The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

Transgender Vermont educator responds to Fox News attack with ‘love and light’Laws targeting LGBTQ+ people are proliferating across the country. Some 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have so far been filed — more than three per day — mostly targeting transgender people,.In Idaho, Texas and Alabama, Republican leaders have passed laws criminalizing transgender health care, while Florida has banned discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary school in a law that critics dub the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.Vermont is also under anti-trans attack. On April 6, conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a segment titled “Groom & Doom,” which singled out a webinar offered in February by the Burlington School District titled “Let’s Talk About Gender Identity and Expression.” The webinar was led by Nikki Ellis, an assistant principal at Edmunds Middle School who is transgender. Ingraham charged that middle school students are “bombarded by efforts to undo any semblance of traditional values that their parents might have taught them.”In the days following the broadcast, Ellis and the Burlington schools were flooded with hate mail. Burlington School Superintendent Tom Flanagan denounced the attacks, reassuring LGBTQ+ community members that “we care about them and that we are here for them.” Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks are not limited to schools. The head of the Burlington Republican Party, who has a history of making transphobic social media posts, tweeted out photos of Vermont legislators who support a transgender rights bill and labeled each of them a “groomer.”On Tuesday, transphobia took a deadly turn when a trans woman was killed in Morristown.“It's sad and unfortunate that being transgender or being queer is being compared to sexual abuse and pedophilia because being who you are in your identity as a queer person doesn't mean that you're trying to impose on anyone else,” Ellis told The Vermont Conversation. “The reality is that there are traumas and turmoil and abuse that happen for kids across all identities and all experiences and all communities. But that's completely unrelated to, you know, being LGBTQ+.”Rep. Taylor Small, Vermont’s first openly transgender legislator, said the anti-trans backlash comes at a time when LGBTQ+ people are winning legal protection in Vermont. “Last year, we were able to pass a bill to ban the LGBTQ+ ‘panic’ defense. And just last week, the governor signed a bill to make it easier for transgender and nonbinary people to amend their birth certificates to see themselves and their identity reflected on their vital records.”Ellis is unbowed by the transphobic attacks. They responded to critics with an invitation: “Hey, Laura Ingraham, I'd love to take you out for coffee or dinner. And I'd love to be able to have an opportunity for you to see me for who I am, the person that I am, the passions that I have and the way that I care deeply about my community. And to everybody else out there, the love that I have and the love of this work is unconditional. And that means that we will just continue to wrap ourselves, wrap other queer folks up in love and light.”

How did leading Republicans go from being Cold Warriors to apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin? For insight, we turned to Stuart Stevens, who knows Republican politics from the inside. He was a top Republican political operative who worked on five presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues that the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”Stevens tells The Vermont Conversation, “I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it's a devastating conclusion. But I think it's the only honest one.”“We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself,” Stevens said. “They'll be for democracy when they win and they won't be for it when they lose. That means you're not a democracy. And if we don't wake up and face this, we're going to lose democracy.”

The Vermont Land Trust, founded in 1977, is one of the oldest and largest land conservation groups in the country. It has helped protect more than 620,000 acres in Vermont, comprising about 11% of the state.The land trust began with a simple goal of conserving land and supporting farmers. But with heightened awareness about equity and racial justice today, things are not so simple.Who can claim the right to land that was stolen from Indigenous people? How has racism shaped who owns land? How can land conservation help combat climate change?Last year, the Vermont Land Trust received a $6 million grant from the Vermont Community Foundation and High Meadows Fund to diversify farm ownership and address climate solutions, of which $2 million is “to expand land ownership and access among people who have been historically marginalized or oppressed based on their race or ethnicity.”This grant, the largest of its kind in Vermont, raises challenging questions, concedes Nick Richardson, president and CEO of the land trust since 2017.“When a white-led organization like ours is the recipient from a white-led foundation of funding that's meant to be directed towards BIPOC land sovereignty work, that's the indication of a problem,” he said, referring to Vermonters who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. “It shows how far we have to go as a state in terms of meeting our goals and … commitments that we should all make around BIPOC racial equity and justice. And that's really uncomfortable and hard work. And we're really committed to it.”

Education is the new frontline in America’s culture wars.In Florida, teaching about LGBTQ+ issues has become a flashpoint. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently surrounded himself with smiling elementary school children as he signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that bars discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in the state’s primary schools.Teaching about racism is also now perilous. At least 36 states have passed or proposed laws or policies that restrict the teaching of race or racism.At the heart of this culture war is a struggle over who controls education. As a result of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions loosening restrictions on funding religious schools, some states are enacting policies permitting public funding of private schools, including religious schools. The Vermont Senate recently passed S.219 to restrict public funding for religious schools. But critics, including former Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, fear that Vermont may unwittingly establish a precedent that conservative legal groups will take to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to knock down the wall between secular and religious education.I spoke with Holcombe and Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a leading expert on education law and policy, about the implications of allowing public funds to pay for private and religious education.“The Supreme Court is moving toward a doctrine that suggests … that you can't exclude religion and that the state really can't control its dollars once they enter the private sector,” Black said.If that happens, he said liberal states may simply end programs to pay tuition for some students to attend private schools, while other states may “run wild” with public support of religious schools.“We may be leading to a tale of two different countries when it comes to public education and privatization in America,” Black said.

Ski mountaineer Kit DesLauriers skied off the summit of Mount Everest into history. DesLauriers is the first person to ski from the so-called Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent. Her 2006 descent of Everest capped a string of firsts: She was the first woman to ski the Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica, and Mt. Aspiring in New Zealand. She also made the first female solo ski descent of Grand Teton in Wyoming. A two-time Freeskiing World Tour champion, National Geographic named her an Adventurer of the Year in 2015. DesLauriers was formally inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame this week, following her election in 2019.Kit DesLauriers is the mother of two daughters with her husband, Rob DesLauriers, whose family runs the Bolton Valley ski area in Vermont. She is the author of a memoir, Higher Love: Skiing the Seven Summits, which was reissued last year. She is a member of The North Face global athlete team, the board of the Alaska Wilderness League and the riders team of the climate action group Protect Our Winters. I spoke with her from her home in Jackson, Wyoming.

Countries around the world are debating how to respond to the unfolding humanitarian and political crisis in Ukraine. Few people have more intimate knowledge into the thinking of the Washington national security establishment than David Sanger. Sanger is a senior writer for the New York Times covering the White House and national security. He is a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a CNN expert analyst and the author of three bestselling books, the most recent of which is The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was also an HBO documentary by the same title.Sanger recently wrote about possible end game scenarios in Ukraine. “I think you can make a persuasive case that Vladimir Putin is going to end this conflict in a lot worse strategic position than he began it,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “Three weeks ago, we were thinking that Russia's military was 10 feet tall. We now think they're kind of the gang that couldn't shoot straight. We thought that Putin was a master strategist. We now think he bit off more than he could chew … and underestimated the Ukrainians and overestimated his own power. We thought that he was trying to split up NATO, and he ended up reaffirming NATO's power. These are all pretty big mistakes he made.”What is the mood among American national security leaders? “Worried that this war is going to spread to involve us,” Sanger said. “Even if the chances are 15 or 20 or 25 percent, that's pretty significant. Worried that the humanitarian disaster is going to continue for some time. Worried the American attention to this could flag.”Sanger also discussed his 40-year career at the Times and how he has periodically covered Washington from his home in Vermont.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine? What motivates Vladimir Putin? What do Russians believe about the war?To help cut through the fog of war and explain the back story behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we turned to Russia expert Will Pyle. He is Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury College and an affiliate of the programs in International Politics and Economics and Russian and East European Studies. Pyle says that Putin “viewed the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” He adds that “very rarely do empires break up peacefully … What we're seeing now is the conflict associated with an imperial breakup, where the imperial center says, 'No, we're not going to allow the periphery, these colonies, to go their own way without a fight.'”Pyle recently wrote in the Washington Post about the attitudes of ordinary Russians. He tells The Vermont Conversation, “Russians’ willingness to sacrifice material wellbeing for national foreign policy goals is much greater than citizens in other countries.” However, he is less optimistic about “their willingness to tolerate body bags and economic costs imposed by the sanctions, [which] are going to be really brutal.”“That willingness of the Russian public to tolerate sacrifice — it's not unlimited,” he said.

In 2021, the Vermont Legislature issued a long overdue apology for Vermont’s early 20th century state-sanctioned eugenics movement, which targeted Indigenous people and other groups. According to VTDigger, “The eugenics movement used forced sterilizations and other practices in an attempt to wipe out targeted populations who were deemed unfit to procreate, including Indigenous people, French Canadians, mixed-race people, people with disabilities and low-income families, among others.”In issuing the formal apology, Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint declared, “This is a moment for grief, but it’s also a moment for growth.”The apology left unspoken how to undo the harm. Now, a bill in the Vermont House, H. 96, proposes that Vermont establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine what happened and possible reparations. We talk with Rep. Tom Stevens, chair of the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, and a sponsor of the bill, and Virginie Ladisch, a senior expert at International Center for Transitional Justice.“We’re trying to build something that represents the beginning of a longer conversation between those of us who are part of the system and the people that we’re needing to listen to during this process,” says Rep. Stevens.

The world has been watching in horror at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben argues that this is a war fueled by fossil fuels. He writes in The Guardian, “If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.”McKibben is the co-founder of the global climate justice group 350.org, and Third Act, a new group focused on activism by older Americans. He says that the way to bring down “petrostate autocrats” like Vladimir Putin is for the U.S. and Europe to quickly slash their dependence on fossil fuels.“President Biden should immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power,” urges McKibben. In the same week that the Russian invasion has been unfolding, the world’s top scientists released a climate change report that it characterized as “an atlas of human suffering.”I talked with McKibben about the confluence of war and climate change, and ways to confront both urgent crises.

When Alex Belth went on a first date with Emily Shapiro, he was smitten. He had finally met the woman of his dreams, and he imagined a life together filled with romance and kids. The were married in 2007, five years after that date.Belth, now 50, and Shapiro, 49, remain deeply in love. But their life has been very different from what they first imagined. Shapiro has struggled with chronic illness, and Belth has been her caregiver. At the age of 22, Emily developed Crohn’s disease, an incurable autoimmune condition that affects the digestive system. Shortly after they married, she was diagnosed with chronic migraines and a spatial management disorder in which her eyes don’t work with each other.Caring for loved ones with chronic illness has taken on new urgency during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of some 80 million Americans – and over 111,000 Vermonters -- who have been infected with Covid-19, some 10 to 30 percent of them will likely experience long-term chronic symptoms known as long Covid. Many people with the condition encounter frustrating barriers to getting effective care. Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said on the Vermont Conversation in December 2021 that he predicts “a pandemic of long Covid.” Instead of enduring their health challenges in silence, Belth and Shapiro have chosen to live their lives out loud – literally. Belth, an editor at Esquire magazine, and Shapiro, a former emergency room unit secretary who now has a practice in energy healing, have released a new Audible Original audio book, Here I Are: Anatomy of a Marriage. It consists of their candid conversations about love, sex, romance and life with chronic illness. They recorded the book in their home in Bristol, Vermont, where they moved in April 2020 after years in New York City.“A lot of this stuff isn’t talked about so readily,” says Shapiro. “If someone else can feel a little bit better about themselves identifying with these universal themes, that's potent for me.”

Fifty years ago, a burglary took place at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. What seemed like a petty crime spiraled into a conspiracy and coverup that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. A half century later, the echoes of that scandal still reverberate as Congress investigates the alleged crimes and coverups of another president, Donald Trump.Vermont author Garrett Graff reexamines the scandal that would shape all others in his new book, Watergate: A New History. Graff is a journalist and historian who has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology and national security. He has served as editor of Politico and Washingtonian magazines, and he has contributed to Rolling Stone, New York Times, CNN and numerous other media. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” and “The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror.” Graff is currently the director of cyber initiatives for The Aspen Institute.“Watergate is the most fascinating story ever told of how power unfolds in Washington, because no single institution — the media, the Justice Department, the House, the Senate — is able to force Richard Nixon from office,” Graff says. “Instead, it's this incredibly complex relationship of checks and balances … that is required in order to force a corrupt and criminal president from office."Unlike today, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress played a role in policing the Nixon presidency in order to maintain the balance of power, Graff says. "The Republican Party sort of had a sense of outrage that was not in evidence in either of the Trump impeachments.”Graff is concerned that the country has not learned the lessons of Watergate. “I think we are headed for a deeply grave crisis in our democracy. And it's not at all clear to me that America has the wherewithal or the courage to avoid that future right now.”

As the Covid-19 pandemic enters its third year, its impacts have fallen especially hard on young people. In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General warned of “devastating” mental health effects on youth, noting that there were significant increases in self-reports of depression, anxiety, and a 51 percent increase in emergency room visits for suicide attempts by adolescent girls in early 2021.Mentorship programs have long offered a way for young people to tackle challenges with the help of caring adults. Young people with mentors are half as likely to skip school and 55% percent more likely to attend college, according to MENTOR, an advocacy group.We explore mentorship with leaders of Vermont’s mentoring programs: Chad Butt of MENTOR Vermont, Kimberly Diamond of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Vermont, Beth Wallace of Everybody Wins Vermont, Kim Smith of Girls Boyz First Mentoring, and Pam Quinn of Twinfield Together. We also talk with a mentor and her 15-year-old mentee from Central Vermont about the impact of their partnership.

In a Winter Olympics filled with iconic moments, one was especially poignant: Vermont skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who stunned the ski world by roaring down the mountain to a second place finish in the Super G, FaceTiming with his mother Barbara Ann Cochran at the finish of his run. The two were laughing and crying. Ryan had won his Olympic silver medal almost 50 years to the day after his mother won an Olympic gold medal in slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.Cochran-Siegle’s feat marks a new chapter in the story of the Skiing Cochrans, Vermont’s First Family of Skiing. Six members of the Cochran family have skied in the Olympics. Mickey and Ginny Cochran opened Cochran’s Ski Area in 1961 in their backyard in Richmond, Vermont. The beloved ski area is now a nonprofit where generations of Vermonters have learned to ski.Barbara Ann Cochran, 71, watched her son’s silver medal run streaming on her computer at her home in Starksboro. In the hours that followed, the publicity-shy mother and grandmother has appeared alongside her son on the Today Show, among numerous other media. Ryan, 29, is one of Barbara Ann’s two children, and she has two grandchildren by her daughter Cate, one of whom jumped into her lap during her Today Show interview.Since retiring from ski racing at the age of 23, Barbara Ann Cochran has pursued a diverse career. She wrote ski columns for the Washington Post, has been a performance coach, and has run the ski school at Cochran’s for the past 40 years. She recently announced that this would be her last season directing the ski school.Cochran says that her father Mickey espoused a philosophy of skiing that he called the Cochran Way. “He was hoping that we would experience skiing as just a heck of a lot of fun. Those were his words. But he also wanted us to learn some life lessons. He wanted us to realize that in order to do well [and] get better at something, you really had to work hard at it and put effort into it. And he felt that it took not only the hard work, but paying attention to details …to get yourself better.”Mickey Cochran urged his children to not just focus on results, says his daughter. “It was about putting your best effort into it and seeing yourself getting better and better [in] what you were doing.”On an icy slope in China, Cochran-Siegle demonstrated that the Cochran Way lives on in a new generation. “Regardless of where I finished today I wanted to be proud of my skiing,” the newly minted Olympic silver medalist told NBC. “Even before I saw my time I was like, ‘That was as good as I could have done.’”

Katherine Paterson is one of America's most celebrated writers for children. The author of more than 40 books, she is one of just six writers who have twice won the prestigious Newbery Medal, for Bridge to Terabithia in 1978 and Jacob Have I Loved in 1981. She has also won the National Book Award twice. In 2000, Paterson was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.Paterson frequently writes about children confronting difficult issues. At 89 years old, the Vermont author shows little sign of slowing down. She recently published a new book, Birdies Bargain, about a child with a parent heading off to fight in Iraq.Paterson’s books are among the most beloved in children’s literature. They are also among the most banned. Book banning has lately been enjoying a revival, as books are being pulled from library shelves in “unprecedented” numbers, according to the American Library Association. Among the latest crop of books to be yanked from library shelves are Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman; Beloved, by Toni Morrison; and The 1619 Project, a bestselling history of slavery in the U.S. that grew out of a special issue of the New York Times Magazine.Bridge to Terabithia rose to #8 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books for the 1990s; her book The Great Gilly Hopkins was #20 on that list. Only a handful of authors had their books banned more often in the 1990s, including Maya Angelou, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.“If you write a book that has any power in it, it has the power to offend,” Paterson says. “I don’t want to write a book that has no power in it, so I have to run the risk of offending.”

Student discipline used to be handled by guidance counselors and principals. Today, police are increasingly called upon to respond to children’s behavioral issues, giving rise to the school-to-prison pipeline. Today, over 1.5 million students attend schools with police but no counselors. The consequences can be dire: students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged when they attend schools where there are police, also known as school resource officers, or SROs.Professor Mark Warren and Jonathan Stith argue that during pandemic-schooling, schools are responding to a student mental health crisis with harsh discipline that has fallen hardest on students of color. This “white lash” has resulted in what they call the “pandemic-to-prison pipeline.”“The pandemic has really caused a lot of trauma and a lot of stress, economic hardship, family loss for young people and disruption of schooling,” says Mark Warren, Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. “Instead of getting support, and investment of support, what we've been starting to see is the intensification of discipline and policing practices in schools.”Warren argues that there is no research-based evidence that the presence of police improves safety in schools.There is now a national campaign to limit the police presence in schools. Since June 2020, more than 138 school districts announced they would remove police from schools. In Vermont, several school boards, including Burlington, have voted to end or reduce their police contracts. A report last year by a task force of the Burlington School District concluded: “The majority of SRO activity is not associated with law enforcement but with mentoring students and connecting them with needed resources…These additional roles fell to the SROs due to social workers being overwhelmed with cases.”There is “a direct link between that the Black Lives Matter movement and police-free schools,” says Jonathan Stith, National Director of the Alliance for Educational Justice and co-director of the National Campaign for Police-Free Schools. The effort to increase school policing, as well as fights over the teaching of critical race theory in schools is “what we've been calling this ‘white lash’ post the Trump presidency.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in January that for maximum protection against Covid-19 infection, people should upgrade to a N95 or KN95 mask.For Anne Miller, masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) are very personal. In April 2020, her mother in law was among the first Vermonters to die after contracting Covid-19. After that, the health care consultant and resident of Essex made it her mission to find and disseminate top quality PPE to anyone who wanted it.Miller is the executive director of Project N95, a “PPE clearinghouse” that connects people who need personal protective equipment to companies that make it. Project N95 has so far delivered over 12 million units of PPE and Covid-19 tests. The U.S. government is now offering a limited number of free N95 masks through pharmacies and other outlets.When it comes to finding high quality masks, “The big part of this is fit and filtration,” Miller advises. “An N95 has those straps across the back, they mess up your hair. These are the ones that are going to confer the best protection for you.”Miller warns that when the CDC tested masks, “60 percent of the KN95s that they tested were found to be fake…in the sense that they didn't do what they claimed to do. They didn't filter 95 percent.” She says it’s important to order from sources, such as Project N95, that test and certify that their masks meet rigorous standards.

Vasu Sojitra was an undergraduate at the University of Vermont and wanted to join his friends to go backcountry skiing. But he faced a challenge: Sojitra has only one leg. At the age of 9 months, his right leg was amputated following a serious blood infection. So Sojitra and his friends attached a snowshoe to ski poles to enable him to backcountry ski. Sojitra graduated UVM in 2013, and his remarkable pursuits as an adaptive athlete became the subject of a 2014 film, Out On A Limb.Sojitra has continued breaking barriers both as an adaptive athlete and as an advocate for racial justice and inclusion. He has climbed the Grand Teton, and in 2021, he and fellow adaptive skier Pete McAfee did the first disabled descent of Denali, the highest peak in North America. The excursion was featured in the latest Warren Miller ski film. Sojitra is also the first adaptive athlete for The North Face and is a co-founder of Inclusive Outdoors Project.“I try to pride myself in having a disability,” says Sojitra, who grew up in Connecticut and India and now lives in Bozeman, Montana. “I don't think the word ‘disabled’ is a bad thing. I think it's the lack of access that we have, and the lack of opportunities that disabled folks have when it comes to living a life around well-being. And that's just why I'm very much prideful of having a disability. …Once we start normalizing and representing disabled people in mainstream media, in leadership in all of these spaces, then people are going to start realizing that disability is not a bad thing.”Sojitra hopes that his ‘firsts’ in the outdoor world create space for people of color and people with disabilities. “As a person of color with a disability, [I’m] trying to really just showcase this is what humans look like. …We are out here, and we're having fun, just like the majority that some in these spaces are.” He intends to “keep expanding this narrative around what it means to be disabled in the outdoors, what it means to be a person of color in the outdoors.”