The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision in 2022, it was the culmination of a successful half-century movement to ban abortion. Despite the fact that 60 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases, it is now difficult to nearly impossible to get an abortion in most of the country. Forty-one states now have abortion bans, including 13 states with total bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Vermont is one of just nine states that do not restrict abortion.Who killed abortion rights?Journalist Amy Littlefield set out to answer this in her new book, “Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.” In it she chronicles her meetings with key figures in the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade, including a former IRS attorney, a gay conservative disgraced ex-congressman, and true believers who tried to convert Littlefield to their cause.She also met the families of women who died as a result of not having access to safe abortion.Amy Littlefield is the abortion access correspondent for The Nation. She has written about reproductive rights for The New York Times and is a frequent commentator for news outlets including MS Now, Democracy Now! and Reveal.Littlefield said that seeking an abortion in parts of the country where it is restricted “can be a really terrifying and isolating experience.” Some people seeking an abortion are being charged with murder, and in other cases “we're seeing cases of women dying preventable deaths because they can't get treatment for rare and totally treatable consequences of medication abortion or for miscarriage.”Despite the obstacles, the total number of abortions has risen since Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is partly due to the availability of medication abortion (commonly known as abortion pills), which now comprise over one-fourth of all abortions.“I did not see that coming,” conceded Littlefield.“The abortion rights movement had really been in a sort of defensive position for much of its history since the Roe decision, and so I did not see it coming that there was going to be this bold, creative legal experiment happening in real time that people were going to be participating in once Roe v. Wade was gone.”Littlefield expects that abortion shield laws that protect providers and patients, such as Vermont passed in 2023, will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court and could be weakened or nullified. But she noted, “We're seeing the proliferation of community support networks of activists who are circulating medication abortion person to person or in nondescript envelopes delivered from one post office box to another.” “Those efforts are pretty much untraceable and happening on a scale that no one has been able to fully measure or document.”

Thousands of Vermonters from nearly every county took to the streets to voice their outrage at the Trump administration on Saturday, March 28, in the third No Kings protest. About 50 rallies were held around the state. Nationally, 8 million to 9 million people turned out to over 3,000 demonstrations in what organizers say was the largest day of protest in American history.The Vermont Conversation spoke with a number of people at the Statehouse in Montpelier, where thousands of protesters came to rally and listen to speakers. Many expressed their opposition with clever signs, like one with tennis balls attached to it that said, “Free Balls 4 Congress.” Another read, “Sorry for Being Weird. This is My First Dictatorship.”Barre resident Guy Rock was attending his first protest. He was wearing the military fatigues of his brother, a 16-year service veteran. Asked why he came to the rally, Rock replied, “Donald Trump's a criminal. He's guilty of treason. … He's the greatest threat I've ever seen to our way of life. ICE is an extension of him.”Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., fired up the crowd from the steps of the Statehouse, but he was a little bleary-eyed when I caught up with him. He had debated funding for the Department of Homeland Security into the wee hours of the previous night.The Senate ultimately voted to fund the department except for ICE. The House later voted down the Senate’s funding bill, leaving DHS partly shut down. I asked Welch what the midnight debate was about.“It's all about the outrage of what happened in Minneapolis, where we saw an incredible rampage of violence by ICE. They literally murdered two people,” he told me after addressing the crowd. “They should be required to abide by the same rules, the same training as any other law enforcement agency in our country, like in Burlington or in Montpelier.”The war in Iran “is a disaster,” Welch said. “This could be another forever war. It's $2 billion a day. He's going to be asking for $200 billion. That's $1,400 a household. We should be funding an extension of the health care tax credits. We should be providing workforce training for kids.”Welch added that he feels the No Kings protests are important. “The rallies allow all of us to come together and share our hope that if we stick together, we keep marching forward, despite a lot of setbacks and despite the odds being against us in many cases, that we can prevail.”Rep. Anne Donahue, I-Washington-1, was outside on the Statehouse lawn. She has represented Northfield and Berlin for 24 years. Once a Republican, she is the lone member of the Statehouse who left the Vermont GOP because of Donald Trump. She said there wasn’t just one issue that pushed her to leave the Republican Party and become an independent, but “you wake up every day and there's something worse happening.”“I really fear for our democracy,” said Donahue. “It's at tremendous risk right now, and a big part of that is people not speaking up and not putting that stake in the ground.”James Lyall, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, said: "There are more of us than there are of them, and as long as people continue to show up for one another, creatively, nonviolently and consistently, there's absolutely no question in my mind that we will overcome what we are facing."Two young men wearing red “Make America Great Again” caps stood out in the crowd. Seth Fewer, 15, is a freshman at Spaulding High School in Barre. He has tried to launch a chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative student organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, but he was unable to find faculty sponsors in his school.I asked him how he felt about the war in Iran. “I don't support war, but considering this is a country that's been preaching ‘death to America’ since like the ’80s, people have to realize that this is a country that we really have to deal with strongly,” he said.Fewer, who was sporting a Charlie Kirk T-shirt, conceded that starting a war “is not what (Trump) promised us … but most of (his) policies are good, and that's what we need for America.” Dr. Dan Goodyear, a family practice physician in Richmond, was in the crowd, holding an American flag. “This country's democracy is at risk right now, and I think that has a direct effect on people's overall health in the long run, the stress that it causes, the risk with people getting improper health care or subpar health care. We need to stand up and rebuild the democracy back to what it was.”“It enriches my soul to see people who care, who are believers in truth and democracy and solidarity to come together and have a shared experience like this. It's nothing but empowering,” Goodyear said.

In February, I was surprised to receive a phone call from jail. It was Steven Tendo calling from the Strafford County jail in Dover, New Hampshire, where he was being held after being violently arrested by ICE agents on Feb. 4 at the Vermont assisted living facility where he works.Tendo was determined that his voice be free even if his body was not. That determination is a throughline in his life. It is why he is alive to tell his story today as a free man, at least for now.Steven Tendo is a minister, health care worker, nursing student and asylum-seeker from Uganda. He fled his native country in 2018 after the Ugandan government targeted him for the education and voter registration work that he was doing through an organization that he founded. He endured a harrowing ordeal in Uganda: he was abducted by armed men and interrogated and tortured in a secret facility. Several of his fingers were cut off. At another time, he was placed in an underground room with a python. Several members of his family have been killed. He was warned that he was next.After making his way to the U.S. in 2018, Tendo applied for asylum and spent two years in immigration detention in Texas, where his case drew the attention of Amnesty International. Tendo’s asylum application was denied and he has been fighting deportation in the courts ever since.Tendo told me that if he is deported to Uganda, “I would definitely die. They would kill me.” He said that Ugandan operatives told his family “that they should prepare my grave because they are ready for me.”In 2021, after being released from detention, Tendo settled in Vermont, where he works as a licensed nursing assistant at UVM Medical Center and is pursuing a nursing degree at Vermont State University. He is a minister of a small church.On February 20, a New Hampshire judge ruled that ICE had failed to follow proper procedure and ordered Tendo released after 16 days in jail.Tendo said that his violent arrest in Shelburne on February 4 “exhumed the trauma that I went through in Uganda.”He compared what he experienced at the hands of ICE agents in Vermont to Uganda, where justice is “kind of a jungle. There is no process. There is no warning. There is no nothing. They would just pick you up anyhow, anywhere. I thought that the U.S. being a first world country, a super power, a democracy…it would be different. And so when that happened to me, I cried deeply down in my heart. I was like, ‘Why does it have to follow me wherever I go?’”Tendo remains in constant peril. On March 20, Tendo had to report to the ICE office in St. Albans for what was supposed to be a routine check-in. ICE has periodically used these check-ins to arrest people. In what is now a familiar ritual, some 200 people rallied outside the ICE office in support of Tendo last week and his check-in occurred without incident. He was ordered to check-in again with ICE in a month.Tendo said that the support he has received from Vermonters throughout his ordeal “means a lot to me, and it sends a message to ICE that I am not a criminal.”He is motivated to keep going by “the people that benefit out of my voice being aired out there on their behalf. They see me as a beacon of hope.”“I just can't put up with injustice against anybody, irrespective of their skin color, irrespective of their faith, irrespective of who they are.”The treatment that he and fellow detainees were subjected to in the immigration jail in New Hampshire was “inhumane,” Tendo said, with 40 men sharing one bathroom and being subjected to constant cold.“I witnessed a lot of fear and a lot of desperation among most of the people” in the jail, which included primarily Latin American and African immigrants. He asserted that everyone in immigration detention had paperwork such as active asylum cases. No one, he said, was “illegal.”“Everyone was confused, everyone was scared, everyone was traumatized, because most of them had been picked off the streets.”I asked Pastor Tendo what keeps him going.“My faith has brought me a long way. I am someone who sees a light at the end of the tunnel. …My eyes see beyond what people are seeing right now. I am seeing a community where everybody can be accepted and work together and use our unique differences to build each other.”Tendo said that he uses every challenge “to strengthen myself and push back with kindness, with love and with compassion.”“I know it may sound weird and not common. But it's who I am.”

When President Trump threatened to annex Greenland earlier this year, the vast Arctic island with a population slightly larger than Burlington was dragged from the periphery of world affairs to the center. The threat that the U.S. might forcibly take Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.How did Greenland become a geopolitical flash point? What is the experience of traveling through its frozen landscape? And what may be next for the island's peoples?On this Vermont Conversation, I talked with two people with first-hand experience in Greenland. Vermont journalist Adam Federman has traveled and reported on Greenland for The New Republic and In These Times. Federman, who lives near Middlebury, is Reporting Fellow with Type Investigations. Rob Reynolds is a Los Angeles-based artist who has travelled extensively with scientists in the Arctic gathering images that are currently part of an exhibit called Zero Celsius at Mad River Valley Arts. Reynolds will participate in a public conversation with author Bill McKibben in Waitsfield on March 14.The Arctic is warming faster than any place else on Earth, and some projections indicate that the Arctic Ocean could have ice-free summers as early as 2030. This will have global ramifications as sea levels rise and inundate low-lying population centers, and new shipping corridors open up.These climate-driven changes could lead to “the prospect of open military conflict in a part of the world that has been spared. I find that terrifying,” said Federman. The race to exploit natural resources in previously inaccessible landscapes “has tremendously dangerous implications for the people who live in that part of the world.”For Rob Reynolds, Greenland is “a place of wonder. It's a place of awe. It's a place unlike any other that I've ever been to.”“The thing that that is most staggering to me about Trump's almost provocative light hearted threat to take Greenland by force … is that people live there. And the great lesson that Greenland has to teach us is that conservation is something that we should be thinking about. We shouldn't be thinking about taking it. We should be thinking about keeping it frozen.”Federman said that Trump’s Greenland provocations are “a new form of imperialism.” That has unexpectedly led to “greater indigenous power in this part of the world.” Greenland’s parliament “has clearly rejected the notion that the United States could somehow come in and take over.”“It's taken many, many years, but Greenland does now have a seat at the table and cannot be ignored.”

As the world contends with increasingly destructive and costly climate-fueled disasters, the Trump administration has announced that it is eliminating the government’s ability to fight climate change.Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is erasing the scientific finding, known as the “endangerment clause,” that permits it to take action to protect public health and the environment.“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be,” reported the New York Times.I turned to Bill McKibben to glean the significance and implications of this latest development. McKibben is arguably the world’s foremost reporter and organizer on the climate crisis. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about climate change, and he has gone on to author over 20 other books.He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and to his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. McKibben is also the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change.

When cross country skier Ben Ogden won a silver medal in the classic sprint at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, he broke a 50-year medal drought for American men. The last American man to medal in cross country skiing was Bill Koch, Ogden’s Vermont neighbor and skiing mentor. Ogden, who began skiing in Koch’s backyard as a kid, followed those ski trails right into the Olympics. He celebrated by doing a backflip off the podium. Ten days later, Ogden raced to a second silver medal in the men’s team relay with teammate Gus Schumacher. Ben Ogden is now the most decorated men’s cross-country skier in U.S. Olympic history. Ogden grew up in Landgrove, Vermont, and attended the University of Vermont, where he was a three-time NCAA cross country ski champion. This was Ogden’s second Winter Olympics.Less than a week after standing on an Olympic podium, Ogden is back racing on the World Cup circuit in Europe. That’s where I caught up with him.

When Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., traveled to Minneapolis on a Congressional oversight mission several weeks ago, she saw a city under siege. Some 3,000 masked federal agents dispatched by President Donald Trump were roaming the city, snatching people from their homes and streets, often without warrants or explanation. Balint fears Vermont could be next. “This is not a law enforcement effort, this is about power and control and submission,” Balint said of what she observed in Minneapolis. She said that the killing of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis “just absolutely shook me to my core, not just because of the violence and the loss of life, but also immediately the lying about these two people” by the Trump Administration. “This is about the president punishing states and municipalities that he does not feel like give him enough fealty,” Balint said. “Any state that did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, they're in the crosshairs. And we must assume that at some point this President will try to make an example of us, and we can't be caught flat footed.”Last week, Balint said she and Senators Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., met with Gov. Phil Scott to prepare for that potential day.Though in another sense, that day has already arrived. Just this week, FEMA denied disaster aid to Vermont for 2025 flooding in the Northeast Kingdom. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “also oversees FEMA," Balint said. "And the President is using FEMA right now to pick winners and losers. And the winners are Republican states, and the losers are so-called democratic states,"

Young Bernie Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964 as part of a counter-cultural wave. The tall Jewish kid with the thick Brooklyn accent who spoke of socialism and revolution fit right in with the communards and hippies, though he was neither. Sanders was then, as now, his own man, raging against the establishment while simultaneously seeking to lead it, albeit in a very different direction.As author Dan Chaisson writes, the story of Bernie Sanders is also the story of Vermont. “To see how Vermont changed, simply look at how Bernie’s message, reiterated for fifty years, migrated from the fringe to the heart of Vermont’s political discourse.”In the early days, Burlingtonians knew Bernie “as a perennial political loser” who typically garnered a slim percentage of the electorate in in the 1970s, recounted Chiasson. “But also he was just an indefatigable kind of force.”Dan Chaisson is a Burlington native and the author of five books of poetry. He is a professor of English and chair of the English department at Wellesley College. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, his new book is Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. Chiasson weaves together his own story of growing up in hardscrabble Burlington in the 1970s with Sanders' own, whom he observed throughout his life go from gadfly to mayor, to the most influential progressive political figure in the country.Chaisson traces Sanders’ politics to his experience growing up poor in Brooklyn “in an economy that was designed to kill" him and his family. "His mother died in her 40s of a congenital heart condition.”Sanders attended the University of Chicago where he participated in civil rights protests. “He thought that things like racial and other kinds of traumas in our country stemmed directly from economics,” said Chiasson. “Moving to Vermont was a way of thinking, could we start society over?”What explains Bernie’s appeal to conservatives in areas like the Northeast Kingdom? Chaisson said that Sanders admired and channeled George Aiken, the Republican Vermont governor and senator who famously opposed the Vietnam War, declaring that the U.S. should “say we won and get out.” Aiken “had a sort of similar kind of flintiness to him, a similar kind of orneriness or cantankerousness,” Chaisson said.Sanders, a lifelong independent, has long reserved some of his harshest criticism for Democrats. “He feels that the Democrats are the party of the educated elite and he feels much more comfortable among working people.” When he disagrees with someone, Sanders “has a talent for steering the conversation away from those differences and towards places of common interest and common ground.”Asked what he thought the legacy of Sanders would be, Chaisson said, “Just the tenacity, the temerity, the moral vision that Sanders laid out.” He quoted former Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, who described Sanders as “a moral visionary.”“Somebody with Bernie's fight in him and with his sense that there are right and wrong sides of the question morally when we engage with politics, that makes me feel pretty hopeful.”

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota has sparked furious backlash. Protests have been held around the country following the killing by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott characterized the immigration raids as “a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans.”Last week, a group of over a dozen Vermont faith leaders responded to a national call for clergy to come to Minneapolis to bear witness and support besieged local religious leaders. On this Vermont Conversation, I spoke with two Vermont clergy who have just returned from a tumultuous and emotional trip to Minneapolis. Rabbi David Fainsilber is the rabbi of the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe, and Rev. Dr. Becca Girrell is the pastor of United Community Church of Morrisville.“Minneapolis is serving as a testing ground. That is true both for the operations of ICE and Border Patrol and other federal enforcement (using) pretty brutal tactics, but it's also true of the community response and resilience,” said Rev. Girrell. “What moved me and stays with me the most is the way in which the people of Minneapolis are drawing together peacefully and legally and in strong solidarity and support."Rev. Girrell said that the brutal tactics of federal agents are “meant as a warning to people like me, to people of good faith or no faith all around the country, that we should not stand up for our neighbors, and we should not protect them with ourselves and our very lives if necessary. And what I saw was the people of Minneapolis will not comply with that order."Asked whether he saw parallels between the actions of federal agents in the U.S. and how immigrants were rounded up in Nazi Germany, Rabbi Fainsilber said the link wasn't necessary. "You don't need to look far to see slavery, to see genocide. Let's look in our own backyard here and our history to make the point that today is not okay. What is happening feels like a direct line from American history to today.”Fainsilber added that it is “time for people to raise their voices, to not sit on the sidelines, … to make sure that there's legal accountability when officers kill civilians, that there's no additional federal funding for ICE right now, for corporations to become Fourth Amendment businesses so that they're not aiding and abetting ICE activity.”Rev. Girrell returned from Minnesota with a warning. “The violence we see in Minneapolis may come here to Vermont. But the strength of community resilience is already here, and we continue to build that, and we continue to know our neighbors well, so that if there is a crisis, we can respond immediately, and we can respond with strength and love for our neighbors.”