The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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 addedRegarding 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 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.”