The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

This week, world leaders are gathered at the United Nations' COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss what to do about the climate crisis. Gus Speth knows what brought us to the edge of this climate emergency. President Carter and all the presidents who followed knew, too.The United States government knew that climate change was an impending disaster. They knew that burning fossil fuels could drive the world into crisis. And yet for the last half century, American leaders put their feet on the accelerator of fossil fuel consumption and pushed down hard.The actions of American leaders “on the national energy system over the past several decades are, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic,” writes Speth.Gus Speth is now telling the story of how and why this happened. Speth, who lives in Strafford, Vermont, is a luminary in the environmental movement. He served as chair of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality during the Carter Administration. He went on to lead the U.N. Development Program, served as Dean of the Yale School of Environment and co-founded the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was a professor at the Vermont Law School and is now part of The Next System Project, which addresses systemic challenges confronting the U.S. Speth’s latest book is They Knew: The Us Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis. On this week's Vermont Conversation, Speth talks about what radicalized him, leading him to go from government insider to getting arrested in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.

It was the crime of the century.Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — which is controlled by the billionaire Sackler family — was the hidden hand behind the national opioid epidemic that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The company deceived doctors and patients about OxyContin’s addictive properties and rewarded high-volume prescribers.In September 2019, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from thousands of lawsuits from individuals, hospitals and local governments. In a settlement reached last month, Purdue Pharma was dissolved, and the Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle claims. But the Sacklers, who remain among the richest families in America, were absolved of opioid-related liability.It appears that the criminals got away with the crime.Ryan Hampton knows this story firsthand. An alumnus of the Clinton White House, he became addicted to OxyContin and ended up unemployed and homeless. He has become an addiction recovery advocate and served as one of four victims appointed as a watchdog during the bankruptcy proceedings. He tried to ensure that justice was done but found himself up against powerful interest groups, including representatives of big insurance companies, pharmacies, and state attorneys general. He finally quit as the co-chair of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee and wrote a book, Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis. "Ignored by a system devised to protect extreme wealth and perpetuate social disparity, Purdue’s victims find themselves doubly victimized," Hampton wrote recently in the New York Times. "I know this because I not only represented the victims; I’m one of them."

What does a performer do when she can’t perform?For Karen Kevra, she becomes a storyteller.Kevra is a Grammy-nominated flutist and founder and artistic director of Capital City Concerts in Montpelier. When Covid-19 shuttered performance venues last year, she searched for a new way to connect with her audience. Kevra has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including performances at Carnegie Hall and the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. Last year, 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.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. Their musical relationship blossomed into a lifelong friendship until Moyse’s death in 2007 at the age of 94."There’s a difference between a teacher and a mentor," says Kevra. "A mentor is someone who helps to shape you, who becomes a part of your life and really shows you how to live life."

Vermont has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, and to meeting 90 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2050. Are these energy goals a pipe dream, or are they within reach?The answer depends on where you live. The city of Burlington now gets all of its power from renewable generation. And as President Biden struggles to get a national clean energy infrastructure plan passed, Burlington residents will soon vote on an energy bond that is aimed at making Burlington the first city in the country to be netzero in energy use.The Vermont Conversation is joined by Darren Springer, general manager of Burlington Electric Department, and Peter Sterling, interim executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, to get a snapshot of where Vermont is now on its green energy quest.“Burlington is on the leading edge in the country,” says Springer of Burlington’s energy future. “We’re taking an all-in approach to try to reach a reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuel use in the [heating and ground transportation] sectors.”

When Bernie Sanders decided to pursue national politics, one obstacle stood in his way: He had to defeat Vermont’s Republican congressman, Rep. Peter Smith. In 1988, Sanders first ran for Congress against Smith and lost in a three-way race. Two years later, Smith was completing his first term when the former mayor of Burlington challenged him again. This time, the maverick socialist won handily.Peter Smith occupies a unique place in Vermont’s political history. He is the one-term Republican congressman who in defeat launched Sanders’ three-decade long national political career. And Smith is Vermont’s last Republican congressman.Smith cites a saying that “if you wanna surf, you gotta get ahead of the wave. In politics, the wave broke right on top of me. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”Smith has left the Republican Party and signed a letter in 2016 with other former Republican Congressmen denouncing Donald Trump as “manifestly unqualified to be president.”Smith says he still occasionally participates in programs in which former members of Congress speak to students and citizen groups. He identifies himself as “R-Vermont in the 101st Congress.”  He says with a soft laugh that it is “a little confusing to some people because I’m generally to the left of whoever the Democrat is that I’m traveling with. The truth of matter is when I was in the Congress, I voted to the left of something like 55% of the Democratic Caucus.”Peter Smith founded and led the Community College of Vermont in the 1970s and went on to serve as a state senator and Lieutenant Governor. After losing to Bernie Sanders in 1990, Smith left politics and Vermont to pursue a career in education. He was the founding president of California State University at Monterey Bay, was dean of the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University, Assistant Director of UNESCO, and is now a professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus. He has written a new book about people who did not attend college but who bring deep experiential knowledge to their work, Stories from the Educational Underground: The New Frontier for Learning and Work.Smith says, “I couldn’t see it in 1991, but…I think I am doing what I was meant to do. I frankly think Bernie has been doing what he was meant to do. He’s had a major impact on the party and the country.”

As the Covid pandemic grabs headlines, another deadly epidemic is quietly ravaging communities: addiction has led to a record spike in overdoses. Nationally, there was a 29% increase in overdose deaths last year. In Vermont, opioid deaths rose by 38% in 2020, with 157 people who died by overdose.For town librarian Brett Ann Stanciu, these statistics had a name and a face. In 2016, a local man who broke into her library in Woodbury, Vt., died by suicide after encountering a library trustee. This led Stanciu on a quest to understand opioid addiction in her community and in Vermont. It also led her to reckon with her own addiction. This quest is the subject of her new book, Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.Stanciu, a graduate of Marlboro College and formerly the librarian in Woodbury, says that her book “looks at our society and how it’s frayed apart, what the ways [are] that we can put our society back together.”In our second half, we talk with Maia Szalavitz, a New York Times bestselling author of Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction. Szalavitz. When she was in her 20s, Szalavitz struggled with an addiction to heroin and cocaine. She says programs promoting abstinence from drugs have resulted in broken families, mass incarceration and the spread of disease. Szalavitz says a more effective -- but politically controversial -- approach is harm reduction. Examples of this include needle exchange programs and using methadone and buprenorphine to treat addiction.Szalavitz says that harm reduction is now gaining acceptance—but for dubious reasons. “Our drug laws are racist. The only reason the drugs that are legal are legal and the drugs that are illegal are illegal is racism and anti-immigrant panic. …Now when we see the victims of the opioid problem as being white, suddenly being nicer to them is OK, so harm reduction gets massively adopted all over the place.”Szalavitz advocates ending the failed war on drugs and de-stigmatizing substance abuse. “When you take away the elusiveness and the cops and robbers, it doesn’t actually make people want to stay addicted forever. It gives them space to make some change…. Overall the picture is extraordinarily positive.”

This week, the U.S. government narrowly averted shutting down. Now, a debt default crisis looms on the horizon. This brinksmanship has been driven by Senate Republicans, who threatened a shutdown and are blocking raising the debt limit as part of a strategy to undermine President Biden’s economic agenda. Unless an agreement is reached by Oct. 18, the U.S. will default on its debts for the first time in its history.How did government become the enemy? The simple answer is that Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the presidency in 1980 by declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” President Reagan ultimately presided over three government shutdowns, the first time that shuttering the government was used as a political weapon. President Trump took this scorched earth political warfare to a new level, presiding over the longest government shutdown in history – 35 days — which occurred in January 2019 over disputes with Congress about funding his border wall. Trump’s shutdown cost American taxpayers about $5 billion.According to Yale historian Paul Sabin, the anti-government movement that Reagan rode to victory was actually inspired by citizen activists of the 1960s, such as Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. He describes this improbable connection between 1960s liberal activism and the current anti-government movement in his new book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program.Sabin is deeply concerned by the authoritarian bent of the current anti-government movement. “We need to actively defend the government and its purposes and the public goods and the role of public institutions.”“My dream would be we could find a way to… combine active government with the idea of continuous reform and improvement and we could come to terms with complicated, flawed institutions.”“We’re never going to have a perfect government,” Sabin concludes.

It is the greatest fraud in Vermont’s history.The EB-5 scandal has the elements of a true crime novel: A shady grifter. Secret meetings. Duped investors. Complicit regulators. A panicked whistleblower. A tenacious journalist. Whispers of blackmail. Millions of dollars lost. A dramatic raid by Federal agents that brings it all crashing down.In 2012, when VTDigger founder and editor Anne Galloway attended a glitzy press conference announcing plans for massive investments and thousands of jobs in the financially depressed Northeast Kingdom, she smelled a rat. The latest revelations in the unfolding saga include a state attorney who alleged that top government officials knowingly “aided and abetted” the fraud.In this Vermont Conversation, Galloway offers a primer on the EB-5 scandal, starting from the program’s beginnings in 2006 to the most recent developments. In 2017, Galloway was a finalist for the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors FOIA Award for her EB-5 investigation.Galloway says that the EB-5 scandal is a cautionary tale in the small Green Mountain state. “We have a situation in Vermont in which we’re not very good about holding people accountable,” she says. “There are companies and entities that operate in this state with impunity because people in power aren’t willing to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that would make their work more accountable to the public.”

Where will homeless Vermonters live?That question has come to the forefront as more than 540 households were slated to lose their rooms in motels this week. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Vermont’s general assistance housing program has utilized vacant motel rooms for Vermonters who would otherwise be homeless. VTDigger has reported that some 700 people were forced out of the program July 1, while people with children, or with disabilities, or who were fleeing dangerous or life-threatening conditions were allowed to remain. Vermont’s emergency motel stays were slated to end on September 23 – despite the fact that federal funds are available to cover the motel housing until the end of the year.Vulnerable Vermonters have received a last-minute reprieve. On September 21, Gov. Phil Scott announced a “30-day pause” in the effort to close the motel housing program. His announcement came following criticism from legislators and advocates.One such advocate is Addie Lentzner, a senior at Arlington High School. She helped organize a letter signed by dozens of owners of emergency hotels around the state that declared: “We as motel owners call on Governor Scott to use the federal money to reinstate the GA Motel Program through December, and ensure that there is safe and consistent housing available when the time comes to transition out. At this point, every available motel room should be used for shelter. Now is the time to act before almost 600 people are kicked out.” The letter pushes back on arguments by state officials that motel owners want voucher recipients gone to free up rooms for leaf-peeping tourists. On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people who are directly affected by the motel housing program, including Laila Lakshmair and her son, Raj Singh, who operate the Bradford Motel; Olive, a resident of a motel in Morrisville, who asked to be identified by her first name only to protect her privacy; Kim Anetsberger, executive director of Lamoille Community House, a seasonal homeless shelter; and advocate Addie Lentzner. In the second half of the Vermont Conversation, we talk with longtime advocate for the homeless Rita Markley. For over two decades, Markley has led the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS), one of Vermont’s oldest shelters for people experiencing homelessness. Markley discusses how the homelessness crisis has deepened over the past 30 years as a result of policy choices and the closures of mental health facilities, and how policies must change for homelessness to be eradicated.

John Killacky has had a front row seat in America’s culture wars. As a gay man and a dancer in the 1980s, he lost over 100 friends to AIDS. As an arts administrator in the 1990s and 2000s, he confronted police who threatened to shut down artists who they deemed to be obscene. And as the former director of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vt., he agreed to allow a visit by presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 – and broke down in tears after a night filled with rage, vitriol and protest.The Trump campaign overbooked the theater, causing overflow crowds to spill onto the streets and confront anti-Trump protesters. As protesters inside the Flynn disrupted his speech, Trump demanded of police, “Get ’em out. Confiscate his coat. It’s about 10 degrees below zero outside. … Tell him we’ll send it to him in a couple of weeks.”Today Killacky is a Vermont State Representative representing South Burlington and is one of a handful of openly LGBTQ legislators. He has a new book of essays, Because Art.Killacky was targeted by protesters for giving a platform to Trump in 2016. He remains unsettled by what he saw that night.“I felt like I experienced fascism from the stage,” he says. He talks about whether he would make the same decision again.

The issue of resettling refugees has been a flashpoint in Rutland. Five years ago, then-Alderman David Allaire fiercely opposed the settlement of 100 Syrian refugees in the city, declaring that the program should be “slowed down, if not stopped.” His opposition to resettling refugees was a central issue in his campaign against Mayor Chris Louras. Six weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Allaire soundly defeated Louras in March 2017 in a vote that was widely viewed as a referendum on refugee resettlement. The refugee controversy and Louras' defeat made national news.Last week, something remarkable happened at a meeting of the Rutland Board of Aldermen. Now-Mayor David Allaire stood up to speak to the issue of a plan to resettle Afghan refugees in Rutland. Allaire declared, “I want to make clear to everyone that I am supportive of this...” Gov. Phil Scott has also expressed support for bringing refugees to Vermont.Rutland Alderman Devon Neary noted the results of a recent census. “We lost 688 folks, so honestly, this couldn’t come at a better time,” he told Amila Merdzanovic, director of Vermont’s chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. He encouraged Merdzanovic to look at Rutland as a “big partner, not just as a little partner.”“For the Love of Rutland” is a new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who grew up in Rutland and is now an associate professor in Film and Digital Media and director of Graduate Studies in the Social Documentation MFA program at University of California at Santa Cruz. The film follows a Rutland woman who is struggling with overcoming poverty and addiction. The film also follows former Mayor Chris Louras during the bitter debate over refugees in 2016, and his electoral defeat.

Bill McKibben has a new target for his climate activism: his fellow Baby Boomers.McKibben, the founder of the global climate action group 350.org and a bestselling author, announced last week that he will end his weekly “Climate Crisis” column in The New Yorker and instead launch his own Substack newsletter, The Crucial Years, and a new organization, ThirdAct.org. He tweeted: “We're going to try and organize 'experienced Americans' — i.e., people over 60 like me — around issues of climate justice, racial justice, economic justice.”“Our generations have done their share of damage,” he writes. “We're on the verge of leaving the world a worse place than we found it. But we also have the skills and resources to help make change.”McKibben also reflects on the perilous state of democracy and on the prospects for his beloved but snakebitten Boston Red Sox.

A Texas law that effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy went into effect on September 1. The law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, known as SB8, bans abortion before many people know they are pregnant. It took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court, flush with three Trump appointees, refused to grant an emergency request to block it. SB8 has a novel provision that essentially deputizes ordinary citizens to enforce the law and claim a $10,000 bounty on anyone that they think has violated it. The Texas abortion ban is now expected to be replicated in many other Republican-led states.“It is an all-out attack on the people who need abortions by intimidating and terrifying every person around them who might help them,” asserts Lynn Paltrow, the founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a human rights and civil rights organization focused on pregnant and parenting women.Paltrow, who is an attorney, tells The Vermont Conversation that the Texas law is “about much bigger issues: white supremacy and male supremacy. It isn’t just criminalizing abortion. It is labeling and surveilling everybody who has the capacity for pregnancy.”The anti-abortion law took effect the same week that Gov. Abbott signed laws restricting voter access and loosened gun restrictions. Paltrow says all these laws are part of a “strategy of undermining democracy and undermining constitutional review by the Supreme Court.”Stopping the Texas law is a critical test, she says. “It’s not only a fight for abortion rights. It’s a fight for a true democracy.”

Is Vermont squandering its hard won gains keeping Covid-19 in check? That’s the argument of Anne Sosin, a public health specialist and Policy Fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. She recently wrote an essay for Time Magazine titled, “Vermont Offered the U.S. a Textbook for Reopening Schools Safely. Why Is It Throwing Out the Lesson Plan?” “We see a departure from the evidence-based approach that’s been so critical to Vermont’s success in earlier phases of the pandemic,” Sosin tells The Vermont Conversation. “Right now, we need to be prioritizing the health and education of our children. That means aligning what we’re doing with the best evidence, local epidemiology and the guidance coming out. And I’m concerned that we have shifted very far away from that in the last several weeks.” The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking in schools regardless of vaccination status. Gov. Phil Scott said masks are "a good idea," but he has declined to mandate them in schools or elsewhere. The Delta variant is now surging in places that were recently hailed as Covid-19 success stories, such as Iceland, Israel and Hawaii. These places are a cautionary tale for Vermont, Sosin said. “All of these places have very high vaccination rates like Vermont, yet this variant has led to very rapid increases in transmission and has had significant impacts on health systems, schools and businesses,” she said. “We need to learn and be really humble in our approach as we respond to it.” Vaccines are not enough, she said. “Employing other tools right now helps us to safeguard the gains that we’ve made as a state. It doesn’t diminish our success,” Sosin said.

Less than a week into the school year, cases of Covid-19-positive students are popping up in schools all around the state. Gov. Phil Scott so far has declined to mandate face masks in schools, but he recommends that students and educators wear masks. It has been left to each school district to decide whether or not to mask. “We’re going to always do whatever it takes. We’re going to keep kids as safe as we humanly can,” said Brigid Nease, superintendent of the Harwood Unified Union School District, which includes Waterbury, Duxbury, Waitsfield, Moretown, Warren and Fayston. On Sunday, Nease was notified that a student at Crossett Brook Middle School had tested positive for Covid-19. By Monday, 23 middle school students were in quarantine. Nease said she is concerned by the minimal guidance that schools have received from the state. “Each superintendent is really feeling … that we are just out here alone trying to determine what we need to do with what our community will support and what the spread looks like in our own community,” she said Educators are also trying to resist being dragged into the culture wars around masking and vaccines. “I am hearing direct reports of personal fear from principals and superintendents," Nease wrote in her back-to-school letter to the community on Aug. 19. "One of my superintendent colleagues has received a death threat. Some principals are receiving letters from groups threatening to storm the schools on the first day. Leaders are receiving voicemails from very angry community members screaming at them. Today, when seeking out advice and support we were told to access law enforcement.” Nease discusses the uncertainty and anxiety around the new school year and how she and other educators are managing a second pandemic school year.

A curious hallmark of the Covid-19 pandemic is the backlash that it has spawned. Right-wing politicians and their media allies are emboldened as they rage against masks and vaccines, spout conspiracy theories and attack doctors and scientists. Republican governors in Florida and Texas, where infections are raging among children, are blocking schools from mandating that children wear masks, a simple public health measure. Those same states are reporting that their ICUs are full, many of them with children. This type of behavior is not new. The Anti-Vaccination League of America was founded in 1908 just as a vaccine against smallpox — a disease that had killed millions — was being mandated by some states, while mandates were prohibited by others. The effort to blame China for the pandemic also has a familiar ring. “The idea of looking for scapegoats, of casting blame has taken on new life during Covid,” says Martin Halliwell, professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. “Stigmatizing has a long narrative. There is a constant, the idea of looking for someone to blame.” Martin Halliwell tells the story of America’s social and political struggles around public health in his new book, American Health Crisis: 100 Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics. He discusses what is new and familiar about our current public health crisis.

An extremist movement led by angry and entitled white men is spreading throughout the country, and Vermont is providing fertile ground for their violent hatred. That’s the contention of Michael Shank, a resident of Brandon, who says that he is moving in order to escape armed white extremists who have been harassing him and been tolerated by local authorities. Shank made his case in an op-ed article for USA Today on Aug. 4, titled: "White extremism is winning in my Vermont town. I'm selling my animal sanctuary and moving." On Friday, August 13, 2021, Shank's neighbor, Eric Grenier, a convicted felon, was arrested on weapons charges. Shank has accused Grenier of making death threats. Shank writes that white extremists have “bullied countless people of color in Vermont, who had to flee their communities because it became increasingly hostile and unsafe for them. And now it’s pushing me out, too.” Shank tells The Vermont Conversation, “Not only are people unsafe in our communities…but they are unsafe in terms of who they turn to for protection…. The very people who are supposed to protect them aren’t protecting them.” He cites recent reports about racial disparities in policing in Vermont that show that Black and Hispanic drivers are 3 to 4 times more likely to be searched by police during traffic stops — despite having a lower “hit rate” for contraband. The bias that pervades policing has created a permissive environment for racial harassment and white extremism to flourish, says Shank. “Vermont has a leadership problem on this issue,” he asserts. “We are allowing the racism to metastasize.” Shank has also worked in Afghanistan as a senior policy adviser to former California Rep. Mike Honda, and he discusses what led to the Taliban retaking the country. Michael Shank is communications director for the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. He is also an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

What would you do if you knew that your father fought for the Nazis? For years, Alexander Wolff harbored this dark family secret. Wolff, a staff writer for Sports Illustrated for more than three decades, longed to know more about his family’s role in Nazi Germany. Was his father, Niko Wolff, involved in the worst Nazi crimes, including the extermination of Jews? How did Niko hide the fact that he was part Jewish? How else was his family involved in the war? In 2017, Wolff left Sports Illustrated and moved with his family from their home in Cornwall, Vt., to Germany, where he spent a year probing his family’s secrets. He also wanted to learn more about his grandfather, Kurt Wolff, a young German Jewish publisher who published renowned authors including Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth before fleeing the Nazis and coming to New York, where he founded Pantheon Books, a highly regarded publishing house. Alex Wolff’s tumultuous family saga is the subject of his new book, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home. He is also the author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama and is the former owner of the semi-pro Vermont basketball team the Frost Heaves.

In 2019, producer Bess O’Brien set out across Vermont to capture the stories and lives of teenagers. She wanted to hear about their joys and struggles in their own words. O'Brien did this in 2005, and the result was an award-winning musical, The Voices Project. This time, following a year-long delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the students who comprise the cast of the Listen Up musical are finally taking their songs and stories to the public from August 4 through August 15, 2021. The students sing and speak their truth about a range of current youth issues ranging from racial justice to mental health, gun violence, sexual identity, disability, family, love and community. On this week's Vermont Conversation, student cast members Theo Novotny, Miles Novotny and Sadie Chamberlain perform and discuss the issues raised in the musical and the process of making it, and producer Bess O’Brien describes how and why the musical was created.

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.”

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.”