.
“We’ve had a bipartisan penchant for militarism, and it hasn’t worked,” argues Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and leading foreign policy critic. “If all these interventions resulted in a more secure and prosperous United States of America, an international order that was more peaceful, more prosperous, I would say, well, maybe militarism works," he says on The Vermont Conversation. "But that hasn’t been the case. The consequences have been strikingly negative. Estimates of total U.S. expenditures since 9/11 are something on the order of $7 trillion. For what? And let’s not talk about the numbers [of people] killed. It’s been a catastrophe.”
America’s endless wars have been justified by the often-repeated assertion of its leaders that we alone can solve the world’s problems, our causes are always righteous, and when things go wrong, well, it wasn’t our fault. As Dick Cheney famously reassured us in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, “We will be greeted as liberators.” Nearly two decades later, American troops are still dying in Iraq.
Bacevich calls for NATO to be disbanded and for the U.S. to pursue a strategy of "sustainable self-sufficiency." He writes: "Rather than relentlessly pursuing a way of life based on consumption and waste, it means taking seriously a collective obligation to bequeath a livable planet to future generations. It means embracing some version of the proposed Green New Deal... [This] just might enable a government accustomed to squandering lives and dollars to become a government that nurtures and preserves."
Bacevich is a regular guest analyst on network and cable news and a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, and the American Conservative. He is a graduate of West Point, served 23 years in the US Army and is a professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.
Alex Showerman had a secret. Growing up in Thetford Center, Alex competed on boy’s teams in cross-country, running and hockey. But Alex was actually running from who she was. Like more than half of transgender or nonbinary youth, she considered suicide rather than reveal her secret.
Showerman went on to graduate from St. Lawrence University and work in progressive politics. In her free time, she threw herself into mountain biking and backcountry snowboarding. She numbed the pain of hiding from her true identity by drinking.
Then, in 2019, she broke her neck in a mountain biking accident and was forced to stop running.
Last fall, at the age of 32, Showerman came out as a transgender woman. She feared that she would lose her job doing public relations for outdoor brands and be ostracized by the outdoor sports community.
Showerman has good reason to be concerned: As part of a Republican-led backlash against transgender rights, 125 anti-trans bills have been introduced in more than half the states in the country.
To Showerman’s surprise, she has been hailed as a role model and symbol for inclusion. She has been profiled in Bicycling Magazine and is the subject of a recent Outside Magazine podcast.
“Trans women are women from day one,” Showerman said. “I’m not gonna stop fighting anytime soon. I’m gonna keep on being visible, and I’m gonna keep on showing other trans folks that there is space for you and you can thrive here and make sure that nobody has to go through what I went through.”
Showerman has some advice for trans kids: “Celebrate yourself. You’re awesome.”
Showerman also has advice for parents of children who are questioning their gender identity: “Trust your kid. Love them. Give them a hug,” she said. “Let them be who they want to be.”
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official history of the Vietnam War that was leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. The Pentagon Papers revealed that multiple U.S. presidents and top government officials had been lying about the Vietnam War to the American people and to Congress.
To mark the anniversary of America’s most famous exposé, we are rebroadcasting my 2015 Vermont Conversation interview with Daniel Ellsberg about war, conscience, and whistleblowers.
Ellsberg is a former Marine who served in Vietnam and was an advisor on the Vietnam War to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson.
When the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, the Nixon administration frantically tried to stop the publication. The Times appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the newspaper could publish the documents. The revelations about official secrets and lies led to a collapse of American support for the war.
For leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case was declared a mistrial when evidence surfaced about the government-ordered wiretappings of his phone and break-ins of his psychiatrist’s office.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger referred to Ellsberg as “the most dangerous man in America.” But many view Daniel Ellsberg as a hero who risked his career, and even his personal freedom, to help expose the deception of his own government in carrying out the Vietnam War. "Daniel Ellsberg deserves only praise for his heroic conduct," declared Floyd Abrams, an attorney who represented the New York Times in the case.
Ellsberg is now 90 years old and remains active in the peace movement. Ellsberg and I spoke in 2015 at a conference in Washington, D.C., about the lessons of the Vietnam War.
The legendary whistleblower told me that he would like to be remembered with this simple epitaph: “He was a member of the anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam protest movements.”
Mark Redmond was on a glide path to success. Fresh out of Villanova University, he landed a plum job with a major insurance company and had a cushy apartment on Park Avenue. Money, status, and job security were all firmly in his grasp.
Then he walked away and left it all behind.
Redmond moved into Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth located in Times Square, described by Rolling Stone at that time as “the sleaziest block in America.” His pay was $12 per week.
Redmond writes in his new memoir, Called, “It was a radical change, a case of on one day wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, walking down Madison Avenue, entering the stately international headquarters of the venerable Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, attending to meeting about types of insurance policies and pension plans, and a few days later wearing jeans, sneakers, and a t-shirt, walking past porn places and strip clubs to enter Covenant House, where I’d be helping homeless teenagers.”
“I felt I was finally where I belonged,” Redmond reflects.
Since 2003, Redmond has been executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, which provides housing and support services for homeless, at-risk, and foster-care youth in Vermont. He has also been a storyteller on The Moth. His wife, Marybeth Redmond, is a Vermont state representative from Essex. Redmond talks about his four decades working with troubled youth and telling their stories.
Martha Hennessy is a grandmother of 8, a retired occupational therapist, and a federal prisoner. The 65-year old resident of Weathersfield, Vt. is in jail, along with six other pacifists, for breaking into a Georgia submarine base in 2018, spilling blood and spray-painting anti-war slogans to protest against the threat of nuclear weapons. The group is known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. The name refers to the prophet Isaiah who said that swords shall be beaten into plowshares.
“I have no criminal intent; I want to help prevent another nuclear holocaust,” Hennessy said in her statement.
Hennessy is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the legendary co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, which is committed to nonviolence and working for the poor. Pope Francis has cited Day as a “great American” and the Vatican has given her the title “Servant of God,” the first step towards sainthood.
I asked Hennessy if she felt a responsibility, or even a burden, being Day's granddaughter. "Yes, sure. I spent 25 years not engaging at all," she conceded. But in addition to her peace activism, she continues to travel to New York City to work with the poor at Catholic Worker Maryhouse, Day's former residence. "There’s this being hounded by God, having seeds planted in childhood."
Hennessy is completing a 10 month jail sentence. She is currently at a facility in Manchester, NH, run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. She said that by speaking to the media for this interview, she accepted the risk that her sentence might be extended. Our conversation took place as she did her daily permitted walk.
The 2021 legislative session is in the books. The historic Covid-19 session was conducted entirely online over Zoom. Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, was often eerily alone in her office at the Statehouse in Montpelier.
The session confronted — and then deferred on — some intractable issues such as state pension reform, but it was largely notable for the lack of rancor between Balint, Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) and Republican Gov. Phil Scott. That’s partly due to the fact that Vermont is receiving enormous amounts of federal Covid relief money. The unprecedented cash glut has shifted the dynamic in the Statehouse from fighting over scraps to dividing up the bounty to address big ticket problems such as expanding broadband coverage, responding to the climate crisis, and building affordable housing.
But not all is peaceful in the Vermont Statehouse. On Tuesday evening, Gov. Scott vetoed two bills that would have allowed noncitizens to vote in Montpelier and Winooski, setting a new record for the number of vetoes issued by a Vermont governor.
Balint has spoken candidly about her interest in running for Congress in the event that Sen. Patrick Leahy retires. We spoke about the legislative session that has passed, and her plans for her future in politics.
“Critical race theory” is the newest front in the culture wars, and conservative activists are intent on making Vermont one of its battlegrounds.
At least 16 states with Republican-led legislatures or Republican governors are considering or have signed into law bills to limit the teaching of critical race theory, which, simply stated, considers how racism has been a powerful force in American history that has disadvantaged Black people and other people of color.
About 100 residents packed a church in Essex Center, Vt., on May 28 to hear speakers denounce critical race theory, which they claimed was being taught in the Essex-Westford schools. The school district denies this. Liz Cady, a newly elected member of the Essex-Westford school board, labeled the theory “downright dangerous” and compared the Black Lives Matter movement to Nazism. Cady did not respond to an interview request for this program.
Across the street at another church, members of the student-led Social Justice Union at Essex High School talked about the anti-racism work that students have been pursuing.
“This is about racism. It is not complicated,” asserts Emily Bernard, the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. “Critical race theory is not coming to get you.”
“There is a pocket of people in this country who are afraid of their ideas being challenged,” says Bernard. “There are people who were afraid of the telephone. They thought it would destroy society…. So this resistance, this fear, this hysteria is not new.”
Bernard’s latest book is Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose at the 2020 L.A. Times book prize competition. Last year, Bernard was named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a prestigious $200,000 award given to scholars who are working on “important and enduring issues confronting our society."
“We are not going to end racism through your feelings," Bernard insists. "We have to end it by the work that you do and the work that you undo.”
One of the most striking consequences of the murder of George Floyd is just how far reaching the movement for Black lives and against racism has been. Rallies and protests spread from Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered by police, to small towns across America. One of those communities is the village of Morrisville, Vermont, population 2,000.
On the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, students staged a walkout from Peoples Academy, the local public high school, and from nearby Stowe High School. About two dozen students marched down the hill from Peoples Academy to the traffic light in the center of Morrisville, where they held signs supporting Black Lives Matter and talked to passers-by about the issues. A small number of community members, including a group of teachers, joined the students.
"It’s very far from diverse here," says Maddie Ziminsky, a Black student at Stowe High School was has personally experienced violence. "Racism has had a lot of impact on me. I’ve seen people around me get hurt, racial slurs have become common [and] I’ve had physical altercations that I didn’t expect before. Now, walking outside has become a scary thing."
"You don’t see [racism] in the pretty postcards of Vermont," she says.
"Police are here to protect and serve. We should feel protected and served," says Saudia LaMont, chair of the Racial Equity Alliance of Lamoille, who says she has been threatened by police when she has called for help. "I should not feel afraid to call for help."
I spent the anniversary of George Floyd’s death on the streets of Morrisville talking with students, teachers, and other residents about racism in their community. In the first part of the program, we speak with Saudia LaMont, and in the second half I turn the mic to the students from Morrisville and Stowe who rallied for racial justice.
The world is awash in misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foremost among them is the “big lie” that President Trump won the 2020 election (he lost by 7 million votes), that Covid-19 is a hoax (it has killed nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. and over 3 million worldwide), that the Covid vaccine implants a microchip created by Bill Gates (it doesn’t), and that Antifa stormed the US Capitol on January 6 (the FBI says it was white supremacists and far right groups, not Antifa). All of these falsehoods remain in circulation despite being repeatedly debunked.
Can you boost your resistance to misinformation? How do you talk to people who believe conspiracy theories? Author Andy Norman, who directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, says it possible to inoculate ourselves against bad ideas. His new book is Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think.
“It’s clear that a large part of the American population have mental immune systems that have been compromised,” says Norman.
Americans were shocked by the violent insurrection carried out by a pro-Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. President Trump had spent months goading his supporters to rally behind him and dog whistling to white supremacist groups to rise up, and they heeded his calls.
Susan Corke is not surprised by the rising tide of hate that exploded into public view at the Capitol. She is director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks and exposes hate groups and other domestic extremists. The Center's annual Hate Map currently shows that there are 838 hate groups active in the U.S. In the most recent official assessment, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security named 2019 as “the most lethal year for domestic violent extremism in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.”
The SPLC also explores who becomes radicalized in a podcast, Sounds Like Hate, which just launched its second season. In 2020, the podcast examined racism in Randolph, Vermont.
“2020 was a perfect storm," Corke says. "You had the coronavirus, and people were spending more time online and people were radicalizing online…What you have now in 2021 is the people that stormed the Capitol, as well as the majority of the Republican Party, are still not disavowing what happened on January 6.
"So we’re at a very dangerous and divided place in our country. These hate groups and those that have been radicalized are still very mobilized.”
Gov. Madeleine Kunin is an open book. Vermont’s only female governor has been chronicling her life in books since the mid-1990s, when she penned a memoir, Living a Political Life. Since serving as Vermont’s governor from 1985 to 1991, Kunin went on to jobs as deputy secretary of education and ambassador to Switzerland. Along the way she has been sharing her insights about women and leadership in other books, including Pearls, Politics and Power and The New Feminist Agenda.
Kunin has lately turned her focus back to her own life. In Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties, Kunin, 87, offers an intimate personal narrative of growing older. She has a new book of poetry, Red Kite, Blue Sky, in which she chronicles her experience of love, loss and loneliness in the aftermath of the 2018 death of her husband, John Hennessey, Jr., and after enduring a year of Covid-19 isolation.
Kunin continues to be active in politics as the founder of the Vermont chapter of Emerge, which trains Democratic women to run for office. The former governor periodically testifies in the Vermont Legislature and remains a keen observer of politics, penning regular columns for VTDigger.
“We have to be vigilant to protect our democracy and to push back,” Kunin says about threats to democratic institutions from President Trump and his supporters. “That’s all the more reason for people to enter politics. We have to have voices who will speak out and speak the truth.”
Alison Bechdel is obsessed. Her passion is exercise – karate, cycling, running, skiing in all its forms, to name a few of her pursuits. This obsession is the focus of Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. A New York Times book review declares, “This is a true delight of graphic literature, and nobody does it better. You feel as if you’re peering through a plexiglass panel right into Bechdel’s marvelous brain…[It is] a nearly perfect book.”
Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont and a recipient of a MacArthur genius award. She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For." Her best selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide. The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.
Bechdel runs, skis and bikes from her home in West Bolton, Vermont, which she shares with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, who is the colorist for her new book.
When President Ronald Reagan conjured the “welfare queen” in his 1976 presidential campaign, he created an enduring and damaging myth that people living in poverty were lazy, cheating, minority, urban and female.
In fact, more than half of Americans will live part of their life below the poverty line at some point in their lives. And most Americans in poverty are white and do not live in cities.
This is one of many myths about poverty that are debunked by Mark Rank in his new book, Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, is considered one of the foremost experts on issues of poverty and social inequality.
On the Vermont Conversation, Rank discusses the truth about poverty in America and the obstacles that stand in the way of going from rags to riches. He believes that the U.S. could be at a turning point in how it deals with poverty.
“One of the silver linings of the pandemic is it reveals the fact that [poverty] doesn’t have anything to do with people’s motivation or not working hard enough. This is a collapse on a very systematic level,” Rank says. To address post-pandemic poverty, “we need to think very big. I think that’s what Joe Biden is doing. He’s thinking FDR or LBJ, [whose] programs had a really significant effect on improving people’s lives.”
Syd Ovitt’s life changed forever in November 2017. The student from Pittsfield, Mass., was a freshman at the University of Vermont. She was excited about her new classes and meeting new people. But in her first semester, Ovitt says, she was sexually assaulted by a fellow student. When she reported the attack to UVM officials, a months-long ordeal followed. Her alleged perpetrator was found not guilty. Ovitt’s mental health deteriorated and her grades plummeted.
Then Ovitt got angry. She spoke publicly and often about her experience at UVM, and her story was picked in news reports. She launched a national campaign called Explain the Asterisk to require students convicted of sexual assault to have that reason noted on their transcript. She has lobbied numerous members of Congress to support the initiative.
Nationally, sexual assault on campus is pervasive. More than one out of four female undergraduates and 7 percent of males experience rape or sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
Last week, after a UVM student posted their experience of sexual violence, the student body erupted in outrage, grief and solidarity. Scores of students have been posting on social media with their own harrowing accounts of surviving sexual violence, many on an Instagram account called ShareYourStoryUVM.
On Monday, thousands of UVM students walked out of class to protest sexual violence on campus and what they say is an inadequate response by the university. Syd Ovitt and other survivors of sexual violence addressed their classmates.
In response, the university administration has met with students and agreed to numerous demands put forth by student leaders. Erica Caloiero, interim vice provost for student affairs at UVM, stated, “The goal is for these incidents to never happen in the first place. And when they do happen, to make sure that victims are fully supported, and respondents receive a fair hearing and are held fully accountable when the circumstances warrant.”
Syd Ovitt, now a senior who will graduate from UVM later this month, shared her story with the Vermont Conversation.
When Anne Sosin contracted Covid-19 in early April, a disease that had been the focus of her academic work suddenly became personal.
Sosin, a policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College, has worked globally on public health initiatives. Lately, she has been studying how rural communities in Vermont and New Hampshire have responded to the pandemic. She has a been a rare public health expert who has publicly criticized Gov. Phil Scott’s relaxation of health restrictions as he moves to reopen the state by early July 2021.
Sosin has warned against opening up too quickly and endangering the health of young people, in particular. Her warnings have been prescient, as Vermont has seen a spike of infections among students as schools have re-opened to in-person instruction and indoor sports have resumed. Her prescience hit home when her daughter’s child care provider called her a few weeks ago to say that she had a positive Covid test result. Sosin and her daughter both tested positive. She first spoke publicly about this to VTDigger last week.
An expert on health inequities, Sosin sees a worrisome trend if large regions of the country have low vaccination rates against Covid-19. “The pandemic requires putting an end to the epidemic not only in Vermont and other northeastern states, but in the rest of the U.S. and the rest of the world,” she says. “If we get to a situation where we have large parts of the country that remain unvaccinated, we’re not going to see an end and we really risk having this rage on for months, if not years, to come.”
Bestselling Vermont author Jessica Lahey is done with keeping secrets.
In her new book, The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, she reveals her best kept secret: she is an alcoholic. The story begins before she sips her first glass of wine, when she becomes aware that alcoholism runs in her family. Acutely conscious of this, she takes precautions to stay away from alcohol as a young adult. As a student at UMass Amherst, she becomes a drug and alcohol counselor, teaching her classmates about the perils of addiction.
But in her thirties, after having two kids, Lahey begins drinking wine. She is soon drinking a bottle a day, then more, then liquor. Finally, she blacks out drunk at a family birthday celebration, and her father confronts her.
“I know what an alcoholic looks like,” he tells her, “and you’re an alcoholic.” That night, Lahey attends her first 12-step program meeting. She has been attending meetings ever since.
“There are lots of people that are going through this and you don’t have to be alone,” she counsels.
Jessica Lahey, a former teacher and author of the 2015 bestselling parenting guide, The Gift of Failure, is now on a mission to teach parents how they can "inoculate" their children from substance misuse. “Inoculation theory” starts with knowing the facts about substance misuse and other risky behavior.
“It raises the likelihood that your children will refuse that high risk behavior -- which could be drinking, or sex before they’re ready, or driving in the car with someone who’s drunk,” says Lahey.
Each April 15, Jackie Robinson Day is celebrated in every ballpark in America. It marks the day in 1947 when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play professional baseball, thus ending baseball’s color barrier. Robinson has become an icon, his number 42 retired in every ballpark, to honor his trailblazing feat in both sports and racial justice.
But four decades before Robinson’s historic appearance on a Major League Baseball diamond, another African American ballplayer nearly broke baseball’s color barrier — via Vermont. His name was William Clarence Matthews, and he was a nationally renowned baseball player for Harvard College. Several of Matthews’s Harvard teammates went on to play in the MLB, but Matthews had to settle for playing professional ball in Burlington, Vermont, in the independent Northern League, which was integrated.
Word of Matthews’ feats on Vermont’s diamonds spread. Then in 1905, a Boston newspaper reported the bombshell news that Matthews was about to be drafted by the Boston Nationals, a professional baseball team with a woeful record. But the deal was never signed, and Matthews, one of the greatest ballplayers of his era who was shut out of the professional game, went on to become a distinguished attorney and assistant U.S. attorney general.
Matthews said presciently in 1905, “A Negro is just as good as a white man, and has just as much right to play ball.” It would take another 42 years for that right to be realized.
The remarkable story of William Clarence Matthews was recently recounted in a lengthy article on mlb.com, “The Player Who Nearly Integrated Baseball in 1905.” The article is based on the research of Vermont baseball historian Karl Lindholm, who is at work on a book about Matthews. Lindholm, emeritus dean of advising and assistant professor of American Studies at Middlebury College, tells Matthews's story on The Vermont Conversation.
The conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is a milestone in the movement for Black lives and racial justice. It is a rare moment of accountability for the police killings of black, indigenous and people of color. Since 2005, 140 police officers have been arrested for on-duty killings in the U.S.; just 7 were convicted of murder.
Chauvin’s conviction comes during Earth Week, the days of environmental activism leading up to Earth Day on April 22. A central part of Earth Week this year is the We Shall Breathe virtual summit, which connects the climate crisis to issues of pollution, poverty, police brutality, and the Covid-19 pandemic, and places them all within a racial justice framework. We Shall Breathe is sponsored by the Hip Hop Caucus, led by its founder and president, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. Rev. Yearwood is a minister, community activist, U.S. Air Force veteran, and a national leader in the environmental justice movement.
“Climate justice is racial justice, and racial justice is climate justice,” Rev. Yearwood tells the Vermont Conversation.
“I believe that another world is possible that is not based on extraction,” says Yearwood. “I believe that another world is possible where you are not judged by the hue of your skin. That we can be brothers and sisters. That we can coexist together.”
Chuck Collins gave away a fortune – literally. When he was in his twenties, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune gave away his millions to progressive political causes. Now a resident of Guilford, Vermont, Collins has spent his life fighting inequality and exposing how the rich make themselves richer at everyone else’s expense.
In his new book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Collins details how the rich deploy a secret army of bankers, lawyers, wealth managers, accountants and consultants that he dubs "the Wealth Defense Industry." He knows these people. They were the advisers who told him that he was a fool for giving away his money. He did it over their objections.
“This hidden wealth system is really undermining…healthy democratic society,” says Collins, who is director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies. “In the U.S. we are…building our own oligarchy of inherited wealth dynasties and that fundamentally puts us on a collision course with democratic institutions and norms. It’s not just about avoiding taxes. It’s really about avoiding accountability and enabling these huge inequalities to fester and grow.”
Journalist Eva McKend is a trailblazer. She was the only black, female, on-air news anchor in Burlington when she worked at Vermont’s CBS affiliate, WCAX, from 2015-2018. And she was among a small number of journalists of color in the state. In 2018, McKend moved to Washington, D.C., to become an on-air congressional correspondent for Spectrum News, a cable news service. McKend, a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, is a regular guest on the NPR program 1a, and her series of stories on Black hemp farmers in Kentucky has won several awards.McKend's current beat includes covering the Kentucky congressional delegation, which is led by one of the most powerful politicians in America, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McKend's pointed exchanges with McConnell have made national news. She got McConnell to confirm that humans exacerbate climate change, got him to declare that he would not be an impartial juror in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, and challenged him about reparations for slavery, which he emphatically rejected. “These are questions that should be asked,” says McKend. “I worry that if I don’t ask them, they’re not going to get asked.”
A furious public disagreement is raging between Vermont’s top elected prosecutors, with no resolution in sight. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George is accusing Attorney General T.J. Donovan of being “disingenuous and hypocritical” and of “misleading the public.”
At issue are two murder cases and one case of attempted murder that were dismissed by George in 2019 after she deemed that the alleged assailants were legally insane. She said that she could not simply incarcerate people whose mental illness led them to commit a crime. "It is awful that our mental health agencies are failing us,” she tweeted at the time, “but real leadership requires digging in and fixing problems, not pointing fingers elsewhere and undermining the judicial system's integrity."
Gov. Scott objected to the dismissals, writing, “I’m at a loss as to the logic or strategy behind the decision to drop all charges.” Scott asked the attorney general to review the cases, and in a rare move, Donovan overrode George’s decision and has now refiled the three cases that George dismissed.
At the heart of this dispute is how the state deals with mentally ill people who commit serious crimes. Should they go to jail, or be held in a psychiatric institution? And should the governor and attorney general second guess the decisions made by frontline prosecutors?
“From [Donovan’s] perspective, justice means jail,” George tells the Vermont Conversation. She accuses Donovan of “attempting to show that he is tough on crime. That seems like a change from his ‘progressive policies.’” Donovan insists that the attorney general has “concurrent jurisdiction” over the cases and that a jury should evaluate claims of insanity.
I asked George and Donovan to appear together to discuss these issues on the Vermont Conversation. George agreed to the conversation, but Donovan insisted on a separate interview.
T.J. Donovan served as Chittenden County State’s Attorney for 10 years, where he and George were colleagues, before he was elected attorney general in 2016. Sarah George was elected to succeed Donovan as Chittenden County States Attorney in 2016.
“From the beginning,” Gov. Phil Scott said of Vermont’s Covid-19 response, “we have consistently used data and science to guide our decisions.” But when it comes to following public health guidance, the governor appears to have made an exception for one group: prisoners. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends priority vaccination of corrections staff and incarcerated people at the same time “because of their shared increased risk of disease.” And last month, Vermont’s Covid-19 Vaccine Implementation Advisory Committee called on the administration to “immediately amend its vaccination policies to provide access to Covid-19 vaccines to all incarcerated individuals in its care.” The advisory groupincludes more than two dozen health care providers and advocates.
Last month, Scott refused this guidance and declared that prisoners “will be vaccinated like anybody else, with the age banding.” This was despite an outbreak of Covid-19 at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, the state’s largest prison, where 179 inmates — more than half of the prison population — were infected, along with two dozen corrections officers.
A handful of states, including Massachusetts, have prioritized vaccinations for prisoners, but many states have failed to vaccinate their high risk prison populations. Nationwide, fewer than 1 in 5 state and federal prisoners have been vaccinated according to data collected by The Marshall Project and The Associated Press.
We discuss the question of vaccinating prisoners with four guests: Vermont Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker; Dr. Simi Ravven, president of the Vermont Medical Society; Mike Fisher, chief health care advocate at Vermont Legal Aid and member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Implementation Advisory Committee; and Steffen Gillom, president of the Windham County chapter of the NAACP.
In the fall of 2012, Theo Padnos, who grew up in Woodstock, Vermont, was working as a freelance journalist in Turkey. He made a fateful decision to trust two men who promised to arrange safe passage for him into Syria, where he hoped to report on the civil war that began a year earlier. It was a catastrophically bad decision.
His supposed helpers turned out to be working with Jabhat al-Nusra, the main affiliate of al-Qaida in Syria. Upon entering Syria, he was beaten and kidnaped. He spent the next two years in secret prisons being tortured by his captors. One of the ways he consoled himself was to write an allegorical novel set in Vermont. During his captivity, other journalists captured in Syria, including James Foley and Steven Sotloff, were executed. Others, like Austin Tice, disappeared. Padnos was lucky: In August 2014, he was released after the government of Qatar paid millions in ransom.
Padnos first wrote about his ordeal in 2014 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, and he is the subject of a documentary, Theo Who Lived. He has a new book about his ordeal, Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment. The New York Times says it “lays bare the human condition at its extremes. There is depravity and resilience, rage and revelation, and, ultimately, a triumph of the human spirit.”
Padnos sees parallels between the mindset of his al-Qaida captors and the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January. “What if they set up their own little government, what would it be like to live inside it?” Padnos asks of the insurrectionists. He warns that the U.S. "started down the road…to have a similar outcome as Syria is having now.”
In February 2020, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger appointed Tyeastia Green as Burlington’s first Director of Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Weinberger hailed her hiring as part of an effort in Vermont’s largest city to begin “breaking down the barriers of institutional racism and implicit bias.” Green arrived in Burlington just months before a movement for racial justice took to the streets of the country and around Vermont following the killing by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s murder hit home for Green: she grew up in Minneapolis near where he died.
Green has been deeply involved in discussions about racial disparities in the work of the Burlington Police Department (BPD). BPD arrested African Americans nearly four times as often as whites in 2019, and officers disproportionately use force against Black residents. But earlier this month, Weinberger removed Green from overseeing a study to assess the BPD, replacing her with a white man who he said would “be seen as neutral.”
Sen. Kesha Ram slammed Weinberger for “questioning the neutrality of his only Black department head…because of her lived experience.” Ram wrote, “It is insulting to Green and to our community, and it can only leave us to presume that the decision gives comfort to those who are opposed to systemic change.”
Following a furious backlash, the mayor reversed himself and apologized 24 hours later, conceding, “This decision was wrong and reveals my own bias.”
Reflecting on the last year, Green observes, “What surprises me the most is how racist Vermont is… In 2021, Vermont is still the second whitest state in the union. That's not by accident. …Why are people over the decades not staying? There's a reason there. And we have to deal with that.”
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic, a former columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. Her latest book is Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, in which she explores why people, including former friends of hers, are drawn to strongmen and nationalist movements.
On this Vermont Conversation, she discusses her recent articles about how social media poses a threat to democracy, how and why Russia interferes in US elections, and what should be done about it, and how to deal with insurrectionists who live among us.
Jessie Diggins is the fastest woman in the world. At least on cross-country skis.
Earlier this month, Diggins, a Minnesota native who trains in Vermont, became the first American woman to win the overall World Cup cross-country skiing title. Only American cross-country skier Bill Koch, who won the men’s title 39 years ago, has accomplished this. This is just the latest first for the trailblazing Diggins: In January, she became the first American to win the Tour de Ski, a multiday ski race modeled on the Tour de France bike race. And in 2018, she and teammate Kikkan Randall became the first American women to win an Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing.
As Diggins smashes records, she has become an icon for other female skiers around the country and the world. Her explosive speed is matched by her fun-loving public persona. She often races with paint and glitter on her face and is routinely captured on podiums jumping for joy. Diggins has also been praised for her candor about her struggles with an eating disorder, which she recounts in her new memoir, Brave Enough.
Jessie Diggins and several of her teammates on the US women’s cross-country team were guests on the Vermont Conversation in January 2018, just days before they left for the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang. The finals of the women’s team sprint featured what many say was the most exciting moment of the 2018 Olympics. On the final lap, Diggins was locked in a 3-way contest with the top female skiers from Sweden and Norway. As Diggins battled to break past her two opponents, the announcers from NBC Sports screamed themselves hoarse capturing the thrill of the moment.
“Here comes Diggins!,” as the NBC announcers shouted over the roar of the crowd, could well be a motto for Jessie Diggins as she continues to smash records. She talks with us about her skiing, going public about her struggle with bulimia, the social and political causes that she is championing, and just what was going through her mind as she lunged for Olympic gold.
As more Americans get vaccinated against Covid-19, both President Biden and Gov. Scott are predicting that life will return to normal by this summer. But now a new public health threat is emerging: people who refuse to get vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy may become a risk factor for getting infected by Covid-19.
There is a striking partisan dimension to vaccine hesitancy: in a recent CBS News poll, a third of Republicans said that they would not be vaccinated — versus 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure.
Why are some people reluctant to get vaccinated against a deadly disease? What works to change people's minds?
For answers, we turned to Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is also a columnist for the Wall Street Journal writing on behavior change. Ariely studies the irrational ways people behave and designs ways to make human behavior more rational.
A battle over the future of the Vermont Republican Party is being waged by supporters and opponents of former President Donald Trump. At stake is the future of the Vermont GOP and whether many top Republican officials will continue to be associated with it.
Vermont state party officials have strongly supported Trump. In the aftermath of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot by Trump supporters that left five people dead, Vermont Republican Party Chair Deb Billado issued a statement condemning the violence as “wrong, immoral and against the fundamental principles that we hold dear.” But she did not mention or blame Trump, and compared the Capitol riots to unrest at racial justice protests last summer. By contrast, Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott called for Trump to resign or be removed, and many of Vermont’s Republican lawmakers called for the resignation of the leadership of the Vermont GOP.
To discuss the struggle over the future of the state Republican Party, we’re joined by Republican Rep. Scott Beck, who represents St. Johnsbury in the Vermont legislature, and Kolby LaMarche, a Champlain College student who is the former chair of the Burlington Republican Party. Party chair Deb Billado did not respond to multiple interview requests.
The Governor’s Institutes of Vermont (GIV), a four-decade old high school enrichment program that more than 10,000 Vermont students have attended, has had to improvise its way through the Covid-19 pandemic. For help, it turned to a professional improviser: Elizabeth Frascoia is a Vermont native and professional jazz trombonist and singer who has performed with pop stars like Michael Bolton, and on Saturday Night Live, American Idol, the Tonight Show and at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. In January, she took over the reins of GIV as executive director.
Frascoia is helping to steer the program through its second summer of remote programming. Governor’s Institutes have traditionally been held on college campuses throughout the state, from a program in global issues and youth action at Landmark College in Brattleboro to a math institute at the University of Vermont, as well institutes in the arts, engineering, health sciences, and other focus areas.
This year, the institutes have been rebranded as “immersions” with the promise that they will carry out GIV’s commitment to provide students with “high-impact, world-class learning opportunities that stimulate their personal growth and expand their aspirations, perspectives, and career horizons.” The application deadline is April 1, 2021.
Frascoia discusses her journey from growing up in Woodstock, to studying neuroscience at Harvard University, launching a career as a world traveling jazz musician, to returning to Vermont to lead GIV, the oldest governor’s school in the country, as it improvises its way into the future.
One year ago this month, when the pandemic arrived in Vermont, Gov. Scott ordered schools to end in-person instruction. Thus began the odyssey of the Class of Covid-19. In the Harwood Union Unified School District (HUUSD), which covers Waterbury, Duxbury, Moretown, Warren, Waitsfield and Fayston, its five elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school emptied out and all instruction moved online. The classrooms remained empty through August. Graduation at Harwood Union High School (HUHS) was a drive-through affair. Last fall, HUUSD students returned to their schools to begin a year of hybrid learning, with younger students spending up to four days in the classroom, and high school students attending two days in person, and three days online.
I know these schools well: I have two children who are graduates of the Harwood schools, and I served on the school board of Harwood Union High School. These are schools that I’m used to seeing teeming with children. The sight of them empty last spring, as if suspended in an endless summer, was strange and unsettling.
Wednesday marks a milestone: The teachers of HUUSD are getting vaccinated at a clinic set up at the Crossett Brook Middle School, part of a new statewide effort to vaccinate educators. By this fall, the hope is that students will return full-time to the classrooms of the Harwood district.
I invited several members of the Harwood community to reflect on this pandemic school year. Jonah Ibson is an English teacher at HUHS, and Katie Sullivan is a fourth grade teacher at Warren Elementary School. Gavin Thomsen is a senior at HUHS.
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced Vermont to transform how it responds to homelessness. The state has garnered national attention for its use of hotels to house people who are experiencing homelessness. The unprecedented effort, which began last spring, was initially driven by the need to minimize the risk of contagion posed by congregate homeless shelters. Some 2,700 unhoused Vermonters are now living in hotels, where they also receive social and health services. However, the hotels have also struggled with a rise in criminal activity.
How do Vermonters end up being homeless, and what is the long-term solution to homelessness post-pandemic? Three frontline service providers join us to discuss the landscape of homelessness in Vermont: Paul Dragon, executive director of Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity (CVOEO), a community action agency; Dawn Little, a street outreach worker in the Barre-Montpelier area for Good Samaritan Haven, a 35 year old shelter in Barre; and Ken Russell, director of Another Way, a drop-in center for people with mental health challenges Montpelier.
In the second half of the program, Sean Elsass, a transgender Vermonter who formerly worked in corrections, shares his experience of being homeless. Elsass first publicly shared his story in January at a hearing on homelessness in the Vermont Legislature.
“Everyone is really a paycheck away [from] homelessness,” says Elsass.
This week, the Vermont Legislature is taking up some long overdue business. Ninety years ago, lawmakers authorized a eugenics program that allowed the state to sterilize and institutionalize people it deemed “unfit” or “defective.” In practice, the primary targets of this racist campaign were Indigenous people, French-Canadians, and people who were mixed-race, poor or disabled.
In the three decades of the so-called Vermont Eugenics Survey, there were 253 documented cases of sterilization, though the actual number may be far higher. The campaign of involuntary sterilization and family separation has had a lasting impact on targeted communities, particularly Vermont’s Native American people.
The House General and Military Affairs Committee is now hearing testimony in support of a joint resolution that would formally apologize for the sterilization program. Several dozen states had similar programs of sterilization in the last century. If the legislative resolution passes, it is believed that Vermont will become the first state to apologize for these actions.
This week's guests are:
- Nancy Gallagher, an independent scholar and author of Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State.
- Amanda Gokee, a reporter for VTDigger who is Native American and is covering the legislative resolution.
- Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe in Vermont, whose family had personal experience with Vermont’s sterilization campaign.
- Rep. John Killacky, D-South Burlington, a legislative sponsor of the official apology.
“You need to apologize before you can fix something and heal it,” says Chief Stevens. “Until you recognize it, you’re either in denial or don’t want to face what happened.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic grinds into its second year and dominates headlines, another epidemic rages in silence, hardly mentioned in the major media: opioid overdoses. A new study indicates that nationally, emergency department visits for opioid overdoses were up 29% last year. According to the CDC, 81,003 people died from drug overdoses in the 12-month period ending last June: a 20% increase and the highest annual number of fatal overdoses ever recorded in the U.S.
Vermont is also breaking overdose records: 134 Vermonters died from overdose deaths as of November 2020, compared to 99 deaths in that period the previous year.
Covid-19 is playing a role in this overdose crisis. Isolation, economic turmoil, and stress can all trigger relapse and addiction. At the same time, many support systems and treatment options have become unavailable.
We discuss the overdose crisis and possible solutions, including drug legalization and harm reduction efforts, with Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan, anti-poverty and opioid policy advocate Brenda Siegel, Rep. Selene Colburn and Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah Fair George. And we hear about the personal experience of addiction, homelessness and recovery with Jedediah Popp, co-director for the Windham County Consortium on Substance Use, who is in recovery from substance use disorder.
A striking feature of the Covid-19 pandemic is the disparities in who contracts the disease, who dies from it, and now, who gets vaccinated. Around the country, white people are getting vaccinated at higher rates than people of color. In Mississippi, Black people have received 15% of the Covid vaccinations, but they account for 38% of coronavirus cases and 42% of deaths in the state. This disparity is also evident in Vermont: 9.1% of white Vermonters have received the vaccine, 7.3% of Hispanic Vermonters, 6.6% of Asian Vermonters and 6.1% of Black Vermonters — and only 1.9% of Native American Vermonters.
Natalia Linos has argued that prioritizing vaccines based on age “risks building in inequities by race and ethnicity.” Linos is a social epidemiologist and executive director at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. She has worked internationally with the U.N. Development Programme and as a scientific advisor in the Commissioner’s Office at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In 2020, Linos took her advocacy into a new arena: she ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Massachusetts to replace outgoing Rep. Joe Kennedy. On this Vermont Conversation, Linos discusses Covid-19 disparities and why she believes science should play a larger role in politics.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, most Vermonters would have been hard pressed to name the state’s health commissioner. Today, Vermonters can easily identify Dr. Mark Levine’s familiar baritone voice as he discusses the latest strategies for containing the pandemic in twice-weekly press conferences with Gov. Phil Scott. These strategies have contributed to Vermont having the lowest Covid death rate in the nation. However, Covid continues to take a significant toll: as of February 9, about 10,000 Vermonters have recovered from Covid-19, 186 people have died, 53 people are currently hospitalized, and cases are now rising in Vermont.
Dr. Mark Levine is a graduate of the University of Rochester medical school. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Vermont and associate dean for graduate medical education before Gov. Scott named him Vermont’s commissioner of health in March 2017.
“Much as we have tried to be the island of Vermont within the continental U.S., … that’s been a real challenge,” says Dr. Levine. He remains very concerned about the spread of coronavirus variants such as strains from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, but asserts that Vermont health workers are "energized" to expand the vaccination campaign.
Levine says that the approval of vaccines this fall was a success, but bemoans the fact that the rollout “was punted from the federal level to the states.”
”The part that we’ve fallen down on as a country,” he says, is “how each state would get their vaccine and eventually get it into the arms of people who need it.”
When Tabitha Moore founded the Rutland chapter of the NAACP in 2016, she didn’t imagine that advocating for racial justice in her community would lead to its opposite: a torrent of bigotry and hate. Following threats and harassment directed at her children and herself, Moore, a sixth generation Vermonter, announced last year that she was stepping down as head of the NAACP chapter that she founded.
Moore is not alone. VTDigger's Emma Cotton published an article this week detailing how three women of color, who are all community leaders in southern Vermont, are leaving their leadership positions following multiple incidents of racist harassment. Moore and one of the other women featured in the article have felt forced to move from their homes.
“Black women are leaving positions of power and it’s not because we are weak. None of us are weak. It is a matter of self-preservation,” says Moore.
Tabitha Moore talked on The Vermont Conversation about how her racial justice work in Vermont ended up making her a target of relentless campaign of racism, and what needs to be done if Vermont is to be a safe and accepting place for people of color.
“Expecting Black people to fix racism is like asking the environment to fix global warming,” says Moore. “The solution is that white people need to hold other white people accountable.”
Hate is on the rise. Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a rare National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warning of the threat from home-grown extremists, anti-government militias, far-right hate groups and white supremacists. This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual report, The Year in Hate and Extremism 2020. The report documents the existence of 838 hate groups around the country, including 30 hate groups in New England. It includes a Hate Map, which shows the location of all the groups. SPLC says the number of hate groups are “a barometer of extremism in the country.”
“The insurrection at the Capitol was the culmination of years of right-wing radicalization,” said Susan Corke, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “Most recently, it was the product of Donald Trump’s support for and encouragement of radicalized individuals and groups to buy into conspiracy theories about a ‘stolen election.’”
Cassie Miller, Senior Research Analyst with SPLC, discusses the state of hate from around the US to New England. “My biggest worry is what we’re seeing right now is the growth of a mass social movement that is anti-democratic,” she tells The Vermont Conversation. “It’s not going to go away just because we have a new president.”
About 1 in 10 people — nationally and in Vermont — live below the poverty line. Low-income people are everywhere.
There’s a pernicious myth that poverty is a personal failure or a character flaw. The myth goes that if people were just willing to work harder, they could pull themselves up. The reality is that the vast majority of people in poverty are working. And poverty defies stereotypes.
“The face of poverty in America is a white child,” says Joanne Goldblum, CEO and founder of the National Diaper Bank Network. Goldblum is co-author, with journalist Colleen Shaddox, of the new book, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty. She notes that nearly half of American children are poor or low-income. The authors argue that poverty is not a personal failing, but the result of bad policy — and it can be solved. They provide a roadmap for the Biden administration to eradicate poverty for millions of Americans through policy changes.
This has been a year of reckoning for American journalism. In the wake of the racial justice protests last summer following the police murder of George Floyd, several leading journalism outlets reflected on their own roles regarding race and racism. In September, the Los Angeles Times apologized for its history of racism, which it detailed in a series of articles. In December, the Kansas City Star apologized for its own racism and published a series of articles that addressed how the paper “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.”
The demand for reckoning and reflection has also come to Vermont. Last summer, racial justice activists in Burlington burned copies of Seven Days in anger over how a protest encampment was covered. This week in Vermont, a letter was released signed by over 50 people, including former Governors Kunin, Dean and Shumlin, addressed to the Vermont media. The letter stated:
“We hope you will engage in internal conversations within your organizations about the issues of sexism, gender bias and racism in reporting, and commit to the challenging work of reckoning with the unconscious biases that affect our public narratives every day.”
VTDigger editor in chief Anne Galloway responded to the letter, conceding, “I am frankly embarrassed that our organization has been part of the problem.”
We discuss sexism and racism in the Vermont media with two media leaders and two signatories of the letter to the Vermont media. Alex MacLean, partner and president of Leonine Public Affairs, and Kiah Morris, Movement Politics Director for Rights and Democracy Vermont and a Commissioner for the Vermont Commission on Women, both signed the letter to the Vermont media. Cathy Resmer, deputy publisher of Seven Days, and Anne Galloway, founder and editor of VTDigger, acknowledged the need for change.
As former president Donald Trump trades the White House for Mar-a-Lago, his luxury club in Florida, he leaves in his wake a Republican Party in disarray. Trump is threatening to support primaries against Republican politicians who he believes were disloyal to him. State parties are sharply divided, such as in Arizona, where the state Republican Party has doubled down on Trump and is planning to censure Republican Governor Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump. In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who supported Joe Biden and has been a frequent Trump critic, has slammed the Vermont Republican Party for “white supremacy dominating, racial inequity, and so forth.”
To talk about where Republicans go from after Trump, we’re joined by Stuart Stevens. For 25 years, Stevens was the lead strategist and media consultant to top Republican politicians, helping to elect presidents, senators, congressman, and governors. He was the strategist for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, and he worked on George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns. Stevens, who lives in Vermont, is a senior advisor to The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republican operatives who opposed Trump. He is the author of the bestselling book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
Is the GOP a threat to democracy? “Of course it is,” replies Stevens. “I don’t see how you can argue that.”
Joe Biden is now the 46th president of the United States, and Donald Trump becomes a figure in history. But where and how does Trump fit into that history? Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, explains that Trump now defines a new kind of media-savvy — but ultimately failed — strongman leader. She is the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present."Trump is a 21st century strongman. He’s a showman and manipulator," says Ben-Ghiat. "Trump mastered misinformation and connecting emotionally with people...But his populist stuff was just B.S."
American democracy is enduring an unprecedented test. An American president, Donald Trump, capped off months of denying the reality that he had lost the 2020 election by inciting his followers to rise up and vent their rage against a co-equal branch of government, the U.S. Congress, and Vice President Mike Pence, who certified the result. Thousands of Trump supporters, mostly angry white men, mounted a violent insurrection and laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the counting of electoral votes to certify the election of Joe Biden.
These American terrorists parroted Trump’s exhortations that something had been stolen from them. Symbols of the confederacy and white nationalism were everywhere in the insurrectionist mob. This was Trump’s last stand, and its racist underpinnings were on full and ugly display. To get some perspective on the insurrection, the enduring scourge of white supremacy, and the 92nd birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King, we turned to Rev. Dr. Arnold Isidore Thomas, pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Jericho. Rev. Thomas is moderator of the Racism in America Forums and former conference minister of the Vermont Conference of the United Church of Christ. He is the first black denominational leader in the state.
“I believe America is in the midst of a political war,” says Rev. Thomas. “We as a nation are not far removed from the civil unrest that sparked the war between the states back in 1861.”
President Donald Trump needed help to spread the lie that he won the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in fact won the election by seven million popular votes and prevailed in the Electoral College 306-232. For Trump to maintain his fantasy and overturn the election, he needed lawmakers to elevate the fraud. He found plenty of Republican accomplices. 139 House members — more than half the House Republican caucus — and eight senators voted for one or both efforts to block the counting of some electoral votes and disenfranchise millions of Americans. The formal counting of electoral votes was ultimately temporarily halted when terrorists incited by President Trump stormed the Capitol.
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) and Rep. Peter Welch (D) were both forced to take cover during the assault. They spoke about that experience, and Trump’s legacy, on the Vermont Conversation.
The Trump presidency, says Welch, has been "a catasrophe." Leahy says that he believes Trump “will be remembered in history as a disaster to our constitution, one who has tried to subvert our laws and government, a person who has lied constantly, and finally, was impeached twice because of that.”
The climate crisis continues to break records. 2020 and 2016 are officially tied as the hottest years in recorded history, and the last six years are the hottest six on record. The impacts of these extremes are evident. The Atlantic hurricane season saw a record 30 named storms, and the worst wildfire season ever in the Western U.S. blackened over 10 million acres. Globally, the Arctic is melting at a record pace and historic wildfires swept Australia, Siberia and elsewhere.
Bill McKibben, founder of the global grassroots climate action group 350.org and a contributing writer to the New Yorker, has long been at the center of the climate fight, raising awareness with his writing and leading protest movements. MicKibben discuss the deepening climate crisis, the state of the fossil fuel divestment campaign, and what climate actions he wants to see the Biden Administration pursue in its first 100 days.
The historic victories of Georgia Senate candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff shift control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats. Warnock will be the first black Democrat to ever represent the South. This victory capped an enormous grassroots organizing effort to mobilize voters, especially women and BIPOC communities, led by Stacey Abrams and her groups, New Georgia Project and Fair Fight.
Another less visible but powerful force was also at work in Georgia and other swing states: a grassroots movement to back candidates who supported the “care economy” by expanding child care and services for the elderly and disabled. Vermont journalist Sue Halpern, a staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote about this powerful but largely under-the-radar movement. She discusses the movements behind the stunning Georgia electoral results, as well as what her 92-year-old mother taught her about the 2020 general election.
When Steve Goodman first appeared on the Vermont Conversation in March, he described the coronavirus as a tsunami about to overwhelm us. Steve Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, is an associate dean at Stanford Medical School, where he is also a professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine. His words were prescient: nine months later, over 340,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and at least 20 million people have been infected. Vermont, once an outlier with few Covid deaths and infections, now has daily averages of over 80 new cases and two deaths.
Steve returns to the podcast this week to share his thoughts on this Year of the Pandemic: where we are, how we got here, and how it ends.
A new national report on the current experience of families with children reveals that Vermont ranks first in the nation for family housing stability and health insurance, but mental health and food security show signs of trouble. The annual Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation reveals that 22% of Vermonters with children reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless in the previous week, compared to the national rate of 21%. Some 11% of Vermont respondents say there is sometimes or often not enough food to eat, compared to the national rate of 14%. We discuss the impact on Vermont families of the Covid-19 pandemic with three statewide advocates:
- Sarah Teel, research director, Voices for Vermont Children
- Faye Mack, advocacy & education director, Hunger Free Vermont
- Erhard Mahnke, Coordinator, Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition
This week, Vermont passed milestones of both despair and hope. On a somber note, Vermont saw its 100th death from Covid-19 since the pandemic began in the state nine months ago. On the other side of the split screen was a hopeful milestone: On Tuesday, an emergency department nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center became the first person in Vermont to receive the new Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer that just received an emergency use authorization from the FDA. Thousands of Vermonters will be vaccinated by the end of this month.
Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine observed, “This is a pivotal moment, one that marks the beginning of the end of the pandemic.” But he tempered his message by noting that it will take months for the vaccine to bring Covid-19 under control, and people must continue to be vigilant. Levine warned, “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of everyone keeping up their efforts to protect themselves and prevent spread of the virus.”
On this week’s Vermont Conversation, we talk with Christine Finley, the immunization program manager at the Vermont Department of Health, who is helping to coordinate the statewide program to vaccinate Vermonters against Covid-19.
When Taylor Small was elected Vermont state representative from Winooski last month, she made history. Small will be the first out transgender person elected to the Vermont State Legislature, and just the fifth out trans state legislator in the nation. Small, who is currently the director of the Health and Wellness program at the Pride Center of Vermont, is part of a so-called "rainbow wave" of victories for LGBTQ candidates around the country. The number of out LGBTQ state legislators increased from 161 this year to 175 who will be in office in 2021. In Vermont, Becca Balint, the first openly LGBTQ state senator, is poised to become Senate president pro tem.
Taylor Small is conscious of her role as a trailblazer and what her victory means for other LGBTQ people. "My goal,” says Small, “is now that the door is open, I'm going to hold it open for those who are yet to come."
When the Vermont Legislature convenes on Jan. 6, 2021, Rep. Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, is poised to become the speaker of the House. She will succeed Mitzi Johnson, who lost her seat in the Nov. 3 general election. Krowinski was first elected to the Legislature in 2012 and served most recently as the house majority leader. When not in the Legislature, she is executive director of Emerge Vermont, an organization that recruits and trains female Democratic candidates to run for political office. Krowinski previously worked as chief of staff to former speaker Gaye Symington. Krowinski will become just the fourth woman to serve as speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives: she is preceded by Johnson, the speaker from 2016 to 2020, Gaye Symington, the speaker from 2005 to 2009, and Consuela Bailey, Vermont's first female House leader, who served as speaker from 1953 to 1955.
Krowinski will become part of a historic all-female leadership team in the Legislature, joining Senate President Pro Tem-elect Becca Balint and Lt. Gov.-elect Molly Gray. "I’m so honored to be part of this point in history," says the incoming speaker. "We are modeling and showing women and young girls in this state that you have a path to be in a leadership role." Krowinski says that when groups of young girls come into the Statehouse, “my favorite thing to do is take them into the House chamber and give them all a chance to stand behind the podium and look out."
"This could be yours," Krowinski tells the girls as they peer out over the ornate chamber. "There is a path for you if you want it and if you want to lead."
Allen Gilbert has had a front row seat to historic changes in Vermont that influenced the nation. As executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union from 2004 to 2016, he was involved in the groundbreaking legal battles that led to the state's landmark marriage equality decision. He was in the courthouse with 8 year old Amanda Brigham and her parents for the landmark Brigham case that transformed Vermont's way of funding education. And he has worked in the more elusive fight for universal health care. He writes about being a participant and witness to this history in his new book, Equal is Equal, Fair is Fair: Vermont's Quest for Equity in Education Funding, Same-Sex Marriage, and Health Care.
When Sen. Becca Balint is sworn is as the Vermont Senate’s new president pro tem next month, she will shatter not one, but two glass ceilings over the state’s highest legislative body: Balint will become the first woman and the first openly gay pro tem in the state’s history. "I am a woman, I am an openly gay woman, I am a mom, I am a Vermonter," says Balint. "When I walk into that building [the Statehouse] though...the biggest weight that I feel is wanting to do the work that Vermonters have sent me there to do and make lives easier for people on the ground."
Balint is a former teacher who was elected to the Vermont State Senate in 2014, becoming its first openly gay member. Her Democratic Senate colleagues elected her majority leader two years later. Balint grew up in upstate New York and attended Smith College, then received a masters degree in education from Harvard and another masters in history from UMass Amherst. She and her wife have two children and live in Brattleboro. Balint is part of a first ever all-female leadership team that will run the Vermont Senate, which includes incoming Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, Majority Leader Alison Clarkson and Asst. Majority Leader Cheryl Hooker.
Starting November 6, 2020, all Vermont Conversation programs can be found at VTDigger, Vermont’s nonprofit news source: https://vtdigger.org/vermontconversation/
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Sen. Edward Kennedy, who died in 2009, was an iconic figure in American politics, part of an American political dynasty that has been rocked by fame and tragedy. Compared to his brothers Robert F. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy, Ted was considered a lightweight, who rode their coattails into the Senate in 1962 at the age of 30. Neal Gabler, author of the new biography, "Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975," says that following the assassinations of his brothers, Ted Kennedy became the leading voice of American liberalism, championing the war on poverty, civil rights, and the antiwar movement. But his moral authority and his presidential ambitions were seriously damaged by his involvement in a fatal car accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969.
The Kennedy family saga marked a milestone this year: Joe Kennedy III, grandson of RFK, lost to incumbent Sen. Ed Markey in a primary, becoming the first Kennedy ever to lose a Massachusetts election. Could this spell the end of the Kennedy dynasty? Gabler says it's possible "if the country doesn't want to give voice to the voiceless or power to powerless."
Kesha Ram is used to breaking barriers. At the age of 34, she already has an impressive list of firsts: she was elected to the Vermont House in 2008 at age 22, becoming the youngest member of that body. Earlier this month, she was elected to be a state senator from Chittenden County, Vermont’s most populous county. Ram, who was born to an Indian father and Jewish American mother, will become the first woman of color to serve in the Vermont Senate.
"I want to I give credit to Donald Trump," Ram says. Prior to Trump's election, "nobody felt like we had any racial justice issues in Vermont. After 2016, a lot of people woke up to the racial reality of a lot of Americans and a lot of Vermonters. ...Now I feel I have the wind at my back to advance racial, economic and social justice issues."
How can it be that with all the advances of science and medicine, the U.S. is fighting a virus with the old-fashioned tools of isolation and face masks? How and when will the Covid-19 pandemic end, and what will be the lasting impact? Nicholas Christakis tackles these issues in his latest book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Christakis, who lives in Norwich, Vermont, is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale.
“I’m ashamed of how badly we have done,” Christakis says of the U.S. response. “We should have been preparing the American people for dealing with a very serious calamity that was ahead. We did nothing to prepare in a meaningful way. Our leadership failed us.”
Could Donald Trump launch a nuclear strike before leaving office? He could, and no one could stop him, writes Vermont journalist Garrett Graff this week in Wired. Looking ahead, Donald Trump’s post-presidency “would almost certainly be unlike anything America—or the world—has ever experienced,” Graff argues. For months, Graff has been interviewing national experts and gaming out scenarios about what Trump might do in the 60 days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, and what he could do afterward. It is an unsettling picture, ranging from the potential to wage war to destroying records and going on a “pardon-palooza.”
Graff is a contributing editor at Wired and the former editor of Politico. His bestselling book, Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die, is now a series on VICE TV that debuted this week.
Treason. Traitor. These are some of the most serious accusations one can level, especially in politics. Yet it has now become commonplace to hear these terms bandied about against political adversaries. Those who President Donald Trump has branded as "traitors" include President Barack Obama, Robert Mueller's investigation, the New York Times, the mainstream media, former FBI director Andrew McCabe, and all Democrats.
"This transition is going to be quite ugly," says Carlton Larson, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at University of California, Davis. Larson is the author of a new book, On Treason. He discusses what treason is — and is not — and explains why there has only been one person indicted in America for treason. He also weighs in on whether Trump's actions in cozying up to foreign adversaries are treasonous.
President-Elect Joe Biden declared in his acceptance speech that racial justice would be a key focus of his administration. What is the state of racial justice now and what should racial justice work focus on? How pervasive is white supremacy, and what should be done about armed groups such as Slate Ridge in Vermont? To talk about this, we turn to Kiah Morris, who served as a Vermont State Representative from Bennington from 2014-2018. She was the second African-American woman to be elected to the legislature in Vermont history. She resigned in 2018 following racist harassment from a self-avowed white nationalist in Bennington. Kiah Morris is now Movement Politics Director in Vermont for the social justice advocacy organization Rights & Democracy.
The 2020 election was historic. Voter turnout records were smashed: Some 160 million Americans voted — the largest number ever, comprising 67% of eligible voters, the highest turnout rate in 120 years. In Vermont, over 360,000 voters turned out, exceeding the previous record of 327,000 votes cast in 2008. Former Vice President Joe Biden won Vermont with 66% of the vote (up from 56% for Hillary Clinton in 2016), while President Trump received 30% of the Vermont vote, the same proportion as he received in 2016. Nationally, Biden received the highest number of votes ever by a U.S. presidential candidate, topping Barack Obama’s 2008 total, and currently has a 3.5 million vote lead over President Trump.
In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott was elected to a third term with a stunning 40 percentage-point victory over Democratic nominee David Zuckerman. And in another historic result, Molly Gray was elected as just the fourth woman to hold the office of lieutenant governor.
We discuss the national election results with Stuart Stevens, a former top strategist for George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns and also a lead strategist for the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. In the 2020 race, Stevens was part of The Lincoln Project, a group of Republican strategists who worked to defeat Trump. Stevens is author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
We dissect the results of the Vermont election with Anne Galloway, founder and editor of VTDigger, and Xander Landen, VTDigger’s political reporter.
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc125-election.mp3
The 2020 election is historic. Former vice president Joe Biden received the highest number of votes ever by a US presidential candidate, topping Barack Obama’s 2008 total. Biden currently has a 3 million vote lead over President Trump and as of Wednesday afternoon, appears to be headed for an electoral vote victory. But…there was no blue wave. And the entire election was far closer than anyone thought.
In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott was re-elected to a third term with a stunning 40 percentage point victor over Democrat David Zuckerman. And in another historic victory, Molly Gray was elected as just the fourth woman to hold the office of Lieutenant Governor.
We discuss the national election results with Stuart Stevens, a former top strategist for George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns and also a lead strategist for 2012 Republican presidential candidate. In the 2020 race, Stevens was part of The Lincoln Project, a group of Republican strategists who worked to defeat Trump. Stevens is author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
We dissect the results of the Vermont election with Anne Galloway, founder and editor of VTDigger, and Xander Landen, VTDigger's political reporter.
“We have a far-right extreme majority on the Supreme Court,” asserts James Lyall, executive director of the Vermont ACLU. “At no point in our lifetime has the Supreme Court been so far out of step with where most of the country is.”
This week, just days before a national election, the Republican-led Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The confirmation was rammed through in record time just four years after Republicans refused to give a hearing to President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, because they insisted that eight months before an election was too soon. Barrett is now part of a 6-3 conservative majority, the most conservative court since the 1930s.
We examine the implications of the new Supreme Court in key areas: reproductive rights, civil liberties and immigrant rights, and how this could affect Vermont.
Lynn Paltrow, executive director, National Advocates for Pregnant Women
Ghita Schwarz, senior attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights
James Lyall, executive director, Vermont ACLU
https://content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc124-supco.mp3
“We have a far right extreme majority on the Supreme Court,” asserts James Lyall, executive director of the Vermont ACLU. “At no point in our lifetime has the Supreme Court been so far out of step with from where most of the country is.”
This week, just days before a national election, the Republican-led Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The confirmation was rammed through in record time just four years after Republicans refused to give a hearing to President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, because they insisted that eight months before an election was too soon. Barrett is now part of a 6-3 conservative majority, the most conservative court since the 1930s.
We examine the implications of the new Supreme Court in key areas. Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, discusses the future of reproductive rights. Ghita Schwarz, a senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, talks about the implications for civil liberties and immigrant rights. And Vermont ACLU executive director James Lyall discusses how the new Supreme Court majority could affect Vermont.
Hunger is growing in Vermont. The rate of Vermonters experiencing food insecurity has gone from 1 in 10 before the pandemic to 1 in 4 today. Last summer, people waited hours in line for mass food distributions around the state, but those distributions are ending. A groundbreaking new program has just launched called Everyone Eats, in which Vermont restaurants are paid to provide food for Vermonters in need, achieving the twin goals of employing food workers and feeding Vermonters. However, this feeding program will end in December unless Congress reauthorizes emergency funding.
John Sayles, CEO of Vermont Foodbank, Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, and Jean Hamilton, program coordinator for Everyone Eats discuss the changing face of the hunger crisis and how it is being addressed.
“This isn’t just illegitimate; it’s a caricature of illegitimacy,” tweeted Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy during the confirmation process of President Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who is expected to be confirmed just days before the 2020 presidential election. Leahy says that Barrett’s appointment “diminishes [the Supreme Court’s] moral authority.” Leahy also discusses his views on court packing and the rising threat to abortion rights.
Leahy is the last of the Senate’s “Watergate babies,” the Democrats who were elected in November 1974, just months after President Richard Nixon resigned in scandal. Despite current challenges, Leahy remains hopeful about the future. “I really do believe in our better angels,” he muses. “We can do better and get over this.”
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc122-leahy.mp3
“This isn’t just illegitimate; it’s a caricature of illegitimacy,” tweeted Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy during the confirmation process of President Trump’s US Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who is expected to be confirmed just days before the 2020 presidential election. Leahy says that Barrett’s appointment “diminishes [the Supreme Court’s] moral authority.” Leahy also discusses his views on court packing and the rising threat to abortion rights.
Leahy is the last of the Senate’s “Watergate babies,” the Democrats who were elected in November 1974, just months after Pres. Richard Nixon resigned in scandal. Despite current challenges, Leahy remains hopeful about the future. “I really do believe in our better angels,” he muses. “We can do better and get over this.”
Is fascism on the rise under President Donald Trump? Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the bestselling 2018 book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,discusses the fascist tactics used by Trump to maintain power. Demonizing immigrants, delegitimizing political opponents, mobilizing paramilitary groups, undermining experts, attacking the press, and lying incessantly until there is no accepted truth are all classic tactics used by fascist leaders throughout history. Stanley, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Washington Post,says, “Normalization is what I fear most. …We’ve normalized law breaking in the White House on a stunning level, corruption on a scale we’ve never seen before.” He asserts, “Right now, the idea that we’re a law and order state is a dim memory.”
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc121-stanley.mp3
Is fascism on the rise under President Donald Trump? Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the bestselling 2018 book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, discusses the fascist tactics used by Trump to maintain power. Demonizing immigrants, delegitimizing political opponents, mobilizing paramilitary groups, undermining experts, attacking the press, and lying incessantly until there is no accepted truth are all classic tactics used by fascist leaders throughout history. Stanley, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Washington Post, says, “Normalization is what I fear most. …We’ve normalized law breaking in the White House on a stunning level, corruption on a scale we’ve never seen before.” He asserts, “Right now, the idea that we’re a law and order state is a dim memory.”
What is at stake in the 2020 election? Is democracy on the ballot? Howard Dean has a unique perspective that extends from the Green Mountains to the nation. He served as governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003, after which he ran unsuccessfully for president in 2004, and then served as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009. He has worked as a political consultant and commentator in the years since. “What’s going on is just shocking,” he says. “We’re in really serious trouble. When you abandon the rule of law as a democracy, your democracy is gone. And it’s going to be gone before people realize if we don’t turn this thing around.” Dean also discusses his thoughts on running for office again if Sen. Patrick Leahy does not run for re-election in 2022, or Sen. Bernie Sanders retires in 2024.
Former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin, who just turned 87, remains a keen participant in politics. Kunin is the first and only woman to be elected governor in Vermont, serving from 1985 to 1991. She was also deputy secretary of education and ambassador to Switzerland in the Clinton Administration.
Kunin continues to be actively engaged in urging women to run for office. She is founder of the Vermont chapter of Emerge, which trains and supports Democratic women candidates. She speaks and lobbies in support of issues such as death with dignity, universal pre-K and paid family leave. She is the author of four books, most recently, Coming of Age: My Journey to the 80s.
Kunin, the first Jewish woman governor in the U.S., was born in Zurich, Switzerland. Her family emigrated to the U.S. as the Nazis began to sweep across Europe. She views President Trump’s signal to white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups to “stand by” with deep concern. “This opens a Pandora’s Box that we’ve got to close as quickly as possible,” she warns. “This is not America.”
Gov. Madeleine Kunin
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vct119-kunin.mp3
Former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin, who just turned 87, remains a keen participant in politics. Kunin was the first and only woman to be elected governor in Vermont, serving from 1985 to 1991. She also served as deputy secretary of education and ambassador to Switzerland in the Clinton Administration.
Kunin continues to be actively engaged in urging women to run for office. She is the founder of the Vermont chapter of Emerge, which trains and supports Democratic women candidates. She speaks and lobbies in support of issues such as death with dignity, universal pre-K and paid family leave. She is the author of four books, most recently, Coming of Age: My Journey to the 80s.
Kunin, the first Jewish woman governor in the U.S., was born in Zurich, Switzerland. Her family emigrated to the U.S. as the Nazis began to sweep across Europe. She views President Trump’s signal to white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups to “stand by” with deep concern. “This opens a Pandora’s Box that we’ve got to close as quickly as possible,” she warns. “This is not America.”
Voter suppression could affect the outcome of the November presidential election. Will everyone get to vote in November, and will their votes be counted? "It could be a big mess," warns Sue Halpern, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine covering election security and a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. "There's so many reasons why the simple act of voting has become so fraught." She adds, "My biggest concern is that people won't be able to vote."
The presidential debate held on Sept. 30 will be remembered as the first time that an American president openly allied with white supremacists. “The remarks addressed to the Proud Boys stood out as a kind of bellwether of something pretty severe and to be taken seriously,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, the founder of the Center for Right Wing Studies at UC Berkeley and author of Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism. “He was giving them orders: Stand down, stand by. He was also giving orders to his army of pollwatchers … a force of intimidation. Trump last night crossed the Rubicon.”
Trump also claimed that former Vice President Joe Biden is a socialist and part of the “radical left.” John Judis, editor-at-large of Talking Points Memo and author of The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left, asserts that Biden “is not in any sense a doctrinaire socialist.” But he adds that Biden, who may be forced by the pandemic to expand national health care and other social welfare programs, might “tend toward policies that put the public first, that put the public interest before profits and that shift the balance of power in America.” Judis also says that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, together with Eugene V. Debs, are the “two great figures in the history of American socialism.”
Lawrence Rosenthal, founder, Center for Right Wing Studies at UC Berkeley; author, Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism
John Judis, editor-at-large, Talking Points Memo; author, The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc117-debate_v2.mp3
The presidential debate held on Sept. 30 will be remembered as the first time that an American president openly allied with white supremacists. “The remarks addressed to the Proud Boys stood out as a kind of bellwether of something pretty severe and to be taken seriously,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, the founder of the Center for Right Wing Studies at UC Berkeley and author of Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism. “He was giving them orders: Stand down, stand by. He was also giving orders to his army of pollwatchers…a force of intimidation. Trump last night crossed the Rubicon.”
Trump also claimed that former Vice President Joe Biden is a socialist and part of the “radical left.” John Judis, editor-at-large of Talking Points Memo and author of The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left, asserts that Biden “is not in any sense a doctrinaire socialist.” But he adds that Biden, who may be forced by the pandemic to expand national health care and other social welfare programs, might “tend toward policies that put the public first, that put the public interest before profits and that shift the balance of power in America.” Judis also says that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, together with Eugene V. Debs, are the "two great figures in the history of American socialism."
In the midst of a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 Americans, many people are wondering: Can the Centers for Disease Control be trusted? Dr. Howard Frumkin was a top CDC official under President Obama and is deeply alarmed by the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on the nation’s premier public health agency. “I don’t think any of us has ever seen the level of political interference and manipulation at the CDC that we are seeing these days,” he says. “We have to hope and pray for the sake of our country and the world that the CDC gets back to its position as an independent scientific agency so that we can trust all the advice coming from there.” Frumkin, the former dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, also discusses his new book, Planetary Health, which connects the climate crisis, extreme wildfires, health vulnerability in communities of color, and Covid-19.
Dr. Howard Frumkin, former director, National Center for Environmental Health, CDC; former dean, University of Washington School of Public Health,* co-editor, Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves*
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc116-frumkin.mp3
In the midst of a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 Americans, many people are wondering: can the Centers for Disease Control be trusted? Dr. Howard Frumkin was a top official at the Centers for Disease Control under President Obama and is deeply alarmed by the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on the nation’s premier public health agency. “I don’t think any of us has ever seen the level of political interference and manipulation at the CDC that we are seeing these days,” he says. “We have to hope and pray for the sake of our country and the world that the CDC gets back to its position as an independent scientific agency so that we can trust all the advice coming from there." Frumkin, the former dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, also discusses his new book, Planetary Health, which connects the climate crisis, extreme wildfires, health vulnerability in communities of color, and Covid-19.
“I don’t use the word ‘illegals’ to refer to human beings,” says Maria Hinojosa, a trailblazing Emmy Award-winning journalist who has been among the first Latina reporters at PBS, CBS, CNN, and NPR. “We have to actively get those voices out of our head, …break down that narrative and be active in creating a new one.” Hinojosa hosts the nationally syndicated radio show LatinoUSA on NPR and founded Futuro Media, a nonprofit newsroom which focuses on news from a POC perspective. Her new book is Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, in which she tells her own story of nearly being taken from her family when they came legally into the US in the early 1960s. Her personal experience informs her reporting on immigration, family separation and the human rights crisis on our borders.
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc115-hinojosa.mp3
“I don’t use the word ‘illegals’ to refer to human beings,” says Maria Hinojosa, a trailblazing Emmy Award-winning journalist who has been among the first Latina reporters at PBS, CBS, CNN, and NPR. “We have to actively get those voices out of our head, …break down that narrative and be active in creating a new one.” Hinojosa hosts the nationally syndicated radio show LatinoUSA on NPR and founded Futuro Media, a nonprofit newsroom which focuses on news from a POC perspective. Her new book is Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, in which she tells her own story of nearly being taken from her family when they came legally into the US in the early 1960s. Her personal experience informs her reporting on immigration, family separation and the human rights crisis on our borders.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale and a world renowned scholar of authoritarianism. His 2017 international bestseller, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, is a roadmap to how autocrats rise and democracies fall. Snyder’s newest book is Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary. He describes his near death experience following a missed medical diagnosis last year, and he eviscerates America’s failed coronavirus response. He calls on us to rethink the fundamental connection between health and freedom. “Other countries look at us and for the first time ever, they sincerely pity us, but also wonder, how can you have so much wealth… and kill so many people?” He observes, “We’re at a tipping point. To say that it can’t go on like this is an understatement. Things could get much worse than they are — and they might.” He notes that if Joe Biden is elected president, he will have to undertake “a redo of the 21st century.”
Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History, Yale University, author, On Tyranny and Our Malady
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc114-snyder.mp3
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale and a world renowned scholar of authoritarianism. His 2017 international bestseller, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, is a roadmap to how autocrats rise and democracies fall. "Post-truth," he writes, "is pre-fascism." Snyder's newest book is Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary. He describes his near-death experience following a missed medical diagnosis last year, and he eviscerates America’s failed coronavirus response. He calls on us to rethink the fundamental connection between health and freedom. "Other countries look at us and for the first time ever, they sincerely pity us, but also wonder, how can you have so much wealth... and kill so many people?" He observes, "We're at a tipping point. To say that it can't go on like this is an understatement. Things could get much worse than they are -- and they might."
Peter Welch has been Vermont's lone Congressional representative since 2006. Welch is the Chief Deputy Whip of the House Democratic Caucus and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. He’s a member of the House Progressive Caucus. Faced with the increasingly visible effects of the climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of white supremacy and other threats, Welch says, "I'm extremely worried. I've not seen anything like this in my lifetime." Welch has clashed with the Trump administration, and he is concerned about the president's attempts to undermine the integrity of the upcoming election. "We have a president," Welch says, "who does not believe in democracy and is doing everything he can to erode it and to kill it."
CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter has watched with amazement and alarm as the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News has grown ever more intertwined and interdependent. Fox primetime hosts float conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims, and Trump tweets and repeats them to the world. Stelter, who anchors the CNN show Reliable Sources, explores this unprecedented relationship in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Stelter discusses how Trump has spurned his own briefings in favor of whatever he hears on Fox News and, as the Washington Post writes, “expose[s] a collusion that threatens the pillars of our democracy.”
Brian Stelter, CNN chief media correspondent, author, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth
http://media.blubrry.com/deeperdig/content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc111-stelter.mp3
Ronald Braunstein was a musical prodigy, becoming the first American to win the prestigious Karajan International Conducting Competition in Berlin in 1979. He was leading top orchestras around the world and his career was soaring -- but his mental health was deteriorating. He was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder in his thirties. In 2010, he came to Vermont to lead an orchestra but was fired in less than a year. In 2011, his career in shambles, he and Caroline Whiddon, an orchestra administrator, decided to come out about his mental illness and turn his vulnerability into an opportunity. They formed the me2 Orchestra in Burlington, VT, the only orchestra in the world created by and for people living with mental illness and those who support them. Me2 now has orchestras in Burlington and Boston, and new affiliates are forming elsewhere. Now a new film, Orchestrating Change (click for show times on PBS), documents the remarkable musical and mental health odyssey of Braunstein and me2 and the orchestra's mission to end the stigma around mental illness.
Guests: Ronald Braunstein (co-founder & conductor), Caroline Whiddon (co-founder & executive director), Marek Lorenc (musician)
CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter has watched with amazement and alarm as the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News has grown ever more intertwined and interdependent. Fox primetime hosts float conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims, and Trump tweets and repeats them to the world. Stelter, who anchors the CNN show Reliable Sources, explores this unprecedented relationship in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Stelter discusses how Trump has spurned his own briefings in favor of whatever he hears on Fox News and, as the Washington Post writes, "expose[s] a collusion that threatens the pillars of our democracy."
When NBA players walked off the court in protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in late August 2020, they announced a surprising precondition for their return: that the arenas in which they played should be used as voting sites in the November 2020 election.
The idea had been floated by a group of activists led by Eugene Jarecki, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary filmmaker from Vermont. Jarecki is co-chair of the non-partisan Election Super Centers Project. Numerous professional sports teams have now agreed to have their stadiums and arenas serve as election centers, including the Indiana Pacers, Dallas Mavericks, Pittsburgh Steelers, Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors and Washington Wizards. Jarecki explains how the idea became reality with the help of basketball superstar LeBron James, coach Doc Rivers, and others, and why they view this move as a vital strategy to defend fair elections and American democracy.
Eugene Jarecki, filmmaker and co-chair, Election Super Centers Project
http://content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc110-jarecki.mp3
When NBA players walked off the court in protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in late August, they announced a surprising precondition for their return: that the arenas in which they played should be used as voting sites in the November 2020 election. The idea had been floated by a group of activists led by Eugene Jarecki, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary filmmaker from Vermont. Jarecki is co-chair of the non-partisan Election Super Centers Project. Numerous professional sports teams have now agreed to have their stadiums and arenas serve as election centers, including the Indiana Pacers, Dallas Mavericks, Pittsburgh Steelers, Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors and Washington Wizards. Jarecki explains how the idea became reality with the help of basketball superstar LeBron James, coach Doc Rivers, and others, and why they view this move as a vital strategy to defend fair elections and American democracy.
At last month's Republican National Convention, President Donald Trump declared, “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens.” The man behind this rhetoric is Stephen Miller, a powerful Trump advisor. The 35 year-old anti-immigration crusader and white nationalist has been the moving force behind Trump’s immigration policy and the author of his darkest speeches.
Miller has conjured apocalyptic visions of immigrants as a threat to America and has targeted refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant children. So who is Stephen Miller? Jean Guerrero, an Emmy-winning investigative reporter formerly with the Wall Street Journal, explores the influence of Miller and white nationalism in the Trump administration in her new book, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.
Will the 2020 election be stolen? Will voter suppression affect the outcome? Voting rights expert and journalist Ari Berman discusses how voter suppression works and how it has already changed electoral outcomes in the U.S. He explains the strategy behind President Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Postal Service and Trump’s threat to deploy armed agents at polling places — a voter intimidation tactic with long history. Berman explains his nightmare scenario for Election Day 2020 — what it will take for it to happen, and how to prevent it.
Ari Berman, senior reporter, Mother Jones, author, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
http://content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc108-berman.mp3
Will the 2020 election be stolen? Will voter suppression affect the outcome? Voting rights expert and journalist Ari Berman discusses how voter suppression works and how it has already changed electoral outcomes in the U.S. He explains the strategy behind President Trump's attacks on the U.S. Postal Service and Trump's threat to deploy armed agents at polling places — a voter intimidation tactic with long history. Berman explains his nightmare scenario for Election Day 2020 — what it will take for it to happen, and how to prevent it.
Guest: Ari Berman, senior reporter, Mother Jones, author, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
A half dozen Vermont delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina this week join 330 other Republican delegates representing 50 states, six territories and Washington, D.C., to renominate Donald Trump as their candidate for president. They discuss why they believe Donald Trump has been “extremely successful,” their claim that Democrats are responsible for most coronavirus deaths and that the virus spread from China through “negligence or a deliberate act,” and why a majority of Vermonters do not support Trump.
Deb Billado, chair, Vermont Republican Party, delegate, Republican National Convention
Jay Shepard, national committeeman, Vermont Republican Party, vice chair, Republican National Committee, delegate, Republican National Convention
Anya Tynio, RNC delegate, Republican candidate for Congress in Vermont, 2018, 2020
Janssen Willhoit, RNC delegate, former Vermont state representative, Republican candidate for Vermont attorney general, 2018
http://content.blubrry.com/vermontconversation/vtc107-rnc.mp3
Vermont delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Charlotte, North Carolina discuss why they believe Donald Trump has been "extremely successful," their claim that Democrats are responsible for most coronavirus deaths and how the virus spread from China through "negligence or a deliberate act," the impact of Vermont Gov. Phil Scott's refusal to back Trump, and why a majority of Vermonters do not support Trump.
Guests:
Deb Billado, chair, Vermont Republican Party, delegate, Republican National Convention
Jay Shepard, national committeeman, Vermont Republican Party, vice chair, Republican National Committee, delegate, Republican National Convention
Anya Tynio, RNC delegate, Republican candidate for Congress in Vermont, 2018, 2020
Janssen Willhoit, RNC delegate, former Vermont state representative, Republican candidate for Vermont attorney general, 2018
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, thus giving women the right to vote. This was the culmination of a suffrage movement that was launched in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, which was also attended by leading abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. An effort to secure women’s suffrage failed at the US Supreme Court, leading to the movement to win the vote by a constitutional amendment. Enactment of women’s suffrage in 1920 was historic, but it did not end discrimination against African American women, who continued to be denied the vote due to Jim Crow racial discrimination laws until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Marlboro College Professor Emerita Meg Mott discusses the suffrage movement, the racial divisions within it, enduring discrimination faced by African American and LGBTQ women, and parallels to modern efforts at voter suppression.
Guest: Meg Mott, Professor of Politics Emerita, Marlboro College
This has been the most unconventional Democratic National Convention. It is taking place, not in Milwaukee as originally planned, but virtually, due to the coronavirus pandemic. We talk with five Vermont delegates to the 2020 DNC about their roles, their hopes and their fears for the 2020 presidential election.
Carolyn Dwyer, political advisor, managed last four campaigns for Sen. Patrick Leahy and also headed Rep. Peter Welch’s efforts in 2006 and 2008 (Biden delegate)
Jim Dandeneau, former House campaign director for Vermont Democratic Party, (Sanders delegate)
Lisa Ryan, Director of Rutland County Community Justice Center at BROC Community Action, serve on Rutland City Board of Aldermen, former first vice president of the Rutland Area NAACP (Sanders)
Rep. Mary Sullivan, longtime state rep from Burlington (unpledged)
Allison Leibly, 18 year old from Woodstock, VT, freshman at Stanford (Biden)
Can schools safely reopen? Balancing staff and student safety against the need for children to return to school has been daunting and controversial around Vermont and the country. “The kids are not alright,” asserts Dr. Rebecca Bell, a critical care pedia
How does a self-described “pro-life, gun-owning combat veteran” end up starring in ads against President Trump? Dan Barkhuff is a former Navy SEAL and now an emergency physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center. He is the founder of …
For 25 years, Stuart Stevens was a leading strategist and media consultant to top Republican politicians, helping to elect presidents, senators, congressman, and governors. He was top strategist for 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and he
Former Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe and Lt. Governor David Zuckerman are vying to be Vermont’s next governor. First, one of them must win the August 11 Democratic primary to advance to the general election, where they will likely face Republican …
In June 2020, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s attempt to severely limit abortions. This came as a shock to many because Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal majority, seemingly reversing an earlier stand that he took …
Should children return to school? Will this result in the spread of COVID-19? And if a vaccine against COVID 19 is developed, will people get vaccinated? Pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. William Raszka argues that depression is becoming a major
Why does the U.S. now have the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world? Dr. Steve Goodman argues that public health experts “know exactly how to [manage COVID] – we just need the political will.” He notes, “It’s not politicians who …
Most people might assume that the greatest threat to the media is President Trump’s relentless assaults on what he falsely calls “fake news.” But Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan argues, “Another crisis is happening more quietly. Some of
Emily Bernard’s latest book of essays, Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, was named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR and received the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. …
The Vermont Legislature have temporarily adjourned after appropriating about $1 billion in coronavirus relief funds. The money is intended to help Vermonters, businesses, and communities survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Vermont House Speaker Mitzi Johnson d
Vermont Sen. Dick Sears (D-Bennington) discusses criminal justice and policing reform in the age of Black Lives Matter protests and police brutality revelations. He also discusses reducing Vermont’s prison population and ending the “warrior mentality” of
Pres. Trump declared at a rally in Arizona this week: “This will be in my opinion the most corrupt election in the history of our country, and we can not let this happen.” Trump has repeatedly claimed without proof that …
In a forceful New York Times op-ed following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Brandon del Pozo, a former NYPD officer and police chief of Burlington, Vermont, slammed police for having “aligned themselves with the president’s flagrant ra
According to the ACLU of Vermont, “Every metric we have shows that Black Vermonters face systemic barriers to education, health care, employment, and justice.” Too often, conversations about racism consist of white reporters (like me) asking black people
Is America on the brink of authoritarianism? Steven Levitsky has been wrestling with that question. Levistky is professor of government at Harvard University and is co-author, with fellow Harvard Professor Daniel Ziblatt, of the international bestselling
Could the wave of protests around the US signal a tipping point for social change? How are the issues of climate crisis, racism, police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic linked? Bill McKibben, a veteran activist and author, discusses the interconnectio
America is in revolt. Following the police killings of unarmed African Americans George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, numerous cities have erupted in mass protests against racism, police brutality, white supremacy, and inequality. We discuss r
Scenes of American soldiers and militarized police attacking peaceful protesters have shocked the world this week. James Lyall of the ACLU of Vermont says, “This is not a time for despair. It is a time for everyone to speak out, to …
Immigrants and undocumented workers on Vermont’s dairy farms have been hit with a triple crisis: the coronavirus pandemic, the collapse of dairy farms, and the ongoing threat of deportation by ICE. Farmworkers, led by Migrant Justice, are demanding suppor
The covid-19 pandemic has hit immigrant communities harder than nearly any other group. But as trillions of dollars in relief money has been authorized by Congress, the undocumented, including essential workers, have been left out. We speak with two leade
The COVID-19 pandemic has infected millions of people around the country and the world, but the rates of death among low-income and minority communities is disproportionately high. Why? Dr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at the Harvard T.
Amitai Etzioni is from a family of German Jews who fled Germany as Hitler and the Nazis were rising in the 1930s. He worries that fascism could come to America under Donald Trump. “Now we have a demagogue who can …
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many businesses and employees are relying on lifelines from emergency federal relief programs. Vermont’s Congressional delegation — Senators Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch — discuss the federal re
In just the first two months of the pandemic, 70,000 Americans died of COVID-19–more Americans than died during the decade-long Vietnam War. Epidemiologists have written that if Trump had instituted social distancing on March 9, a week earlier than he …
Molly Gray is a fourth generation Vermonter who grew up on a family farm and now works as an assistant attorney general in Vermont. She is running for Lt. Governor of Vermont. If elected, she would be just the fourth …
The COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis are impacting many people’s mental health. A recent poll by Kaiser showed that 45% of adults in the United States reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted due to worry and stress …
As President Trump pushes states to relax their COVID-19 restrictions amid protests, many sponsored by national conservative activists including the Mercer and Koch families, we talk with Stanford epidemiologist Steve Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, about where we
The images are becoming a symbol of our time: 800 cars in line at a food shelf in Pittsburgh. New York City residents lined up for blocks to receive free food. In Vermont, food shelves are experiencing a spike in …
When Donna Carpenter, owner and board chair of Burton Snowboards, heard that local hospitals were asking for donations of personal protective equipment to deal with the widening COVID-19 pandemic, she thought of the nurses and physicians who cared for her
As Vermont grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, volunteers are stepping forward to play key roles in their communities. We talk with Vermonters involved in mutual aid and community-level response to the pandemic. (April 9, 2020 broadcast) Allison Levin, e
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools and students to transform overnight. Classes have gone from in person to online, meals are being served not in school buses instead of cafeterias, and teachers are conjuring new ways to maintain bonds between …
How are Vermont businesses coping with the COVID-19 pandemic? For some, it means reinventing themselves. Caledonia Spirits and Silo Distillery have transformed from distilling spirits to making hand sanitizer for area hospitals and residents. Vermont Glov
In our second COVID-19 conversation (first episode here, article on Medium), Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Steve Goodman discusses the latest scientific information emerging from Europe and China about how COVID-19 is spread and stopped, the evolving respon
Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vt.) discusses how the federal government is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying it has evolved from “a slow response, to a little bit of denial, to a cavalier response…to a sense of urgency and action.” He …
The coronavirus pandemic is sweeping across the globe and has arrived in Vermont. Stanford epidemiologist Steve Goodman discusses the uniquely dangerous dimensions of this new pandemic, the botched federal response, the impact of the Trump Administration’
“The problem isn’t really individuals making money. The problem is having an entire system that grows the wealth of billionaires at the expense of everything else we care about — including our democracy,” writes Chuck Collins in an op-ed for …
Vermont House Speaker Mitzi Johnson is 1 of just 8 female Speakers of the House in US legislatures. Johnson was elected to the VT House of Reps in 2002. She rose to be chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, and …
2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Act 250, Vermont’s signature land use and development law. It was passed at a time when Vermont was undergoing significant development pressure. Two new interstate highways, I-89 and 91, had recently opened, increasing d
Vermont Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe on the key legislative issues in 2020, including the failure of paid family leave and the veto of a higher minimum wage. He accuses Gov. Phil Scott of “governing by veto or veto …
Visitors to Vermont’s mountains will encounter people with disabilities skiing and participating in sports that once might have seemed beyond reach. They are participants with Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports, a nationally recognized organization that empowe
The programs that low-income rely on are under attack. Nationally, Pres. Trump is slashing money for food stamps and affordable housing, to name a few. In Vermont, Gov. Scott is proposing to eliminate funds for two longstanding anti-poverty programs: the
In fall 2019, Rebecca Holcombe became the first declared candidate for Vermont governor in the 2020 gubernatorial race. Holcombe is a former teacher, principal, and she served as Vermont’s secretary of education under Governors Peter Shumlin and Phil Scot
TURNmusic is a chamber music ensemble with attitude. It is taking classical music out of its comfort zone, venturing into the community to play in bars, meeting halls and other offbeat venues. Conductor Anne Decker of Waterbury, Vermont, says the …
More than 8,000 Vemonters are under some form of correctional control. One in four people incarcerated in Vermont have not been convicted of a crime. A new bipartisan consensus is emerging for criminal justice reform. A poll released this week …
This week, Vermont’s nonprofit news publication VTDigger was awarded a $900,000 grant by the American Journalism Project to support its work as a daily statewide news source. This is the largest grant ever received by VTDdigger, which recently celebrated
Does it make sense to pay people to move to Vermont to solve a workforce shortage? Does spending more on tourism marketing actually bring more tourists? Is Vermont losing or gaining workers? Vermont State Auditor Doug Hoffer follows the money …
Will Vermont finally get paid family & medical leave, a higher minimum wage and legalized marijuana sales that are taxed and regulated by the state. Vermont House Majority Leader Jill Krowinski (B-Burlington) discusses the politics and possibilities of th
This week, Vermont Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman announced that he would run to replace Gov. Phil Scott, who is widely assumed will run for a third term in 2020. If Zuckerman were to defeat Scott, he would be the first …
Ken Squier is an American broadcasting legend and Vermont icon. He is best known to Vermonters as the owner of WDEV Radio Vermont, the 90-year-old independent radio network, and to its listeners as the host of Music to Go to …
Why are women a disproportionate share of Vermonters in poverty? Why are 4 out of 10 women who work full time unable to meet their basic needs? Why do women earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by a man? …