The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

When 32 year old Peter Fatovich died by suicide in 1994, he left behind his adoring wife, four children under five years of age, and a million questions. Fatovich’s widow, Jenny Grosvenor, pushed the questions aside — until now. Grosvenor, who lives in Stowe, has spent the past few years pursuing the truth behind what tormented her young husband to take his own life in the waters of Huntington Gorge in Richmond, Vt. She finally discovered his dark secret: In the late 1970s, Fatovich was the victim of sexual abuse by a priest at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY, a Catholic high school. Fatovich is far from alone. According to BishopAccountability.org, a nonprofit that tracks clergy abuse allegations, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has reported that over 7,000 clergy were credibly accused of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2018. The Conference reports that there have been over 20,000 victims. The Catholic Church has paid out over $4 billion to settle clergy abuse cases. Last week, Jenny Grosvenor published a searing article in The Daily Beast, “A Widow’s Hunt for the Priest Who Preyed on Her Husband.” It told the story of her years-long pursuit of the truth. The response has been overwhelming. One email that she received said: “My Dad read your article and finally remembered that Malone had molested him in the early 60s. … Luckily now I think he will get the help that he needs. And as a survivor of priest abuse myself, I can finally understand the turmoil he's been going through.” Jenny Grosvenor is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Vermont. She has worked at Life Magazine and Sports Illustrated. She is writing a memoir about suicide, priest sexual abuse, and survival. Grosvenor writes, “I find some consolation in knowing that sharing my story could save other victims of this horrific abuse.”

Could the next presidential election be stolen? Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, is concerned that that’s precisely what may happen in 2024. Levitsky is co-author, with fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt, of the international bestseller, How Democracies Die. The book argues that modern democracies are subverted not by military coups, but by weakening key institutions such as the judiciary and the press. Levitsky wrote recently in The Atlantic, “The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election.” Although Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Levitsky said on The Vermont Conversation, “I see 2020 as a dress rehearsal.” Republicans “appear to not only have the ability, but the interest and the will to overturn an election.” Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die during the first year of the Trump presidency. Joe Biden carried around a marked-up copy of the book during his 2020 campaign and often cited it. I asked Levitsky, having observed four years of Trump, if he now believes he missed anything when describing how democracies are subverted. “What we missed was the transformation of the Republican party,” he replied. “We didn’t view the Republicans as an authoritarian party. …We could not have imagined a majority of House Republicans voting to overturn the election…[or] the vast bulk of the Republican party ultimately condoning Trump’s inciting of the January 6 storming of the Capitol. And we could not imagine the Republican party across the country taking steps to prepare in all likelihood to steal or try to steal the 2024 election. That is the behavior…of an authoritarian party.” “Parties become authoritarian when they really come to fear losing,” he asserts, and “a party based almost exclusively on white Christians has a hard time winning elections.”

“We’re not done with this,” warns Stanford epidemiologist Steven Goodman about the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe my big brother. In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading and lockdowns were being imposed, I asked Steven to join me on the Vermont Conversation to share publicly what he was telling me privately about this novel virus. While President Trump assured us that the coronavirus would “miraculously go away” with the arrival of warm weather, Steven warned that what was coming would “an impending catastrophe.” He explained the cold calculus of exponential growth and accurately predicted the calamity that soon unfolded. Steven Goodman, M.D., MHS, Ph.D., is an associate dean at Stanford Medical School, where he is also a professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine. Today, a fourth wave of Covid-19 is sweeping the country, driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant. While vaccinated Americans are cautiously savoring a return to normalcy, a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is raging, as nearly all new deaths are among the unvaccinated. Yet Republican leaders and right wing media are churning out vaccine disinformation, resulting in vaccination rates of under 35 percent in some states. This large reservoir of unvaccinated people will inevitably become everyone’s problem. “We’re all connected,” Steven says on The Vermont Conversation. “As large portions of major states go unvaccinated, they will become the factory for infections even among vaccinated people. We’re not immune…to the effects of other states and other people who’ve chosen not to be vaccinated.” Unvaccinated communities “turn into virtual waterfalls of mutations and spread of the virus. We’re going to see far less virus in the highly vaccinated populations than if they weren’t vaccinated,…but at the same time we’ll see far higher rates in those areas than if there weren’t states that were producing this waterfall of cases.” Covid-19 remains a major threat around the country and the world, Steven insists. "This is still very much a pandemic — the phrase 'post-pandemic' should be banned. [Covid-19] is raging like an intense forest fire across this globe. There are whole countries and whole continents that are absolutely unprepared for the devastation that is about to be wrought.”

How did German democracy collapse and give way to Nazism? Jack Mayer, a recently retired Middlebury pediatrician, has a personal interest in answering that question. His parents were lucky: They fled Nazi Germany in 1939 just as their neighbors were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where most of them died. Mayer has written two books about Nazi Germany. His first book, Life in a Jar, is a non-fiction story about forgotten Holocaust rescuer Irena Sendler and three Kansas teenagers who tell her story to the world. His latest book, Before the Court of Heaven, is historical fiction that explores the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the democratic government that was in power from 1919, just after Germany’s defeat in World War I, and ended in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Mayer argues that the collapse of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in Germany “is a cautionary tale” for the U.S. today. In the aftermath of WWI, many Germans embraced conspiracy theories and believed that Germany had not lost the war militarily, but because they had been "stabbed in the back" by Jews, socialists and liberals. "Hitler talked about the usefulness of repeating the Big Lie over and over and over until people believed it," Mayer says.

Can reducing reliance on fossil fuels benefit low-income people? For Jared Duval, the answer is personal. Duval, a ninth generation Vermonter, grew up shivering around a propane stove in a small apartment because his single mother struggled to afford her heating bills. Duval’s father lived for a time in a tent behind a flea market in Clarendon, using a space heater to survive relentless Vermont winters. Duval is now executive director of Energy Action Network, a nonprofit organization working to advance Vermont’s carbon emissions reduction efforts. He argues that the climate crisis and fossil fuel dependence disproportionately impact low-income Vermonters, who spend nearly one-fifth of their income on heating fuels and transportation. By contrast, Vermonters earning over $80,000 pay 5% or less of their income for energy costs. Duval reflects on “how expensive it is to be poor. Lower income folks often face higher costs for energy. It’s the exact opposite of what you would want.” In its recently released annual report, Energy Action Network calls for Vermont to drastically lower its carbon footprint in the transportation and heating sectors in the next five years to meet its energy commitments and achieve a more equitable energy path. The state has committed to reducing its carbon emissions to 26% below 2005 levels by 2025 and 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. It could be sued if it fails to meet those targets. Duval shares his own story of reducing his energy footprint and makes the case for an equitable transition that benefits low-income Vermonters. “My hope is in the transformation beyond fossil fuels we can work to make our energy systems more equitable and serve low income Vermonters first, not last,” he says.

“If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism," declared legendary Washington Post political cartoonist Herb Block. Jeff Danziger has lived on that cutting edge since 1975 when his cartoons skewering the powerful began running in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald. His wit and art have also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, VTDigger and other publications, and his cartoons are syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. Danziger is a winner of the 2006 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning, among numerous other awards. Fans of Danziger’s cartoons might be surprised to know that a source of his keen political sense and biting commentary was the four years he served as an intelligence officer and linguist during the Vietnam War. In 1970, Danziger was awarded the Air Medal and, to his surprise, received the Bronze Star, though he said he doesn’t know why. Vietnamese translators couldn’t pronounce Danziger’s name, so they came up with a nickname, Lt. Dangerous, which is the name of his new memoir. In 1971, following his service in Vietnam, Jeff Danziger taught English at U32 High School in Montpelier. He has also worked for the Christian Science Monitor and New York Daily News. Danziger, now 78, divides his time between homes in New York City and Dummerston, Vermont. He has two books out this year. “In Mob We Trust” is a book of his editorial cartoons from the Trump era. And “Lt. Dangerous” is a memoir about his time as a soldier in Vietnam. Danziger said the Vietnam War was pointless, and he opens the book with an author’s note stating, “The Vietnamese are among the bravest and most wonderful people on earth.” He has a message for other young men drafted into a similarly pointless and brutal war: “Don’t do anything you’re told. Disobey everything.”

Is there hope in rural America? Or is it a place in decline that young people just want to flee? Author Gigi Georges traveled to Washington County in Maine, the remote easternmost county in America, to explore the hopes, dreams and hardships of five young women in high school. Washington County suffers from the problems plaguing many pockets of rural America. It has among the highest per capita rates of opioid overdose in the country. The families of the girls experience drug addiction and domestic violence. But the girls also revel in the thrill of being small town sports standouts in basketball and softball. Georges tells the story of these five Maine girls in her new book, Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America. As the girls finish high school, they pursue their dreams. One becomes a lobster fisherman, while another studies to become a speech pathologist so she can help children in her home community. Yet another heads off to Yale University. Georges insists that the stories of these Maine girls are a counter-narrative to the downbeat tales of rural life told in bestselling books such as Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance, who is expected to announce this week that he is running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Georges worked in the White House as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton and has a home near Acadia National Park, just an hour drive from Washington County. She spent four years following the girls who she profiles from high school to college. “The lived experiences of the young women I follow cut against the dominant narrative of rural America as a place of despair and hopelessness,” Georges argues. She says that the communities in rural Maine “despite many challenges, are thriving, hopeful, and optimistic.”

United States troops are now pulling out of Afghanistan, bringing to a close America’s longest war. U.S. intelligence predicts that the Taliban will take over the country within six months, returning the country to much way we found it when we invaded following the 9/11 attacks. Since 2001, the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan has resulted in the deaths of 800,000 people, including 7,000 Americans, while spawning terror groups including ISIS and other jihadi organizations. “We’ve had a bipartisan penchant for militarism, and it hasn’t worked,” argues Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and leading foreign policy critic. “If all these interventions resulted in a more secure and prosperous United States of America, an international order that was more peaceful, more prosperous, I would say, well, maybe militarism works," he says on The Vermont Conversation. "But that hasn’t been the case. The consequences have been strikingly negative. Estimates of total U.S. expenditures since 9/11 are something on the order of $7 trillion. For what? And let’s not talk about the numbers [of people] killed. It’s been a catastrophe.” America’s endless wars have been justified by the often-repeated assertion of its leaders that we alone can solve the world’s problems, our causes are always righteous, and when things go wrong, well, it wasn’t our fault. As Dick Cheney famously reassured us in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, “We will be greeted as liberators.” Nearly two decades later, American troops are still dying in Iraq. Bacevich calls for NATO to be disbanded and for the U.S. to pursue a strategy of "sustainable self-sufficiency." He writes: "Rather than relentlessly pursuing a way of life based on consumption and waste, it means taking seriously a collective obligation to bequeath a livable planet to future generations. It means embracing some version of the proposed Green New Deal... [This] just might enable a government accustomed to squandering lives and dollars to become a government that nurtures and preserves." Bacevich is a regular guest analyst on network and cable news and a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, and the American Conservative. He is a graduate of West Point, served 23 years in the US Army and is a professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.

Alex Showerman had a secret. Growing up in Thetford Center, Alex competed on boy’s teams in cross-country, running and hockey. But Alex was actually running from who she was. Like more than half of transgender or nonbinary youth, she considered suicide rather than reveal her secret. Showerman went on to graduate from St. Lawrence University and work in progressive politics. In her free time, she threw herself into mountain biking and backcountry snowboarding. She numbed the pain of hiding from her true identity by drinking. Then, in 2019, she broke her neck in a mountain biking accident and was forced to stop running. Last fall, at the age of 32, Showerman came out as a transgender woman. She feared that she would lose her job doing public relations for outdoor brands and be ostracized by the outdoor sports community. Showerman has good reason to be concerned: As part of a Republican-led backlash against transgender rights, 125 anti-trans bills have been introduced in more than half the states in the country. To Showerman’s surprise, she has been hailed as a role model and symbol for inclusion. She has been profiled in Bicycling Magazine and is the subject of a recent Outside Magazine podcast. “Trans women are women from day one,” Showerman said. “I’m not gonna stop fighting anytime soon. I’m gonna keep on being visible, and I’m gonna keep on showing other trans folks that there is space for you and you can thrive here and make sure that nobody has to go through what I went through.” Showerman has some advice for trans kids: “Celebrate yourself. You’re awesome.” Showerman also has advice for parents of children who are questioning their gender identity: “Trust your kid. Love them. Give them a hug,” she said. “Let them be who they want to be.”

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official history of the Vietnam War that was leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. The Pentagon Papers revealed that multiple U.S. presidents and top government officials had been lying about the Vietnam War to the American people and to Congress. To mark the anniversary of America’s most famous exposé, we are rebroadcasting my 2015 Vermont Conversation interview with Daniel Ellsberg about war, conscience, and whistleblowers. Ellsberg is a former Marine who served in Vietnam and was an advisor on the Vietnam War to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson. When the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, the Nixon administration frantically tried to stop the publication. The Times appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the newspaper could publish the documents. The revelations about official secrets and lies led to a collapse of American support for the war. For leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case was declared a mistrial when evidence surfaced about the government-ordered wiretappings of his phone and break-ins of his psychiatrist’s office. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger referred to Ellsberg as “the most dangerous man in America.” But many view Daniel Ellsberg as a hero who risked his career, and even his personal freedom, to help expose the deception of his own government in carrying out the Vietnam War. "Daniel Ellsberg deserves only praise for his heroic conduct," declared Floyd Abrams, an attorney who represented the New York Times in the case. Ellsberg is now 90 years old and remains active in the peace movement. Ellsberg and I spoke in 2015 at a conference in Washington, D.C., about the lessons of the Vietnam War. The legendary whistleblower told me that he would like to be remembered with this simple epitaph: “He was a member of the anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam protest movements.”

Mark Redmond was on a glide path to success. Fresh out of Villanova University, he landed a plum job with a major insurance company and had a cushy apartment on Park Avenue. Money, status, and job security were all firmly in his grasp. Then he walked away and left it all behind. Redmond moved into Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth located in Times Square, described by Rolling Stone at that time as “the sleaziest block in America.” His pay was $12 per week. Redmond writes in his new memoir, Called, “It was a radical change, a case of on one day wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, walking down Madison Avenue, entering the stately international headquarters of the venerable Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, attending to meeting about types of insurance policies and pension plans, and a few days later wearing jeans, sneakers, and a t-shirt, walking past porn places and strip clubs to enter Covenant House, where I’d be helping homeless teenagers.” “I felt I was finally where I belonged,” Redmond reflects. Since 2003, Redmond has been executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, which provides housing and support services for homeless, at-risk, and foster-care youth in Vermont. He has also been a storyteller on The Moth. His wife, Marybeth Redmond, is a Vermont state representative from Essex. Redmond talks about his four decades working with troubled youth and telling their stories.

Martha Hennessy is a grandmother of 8, a retired occupational therapist, and a federal prisoner. The 65-year old resident of Weathersfield, Vt. is in jail, along with six other pacifists, for breaking into a Georgia submarine base in 2018, spilling blood and spray-painting anti-war slogans to protest against the threat of nuclear weapons. The group is known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. The name refers to the prophet Isaiah who said that swords shall be beaten into plowshares. “I have no criminal intent; I want to help prevent another nuclear holocaust,” Hennessy said in her statement. Hennessy is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the legendary co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, which is committed to nonviolence and working for the poor. Pope Francis has cited Day as a “great American” and the Vatican has given her the title “Servant of God,” the first step towards sainthood. I asked Hennessy if she felt a responsibility, or even a burden, being Day's granddaughter. "Yes, sure. I spent 25 years not engaging at all," she conceded. But in addition to her peace activism, she continues to travel to New York City to work with the poor at Catholic Worker Maryhouse, Day's former residence. "There’s this being hounded by God, having seeds planted in childhood." Hennessy is completing a 10 month jail sentence. She is currently at a facility in Manchester, NH, run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. She said that by speaking to the media for this interview, she accepted the risk that her sentence might be extended. Our conversation took place as she did her daily permitted walk.

The 2021 legislative session is in the books. The historic Covid-19 session was conducted entirely online over Zoom. Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, was often eerily alone in her office at the Statehouse in Montpelier. The session confronted — and then deferred on — some intractable issues such as state pension reform, but it was largely notable for the lack of rancor between Balint, Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) and Republican Gov. Phil Scott. That’s partly due to the fact that Vermont is receiving enormous amounts of federal Covid relief money. The unprecedented cash glut has shifted the dynamic in the Statehouse from fighting over scraps to dividing up the bounty to address big ticket problems such as expanding broadband coverage, responding to the climate crisis, and building affordable housing. But not all is peaceful in the Vermont Statehouse. On Tuesday evening, Gov. Scott vetoed two bills that would have allowed noncitizens to vote in Montpelier and Winooski, setting a new record for the number of vetoes issued by a Vermont governor. Balint has spoken candidly about her interest in running for Congress in the event that Sen. Patrick Leahy retires. We spoke about the legislative session that has passed, and her plans for her future in politics.

“Critical race theory” is the newest front in the culture wars, and conservative activists are intent on making Vermont one of its battlegrounds. At least 16 states with Republican-led legislatures or Republican governors are considering or have signed into law bills to limit the teaching of critical race theory, which, simply stated, considers how racism has been a powerful force in American history that has disadvantaged Black people and other people of color. About 100 residents packed a church in Essex Center, Vt., on May 28 to hear speakers denounce critical race theory, which they claimed was being taught in the Essex-Westford schools. The school district denies this. Liz Cady, a newly elected member of the Essex-Westford school board, labeled the theory “downright dangerous” and compared the Black Lives Matter movement to Nazism. Cady did not respond to an interview request for this program. Across the street at another church, members of the student-led Social Justice Union at Essex High School talked about the anti-racism work that students have been pursuing. “This is about racism. It is not complicated,” asserts Emily Bernard, the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. “Critical race theory is not coming to get you.” “There is a pocket of people in this country who are afraid of their ideas being challenged,” says Bernard. “There are people who were afraid of the telephone. They thought it would destroy society…. So this resistance, this fear, this hysteria is not new.” Bernard’s latest book is Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose at the 2020 L.A. Times book prize competition. Last year, Bernard was named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a prestigious $200,000 award given to scholars who are working on “important and enduring issues confronting our society." “We are not going to end racism through your feelings," Bernard insists. "We have to end it by the work that you do and the work that you undo.”

One of the most striking consequences of the murder of George Floyd is just how far reaching the movement for Black lives and against racism has been. Rallies and protests spread from Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered by police, to small towns across America. One of those communities is the village of Morrisville, Vermont, population 2,000. On the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, students staged a walkout from Peoples Academy, the local public high school, and from nearby Stowe High School. About two dozen students marched down the hill from Peoples Academy to the traffic light in the center of Morrisville, where they held signs supporting Black Lives Matter and talked to passers-by about the issues. A small number of community members, including a group of teachers, joined the students. "It’s very far from diverse here," says Maddie Ziminsky, a Black student at Stowe High School was has personally experienced violence. "Racism has had a lot of impact on me. I’ve seen people around me get hurt, racial slurs have become common [and] I’ve had physical altercations that I didn’t expect before. Now, walking outside has become a scary thing." "You don’t see [racism] in the pretty postcards of Vermont," she says. "Police are here to protect and serve. We should feel protected and served," says Saudia LaMont, chair of the Racial Equity Alliance of Lamoille, who says she has been threatened by police when she has called for help. "I should not feel afraid to call for help." I spent the anniversary of George Floyd’s death on the streets of Morrisville talking with students, teachers, and other residents about racism in their community. In the first part of the program, we speak with Saudia LaMont, and in the second half I turn the mic to the students from Morrisville and Stowe who rallied for racial justice.

The world is awash in misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foremost among them is the “big lie” that President Trump won the 2020 election (he lost by 7 million votes), that Covid-19 is a hoax (it has killed nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. and over 3 million worldwide), that the Covid vaccine implants a microchip created by Bill Gates (it doesn’t), and that Antifa stormed the US Capitol on January 6 (the FBI says it was white supremacists and far right groups, not Antifa). All of these falsehoods remain in circulation despite being repeatedly debunked. Can you boost your resistance to misinformation? How do you talk to people who believe conspiracy theories? Author Andy Norman, who directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, says it possible to inoculate ourselves against bad ideas. His new book is Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. “It’s clear that a large part of the American population have mental immune systems that have been compromised,” says Norman.

Americans were shocked by the violent insurrection carried out by a pro-Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. President Trump had spent months goading his supporters to rally behind him and dog whistling to white supremacist groups to rise up, and they heeded his calls. Susan Corke is not surprised by the rising tide of hate that exploded into public view at the Capitol. She is director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks and exposes hate groups and other domestic extremists. The Center's annual Hate Map currently shows that there are 838 hate groups active in the U.S. In the most recent official assessment, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security named 2019 as “the most lethal year for domestic violent extremism in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.” The SPLC also explores who becomes radicalized in a podcast, Sounds Like Hate, which just launched its second season. In 2020, the podcast examined racism in Randolph, Vermont. “2020 was a perfect storm," Corke says. "You had the coronavirus, and people were spending more time online and people were radicalizing online…What you have now in 2021 is the people that stormed the Capitol, as well as the majority of the Republican Party, are still not disavowing what happened on January 6. "So we’re at a very dangerous and divided place in our country. These hate groups and those that have been radicalized are still very mobilized.”