The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

Gov. Madeleine Kunin is an open book. Vermont’s only female governor has been chronicling her life in books since the mid-1990s, when she penned a memoir, Living a Political Life. Since serving as Vermont’s governor from 1985 to 1991, Kunin went on to jobs as deputy secretary of education and ambassador to Switzerland. Along the way she has been sharing her insights about women and leadership in other books, including Pearls, Politics and Power and The New Feminist Agenda. Kunin has lately turned her focus back to her own life. In Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties, Kunin, 87, offers an intimate personal narrative of growing older. She has a new book of poetry, Red Kite, Blue Sky, in which she chronicles her experience of love, loss and loneliness in the aftermath of the 2018 death of her husband, John Hennessey, Jr., and after enduring a year of Covid-19 isolation. Kunin continues to be active in politics as the founder of the Vermont chapter of Emerge, which trains Democratic women to run for office. The former governor periodically testifies in the Vermont Legislature and remains a keen observer of politics, penning regular columns for VTDigger. “We have to be vigilant to protect our democracy and to push back,” Kunin says about threats to democratic institutions from President Trump and his supporters. “That’s all the more reason for people to enter politics. We have to have voices who will speak out and speak the truth.”

Alison Bechdel is obsessed. Her passion is exercise – karate, cycling, running, skiing in all its forms, to name a few of her pursuits. This obsession is the focus of Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. A New York Times book review declares, “This is a true delight of graphic literature, and nobody does it better. You feel as if you’re peering through a plexiglass panel right into Bechdel’s marvelous brain…[It is] a nearly perfect book.” Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont and a recipient of a MacArthur genius award. She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For." Her best selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide. The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men. Bechdel runs, skis and bikes from her home in West Bolton, Vermont, which she shares with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, who is the colorist for her new book.

When President Ronald Reagan conjured the “welfare queen” in his 1976 presidential campaign, he created an enduring and damaging myth that people living in poverty were lazy, cheating, minority, urban and female. In fact, more than half of Americans will live part of their life below the poverty line at some point in their lives. And most Americans in poverty are white and do not live in cities. This is one of many myths about poverty that are debunked by Mark Rank in his new book, Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, is considered one of the foremost experts on issues of poverty and social inequality. On the Vermont Conversation, Rank discusses the truth about poverty in America and the obstacles that stand in the way of going from rags to riches. He believes that the U.S. could be at a turning point in how it deals with poverty. “One of the silver linings of the pandemic is it reveals the fact that [poverty] doesn’t have anything to do with people’s motivation or not working hard enough. This is a collapse on a very systematic level,” Rank says. To address post-pandemic poverty, “we need to think very big. I think that’s what Joe Biden is doing. He’s thinking FDR or LBJ, [whose] programs had a really significant effect on improving people’s lives.”

Syd Ovitt’s life changed forever in November 2017. The student from Pittsfield, Mass., was a freshman at the University of Vermont. She was excited about her new classes and meeting new people. But in her first semester, Ovitt says, she was sexually assaulted by a fellow student. When she reported the attack to UVM officials, a months-long ordeal followed. Her alleged perpetrator was found not guilty. Ovitt’s mental health deteriorated and her grades plummeted. Then Ovitt got angry. She spoke publicly and often about her experience at UVM, and her story was picked in news reports. She launched a national campaign called Explain the Asterisk to require students convicted of sexual assault to have that reason noted on their transcript. She has lobbied numerous members of Congress to support the initiative. Nationally, sexual assault on campus is pervasive. More than one out of four female undergraduates and 7 percent of males experience rape or sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. Last week, after a UVM student posted their experience of sexual violence, the student body erupted in outrage, grief and solidarity. Scores of students have been posting on social media with their own harrowing accounts of surviving sexual violence, many on an Instagram account called ShareYourStoryUVM. On Monday, thousands of UVM students walked out of class to protest sexual violence on campus and what they say is an inadequate response by the university. Syd Ovitt and other survivors of sexual violence addressed their classmates. In response, the university administration has met with students and agreed to numerous demands put forth by student leaders. Erica Caloiero, interim vice provost for student affairs at UVM, stated, “The goal is for these incidents to never happen in the first place. And when they do happen, to make sure that victims are fully supported, and respondents receive a fair hearing and are held fully accountable when the circumstances warrant.” Syd Ovitt, now a senior who will graduate from UVM later this month, shared her story with the Vermont Conversation.

When Anne Sosin contracted Covid-19 in early April, a disease that had been the focus of her academic work suddenly became personal. Sosin, a policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College, has worked globally on public health initiatives. Lately, she has been studying how rural communities in Vermont and New Hampshire have responded to the pandemic. She has a been a rare public health expert who has publicly criticized Gov. Phil Scott’s relaxation of health restrictions as he moves to reopen the state by early July 2021. Sosin has warned against opening up too quickly and endangering the health of young people, in particular. Her warnings have been prescient, as Vermont has seen a spike of infections among students as schools have re-opened to in-person instruction and indoor sports have resumed. Her prescience hit home when her daughter’s child care provider called her a few weeks ago to say that she had a positive Covid test result. Sosin and her daughter both tested positive. She first spoke publicly about this to VTDigger last week. An expert on health inequities, Sosin sees a worrisome trend if large regions of the country have low vaccination rates against Covid-19. “The pandemic requires putting an end to the epidemic not only in Vermont and other northeastern states, but in the rest of the U.S. and the rest of the world,” she says. “If we get to a situation where we have large parts of the country that remain unvaccinated, we’re not going to see an end and we really risk having this rage on for months, if not years, to come.”

Bestselling Vermont author Jessica Lahey is done with keeping secrets. In her new book, The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, she reveals her best kept secret: she is an alcoholic. The story begins before she sips her first glass of wine, when she becomes aware that alcoholism runs in her family. Acutely conscious of this, she takes precautions to stay away from alcohol as a young adult. As a student at UMass Amherst, she becomes a drug and alcohol counselor, teaching her classmates about the perils of addiction. But in her thirties, after having two kids, Lahey begins drinking wine. She is soon drinking a bottle a day, then more, then liquor. Finally, she blacks out drunk at a family birthday celebration, and her father confronts her. “I know what an alcoholic looks like,” he tells her, “and you’re an alcoholic.” That night, Lahey attends her first 12-step program meeting. She has been attending meetings ever since. “There are lots of people that are going through this and you don’t have to be alone,” she counsels. Jessica Lahey, a former teacher and author of the 2015 bestselling parenting guide, The Gift of Failure, is now on a mission to teach parents how they can "inoculate" their children from substance misuse. “Inoculation theory” starts with knowing the facts about substance misuse and other risky behavior. “It raises the likelihood that your children will refuse that high risk behavior -- which could be drinking, or sex before they’re ready, or driving in the car with someone who’s drunk,” says Lahey.

Each April 15, Jackie Robinson Day is celebrated in every ballpark in America. It marks the day in 1947 when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play professional baseball, thus ending baseball’s color barrier. Robinson has become an icon, his number 42 retired in every ballpark, to honor his trailblazing feat in both sports and racial justice. But four decades before Robinson’s historic appearance on a Major League Baseball diamond, another African American ballplayer nearly broke baseball’s color barrier — via Vermont. His name was William Clarence Matthews, and he was a nationally renowned baseball player for Harvard College. Several of Matthews’s Harvard teammates went on to play in the MLB, but Matthews had to settle for playing professional ball in Burlington, Vermont, in the independent Northern League, which was integrated. Word of Matthews’ feats on Vermont’s diamonds spread. Then in 1905, a Boston newspaper reported the bombshell news that Matthews was about to be drafted by the Boston Nationals, a professional baseball team with a woeful record. But the deal was never signed, and Matthews, one of the greatest ballplayers of his era who was shut out of the professional game, went on to become a distinguished attorney and assistant U.S. attorney general. Matthews said presciently in 1905, “A Negro is just as good as a white man, and has just as much right to play ball.” It would take another 42 years for that right to be realized. The remarkable story of William Clarence Matthews was recently recounted in a lengthy article on mlb.com, “The Player Who Nearly Integrated Baseball in 1905.” The article is based on the research of Vermont baseball historian Karl Lindholm, who is at work on a book about Matthews. Lindholm, emeritus dean of advising and assistant professor of American Studies at Middlebury College, tells Matthews's story on The Vermont Conversation.

The conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is a milestone in the movement for Black lives and racial justice. It is a rare moment of accountability for the police killings of black, indigenous and people of color. Since 2005, 140 police officers have been arrested for on-duty killings in the U.S.; just 7 were convicted of murder. Chauvin’s conviction comes during Earth Week, the days of environmental activism leading up to Earth Day on April 22. A central part of Earth Week this year is the We Shall Breathe virtual summit, which connects the climate crisis to issues of pollution, poverty, police brutality, and the Covid-19 pandemic, and places them all within a racial justice framework. We Shall Breathe is sponsored by the Hip Hop Caucus, led by its founder and president, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. Rev. Yearwood is a minister, community activist, U.S. Air Force veteran, and a national leader in the environmental justice movement. “Climate justice is racial justice, and racial justice is climate justice,” Rev. Yearwood tells the Vermont Conversation. “I believe that another world is possible that is not based on extraction,” says Yearwood. “I believe that another world is possible where you are not judged by the hue of your skin. That we can be brothers and sisters. That we can coexist together.”

Chuck Collins gave away a fortune – literally. When he was in his twenties, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune gave away his millions to progressive political causes. Now a resident of Guilford, Vermont, Collins has spent his life fighting inequality and exposing how the rich make themselves richer at everyone else’s expense. In his new book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Collins details how the rich deploy a secret army of bankers, lawyers, wealth managers, accountants and consultants that he dubs "the Wealth Defense Industry." He knows these people. They were the advisers who told him that he was a fool for giving away his money. He did it over their objections. “This hidden wealth system is really undermining…healthy democratic society,” says Collins, who is director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies. “In the U.S. we are…building our own oligarchy of inherited wealth dynasties and that fundamentally puts us on a collision course with democratic institutions and norms. It’s not just about avoiding taxes. It’s really about avoiding accountability and enabling these huge inequalities to fester and grow.”

Journalist Eva McKend is a trailblazer. She was the only black, female, on-air news anchor in Burlington when she worked at Vermont’s CBS affiliate, WCAX, from 2015-2018. And she was among a small number of journalists of color in the state. In 2018, McKend moved to Washington, D.C., to become an on-air congressional correspondent for Spectrum News, a cable news service. McKend, a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, is a regular guest on the NPR program 1a, and her series of stories on Black hemp farmers in Kentucky has won several awards.McKend's current beat includes covering the Kentucky congressional delegation, which is led by one of the most powerful politicians in America, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McKend's pointed exchanges with McConnell have made national news. She got McConnell to confirm that humans exacerbate climate change, got him to declare that he would not be an impartial juror in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, and challenged him about reparations for slavery, which he emphatically rejected. “These are questions that should be asked,” says McKend. “I worry that if I don’t ask them, they’re not going to get asked.”

A furious public disagreement is raging between Vermont’s top elected prosecutors, with no resolution in sight. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George is accusing Attorney General T.J. Donovan of being “disingenuous and hypocritical” and of “misleading the public.” At issue are two murder cases and one case of attempted murder that were dismissed by George in 2019 after she deemed that the alleged assailants were legally insane. She said that she could not simply incarcerate people whose mental illness led them to commit a crime. "It is awful that our mental health agencies are failing us,” she tweeted at the time, “but real leadership requires digging in and fixing problems, not pointing fingers elsewhere and undermining the judicial system's integrity." Gov. Scott objected to the dismissals, writing, “I’m at a loss as to the logic or strategy behind the decision to drop all charges.” Scott asked the attorney general to review the cases, and in a rare move, Donovan overrode George’s decision and has now refiled the three cases that George dismissed. At the heart of this dispute is how the state deals with mentally ill people who commit serious crimes. Should they go to jail, or be held in a psychiatric institution? And should the governor and attorney general second guess the decisions made by frontline prosecutors? “From [Donovan’s] perspective, justice means jail,” George tells the Vermont Conversation. She accuses Donovan of “attempting to show that he is tough on crime. That seems like a change from his ‘progressive policies.’” Donovan insists that the attorney general has “concurrent jurisdiction” over the cases and that a jury should evaluate claims of insanity. I asked George and Donovan to appear together to discuss these issues on the Vermont Conversation. George agreed to the conversation, but Donovan insisted on a separate interview. T.J. Donovan served as Chittenden County State’s Attorney for 10 years, where he and George were colleagues, before he was elected attorney general in 2016. Sarah George was elected to succeed Donovan as Chittenden County States Attorney in 2016.

“From the beginning,” Gov. Phil Scott said of Vermont’s Covid-19 response, “we have consistently used data and science to guide our decisions.” But when it comes to following public health guidance, the governor appears to have made an exception for one group: prisoners. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends priority vaccination of corrections staff and incarcerated people at the same time “because of their shared increased risk of disease.” And last month, Vermont’s Covid-19 Vaccine Implementation Advisory Committee called on the administration to “immediately amend its vaccination policies to provide access to Covid-19 vaccines to all incarcerated individuals in its care.” The advisory group includes more than two dozen health care providers and advocates. Last month, Scott refused this guidance and declared that prisoners “will be vaccinated like anybody else, with the age banding.” This was despite an outbreak of Covid-19 at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, the state’s largest prison, where 179 inmates — more than half of the prison population — were infected, along with two dozen corrections officers. A handful of states, including Massachusetts, have prioritized vaccinations for prisoners, but many states have failed to vaccinate their high risk prison populations. Nationwide, fewer than 1 in 5 state and federal prisoners have been vaccinated according to data collected by The Marshall Project and The Associated Press. We discuss the question of vaccinating prisoners with four guests: Vermont Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker; Dr. Simi Ravven, president of the Vermont Medical Society; Mike Fisher, chief health care advocate at Vermont Legal Aid and member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Implementation Advisory Committee; and Steffen Gillom, president of the Windham County chapter of the NAACP.

In the fall of 2012, Theo Padnos, who grew up in Woodstock, Vermont, was working as a freelance journalist in Turkey. He made a fateful decision to trust two men who promised to arrange safe passage for him into Syria, where he hoped to report on the civil war that began a year earlier. It was a catastrophically bad decision. His supposed helpers turned out to be working with Jabhat al-Nusra, the main affiliate of al-Qaida in Syria. Upon entering Syria, he was beaten and kidnaped. He spent the next two years in secret prisons being tortured by his captors. One of the ways he consoled himself was to write an allegorical novel set in Vermont. During his captivity, other journalists captured in Syria, including James Foley and Steven Sotloff, were executed. Others, like Austin Tice, disappeared. Padnos was lucky: In August 2014, he was released after the government of Qatar paid millions in ransom. Padnos first wrote about his ordeal in 2014 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, and he is the subject of a documentary, Theo Who Lived. He has a new book about his ordeal, Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment. The New York Times says it “lays bare the human condition at its extremes. There is depravity and resilience, rage and revelation, and, ultimately, a triumph of the human spirit.” Padnos sees parallels between the mindset of his al-Qaida captors and the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January. “What if they set up their own little government, what would it be like to live inside it?” Padnos asks of the insurrectionists. He warns that the U.S. "started down the road…to have a similar outcome as Syria is having now.”

In February 2020, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger appointed Tyeastia Green as Burlington’s first Director of Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Weinberger hailed her hiring as part of an effort in Vermont’s largest city to begin “breaking down the barriers of institutional racism and implicit bias.” Green arrived in Burlington just months before a movement for racial justice took to the streets of the country and around Vermont following the killing by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s murder hit home for Green: she grew up in Minneapolis near where he died. Green has been deeply involved in discussions about racial disparities in the work of the Burlington Police Department (BPD). BPD arrested African Americans nearly four times as often as whites in 2019, and officers disproportionately use force against Black residents. But earlier this month, Weinberger removed Green from overseeing a study to assess the BPD, replacing her with a white man who he said would “be seen as neutral.” Sen. Kesha Ram slammed Weinberger for “questioning the neutrality of his only Black department head…because of her lived experience.” Ram wrote, “It is insulting to Green and to our community, and it can only leave us to presume that the decision gives comfort to those who are opposed to systemic change.” Following a furious backlash, the mayor reversed himself and apologized 24 hours later, conceding, “This decision was wrong and reveals my own bias.” Reflecting on the last year, Green observes, “What surprises me the most is how racist Vermont is… In 2021, Vermont is still the second whitest state in the union. That's not by accident. …Why are people over the decades not staying? There's a reason there. And we have to deal with that.”

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic, a former columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. Her latest book is Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, in which she explores why people, including former friends of hers, are drawn to strongmen and nationalist movements. On this Vermont Conversation, she discusses her recent articles about how social media poses a threat to democracy, how and why Russia interferes in US elections, and what should be done about it, and how to deal with insurrectionists who live among us.

Jessie Diggins is the fastest woman in the world. At least on cross-country skis. Earlier this month, Diggins, a Minnesota native who trains in Vermont, became the first American woman to win the overall World Cup cross-country skiing title. Only American cross-country skier Bill Koch, who won the men’s title 39 years ago, has accomplished this. This is just the latest first for the trailblazing Diggins: In January, she became the first American to win the Tour de Ski, a multiday ski race modeled on the Tour de France bike race. And in 2018, she and teammate Kikkan Randall became the first American women to win an Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing. As Diggins smashes records, she has become an icon for other female skiers around the country and the world. Her explosive speed is matched by her fun-loving public persona. She often races with paint and glitter on her face and is routinely captured on podiums jumping for joy. Diggins has also been praised for her candor about her struggles with an eating disorder, which she recounts in her new memoir, Brave Enough. Jessie Diggins and several of her teammates on the US women’s cross-country team were guests on the Vermont Conversation in January 2018, just days before they left for the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang. The finals of the women’s team sprint featured what many say was the most exciting moment of the 2018 Olympics. On the final lap, Diggins was locked in a 3-way contest with the top female skiers from Sweden and Norway. As Diggins battled to break past her two opponents, the announcers from NBC Sports screamed themselves hoarse capturing the thrill of the moment. “Here comes Diggins!,” as the NBC announcers shouted over the roar of the crowd, could well be a motto for Jessie Diggins as she continues to smash records. She talks with us about her skiing, going public about her struggle with bulimia, the social and political causes that she is championing, and just what was going through her mind as she lunged for Olympic gold.

As more Americans get vaccinated against Covid-19, both President Biden and Gov. Scott are predicting that life will return to normal by this summer. But now a new public health threat is emerging: people who refuse to get vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy may become a risk factor for getting infected by Covid-19. There is a striking partisan dimension to vaccine hesitancy: in a recent CBS News poll, a third of Republicans said that they would not be vaccinated — versus 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure. Why are some people reluctant to get vaccinated against a deadly disease? What works to change people's minds? For answers, we turned to Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is also a columnist for the Wall Street Journal writing on behavior change. Ariely studies the irrational ways people behave and designs ways to make human behavior more rational.

A battle over the future of the Vermont Republican Party is being waged by supporters and opponents of former President Donald Trump. At stake is the future of the Vermont GOP and whether many top Republican officials will continue to be associated with it. Vermont state party officials have strongly supported Trump. In the aftermath of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot by Trump supporters that left five people dead, Vermont Republican Party Chair Deb Billado issued a statement condemning the violence as “wrong, immoral and against the fundamental principles that we hold dear.” But she did not mention or blame Trump, and compared the Capitol riots to unrest at racial justice protests last summer. By contrast, Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott called for Trump to resign or be removed, and many of Vermont’s Republican lawmakers called for the resignation of the leadership of the Vermont GOP. To discuss the struggle over the future of the state Republican Party, we’re joined by Republican Rep. Scott Beck, who represents St. Johnsbury in the Vermont legislature, and Kolby LaMarche, a Champlain College student who is the former chair of the Burlington Republican Party. Party chair Deb Billado did not respond to multiple interview requests.