The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

The Centers for Disease Control, the nation’s top public health agency, is in chaos following the firing of its director by President Donald Trump and the resignations of its top leaders last week. Nine former CDC directors wrote in the New York Times this week that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who spearhead the purge of the CDC and is a longtime leader of the anti-vaccine movement, is “endangering every American’s health.”

States are increasingly spurning Kennedy and taking health matters into their own hands. Northeastern states, including Vermont, have formed a regional health coalition in response to concerns about federal vaccine guidance. The governors of California, Washington and Oregon declared this week said that the CDC has become “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science … that will lead to severe health consequences.” The three western states are banding together to coordinate their own vaccine policy.

Meanwhile, the state of Florida has just announced that it will become the first state to do away with all childhood vaccine mandates, eliciting strong objections from public health experts.

Can Vermont trust the health advice coming out of the federal government? What are the leading threats to public health confronting the state and country?

“It pains me to say, I don’t know that you want to trust the CDC,” said Dr. Becca Bell on The Vermont Conversation. Bell is associate professor of pediatrics at the Larner College of Medicine and a pediatric critical care physician at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital. She is the immediate past president of the Vermont Medical Society and of the Vermont Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Bell noted that she is speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of the organizations with which she is affiliated).

Bell said that “the officials that have left the (CDC) have really raised the alarm that … we shouldn’t trust what’s coming out of the CDC in terms of some immunization guidance in particular.”

She encouraged families to look to other sources for accurate information, especially the parenting website of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 67,000 pediatricians. She also recommended the Vermont Department of Health and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“Then I ask families to talk to their own child’s doctor, because that’s going to be a great source as well.” 

Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, announced in May that the CDC would no longer recommend a COVID shot for healthy children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued contrary guidance, recommending a COVID shot for all children under the age of 2 since they are “especially vulnerable to severe COVID-19.”

Bell credited Vermont with being proactive “about how we can keep Vermonters safe,” but added that she feels “really sad” for the future of child health in the United States. “I think that we’re going to see a lot of disparities, not just with access to vaccination but access to health care in general, with the big Medicaid cuts that are coming up as well.”

Bell warned that Medicaid cuts, which will result in some 45,000 Vermonters losing health insurance, will fall hardest on children. One third of Medicaid enrollees in Vermont are children.

“What we’re about to see with that One Big Beautiful Bill Act (is) a huge transfer of resources from low income folks to the highest earners in this country,” said Bell. “Accessible, affordable health care is what kids need to succeed and for families to succeed, and so we are deeply concerned about the future of pediatric health care because our foundation is Medicaid. This is how we care for kids. It’s what supports our clinics.”

“The lack of investment in children is just really concerning and very short sighted.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Dr. Becca Bell on the chaos at the CDC, and the uneven future of vaccine access.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Bill McKibben is one of the world’s leading writers and organizers on the issue of climate change. He admits that his message about the perils of a warming planet can leave some people in despair. Now, with the U.S. at an authoritarian tipping point, McKibben has chosen an improbable time to offer hope.

McKibben has a new book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.” He takes readers on a far-flung journey to show how solar and wind energy have suddenly become the cheapest power in the world. People are installing solar panels equivalent to a coal-fired power plant every 18 hours. This is the fastest energy transition in history — and it may just help save democracy.

“There is one big good thing happening on planet Earth and it’s so big and so good that it actually has the capacity to help not only with the overwhelming climate crisis, but also with the crisis of inequality and of democracy that we’re facing now,” McKibben told The Vermont Conversation. “That one big thing is this sudden surge of clean energy, especially from the sun, that over the last 36 months, has begun to really rewrite what power means on planet Earth.”

McKibben explained that what used to be called “alternative energy” is now mainstream. “Four years ago or so we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning things. And that’s a completely epochal moment. Most days, California is generating more than 100% of its power for long stretches from renewable energy.”

“Here’s a statistic just to stick in your mind that will give you hope, too,” he offered. “A single boatload of solar panels coming from someplace like China will, over the course of its lifetime, produce 500 times as much energy as that same ship filled with coal. We’re not talking about a slightly better version of what we have now. We’re talking about a very different world.”

McKibben is currently spearheading Sun Day, which will take place on Sept. 21, 2025. It will be a global day of action celebrating solar and wind power and the movement to leave fossil fuels behind.

“Think about what the foreign policy, the geopolitics of planet Earth would have looked like in the last 70 years if oil was not a valuable commodity,” he said. “Human beings are extremely good at figuring out how to start wars, but figuring out how to start one over sunshine is going to be a trick.”

Vermont is already feeling the impact of this energy shift. “The biggest single power plant in Vermont is now the collection of batteries that Green Mountain Power has helped people put in their basements and garages and that they can call on in time of need to provide power,” he said

Bill McKibben is the author of over 20 books and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He has won the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize.

Alongside his writing, the Ripton resident has founded the global grassroots climate action group 350.org, and Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization now boasts some 70,000 members.

As the country and world teeter on a precipice, what gives McKibben hope?

“Just that we’re still here and fighting and that we have this new tool. It’s like a Hollywood movie: the bad stuff is happening all around us and here’s this new force riding to the rescue over the hills carrying not carbines and repeater rifles but carrying solar panels and lithium ion batteries.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Writer and organizer Bill McKibben on how the renewable energy revolution can bolster democracy.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

As President Donald Trump orders federal troops into the streets of Washington, D.C., to “do whatever the hell they want” to stop crime, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., is traveling across Vermont to share what he insists is the real news that Trump is trying to divert attention from.

Welch has tallied the impact of Trump’s economic policies and determined that they will cost families in Vermont an average of $2,120 each year. He says that 99.5% of all Vermont families will lose money as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his budget reconciliation bill, which the Senate narrowly passed in early July after Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote.

The Vermont Conversation caught up with Welch at Snow Farm Vineyard in South Hero, where Welch held a listening session attended by about 150 people.

Welch conceded that even he is “shocked” by the devastating impact of what he calls the “big ugly bill.” His office released a list of those impacts, including:

• As many as 45,000 Vermonters will lose health care
• As much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue for Vermont hospitals
• Over 26,000 Vermonters will lose access to discounted premiums on the Affordable Care Act marketplace
• 6,000 Vermonters are at risk of losing SNAP assistance
• Annual energy bills for Vermonters will rise by $290
• The state will lose 1,400 jobs by ending green energy projects
• Mortgage payments will rise by $1,060 annually
• 78,000 Vermonters with student loans will pay $3,694 more over the course of their loans

These cuts will shred the country’s social safety net, and undo social programs that date back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“There (were) a lot of lies that were peddled by the administration and frankly by many of my Republican colleagues about how great the bill was,” Welch said, while “ignoring the concrete reality” of how it will hurt the people they represent. Welch said Trump’s budget will add about $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit.

In a rare criticism of Gov. Phil Scott, Welch slammed the governor’s recent decision to provide the Trump administration sensitive data on thousands of Vermonters who receive nutrition assistance. “We should not be providing the private information of our citizens to the federal government,” said Vermont’s junior senator. “We should be protecting the privacy of Vermont citizens.”

All together, Welch said Trump’s actions are part and parcel of an authoritarian push. He accused the president of employing a “dual standard” around crime in the nation’s capital. “You had a riot that was inspired and incited by Trump and those folks who were intent on doing real violence and hurt many of these law enforcement officers have been pardoned by the president.” Welch was in Congress hiding from mobs of Trump supporters who rampaged through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Abroad, Welch was also sharply critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took hostage some 250 soldiers and civilians, Israel has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, detained about 3,000 people — none of whom have been charged with a crime — and waged a campaign of starvation against a desperate population. In response, Welch has called for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and a cutoff of sales of offensive weapons to Israel.

“Being against starvation is not at all being against the endurance of the democratic Jewish state of Israel. It’s about being against starvation and that starvation being inflicted by the authority of the state.”

American democracy is “fragile,” Welch said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Sen. Peter Welch slams Trump on his ‘ugly bill’, DC takeover and war in Gaza.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

From the moment that Wilmer Chavarria was pulled out of line by immigration agents at an airport in Houston on July 21, he sensed that he was a marked man.

Chavarria is the superintendent of schools in Winooski. He was returning with his husband from Nicaragua where they were visiting family — a trip they take every summer. Chavarria grew up in Nicaragua, then received scholarships to attend high school in Canada and Earlham College in the U.S. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018, after marrying his college sweetheart, an American citizen.

Without explanation, a federal agent pulled Chavarria out of line at the Houston airport and ordered him into a windowless room. He was separated from his husband and subjected to five hours of interrogation, an experience that he described as “psychological terror.” Agents demanded the passwords to his computers and phones, and he initially refused, since he had his school-issued laptop with student information that is protected by federal student privacy laws. He finally relented after being threatened by the agents.

“You have no rights here,” Chavarria says the agents told him.

Chavarria’s story has made national news. But often overlooked is why Chavarria believes he was singled out.

“I was flagged and put on some sort of list before I even arrived at that airport,” Chavarria told The Vermont Conversation. “When was it that my profile was flagged? And the even better question, why?”

Chavarria has been an outspoken defender of the rights of immigrants, who comprise a large part of the student body in Winooski schools. In February, he led an effort to make Winooski the only sanctuary school district in Vermont.

In April, he publicly refused to sign a certification demanded by the Trump administration that his school not promote diversity, equity and inclusion. When Vermont’s agency of education asked schools to comply, Chavarria responded that the state should “grow some courage and stop complying so quickly and without hesitation to the politically-driven threats of the executive.”

Winooski is Vermont’s most diverse school district, with a majority of families living under the federal poverty line and dozens of languages spoken in the schools. Nearly 800 students attend the Winooski school, which is home to pre-K through high school.

Chavarria said that the effect of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is “instilling fear and making people afraid to just coming to school because they don’t want to be separated from their children.”

The line the administration is taking is clear to Chavarria: immigrants don’t belong here. “Only one type of people, only one type of language, only one type of race, only one type of culture is considered American. Everything else does not belong,” Chavarria said. “They want us to feel like we will never be accepted here, and that if we can leave, then we should leave.”

Chavarria said that his experience of being targeted by federal agents was terrifying because it clarified that even U.S. citizen’s are not protected.

“This is not North Korea taking you into an interrogation room and doing all that to you. This is your own U.S. government that’s supposed to be there to protect you.”

Chavarria noted that he and his family fled a dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1980s. “The fact that I’m terrified what the government is doing to U.S. citizens right now should speak volumes.”

He said that constantly having to defend himself and other immigrants, whether to fellow Vermonters or to federal agents, has left him “exhausted” but committed.

“Vermont is a good state and the majority of people in Vermont are good people but … that’s not enough,” Chavarrias said. “The times call for more than just being a good person. The times call for more than just being proud of our reputation of being a good brave state. … The times call for action.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Winooski Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria on why he was detained at the border.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

“Eighty years ago this week,” writes Vermont journalist Garrett Graff, “a group of physicists and military leaders changed warfare — and the world — forever.”

August 6 marks the 80^th anniversary of the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which was followed three days later by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. These two bombings are estimated to have killed over 200,000 people.

Graff recounts the scientific and political backstory of the dawn of the nuclear age in his latest book, “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.” This exhaustive work includes testimonies from 500 people who “tell the intertwined story of nuclear physics, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the arrival and advance of World War II in the Pacific, and the tremendous effort of the Manhattan Project to deliver two atomic bombs that helped end the war, as well as the haunting on-the-ground stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves,” writes Graff.

Graff says that the story of what gave rise to the nuclear age is “as important now as ever,” as countries around the world, such as Iran, are racing to start or expand their nuclear arsenals.

“The world actually stands much closer to the edge of nuclear danger than we have for most of the 80 years since the end of World War II,” Graff told The Vermont Conversation. “This year has already seen two major world conflicts set against nuclear tensions. We’ve seen open warfare between India and Pakistan already this spring, the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict in world history. And we also saw, of course, the US and Israeli strikes against the Iranian nuclear program.”

“There’s a possibility, ironically, 15 years after Barack Obama tried to set us on a path toward nuclear abolition, where in the 2020s and 2030s we may actually see more countries join the nuclear club than have ever existed before.”

Garrett Graff describes himself as a historian whose work is often filed under current events. He writes about inflection points in history with an eye towards how they impact the present and future. This includes his 2024 book, “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” and his 2022 book, “Watergate: A New History,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He is also the editor of an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont that was published earlier this year by the Vermont Historical Society.

Graff has had a busy 2025. This spring, his 7-part podcast series dropped, “Breaking the Internet.” In it, he explores how a tool that promised to bring people together has instead driven them apart and has fueled authoritarian movements. This is the fourth season of Long Shadow, Graff’s award-winning history podcast.

Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario.

Graff said that as the U.S. approaches its 250^th anniversary, “We are witnessing an unraveling of our small-d democratic traditions in the United States and sort of backsliding in our democracy and the creeping approach of authoritarianism.”

“It doesn’t feel [like] a coincidence to me that we are watching this backsliding in our democracy at the precise moment 80 years later where we are losing the last members of the Greatest Generation,” those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. 

“There is no preordained rule that America remains a democracy,” Graff said. “And there’s no preordained rule that we remain an economic hegemon. We let both of those things disappear at our own societal and national peril.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Journalist Garrett Graff on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb and the rise of authoritarianism today.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Vermonters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution in 2022. But what if those rights — to abortion, birth control and other reproductive health services — are nearly impossible to access?

Putting care out of reach appears to be the strategy behind the Trump administration’s relentless assault on Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health care. President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that he signed into law on July 4 includes a provision to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortions. A federal judge has temporarily blocked this provision, but if the Trump administration prevails, Planned Parenthood says that numerous health care centers may close, mostly in states where abortion remains legal.

This compounds a problem in Vermont, since half of Planned Parenthood’s clinics in the state have closed in the last three years due to an ongoing financial crisis with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE).

Medicaid already bans funding for abortions. Most of Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid patients who obtain family planning services receive birth control and STI testing. One in four Planned Parenthood patients in Vermont and Maine are insured by Medicaid, and one in five in New Hampshire.

“The absurdity of all of this is just so transparent,” Nicole Clegg, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, told The Vermont Conversation. “We have long-lasting relationships with our patients. We could be their main provider for years … and to suddenly be told, ‘Sorry, you can’t go to that provider anymore because they also provide abortion care’ — that’s what’s happening here. That’s the goal.”

Clegg emphasized that “the overwhelming majority of what we’re providing to patients are disease testing and treatment, cancer screenings, wellness exams, birth control. Those are the primary needs that people have during their reproductive years.”

Abortion opponents are “no longer interested in the states where they’ve been successful in banning abortion. They’re now really focused on the states where abortion is still legal, so that includes Vermont, and what they’re trying to do is go after providers. So that’s the new tactic,” Clegg said.

She noted that people seeking an abortion in states where it is banned are increasingly coming to New England for care. She told the story of a couple seeking an abortion who drove from Oklahoma to Vermont “because they felt like that was going to be the safest option for them.”

“We live in an area of the country where we are a little bit insulated from this fear, but this fear is very real.”

What is motivating the attacks?

“It’s about abortion. It’s about controlling people and their ability to make decisions and decide when to have a family,” Clegg replied.

A 2024 Pew survey found that two out of three Americans – and 79% of Vermonters – believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

“We needed to sort of wake people up by having them lose these basic rights. That’s where we are right now.”

One in three women have received care from Planned Parenthood in their lifetime, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

“There’s just no other healthcare provider in our country that has that kind of reach and impact,” Clegg said.

I asked Clegg what a world without Planned Parenthood would look like. She cited research on what has happened in areas where a Planned Parenthood health center has closed.

“Worse pregnancy outcomes. Increased rates of cancer. Increased rates of unintended pregnancy. Untreated sexually transmitted diseases. Increased rates of HIV and AIDS.”

Will Planned Parenthood survive?

Clegg noted that this year marks Planned Parenthood’s 60^th anniversary. “We have touched the lives of more than a million people” in northern New England, she said. 

“I fundamentally believe we will get through this because people support us. People want to come to us for care. We are embedded in our states and a part of our community in deep ways. We matter too much for our states and our communities to just accept that we would close our doors.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Planned Parenthood’s Nicole Clegg on reproductive rights without clinics.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

What explains the fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base, even when he enacts laws that hurt them?

Arlie Russell Hochschild has searched for answers in the heart of Trump country. She is one of America’s most thoughtful writers about right wing movements, whose insights are informed by her deep relationships with people on the right. 

Hochschild is a renowned professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” is based on her work in eastern Kentucky, where she spent seven years exploring one of the poorest and whitest areas in the country. Her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times, which recently published her essay, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country.”

Hochschild says that communities that have been ravaged by poverty, disinvestment and the opioid epidemic have suffered a deep loss of pride. Trump provides an appealing narrative by telling people that their pride has been stolen from them by undeserving immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and African Americans, to name a few. Trump promises revenge for this stolen pride.

Arlie Hochschild spoke to me this week from her home in Maine. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The unabridged audio version of this interview can be heard by clicking the audio bar above. 

David Goodman  

On July 4, Donald Trump signed into law his “Big Beautiful Bill.” It includes draconian cuts to government services that will shred the safety net that many of his working class supporters rely on. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, some 17 million people will lose their health insurance and millions will see the loss or reduction of food assistance. Some one third of Americans will see their incomes decline and many rural hospitals are likely to close. Yet you report that in your conversations with people in eastern Kentucky that Trump’s followers are mostly happy with what he’s doing. Explain.

Arlie Hochschild  

They’re happy and confused and a little worried. We’re talking about an area of the country, Kentucky 5 (congressional district), which is the whitest and second poorest in the country. It’s coal country. They’ve become used to a kind of up and down economy, and now it’s been down. Like the 42% of all Americans (who are) without a B.A. degree and white, they have in the last three decades been downwardly mobile: less income, decline in owned property, more people living alone, and signs of what are called diseases of despair — alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide, especially among men. So it’s kind of a depressed area. It has known better times, and now it’s bad times. 

Donald Trump speaks to a social vacuum and they didn’t see anything for them that the Democrats had to offer. Among registered voters (in this district), 80% voted for Donald Trump, 20% voted for Harris, and 45% didn’t vote at all. So most people in this reddest of places actually didn’t vote for Trump but (Trump supporters) were the mobilized people. So you’ve got a loss story, and then a mobilization of people who are experiencing loss, and now what’s happened? Wham, they’re losing. Most of them are on Medicaid. All the children in this area qualify for Medicaid and their rural hospitals — there’s a major one in Pikeville, but without Medicaid money, it’s going to have to do layoffs — Head Start summer programs in public schools, all that will be gone. 

When I went back to the people that I wrote about In “Stolen Pride” about a month ago, they were not sure how this was going to land. They were keeping a close eye on tariffs and the effects that would have on the price of gas, the price of eggs, the price of bread, and worried, but they weren’t giving up (on Trump) yet. They had been promised some relief. Finally, someone’s come to save us, so they were hanging on. 

There was a metaphor that Donald Trump put out that sustained this that said, “America has been sick, and I’m the tariff doctor. I’m the budget cuts doctor. I will cure you, but it might hurt. There may be some chemo pain along the way, but hang on, and you’ll be cured at the end.” So that metaphor has been holding on. 

There is a counter metaphor that the Black man who is head of the Democratic Party in Kentucky told me: “Sometimes if (people who) look like me are called the enemy, then maybe you don’t mind when the president is peeing on your leg and calling it rain.”

So you have these two metaphors. One is a sense that, “Donald Trump is betraying me personally,” versus “Hey, catch on. It’s happening.”

David Goodman  

I feel like I got a glimpse of the world that you’re describing. A few weeks ago, my wife and I were riding bikes across western Pennsylvania on a famous rail trail called the Great Allegheny Passage. It follows a defunct rail line that once carried coal and steel, but those industries have died. So now it’s a beautiful bike trail and there are historical markers along the way explaining what once thrived here — this used to be a steel plant, or a coal mine. What struck us besides the wonderful biking was cycling through these small, rural downtowns that were just hollowed out. I kept thinking that this is like the land that time forgot. There has been no improvement here. They are like frozen in time from the 50s and 60s when the steel mills and the industries here closed and nothing has come in to replace it. There are just empty storefronts. 

What happened here in these Rust Belt communities that you write about in Kentucky and that I saw in western Pennsylvania? This is very much Trump country. 

Arlie Hochschild  

Yes, it is. What I saw was a group of people who would be called “stayers” — the people who haven’t left. I went in thinking there’s race, there’s social class, there’s rich, there’s poor. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of stayers and leavers. What I realized is that when an economy goes down and the center of economic gravity is somewhere else, a lot of people, often the more educated people and the younger people, leave. So there’s that new divide. The people who stay feel abandoned and feel a sense of anger and betrayal.

We have to think about emotional narratives. I think they’re the main thing going on and it’s unspoken. I believe that the conditions you biked through and that I saw over quite a few years are a story of a loss. Donald Trump came in and spoke to people predisposed to listen to a narrative that explained it and offered a way out. Trump came in with a promise to make America great again. Many politicians make promises, but there was also an unspoken narrative, which is, “You used to have a lot, and now you stayers have a little. It’s not just lost — it’s been stolen from you. Someone took it.”

David Goodman  

In your book “Strangers in their Own Land,” you talked about the “deep story” that people experienced in these places where they felt forgotten. Could you describe that deep story, and also how your sense of the deep story has evolved as you’ve continued to research and write?

Arlie Hochschild  

A deep story is what the world feels like to you. Your politics flow from that. The original deep story that I discovered in “Strangers” was this: you’re waiting in line, and you don’t feel like you’re angry at anyone, you don’t feel prejudiced. You just feel like you’re waiting in line for the American Dream. The line hasn’t moved in decades. You’re just waiting there, and the dream is far away. Many more are behind you, but you only look ahead. You’re sort of in the middle. The dream is just ahead, and you’re stuck. 

Moment two of that deep story is you see line cutters cutting in line ahead of you and pushing you back. Who are they? They’re women, African Americans, immigrants, refugees. You think, Oh this isn’t fair. And you look and you see that there’s President Obama who seems to be waving at the line cutters, legitimating them and pushing you back.

The final moment of the deep story is that someone ahead of you looks back and says, “You’re uneducated. You’re backward. You’re prejudiced. You’re a redneck.” Then you’re just insulted. You’ve lost all pride. You’ve been publicly humiliated. And you say, “I’m out of here. Whatever anybody has to offer me that’s an inch better than that, I’ll take.” 

That was the deep story that I heard and checked out in Louisiana for my first book. I brought it with me (and shared it with people in Kentucky) in “Stolen Pride.” One guy told me that what’s different now is that there’s a bully in line, and that bully is helping the line cutters. He’s not letting (me) go forward. He’s the bad bully. But also in line is a good bully. (Trump) is our bully who is fighting the bad bully. That’s how it feels. 

Feeling is underlying all politics. We need to not just focus on policies and logic, because often you don’t find that in a Trump speech. But there is an emotional logic that is allowing him to build up the kind of MAGA loyalty that he has. The bully is part of his appeal, that he’s going to be strong.

David Goodman  

It also explains something that I’ve found politically confounding, which is Trump promising as part of how to make America great again that “I am your retribution.” I’ve never heard a politician say that. He’s saying, I am going to inflict pain on those people. That’s the part that I find so disturbing, these displays of inflicting harm and terrorizing immigrants in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The pain is the point. It’s the theater of revenge.

Arlie Hochschild  

That’s right. There is a sequel to the narrative that I described in “Stolen Pride” of loss turning to shame, and then loss turn to stolen. Donald Trump says, “They took it from you.” Who is the “they?” It keeps getting expanded. 

What he also does in his narrative is to say, “I’m standing up for you. I’ve just said something transgressive and people are shaming me. Look at the press, they’re making me feel terrible. (You) know what that feels like to be shamed. Doesn’t it feel awful? They’re doing to me what they want to do to you, and I’m taking it on. I’m heroic, almost a religious figure. I’ll take your shame on. But unlike religious figures, I’m getting revenge. I’m getting retribution. I’m going to get even for the bad things and the shame that have occurred. And now I’m in power. It’s legitimate to feel angry.”

Elon Musk has said empathy is how civilizations get lost. If you count up the number of times Donald Trump says “hate” or “loser,” that’s part of this retribution. He’s establishing a category of insider and outsider – “And you my follower are the insiders. You’re American, American-born, really American. And these outsiders, the cause of your pain, they’ve been taking things from you.” He’s giving back their pride.

Here’s the paradox for me: I don’t see a whole lot of difference between this sinking blue collar white sector of America and migrants coming and trying to get a better life. They’re both at a border control. For migrants, it’s geographic control that they can’t get over. For white blue collar, it’s the B.A. they don’t have that could give them access to the jobs they seek. There’s a border control there too. Getting a B.A. is the knife that cuts between blue collar jobs that are going down and white collar jobs that are going up. You have two groups that actually have all this in common. (Trump) does a lot of rhetorical work to degrade and demean and demonize the non-American, and then he’s going to extend that category of non-American from undocumented workers to residents who are here legally and to people who don’t talk in an American way. There’s already a clampdown on dissent.

He is establishing what I would call new “feeling rules:” It is good to be angry. That’s the main thing he’s doing now, to put us in a different emotional atmosphere by saying, “It used to be rude or bad to be angry and impolite to insult people. Now that’s good.” 

Look what he’s done: he’s attacking universities, on the one hand, which should be the center of rational thought and civility, and he’s getting Ultimate Fighting on the White House lawn — anger, get it out. 

We’re in the middle of a new retribution narrative that’s playing out. It’s unspoken: “I’m recruiting you all to feel and act like soldiers in an army and I’m picking my enemy list, and you’re to join me.” That’s what the new deep story is.

David Goodman  

You’ve talked about the need to build “empathy bridges.” Explain what those are. And how do you build empathy bridges across a divide of retribution and anger? 

Arlie Hochschild  

Empathy bridges aren’t bridges of agreement. The Norwegians have a name for it that translates into “communities of difference.” You differ and you’re probably never going to agree. But that doesn’t mean you fall into silence. It doesn’t mean you’re hostile. It means you’re talking because you come to like each other and you think there’s common ground. 

The people I feature in “Stolen Pride,” we’re actually planning to all get together next October. We’re going to get a “holler log” going, including people who fear and hate Donald Trump and others who think he’s sent by God. 

David Goodman  

What are you going to do?

Arlie Hochschild  

We all need to learn to listen. Learning to listen and turning your own moral frame off temporarily so you can listen without defending your beliefs. Just listen. It’s an art, and I don’t think either side knows how to do it. Actually, polls have shown that people on the left are a little less good at doing this than people on the right, who are more likely rural or semi-rural. They live in more diverse communities than do people on the left. Studies also show that more Americans are more moderate than either party is. 

I think common ground can be found actually on issues such as clean energy. The people even in coal country would say, “You see that sawed off mountain up there? I think we ought to have a solar array up there or a windmill up there.” And Biden, paradoxically, has through the Inflation Reduction Act given billions of dollars, 80% of it to red states. This man who thinks God sent Donald Trump is against Trump on this issue. He says (renewable energy) can be a basis of economic growth. There could be crossovers. We’re never going to agree totally. 

David Goodman  

You have been clear that Democrats bear a lot of responsibility for the fact that their popularity is now hovering around 25 to 30%. What have Democrats done wrong? What should they do to right the ship? 

Arlie Hochschild  

The Democratic Party is more than a little the author of its own defeat here. I think it has closed the door to the white working class. And that’s a huge mistake and big problem. We used to have labor unions 30-40 years ago that were the middleman between the workers of both races and the Democratic Party. Now fewer than 9% of American workers are unionized. So that building block of the Democratic Party is gone. We’ve kind of disappeared into a variety of interest groups — women’s groups, African American groups, gay pride. We’re in pieces and we agree on a lot, but we haven’t got the leadership that we need to articulate that. There is a lot of great ferment and activism out there, groups like Indivisible, for example, but they’re not connected to the Democratic Party. 

The Democratic Party needs to eat some humble pie. Get some great leadership. There are great emerging leaders. I think I would even look at Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, a Republican state, who’s very popular. So surprises all out there.

David Goodman  

We began this with you saying that politics is really about narrative, and Trump had one that just resonated with more people. What would a new Democratic narrative sound like?

Arlie Hochschild  

It should begin with, Yes, a lot of us have suffered. The whole class system has gotten out of whack. The middle class has shrunk and a bunch of super rich have risen to the top and Trump is having us look the other way while that has happened. A lot of people are anxious that they’re falling down. So we need to say, Yes, there’s loss that you used to have something and now you don’t, because that’s the psychology that creates terrible anxiety. But nobody stole it from you, apart from the outsourcing large corporations that sought cheaper labor pools in Mexico and China. So if you want to blame someone, don’t blame your nearby migrant, but look at larger economic forces. And then say, don’t look around for the robber. Look around for the good people out there that see a problem and are rolling up their sleeves and in the American style fixing it, like the rescuers in Texas that are trying to get people out of harm’s way. Let’s not wait til there are more dead bodies. 

Let’s start with renewable energy, and let’s restore America through universities, our source of ultimate jobs and knowledge. They are a passport. Open the passport control to education. It’ll get you a job, and it’s gotten more expensive and out of reach. You need to extend curriculum so that you open the gates to the middle class. Base pride not on just being rich and having an enemy, but on being a giver. The translation of the word “pride” is to be able to help, to be of service, to make a difference for other people. I think we go back to that original concept of pride. Our narrative should be based on that, building instead of tearing down.

David Goodman  

You shared with me just how unsettling and scary this moment is. You spent your life in a university, and Trump is now taking a sledgehammer to higher education. Where do you find hope in this moment? What sustains you?

Arlie Hochschild  

Foremost, I have family and friends. But I also see a lot of great people who could make that alternate narrative come true. 

There are two stories out there. I know one person who says, Well this is getting so bad, I’m going to go to New Zealand. But there’s another person that I know who said, Look, I’ve been living in New Zealand, but the fight is on and I’m coming back. 

That’s the job ahead of us: to be fighters and creators of this new narrative.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild on the rise of the right in rural America.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

This week marks the 25^th anniversary of civil unions, which were the most sweeping grant of rights to gay couples in the nation when they became law on July 1, 2000.

Civil unions grew out of a lawsuit filed by three gay and lesbian couples who had been denied marriage licenses in Vermont. The lawsuit was known as Baker v. Vermont. In December 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the same benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples. The court ordered the Vermont legislature to craft a law that would satisfy the ruling, either by legalizing same-sex marriage or by creating an equivalent partnership structure. 

Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy wrote that the decision, “is simply a recognition of our common humanity.” 

It would take until 2009 for Vermont to legalize same-sex marriage. 

To mark the milestone, I spoke with four of the key participants behind civil unions. Stacy Jolles and Nina Beck were two of the six plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont. Chief Justice Amestoy wrote the decision. Gov. Howard Dean signed civil unions into law. (Rep. Bill Lippert recounted how the Vermont legislature passed the historic law on The Vermont Conversation in an interview in April.)

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The unabridged audio version of this interview can be heard by clicking the audio bar above.

THE PLAINTIFFS

I first met Stacy Jolles and Nina Beck in their South Burlington home in 2000 when I covered the civil unions debate for Mother Jones. In my article, I described them cooing over their newborn son. Seth Jolles has since graduated from college and graduate school. Nina and Stacy had a civil union and were married as each of those opportunities became legal.

Stacy, now 67, a psychologist, and Nina, 69, a physical therapist, are now “semi-retired.” They have been familiar faces as the owners of the popular Burlington tea house, Dobra Tea, which they owned for 11 years and sold in 2021. 

Stacy and Nina joined me on the Vermont Conversation in 2015 to talk about the US Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationally, known as the Obergefell decision. 

This week, I asked them how it felt to be marking the 25^th anniversary of civil unions.

Stacy Jolles   

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. That seemed like such a time of great hope and such a different time than it feels right now. So it is nice to go back and remember that times were better but it’s a little scary to realize that we made it 25 years. We may not make it 26.

Nina Beck

It’s an odd juxtaposition to be celebrating something that happened what feels like a very long time ago but really is only the lifetime of our son, and yet wondering what the future holds or if we’re going to lose those rights that we gained.

David Goodman 

You were one of the three couples that were part of this landmark lawsuit. Tell us a little of your personal story as a couple and then what brought you to sue the state of Vermont?

Stacy Jolles   

Stacy prior to our son Seth, who’s 25 now, we had a son, Noah. We were living in North Carolina and we knew at the time that in order to protect me as the non-biological parent, we needed to do a lot of legal paperwork. And so we did that. When Nina was giving birth, we tried to have a home birth but we ended up going to the hospital. And there was another pregnant couple, actually, that went in, and they didn’t ask the gentleman of the couple anything about paperwork, and they literally stopped me at the door and asked for my paperwork and what allowed me to be there. Who was I? Nina was struggling to give birth and Noah was in trouble in utero and I had to come up with the paperwork that allowed me to be there. So for me, that was a very pivotal moment in our lives and it laid the groundwork that marriage is really a legal contract primarily to protect the children. I don’t need the state to sanction my relationship. I don’t need any public validation other than I need legal protection for my kids. So when the opportunity came along, that was what was in my mind.

Nina Beck   

Stacy and I were living in California before we moved to North Carolina and Vermont. In 1992, we had our big Jewish wedding, which was for our friends and family. That was of course not legally meaningful at all. At the time, we’d heard about a lawsuit brought by three couples in Hawaii and they tried to get marriage. They were the first state, and they failed. But that totally put the idea in my mind that this was a fight. This was this was maybe possible. 

We decided together that if we live somewhere where it was possible to be involved in the work for legal civil marriage, that we wanted to do it. That was 1992, and we showed up in Vermont in 1996 in April and found the Vermont Freedom to Marry movement. We said, how can we be involved? We want to do this. 

David Goodman   

Talk about the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force and the marriage equality movement in Vermont that you were part of.

Stacy Jolles   

Well, the movement was really Beth and Susan. 

David Goodman   

This was Beth Robinson, now a federal judge, and Susan Murray, your attorneys at the time.

Stacy Jolles   

Exactly. A lot can be done with just two people who are dedicated. And they were absolutely phenomenal. 

Nina Beck   

It was a very grassroots movement in terms of trying to lift people’s awareness of what is civil marriage (and) why would we want it? Many people traveled all over the state to speak at events to try and gain public support for this. 

David Goodman   

What kind of responses did you get when you were out there tabling and at county fairs?

Stacy Jolles   

Surprisingly we got mostly positive feedback. Both Nina and I were activists our whole lives and we had nothing to lose. It was our obligation since we were both lucky: our families weren’t going to disown us. We weren’t going to lose our jobs. We had so many privileges in so many ways that so many gay and lesbian people didn’t have then and still don’t have. It felt like an obligation to be the person that came forward when so many others couldn’t.

We experienced very little backlash. We got only one letter that was from someone who said they were going to pray for us. And I’m always happy to have somebody pray for me (laughs). 

David Goodman   

I remember being in the Vermont State House when civil unions was being debated in the winter in early 2000. It was intense. There were busloads of people, many from out of state and many with very noticeable southern accents who were from evangelical churches in the South. It felt very volatile. How did it feel to you?

Stacy Jolles   

Well, we’re both martial artists. Not that we were going to get into any kind of physical altercation. 

It was a different time. If I was in that situation now, I would feel very differently. Political violence has become much more normalized. It was moving times, emotional times, but I didn’t feel in danger.

Nina Beck   

I feel like there was a difference between the way Vermont people who lived here reacted to us, even when they didn’t agree with us, as opposed to the people who came up from the south and came from other states. Those people were much more threatening. And also the Vermont folks, even those who were not on our side, didn’t want help. They told those people basically go away. We’re going to keep it local. 

Later when we’d drive through the countryside and see the barns printed with Take Back Vermont, it wasn’t warm and welcoming, but I honestly didn’t feel in danger. 

David Goodman   

The Baker decision was a win for advancing LGBTQ rights, but Stacy, you’ve told me that you felt it was a loss. Explain how it could be both.

Stacy Jolles   

When the decision came down and the (Vermont) Supreme Court basically punted (same-sex partnership) to the legislature, I felt like we lost. The Supreme Court did not rule for marriage. Intellectually, I recognize that you take two steps forward, one step back. I get that it was progress, but I felt like we lost. I felt like the Supreme Court said, No, we’re not going to give you marriage. (Civil unions) wasn’t going to protect my kids in the way I needed them protected. At the time I was working full time and staying home with Seth, and it wasn’t going to protect his rights with the over 2000 federal advantages from marriage. 

Nina Beck  

We live on Lake Champlain, and if we traveled across that lake to New York State, our civil union wouldn’t necessarily be recognized there. What if we went across the lake for the day and got in trouble and needed medical care? There were many, many important protections that marriage has, that civil unions left out. It was separate but unequal.

David Goodman   

It took another decade for Vermont to pass same-sex marriage in 2009 over the veto of Governor Jim Douglas. How did that feel?

Stacy Jolles   

That was awesome. That felt like a step in the right direction towards federal marriage being legal in all states. That was uplifting. 

David Goodman   

Did you get a civil union and then get married? 

Nina Beck   

Yes, we had a civil union ceremony, which included our local representative coming to our house, acting as Justice of the Peace, sitting in our living room and signing a piece of paper. We were not very excited about it, but we wanted it legally in place. When we won marriage, we had a great party in the boathouse at the Burlington waterfront. We recreated our big Jewish wedding, and Beth (Robinson) officiated. That was a great party. 

David Goodman   

Twenty-five years after civil unions in Vermont, there is intense blowback against LGBTQ rights. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled against LGBTQ rights in several cases, allowing parents to opt-out their children from school classes that include LGBTQ-themed books, and banning gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. How fearful are you that the rights that you won could be undone?

Stacy Jolles   

I think they will be undone. 

I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, as is Nina. So we were raised to view governments like the one we’re experiencing now in a very different way than most Americans might view it. I think it’s going to get very bad and I’m just going to be active until the very last minute. I can be active trying to protect young LGBTQ people’s rights, particularly young transgender people. And I think we’re going to have to fight harder than we have before. 

Nina Beck   

Not to make too many parallels, but the Jews of Europe became extremely assimilated, particularly Austria and Germany, and kind of forgot that antisemitism was real. And there’s a way in which I think young people today who have grown up in the last 25 years without knowledge of homophobia in the way that we who grew up in the 60s and 70s felt it. So it’s a shock to them. It’s not surprising to me, but it is scary in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time.

Every day some more rights are lost. I don’t want to go back to living that way, but I know how to and we’ll just keep fighting. We’ll just have to keep fighting and not be shocked and horrified that these things are going away but rather activated by it.

David Goodman   

You both lived through a time when it seemed impossible that same-sex marriage could win. In 1996, President Clinton passed the Defense of Marriage Act. The tide was not in your favor in the late 1990s. What is your advice to the next generation of activists about what’s needed to prevail even at a time like this?

Stacy Jolles   

We have to be vigilant and brave and as out there as we possibly can. It’s going to get really bad, it’s going to get really scary, and we still are going to have to stand up and fight.

Nina Beck

Don’t back down. 

We have to be as strong as humanly possible. We can look to AIDS activists for tactics. We can look to the civil rights workers for tactics. There’s so many organizations that have gone before us. We just have to adopt the tactics of our predecessors and do it again.

David Goodman   

Any last thoughts? 

Nina Beck   

We continue to feel very privileged to live in the great state of Vermont where we do have rights and privileges as gay and lesbian people. Vermont is the only state that has no laws pending or on the books against trans people. That’s remarkable. We are very lucky to be here.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE

Jeffrey Amestoy served as attorney general of Vermont from 1985 to 1997, winning seven elections, five of them as the nominee of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In 1997, Governor Howard Dean appointed Amestoy to be Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. Two years later, he wrote the Baker decision. Amestoy retired as chief justice in 2004 and later was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Amestoy, 78, spoke with me at his home in Waterbury Center with a stunning view of Mount Mansfield. I asked him what led him to write the most famous line from the Baker decision, that legalizing same-sex partnerships was “simply a recognition of our common humanity.”

Jeffrey Amestoy   

I was cognizant of the extent to which a pure legal analysis that dictated a result to the people of Vermont on an issue that divided them was something to be concerned about. I thought if we could frame the issue in terms that folks would respond to, they would begin to see what it meant in terms of the rights involved. So the phrase “common humanity” was one that I had hoped would resonate. I think it helped structure the public debate, because it became not a question of whether a special class should get special treatment, but I think it helped promote a dialog in which people spoke of their own personal experiences and related it to common humanity. 

The structure of the legal analysis was based on the common benefits clause. So it became a mechanism to try to encourage a public dialog that spoke to the heart of the matter, which was really human relationships. 

David Goodman   

How aware were you that your decision would have national implications and thrust Vermont into the middle of a national culture war?

Jeffrey Amestoy   

I was aware of the significance of the issue to a substantial portion of the country. Folks had fought long and hard, like Beth Robinson and Susan Murray and other advocates for same-sex recognition. You couldn’t be ignorant of the extent to which it had been turned into a real divisive political issue. The Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 — that’s three years before our opinion. The (U.S.) Senate passed (DOMA), 85 to 14. Senator Leahy and Senator Jeffords both voted for it. That law said that marriage was between a man and a woman, and beyond that, no state was required to recognize another state’s same-sex marriage. That framed the political culture. It was a reminder to me that any decision that Vermont came up with was going to precipitate a national debate.

David Goodman   

You also knew that other state courts had waded into this terrain. The Hawaii Supreme Court in 1993 and Anchorage (Alaska) Superior Court in 1998 had both legalized same-sex marriage, only to have voters in those states pass constitutional amendments that reversed the decision. How did that affect you as you approached the Baker decision, knowing that you could spark a backlash that could result in this being a very short lived decision?

Jeffrey Amestoy   

It was fundamental to my perception of how we ought to weigh the consequences of the decision if our rationale was trying to advance equal rights for same-sex couples. To me, one of the paramount determinations to be made was how likely was a decision of the court going to advance that? Would a same-sex marriage decision directed from the court advance that? Based on the experiences of Alaska and Hawaii, (legalizing same-sex marriage) would have certainly precipitated a constitutional amendment in Vermont that would have found a lot of public support that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman. That would have cut off the ability for a court to deal with the matter if the Vermont State Constitution was amended. 

In terms of the climate of the time, between the decision of our court in December 1999 and the civil unions passage in April 2000, voters in California, a liberal state, passed (Proposition 22), a referendum that defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. That passed 61 to 39 percent. That was an indicator of the extent to which there wasn’t going to be a straight line from a Supreme Court decision, even from Vermont, that was going to then lead directly to the recognition of same-sex marriage legally in this country. So all those were part of my framing of the issue.

David Goodman   

You’re describing a very hostile national climate regarding same-sex marriage. What persuaded you to go a different way?

Jeffrey Amestoy   

We tried to look at the issue of the claim for same-sex marriage rights in the context of the Vermont constitution. You had a culture and a history of Vermont in terms of the creation of the common benefits clause. What persuaded me was a legal analysis that we could draw from Vermont’s constitutional culture and one I think that was consistent with Vermont values. So from that standpoint, beyond whatever our personal consideration about the issue was, the claim for same-sex marriage benefits in Vermont resonated with our constitutional framework. Our decision attempted to advance that in a way that would lead to what it did lead to, which was eventually an embrace of same-sex marriage by Vermonters.

David Goodman   

The Baker decision legalized either marriage or an equivalent partnership structure. It took another 10 years before marriage passed over the veto of Governor Jim Douglas. Why didn’t you just legalize same-sex marriage in 1999?

Jeffrey Amestoy   

I thought it would precipitate a constitutional amendment in Vermont, as was being done in 36 other states and was being done in California, that would compel states through their own state constitutions that would foreclose courts from deciding the issue. The constitutional amendments in each state would have provisions that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. 

The response even to the civil union decision indicated how difficult it would have been in that climate in that time to have even Vermonters abide by that decision in the Supreme Court. If you look at the surveys at the time, Vermonters were not embracing the idea of same-sex marriage, and they were not embracing the idea of civil unions either. So it became a much more difficult task for the legislature. Not that what we’d done was an easy thing to do, but the difficult and hard work (that) we honor 25 years later was the work of the Vermont legislature and, of course, Vermonters themselves.

David Goodman   

What does this 25 year milestone mean to you?

Jeffrey Amestoy   

It makes me proud of Vermont. I’m from Vermont. It was a testament to my own faith in the judgment of Vermonters. What Vermonters should be proud of is that it advanced the extraordinary significance of same-sex marriage in this country in a way that I think would have taken longer and perhaps had a more difficult route. Vermonters, as I’d hoped they would, rose to the occasion, as they’ve done historically in a number of other areas too. 

David Goodman   

What did you feel when the U.S. Supreme Court passed the Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015?

Jeffrey Amestoy   

It came much sooner than I thought. At the time of Baker, if someone had asked me would the U.S. Supreme Court reach a decision legalizing same-sex marriage in my lifetime, I would have said no. I go again to the point of how a constructive, realistic approach to moving public discourse that recognizes common humanity probably moved that to a much quicker decision by the United States Supreme Court than I would have thought possible. That was a testament to what we had done in Vermont.

THE GOVERNOR

Howard Dean, 76, became governor in 1991 on the death in office of Governor Richard Snelling. Dean was subsequently elected to five two-year terms, becoming the longest serving governor in Vermont history. 

David Goodman   

How did you feel about same-sex marriage in the mid to late 1990s? Democrats nationally were not particularly supportive.

Gov. Howard Dean   

President Clinton wasn’t supportive because he was a great politician and could read the polls. I was not a great champion at the time. I remember exactly where I was when the (Baker) court decision came down. I was in Burlington at a meeting on education, and somebody threw a microphone in front of my face and said, What do you think of this? And my response was a great dismay to people who later became very close friends (like Rep.) Bill Lippert. 

I said, “Well, it makes me uncomfortable, same as everybody else.” And I was uncomfortable.  

I grew up in the 60s and when I was in high school, it was unthinkable to say who you were if you were gay. There was plenty of homophobia. I grew up in a different era. I came to change my mind as governor, because it was actually quite simple. The same-sex marriage people basically outlined about 1700 rights that you could have if you were a married heterosexual person that you could not have if you were in a gay partnership. And as soon as that happened, I realized this was a civil rights bill. It wasn’t just about marriage, (it was) about equality under the law. There was a whole population of Americans that was discriminated against and so something had to be done about it. But I was somebody who had to be brought along because of my upbringing and because of the generation I come from.

David Goodman   

It’s helpful for people to understand where things were in the 1990s. Even for a Democratic governor like yourself, this was not a simple issue. 

Gov. Howard Dean   

Yeah, it was complicated. But once it got distilled to the civil rights issue, that was easy. And then (Reps.) Tom Little and Bill Lippert, who were respectively the chairman and vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House, came to me and said, Look, we can’t get marriage out of our committee, so we’re going to call it civil unions. And essentially, they said a civil union is going to be marriage by another name. And so I said, Look, you guys are the ones on the firing line. You have to do it. And of course, Bill (Lippert), because he was gay, if he was advising this course, then that was sort of the gold standard. And then it went to the Senate. It passed. And that was brutal. In the House, absolutely brutal. 

The (House speech) I remember the most was (Rep.) John Edwards, who was this former state trooper from a very conservative part of the state, which is Franklin County. And he gave up his seat. There was (Rep.) Marion Milne. She gave up her seat. She got up and said she was from Barre and didn’t like this. And she said basically, this is the right thing to do. She didn’t flinch. 

David Goodman   

Unlike anyone else involved in this issue, you had to run statewide after passing civil unions in 2000. This was the heyday of the Take Back Vermont movement, which really sprung up in response to civil unions being passed. You won re-election in 2000 with 50.5% of the vote, barely enough to keep it out of the legislature…

Gov. Howard Dean   

…Which was a Republican legislature after all was said and done because of civil unions. 

David Goodman   

Many legislators who supported civil unions were defeated in November 2000. So there was a political price to pay. What impact did you think civil unions would have on your political future? 

Gov. Howard Dean   

I hate to say this, and nobody’s going to believe it, but I didn’t care. 

This is where the problem with most politicians is. If an issue like this comes along and you conclude that it’s a matter of civil rights, and you duck it for the convenience of your election, you’re wasting your time in politics. Which, of course, is what the problem in Congress is today. I’d say 100% of the Republicans and a good portion of the Democrats are wasting their time because they shouldn’t be in politics. If you’re not willing to stand up for something, why are you in the business? And so for me, it was easy. 

David Goodman   

You signed civil unions into law in 2000 and it took nine years, and over the veto of your successor, Governor Douglas, for same-sex marriage to be legalized in Vermont. Do you have any second thoughts that perhaps just legalizing gay marriage in 2000 would have been the better move?

Gov. Howard Dean   

We couldn’t possibly get it through the legislature. If Bill Lippert comes to me and says, I can’t get this through the legislature, and Tom Little – (a Republican) who in all states other than this one would be a Democrat — if those two people come to me and say they can’t get the bill through…

In politics, sometimes you have to take half and come back and get the other half later. What we did was the first marriage equivalent bill in the entire United States of America. And I think if we hadn’t done what we did, that would have set the cause back for years. We were the model. Even though it wasn’t full marriage — but it basically was as the two described it in the privacy of my office, this is marriage in everything but name — and that’s what it was.

David Goodman   

What do you think was the national significance of Vermont’s civil unions bill?

Gov. Howard Dean   

I think people saw it as gay marriage. It was sort of the lead issue. It happened. I think the next state that did it was Massachusetts, and they did it by court order.

David Goodman   

Today we see a backlash against LGBTQ issues, with the US Supreme Court and Congress limiting rights. Do you think this is a backlash that began right after you signed that law?

Gov. Howard Dean   

This is an organized conservative attempt to overthrow rights which the vast majority of American people support. This (U.S. Supreme) Court essentially is bought and paid for. The court system in this country is a disaster and thank God it wasn’t like that when all this stuff was going on. 

David Goodman   

In the long arc of your political career, where do you rank civil unions among the things that you’ve accomplished? 

Gov. Howard Dean   

I think the only thing that was more important was getting the waiver from the Clinton administration to insure all kids under 300% of poverty. Virtually every child in the state has health insurance, and that’s been going on since 1992. So that one I’d have to put first, but I’d put civil unions second. 

In terms of personal challenges, civil unions was by far the first, because I didn’t really for sure understand what it was to be a public servant until you have to make a decision like that, where you know the public is going to be really upset. I didn’t know I had it in me to do what was right instead of what was politically expedient. 

I never regretted. I had to wear a bulletproof vest all summer during my campaign because the threats were so awful, not just in state, mostly out of state, and all the parades I had to go to, and the meetings that I went to, and tremendous amount of money spent by the Vermont taxpayers on making sure that nobody could take a shot at me. But it never crossed my mind.

Why are you in politics if you don’t stand up for anything that needs to be stood up for?

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: ‘Don’t back down’ — Vermont’s marriage equality revolution at 25.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The unabridged audio version of this interview can be heard by clicking the audio bar above. 

David Goodman  

I checked the temperature in Washington, D.C., and it is 100 degrees outside. I’m wondering if it’s even hotter inside the building where you are.

Rep. Becca Balint  

It’s pretty hot. Members on my side of the aisle are furious. You had the Trump administration bomb Iran over the weekend, and we still have not received a members’ briefing on it. Members of the House were supposed to have a classified briefing this afternoon but that was just canceled by House Republican leadership. Not only did the president not come to us ahead of the attack, but he also iced out any Democratic members on the intelligence committees and the committees that deal with national security. He has surrounded himself with yes men and even his own people that he’s appointed to advise him on intelligence and national security, he did not listen to them ahead of this. So there is a lot of anger, but also generally fear about the future. 

When you have a president who is extremely emotional, seems to make decisions on a whim and does not ask for any kind of deep analysis ahead of the decision making — so yeah, things feel pretty hot and pretty tense right now. 

David Goodman  

What is your response to the US bombing of Iran?

Rep. Becca Balint  

I think it was the absolute wrong thing to do. We never should have walked away from the Iran nuclear deal. We have to continue with diplomacy. I feel like, in this moment, it seems pretty clear to me that our president is not only being played by Vladimir Putin, but he’s also being played by Benjamin Netanyahu. 

David Goodman  

Explain how this plays into Netanyahu’s interests.

Rep. Becca Balint  

This is what Netanyahu has wanted for years, to have an American president intervene in Israel’s longstanding conflict with Iran. And Americans have said repeatedly, they want no more wars. They want us to pursue a path of peace. And that was a campaign promise that the president made as well, right? He said if you elect Harris-Walz, you’re going to be involved in a war within six months of office, right? This is not only exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu wanted for his own political survival, but also to give him breathing room on Gaza, to enable him to take more power in Gaza and the West Bank. It is a way for (Netanyahu) to consolidate power and control. 

I don’t feel that this president plays chess. I feel like he makes decisions based on the whim at the moment and who is flattering him, and who is making promises to him or where he thinks he is going to get that feeling that he craves. This is a man who craves people praising him, and that is no way for us to be making foreign policy decisions.

David Goodman  

One commentator wrote that your feelings about the attack on Iran either fall into one of two categories: one, that you think this is the end of a war, or two, that you think this is the start of a war. Which do you think it is?

Rep. Becca Balint  

Interesting framing. I am highly skeptical of any information that we are getting from this administration, and so I have said in the last 36 hours that there’s a lot that’s happening right now that feels very similar to what happened in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. You had in this situation of President (Bush) saying this was imminent, that the uranium that was being enriched was going to be used in a nuclear weapon against Israel. It was going to threaten the world. And then you had people within his own administration saying it wasn’t imminent, that actually the intelligence didn’t show that. It’s difficult, if we’re not getting any kind of information from this administration, for us to make an educated decision about what should happen here. Time will tell whether this is the end of the tensions. I have a hard time believing that that’s the case, and we’ll see if this ceasefire holds. 

You’ve got a president who, seemingly on a whim, tweets that we have a cease fire between Israel and and Iran and next thing you know, they’re bombing each other and they say that we never agreed to a cease fire. So what is actually happening here? We would like the opportunity to ask this administration directly, as that is our job as Congress to be serving in a position of oversight.

David Goodman  

You signed on to a resolution calling for the War Powers Act to be invoked. Explain what that is and what Congress’s role is in these situations, and why you think that’s warranted. 

Rep. Becca Balint  

Congress has the authority to declare war and to commit offensive force and troops. That is within our purview, that is not within the purview of the executive branch, which I know is confusing for some people, because you have the president as commander in chief. But it makes sense, too, if you’re committing resources, where do you go to commit resources? You have to come to Congress. Congress makes those decisions. And after Vietnam happened, and obviously years and years of the American people and Congress feeling like they had been quite rightly lied to by numerous administrations about how the war was going, there was a strengthening of congressional power through the War Powers Act in the 1970s. 

Thomas Massie, who’s a Republican from Kentucky, has put forward a bipartisan agreement to demand that the president comes to us to get that authority to declare or to engage in war with Iran. And obviously that hasn’t happened, but many of us were relieved that Thomas Massie has been a strong voice on these issues his entire career in Congress. We disagree on a lot of things, but as you know, politics makes strange bedfellows, and I was very happy to sign onto his bill.

David Goodman  

Let’s turn from violence abroad to violence at home. The murder of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shooting of another Minnesota lawmaker put a spotlight on rising political violence. And earlier this spring, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) stated publicly how afraid she was. She said “I am oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real.” I wanted to get your thoughts on this and also ask, have you felt threatened in any way?

Rep. Becca Balint  

I think every single member of Congress feels threatened, feels in danger. We have all lost a sense that we can navigate this job without experiencing some kind of a dangerous situation, either for ourselves or our families, every time that we are asked to be at an event in Vermont and elsewhere too. In Vermont, my team, the first thing they need to do is they need to go over a safety plan with me. They need to call local law enforcement. I need to know exactly where the car is going to be. How are we going to get out of the building? Who is going to be my go-to? This is happening in every single district.

We do not have security details as member of Congress. I was in a huddle with members this morning as we talked about heading out for the Fourth of July parades that we’re all going to be doing, and that you can’t have a security plan for a parade. We were talking for the first time like, is this the year we all start wearing bulletproof vests? This is not what it’s supposed to be like to represent your constituents. You should not fear for your life. You should not feel fear for the safety of your family. 

David Goodman  

What do you attribute the rise in political violence too.

Rep. Becca Balint  

I think a lot of it, not all of it, can be traced back to the kind of rhetoric that this president has used in both of his campaigns. It has been dehumanizing. It’s been demonizing. It has been attacking viciously people that he doesn’t think belongs, whether it is immigrants or migrants, whether it is women, whether it is trans people. I mean, he is attacking viciously the LGBTQ community and it is picked up. He has broken the rules about what is acceptable discourse. Social media has always been a place where people felt that freedom. But it’s not just happening there. It’s happening in the halls of Congress. It’s happening in committees. It’s happening that constituents feel emboldened to say anything, do anything. This movement in which everything is acceptable isn’t going to go away when Trump is no longer president.

David Goodman  

A number of Democratic leaders have recently been arrested. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, New Jersey Representative Lamonica McIver, and of course Senator Alex Padilla of California, who was thrown to the ground and handcuffed for trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question. And then we saw New York City Comptroller Brad Lander manhandled and arrested. What is the through line that connects all of these instances of high profile arrests of these officials?

Rep. Becca Balint  

Silence and intimidation is the goal. It is to create a situation where if a member of Congress is being arrested, if a senator is being wrestled to the floor, if they will do that to a mayor, if they will do that to a comptroller, they will do that to anyone, and they are doing that to anyone. It is about intimidation and silence so that they will have no oversight over what they’re doing, and when we feel fear, when we feel intimidated, then we are not able to do our oversight, but also we won’t have collective action, right? People say to me, Is it safe for me to go out and protest? Is it safe for us to be seen together? I’ve especially gotten this question from people of color. Am I going to make myself a target? That’s what they want, and it’s going to take all of us to stand up to that, because they’re not going to stop until we say collectively No. And they can’t arrest all of us. They can’t.

David Goodman  

What should Democrats be doing right now to confront what’s going on? 

Rep. Becca Balint  

Well, a couple things. One, there’s a lot more happening than people see. Every single day in the house in every single committee, you have Democrats going toe to toe with Republicans who are trying to push the most outrageous legislation. And we need to be listening more than we’re talking. 

What’s happening is this administration is burning everything to the ground, and it is horrible. People are losing their jobs. There are resources that are not being invested in the NIH and research, there are attacks on Medicaid. These things are going to hurt people. And we also have to be thinking a few steps ahead, which is, where is the opportunity in that to not rebuild what we had before that didn’t feel like it was serving people. 

People want to see us fighting. They want us to see us showing up in difficult conversations and not backing down. I heard from Democrats across Vermont and across the country, they want to see us pushing the envelope more and using power when we have it and not being so timid.

David Goodman  

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that states can restrict access to transgender care, and you delivered an impassioned speech in a House committee. You asked why, with all the problems that the country and the world are facing, there was this obsession among Republicans about trans kids. How do you answer that?

Rep. Becca Balint  

It was a strategic decision that was made by the Republican Party. This is no accident. They sat down with their strategists and they realized that they had sort of lost the battle on rights for gay Americans, and they were looking for a new enemy. And what they realized is that most Americans didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the lives of trans people, and it was a very easy target for them. This is a tiny percentage of the population. That is their answer to anything that we bring up in committee, trans people are to blame. Don’t focus on the fact that you can’t pay your bills, somehow the fact that trans people want health care, that’s to blame. Don’t focus on the fact that you’re being screwed over by tax policy, it’s the fact that you’ve got a 13-year-old trans girl who wants to play field hockey. It is a concerted effort to draw attention away to all the ways in which this administration is lawless, corrupt and not meeting the needs of individual people, and they’re preying on the this group because they’re trusting that most Americans don’t have a lot of experience talking about these issues, and it makes them uncomfortable, because they don’t feel like they know a lot about it. 

A reporter asked me, “Why do you think you have become sort of a champion in fighting for the rights of these individuals?” I said, for me, it comes down to every single individual having access to health care, period. And if nobody else is going to speak up, I’m going to speak up, because this is a basic core value for me. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m the best spokesperson for this. I am not a trans person. I haven’t had this experience. I don’t have a trans person in my family. But damn it, if someone’s coming for the rights of one of my constituents, are coming from their health care, I’m going to fight with everything I’ve got.

David Goodman  

One of the things that we’re supposed to be distracted from looking at is the budget reconciliation bill that is moving through Congress that includes some $800 billion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and health services. In Vermont, this may result in cutting or reducing food assistance for up to 13,000 Vermonters, and potentially result in hospital closures. Talk about this budget and its potential impact on Vermont. What aspects of it are you most concerned about? 

Rep. Becca Balint  

I was meeting with folks in healthcare from Vermont here in my office today and they’re deeply concerned that tens of thousands of Vermonters are going to lose their health care and that facilities will close. A lot of people don’t realize Medicaid is the margin that keeps open a lot of rural health care centers. This is the case that I made to my Republican colleagues on the Budget Committee. I said, it’s not just blue states. Your rural hospitals are going to close too. And many of them didn’t believe us, because I feel like their leadership was not honest with them about what was in there, and they were not curious enough to find out.

David Goodman  

President Trump’s mass deportation program has now come to Vermont. Farm workers are being rounded up. There have been high profile arrests in Vermont, such as the case of Mohsen Mahdawi. Now it appears that Trump is targeting states that do not support him or his deportation policies. What is your response to these developments and what can be done about it?

Rep. Becca Balint  

We always knew this wasn’t going to be about going after “criminals” or “the worst of the worst.” We knew that because you can’t implement a mass deportation program supposedly going after millions of criminals. He was going to have to go after people who were showing up at the Home Depot to buy tools to be able to go and do their jobs every day, or students — people here legally — swooping in on folks when they are just at their court appearances. These supposed criminals are showing up (in court) following the rules, and that’s when they’re being detained, arrested, in some cases, shipped off to other countries. 

(Podcaster) Joe Rogan, who was a huge Trump supporter, was questioning on his show, what are we doing here? We’re now going after people who are living here peacefully, they’re contributing to our communities — this doesn’t make sense. And so this is another situation where we have to be standing up together. We have an obligation as members of Congress to do oversight. And I think that those of us who saw this happening on the campaign trail, we knew exactly what was coming, because we know who Stephen Miller is. He is the mastermind of all of this. He would like to have a white country devoid of brown people. That’s what this is all about. This is about white supremacy.

David Goodman  

You ran in your last race centering your own personal story about your family being Holocaust survivors. I wonder if you could take the temperature on the state of our democracy right now. What is it? Where are we?

Rep. Becca Balint  

If you’re only looking at what this administration is doing, what you see is a very bleak story. You see a president who is exceeding his authority and his power. You see him testing the judicial branch and trying to run roughshod over Congress, and you see a dysfunctional House and Senate not able to do the work of the people. But that’s not all of it. Democracy is a structure that is based on founding documents. It’s an idea and it only works when we’re engaged in it. 

When I look at the kind of outpouring that we saw for the No Kings rallies — I did three rallies, one in Jamaica, Vermont, one in Burlington, one up in Saint Albans. There was great turnout in every single spot. The entire drive up through Vermont along Route 7, there were people out along the side of the road, massive turnout across the country. So when you look at the ways in which Americans are responding in this moment, I feel very hopeful. I have a lot of confidence in the resilience of Americans, of our creativity, of our perseverance, of our insatiable desire to want better for ourselves and our kids. So I actually feel like we’re going to prevail in this moment. We are going to prevail because broadly speaking, the American electorate does not want what this administration is offering right now. It’s slowly sinking in for some people and for a lot of us, we knew what was coming. And it’s even worse than perhaps we thought. But it is sinking in among people like Joe Rogan, it is sinking in. 

I met a woman in Saint Albans, an elderly woman. She pulled me aside and said, “I’ve never protested anything in my life. I’ve never been to a rally. But I’m here, and it feels terrific because I was feeling so alone, and now I’m out here.” 

So when I am outside of DC meeting with people and what they’re working on and what they’re working on locally and within the state, I know we’re going to get through this.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: ‘This is about white supremacy’ – Rep. Becca Balint on fighting the Trump administration.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

This Vermont Conversation was originally published on September 19, 2024.

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’s recent book is “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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: BEST OF Vermont Conversation: CNN’s Elle Reeve on how far-right extremism became the Republican mainstream.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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 immigrants who are legal residents, 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-19 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.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: As Vermonters go hungry, the Trump administration threatens cuts to food assistance.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.

The Golden Globes recognized Jarecki 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.

What follows 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:

David Goodman

You are speaking to me from Berlin. Why are you there?

Eugene Jarecki 

The story of why we are in Berlin is the story of our time. I came to Berlin some years ago to make this new film, and coming to Berlin is no small matter for me because my father fled Berlin in 1939 at the age of six at the last possible moment you could get out of Germany in the prelude to the Holocaust and World War II. My father fled to America to go to a freer country. And I often note what a tragic descent it represents in America for us to have gotten to a point where his son, in order to make a project which is rather politically sensitive, had to leave the country that he fled to — the supposedly freer America — to go back to modern day Germany. Why? Because the protections for journalists and truth seekers like myself, documentary makers and others who want the world to know what is happening to us all and what matters to us all, life here is protected for such people in a way that is no longer true in America. It’s a sad irony.

David Goodman 

Let’s go into the subject of your film. Who is Julian Assange?

Eugene Jarecki 

Julian Assange is a tall Australian albino-haired man, characterized on Saturday Night Live as Dr. Evil, because he was a computer visionary who at the dawn of the Internet age in the early 2000s saw something that no one else had seen. And out of that vision that he had he built something called WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was a simple idea. Prior to WikiLeaks, people who wanted to tell the world what their organization was doing, a so-called whistleblower, had to take great risks to tell the world what their organization might have been doing, whether they were a polluter or a corrupt government, corrupting elections, or dirty little secrets about war and killing. What Julian Assange discovered was that the digital age, which was going to give enormous new powers to governments and corporations, also had a certain promise for individuals. All WikiLeaks was was an encrypted dropbox that would allow a whistleblower to tell the world the thing they needed to know and not have to risk life and limb for it. This quickly led to the most significant leak of military and diplomatic documents in US history, which came because of single Army private, Chelsea Manning, who came into possession of a vast amount of secret material which revealed war crimes committed by America. That immediately made Julian Assange and WikiLeaks public enemy number one for America for having given the whistleblower that protective space in which to release that material.

David Goodman 

Your film includes some of what Chelsea Manning released. What did it show?

Eugene Jarecki 

What Chelsea Manning shared with WikiLeaks and what WikiLeaks then released to the world came to be known as the Collateral Murder video. It showed US helicopters firing on Iraqi civilians and journalists. Two journalists from Reuters were killed when helicopters fired on a group of men chatting on a sidewalk in Baghdad. That extraordinary act of killing and brutality was suddenly on every television screen in the world, and it happened because a whistleblower shared it with an organization. It was at that moment that an international campaign run by the United States to destroy WikiLeaks and the person of Julian Assange began.

David Goodman 

When did you meet Julian Assange?

Eugene Jarecki 

It was about 10 days ago that Julian Assange suddenly joined us at the Cannes Film Festival, a free man walking the red carpet in Cannes having emerged triumphant over the US government despite their 15 year campaign to destroy him. And the story of how Julian Assange got free and won his battle against the US government in one of the most definitive episodes for the defense of press freedom in history is part of what we tell in the film. It’s also a story that everyone needs to know, because it’s true that fights for press freedom, fights for the human rights that we all hold dear, can be won. We live at a time where most fights look unwinnable, partly because those in power are in the business of scaring us. They’re in the business of showing us these dreadful ICE videos where the effectively SS that Trump has turned ICE into is grabbing people in broad daylight off the street, off of aircraft, out of their places of work, places of worship, places of education, and scaring us all into silence. The story of Julian Assange, who warned us that we were headed for that world and they then tried to destroy him, is a story of how what Margaret Mead said is true: “Never doubt that a small group of people properly organized can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Well Julian Assange and his team of young dreamer bandits, pirates working at WikiLeaks and wanting the public to know the truth, they won. The only charge left to which Mr. Assange had to plead guilty was journalism. The charge that Julian Assange had to admit he was guilty of was the act of doing something protected by the First Amendment. It shines an incredibly dark light on the way the US Espionage Act is being used to damage the US Constitution and to do things to people that the Constitution was created to protect them from having done to them.

David Goodman 

Tell us the meaning of the title, “The Six Billion Dollar Man.” And by the way, I really love the takeoff on “The Six Million Dollar Man,” a TV series that I loved in the 1970s.

Eugene Jarecki 

Me too. The movie is called “The Six Billion Dollar Man” because $6 billion is what the United States spent to bribe the country of Ecuador to torture Julian Assange. The goal was to make Ecuador, which had been giving Assange asylum, stop doing so, and make his life so miserable inside the embassy by shattering his human rights, safety and care inside the embassy that he would leave of his own volition so that US and British officials could apprehend him and put him on trial. For the richest country in the world to get one man, the bounty was $6 billion. And we and we have the receipts.

David Goodman 

In 2016 Democrats accused Assange of aiding Donald Trump by being the conduit for Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails, which many people believe was part of a Russian operation. Democrats have vilified him. How do you respond to that?

Eugene Jarecki 

I looked very closely at this because it troubled me as well, and I wanted to get at the heart of it. We found no evidence at all that links WikiLeaks with any kind of Russian operation. The only place we found that link is in the mouths of people in the Democratic Party, constantly saying it over and over again to explain away why they had lost an election. And what we did see was what WikiLeaks did release: evidence of what the Democratic National Committee was doing to destroy the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls. The stripping of democratic rights away from the supporters of Bernie Sanders is what WikiLeaks revealed, full stop. This was a very convenient smear campaign.

David Goodman 

No link to Russia.

Eugene Jarecki 

We found no evidence of any link. And by the way, no news organization has. Everybody in the world tried to find evidence that would link WikiLeaks to Russia, and none has come. Our movie also reveals is that though the US government for years said that WikiLeaks had “blood on its hands” for having released military and diplomatic documents that Chelsea Manning had provided to WikiLeaks, the US government conceded that no single person on the planet was found by them to have been hurt in any way in connection with any WikiLeaks release.

David Goodman 

Why is this movie important now?

Eugene Jarecki 

We’re living at a time with fascism on the rise all over the world, a crackdown on truth telling by those in power who do not find the truth convenient. They want to destroy the world all around us for profit and have us not know what’s happening. And Mr. Assange was the sort of canary in the coal mine of all this. These are people who don’t believe in democracy. And by these are people, I mean successive administrations of US policy makers. What they fear most is an informed public. Because what they’re doing behind the scenes, the dirty little business of how politics and corporate power intersect at the expense of all of us, they don’t want us to know. And so when someone comes along who threatens to expose that as Julian Assange, we see the clampdown. We saw it against Mr. Assange. We saw it in the killing of the journalists in the video that Mr. Assange released. We saw it throughout the diplomatic cables, in the manipulation of affairs of state all over the world, America doing business with dictatorships, America propping up human rights-abusing regimes. We saw so much crime and then we saw the US try to shoot the messenger. The fact that they failed and that he’s still walking is really a burnt stick in their eye.

We now have to understand that the game is on, because they are ratcheting up that use of force against all of us even higher than in the days of Mr. Assange. They’re cracking down on journalists in a way that he was just the precedent for. But his victory tells us that it can be fought by small groups of people working together to not allow these kind of trespasses to happen. When you see people on the street crowding around the people who are being abducted, kidnapped, illegally taken by the SS that Mr. Trump has created known as ICE, you’re watching community effort at work. It might not work the first time or the second time, but it grows. And before long, they are at war with the people themselves, and that’s ultimately a winning game for the people. The people win when they organize against the abuse of few.

David Goodman 

You have made films about Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, exploring why we fight, Elvis Presley, and now Julian Assange. What is the through line that connects your work?

Eugene Jarecki 

I’m a true believer in what they told me America was about. It’s the most it’s the most important social experiment in the last half millennium. My parents fled persecution in Europe to come to that promise in America. When I grew up to see that promise violated successively and the way that industrial capitalism has hijacked the American dream, it became the cause of my life to protect democracy from capitalism. I think Julian Assange was a glimmer of hope for whistleblowers and for all of us in the public who have the right to know what’s happening in our world, and the clamp down on him has exploded to be a clamp down on all information available to the public and on all truth seeking. And as such, he has more to say to our time than anyone I can imagine. That truth is that democratic glimmer that I care about and that I was taught to care about as a child, and I’ll fight for that glimmer till I’m dead.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Award-winning filmmaker Eugene Jarecki on Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and the global crackdown on truth.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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 51^st 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.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Jasper Hill Farm’s Mateo Kehler confronts Canadian boycott and Vermont’s affordable housing crisis.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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 25^th 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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Flutist Karen Kevra on a quarter-century of making world-class music in Vermont.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.

David Goodman  

You have just come out of several weeks in jail. What does it mean to you to be out here?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

My most beautiful memories of being in harmony, at peace and feeling tranquility happened in these mountains. This is the same path that I walked when I was processing my pain and going through healing for my trauma. Even though I was in prison, I was not imprisoned. I was able to imagine myself when I was in the cell, walking, hiking the forest, laying in a hammock, hearing this beautiful sound of water.

David Goodman  

What trauma are you referring to?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

I’m referring to the journey of my childhood, of the little Mohsen who grew up in a refugee camp, who has lived through war, who has been horrified by seeing loved ones being killed unjustly at the hands of the Israeli army. And the little Mohsen who thought many times that his life is about to be over, lived in trauma and pain and fear. The first place where I was able to process and to sit with those memories and the place that I felt safe, which I’m grateful for, was Vermont.

David Goodman  

How did growing up in a refugee camp in the West Bank lead you to Columbia University?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

Fire and pressure form something beautiful. The fire of injustice and the pressure of living in such difficult conditions, under basically military occupation and apartheid, pushed me forward. The magic recipe really is hope and education. I never gave up and I always believed in the idea of justice. 

My uncle, who was killed on my 11th birthday, was inspiration to remind me that my only way is education, that education is light, education is hope. 

David Goodman  

What will it mean to you to walk across the stage at Columbia to get your bachelor’s degree?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

It means many things. I will be walking and thinking of my uncle’s spirit and praying that it’s hovering above me and seeing that the advice that he gave me has fueled my energy to get to this point. I want to also be an uncle to every child who grows up in severe and difficult conditions giving the same message that my uncle gave me, that education is light and education will open many paths for you to change the reality. And the last part is a message to the tyrants who don’t want me to graduate, who want me to lose this opportunity for making peace and bringing justice to my people and to both Israelis and Palestinians. It’s a message that no power in this world can take away from me, my power for imagination to see a peaceful future for the children, Israelis and Palestinians.

David Goodman  

You when you emerged from prison in Vermont two weeks ago, you addressed President Trump directly and said, “I am not afraid of you.” What did you mean by that? 

Mohsen Mahdawi  

I wanted to say that intimidation, bullying, harassment will not stop me from working for this great cause for humanity, for democracy, for the Palestinian people. It is my life, it’s my family’s life, and I refuse to be silenced.

David Goodman  

You were going right to the heart of the power of an autocrat, which is fear. You were denying him that power.

Mohsen Mahdawi  

That’s exactly right. Nobody can take away from me the power of love that I have for the world or my ability to envision and imagine a better future, or my voice that I have to share with the world. The message was not only to President Trump, but also it was to my fellow students and Americans, the people who feel the intimidation and fear. I wanted to tell them that nobody can actually take power away from you unless you let them. This is the big fight between love and fear, intimidation, harassment, or yearning for peace and unity and equality.

David Goodman  

Is there anything you’re afraid of?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of it, but if I die tomorrow, I would be really sad of not making peace between Palestinians and Israelis and changing the reality for the children on the ground, to change the direction from war and bloodshed into peace and coexistence.

David Goodman  

Why do you believe you were targeted for deportation?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

They are putting me through this, treating me unjustly, restraining my freedom, threatening my existence in this country and threatening my educational journey just because I’m advocating for human rights, for the end of war and for peace. One might think it is about Palestine, but the matter now is about our humanity. Who is the next person who is going to get detained? They started with the visa holder, then I am a green card holder, then they will come to naturalized citizens, and then to the citizens. And it’s the same in Palestine, they come after the people in Gaza, now they’re going after the people in the West Bank. We must stand up against it and say no to it, divest from war, invest in peace, and strengthen international law.

David Goodman  

Secretary of State Rubio wrote in a memo justifying your arrest that your activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment,” and when you were released from jail, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said, “When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.” What is your response to those two statements?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

I’ve been advocating for justice and peace. I’ve been a peacemaker on campus. Yes, I’m a strong advocate for the Palestinian rights, but I have partners, mainly Jewish and Israeli partners. See the letters that have been written in my support, the protests that Israelis actually did in New York City in support of me and listen to the Jewish professors at Columbia University. They’re weaponizing the idea of antisemitism for their own purposes. They’re trying to intimidate people and to justify their unjust detention. 

David Goodman  

What is your feeling about violent resistance? 

Mohsen Mahdawi  

I never advocated for violence. I believe in nonviolence as the best path towards peace and justice. I believe like Gandhi believes that truth and justice have their own power. I advocate for compassion and empathy. The Jewish trauma and the Palestinian trauma are intertwined and interconnected. 

David Goodman  

Judge Crawford in releasing you cited your ties to your community and noted that the court had received more than 90 statements and letters from community members, academic experts and professors, “many of them Jewish,” attesting to your character. What did that mean to you?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

I felt so grateful for all of the love and support from the Jewish community, from my professors, from many people who I didn’t know before. What matters really is the light of hope that those letters signal to Americans as a whole. It breaks it through this polarization of one side or the other, Israelis and Palestinians. The reality is we are human beings who are yearning to see a diplomatic resolution for this long bloody conflict. I joke sometimes and say I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much love and support anywhere else as much as I felt inside the cell.

David Goodman  

You speak of hope and love, and yet so much suffering has gone on in your life and is going on in the West Bank and in Gaza, with over 50,000 Gazans killed, some 1500 Israelis killed. What gives you this ability to stay hopeful?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

It is my practical experience. One of my earliest realizations in America was that if there is an enemy, it would be fear, ignorance and segregation. What people who are in power are trying to do is to tell us that we should fear the other, whether if it’s Republicans fearing Democrats, black fearing white, Palestinians fearing Israelis and vice versa. When we come together, we realize we are way more than what divides us. Actually our difference enriches our existence. We just have to break through fear,  with empathy, understanding, through feeling each other’s pain.

David Goodman  

Vermont may be the first place in America where judges freed people in immigration custody, freeing you and Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk. 

Mohsen Mahdawi  

Vermont is the place in America that is becoming the beating heart of hope and life. It signals to Americans all 50 states that the system of democracy is still functioning. It is and communicating to everybody don’t give up, because we have a justice system that holds the system with checks and balances.

David Goodman  

What do you hope to do after you’re finished with your education?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

My purpose in life is to make peace. There is no peace without justice, so to figure out a method with restorative justice, to see children living in a peaceful future and equality. This is what I dedicated my life for. This is why I went back to school. I see myself as a peacemaker, as a diplomat. 

David Goodman  

What is your message to other immigrants who are afraid right now?

Mohsen Mahdawi  

You’re not alone. There are many other people who are like you, feeling afraid from the direction that politics is going in this country. In every situation of darkness, there is always light. 

Don’t be intimidated by the fear but try to understand it and channel it in a beautiful, creative way. 

I choose to see the good people in this country who are working tirelessly to change the situation. Vermont has showed up in an unbelievable, beautiful, inspiring way, and it is paving away for the rest of the country what it means to have a community that is supportive and empathetic and kind and welcoming.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: A walk in the woods with Mohsen Mahdawi.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Attorney General Charity Clark sues Donald Trump and warns ‘there are consequences’ for defying courts.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Bill Lippert on the 25th anniversary of Vermont’s landmark civil unions law and the backlash against LGBTQ+ people.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Journalist Jeff Sharlet on American fascism and how a civil war is speeding up .

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.

Vermont has been thrust to the center of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Trump’s immigration crackdown comes to Vermont.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Journalist Garrett Graff on the rise of authoritarianism and how Covid changed Vermont.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Retiring Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine on the state of public health in Vermont.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: BEST OF Vermont Conversation: New York Times columnist Nick Kristof.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

In the late 1960s, Will Patten was living in Berkeley, California, attending antiwar protests and shaking his fist 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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Can capitalism save us? Will Patten believes Vermont shows us how..

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

“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,” Hakimi Zapata said. “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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: ‘Another World is Possible’, says journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov on why Trump admires Putin.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: The Mirnavator challenges herself and others to get outside their comfort zone.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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 attempting to shutter 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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: ‘An attempted coup’ — Rep. Becca Balint on Trump’s power grab.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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 the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, 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 saidthere have recently been a number of arrests in Vermont by agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Agents have reportedly been showing up at supermarkets, gas stations and Western Union offices where migrant workers are known to frequent. The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project has a form on its website to report ICE activity.

Vermont is home to several thousand asylum seekers, according to Martin Diaz.

Trudy said 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,” she said. “We are looking towards the future. We are hopeful. We are happy. We are fine. We are really fine.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: One woman’s odyssey from Africa to asylum in Vermont .

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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 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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: ACLU leader on how freedom and unity will overcome fear and division.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Facing ‘systematic abandonment’ by the Trump administration, Vermont refugees confront fear and uncertainty .