Episodes
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President-Elect Donald Trump has vowed to take revenge on his enemies. He promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on Day 1 and to further restrict reproductive rights. And he is threatening to overturn longstanding environmental protections and public health measures.
With Republicans now in control of all three branches of government in Washington, state attorneys general are being described as "a last line of defense against Trump."
Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark says she is ready for the fight.
“The federal government can't break federal statute. They can't violate the Constitution, and it's attorneys general like me who will represent the states in making sure that that doesn't happen,” said Clark. During Trump’s first term as president, Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration 155 times, winning 83 percent of the cases.
Clark noted that Trump “has a penchant for breaking the law. He doesn't respect the law in his personal life. He didn't respect it as president, and we can anticipate that he's not going to respect it again.”
“We're going to be ready on day one,” she said.
Clark was first elected attorney general in 2022 and re-elected this November. A native Vermonter whose family owned a popular grocery store in Londonderry, Clark is a graduate of the University of Vermont and Boston College Law School. She went off to New York City to work for a large law firm for six years before returning to Vermont in 2014 for a job in the attorney general’s office. Eight years later, she became Vermont’s top prosecutor. She is the first woman to be elected attorney general in Vermont (her predecessor, Susanne Young, was appointed by Gov. Scott to serve the final six months of Attorney General T.J. Donovan’s term when Donovan resigned in June 2022). Clark is currently one of just a dozen female attorneys general in the country.
“One of the things that I feel almost resentful about is the chaos that a Trump presidency is going to bring on us,” said Clark. “I think about especially my daughter and kids who are in elementary school now and pretty much their whole lives, have had either this chaos or the specter of this chaos and the fear of the second Trump term, and now we're getting it again. …Except this time, we're going to be ready.”
What happens if federal agents attempt to round up people living in Vermont who are undocumented, as Trump has threatened?
“How is he going to pay for it? Who's going to perform the work? How many immigration officers do we even have here in Vermont?” replied Clark “I think we need to sort of stay calm, but we also need to plan and prepare.”
Clark believes that Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, passed in 2022, will protect reproductive rights in the state, but a national abortion ban could upend it.
Abortion is “symbolic of the concept that women are independent human beings who deserve to control their own bodies. And it's appalling to me that we are where we are in this country,” said Clark. “I'm proud of where we are in Vermont, but it is hard to imagine we live in this country where people in Vermont, in every single town, voted to enshrine the right to abortion in our state constitution. And how can our viewpoint be so different from other places in this country? It's honestly disturbing that we are a part of the same union, and yet we have such differing views on this fundamental question of bodily autonomy for women.”
Attorney General Clark concluded with a message to Vermonters.
“I want to reassure them that as their attorney general, I'm going to fight to protect them. I'm going to use every tool in the toolbox to do that.”
“We also have to keep faith in our democracy. And in Vermont, we have a very strong, robust democracy. And we need to keep reinvesting in that vision and participating, even as we look to the future to another four years of Donald Trump.”
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America has chosen a strong man — with an emphasis on “man.”
Donald Trump wagered that that a key to victory was appealing to men. His misogynist comments, his contempt for social and political norms, his embrace of authoritarian strongmen around the world was aimed at winning over men, especially young non-college educated men. It worked: the 2024 election results reflected an historic gender gap, in which most men voted for Trump, while most women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The two century-old tradition of electing men to lead the U.S. continues, at least for another four years.
At the age of 91, Gov. Madeleine Kunin has a unique and long perspective on politics. She is the only woman to be elected governor in Vermont, serving three terms from 1985 to 1991. She went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Deputy Secretary of Education under Pres. Bill Clinton. Kunin founded Emerge Vermont to recruit and train Democratic women to run for office.
Kunin’s politics have long been informed by her personal experience with authoritarianism. A Swiss Jew, her family fled Europe in 1940 as Nazism spread.
“I'm inspired in a strange way by my proximity to the Holocaust,” she said the morning after Trump’s election. “We have to speak up. We have to participate. We can't just sit down and shut the door and stay by the fire. We have to fight more than ever and figure out how to be most effective.”
“We will have to fight hard to protect democracy from here on in.”
As a pioneering politician herself, Kunin said she was “very excited about the possibility of electing the first woman president. I hoped I would live that long.”
She mused, “In a time of uncertainty, the public likes a strong man.”
Kunin reflected on the need to “have more of a dialogue with young men so that they begin to understand who we are. That schism, that gap between men and women is not good for democracy.”
In the aftermath of defeat “your first reaction is to retreat,” Kunin conceded, “but I don't think we can afford to retreat. We have to still be activists. We still have to participate and make our voices heard… We just have to force ourselves to keep democracy alive and to express our political and social views and make sure that as women, we remain active.”
Kunin’s advice to women is to “keep on doing what you're doing … I would urge women to continue to strive for top offices and not be totally discouraged by this election.”
Kunin confessed that on the morning after the election, “I felt the real doom and gloom. But as the day goes on and as I'm talking to you, the fighting spirit is fighting its way back into my mind, into my psyche. I know we can't give up.”
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Episodes manquant?
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As the 2024 presidential campaign hurdles to a climactic finish on Nov. 5, the two major candidates made their closing arguments. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where she promised to be a unifier, casting Trump as a “petty tyrant” who wanted Americans to be “divided and afraid of each other.”
Trump made his final case in a six-hour long rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that featured a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and mocked Jews, Hispanics, Blacks and Palestinians. The New York Times described it as a “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” Many observers and historians have noted that Trump's rally evoked memories of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden that was captured in an Oscar-nominated film, “A Night at the Garden.”
The 2024 presidential race remains razor close. But longtime campaign strategist Stuart Stevens is confident of the outcome.
“I think Harris is going to win easily. I don't think it's going to be particularly close,” said Stevens.
“It's the most stable race I can remember. 47% of the country is either MAGA or open to MAGA and 53% isn't. So the Harris campaign's goal, task, challenge has been to get as much of that 53% as they can and get them to vote. So we wake up in a world where our Senator Bernie Sanders and my old friend Liz Cheney are on the same side. That's not a bad coalition.”
Stevens was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.
Stuart Stevens now contends that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian movement. Vanity Fair recently described him as “the campaign cowboy who famously left the GOP to turn his fire on Trump.” He has written several bestselling books about his political conversion, including his latest, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy To Autocracy.”
Stuart Stevens is now a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. He grew up in Mississippi but has lived for many years in Stowe.
Stevens pointed out that early voting turnout, especially by women, is breaking records. “What is striking about the early vote is that women are voting at 10% higher than men ... (and Harris) is winning women by 14 points ... Even I can do that math," he said.
“When this race is done, it's going to be seen as the women of America spoke,” Stevens asserted.
What happens to Trump if he loses?
“Trump is never going to concede,” Stevens predicted. “They will attempt to have the House (of Representatives) not certify. I think the period from election night until January 20 is going to be the most dangerous period in America since the Civil War.”
Stevens anticipates that if Trump loses he will quickly declare that he is running for president again. “No question. That’s all he does. It's his business. He's not going to go out of business.”
Stevens rues that “Trump didn't hijack the (Republican) party. He revealed it. And the reason that Trump is popular in the Republican Party is because he's what Republicans want.” Even if Trump loses, “it's not going to be the end of Trumpism."
Stevens said that he is not optimistic about the Republican Party, “but I'm very optimistic about America. I just don't think that this is what the country is.”
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America is drowning beneath a tsunami of lies.
The 2024 presidential campaign may be distinguished by the sheer volume and audacity of lying. Donald Trump has made embracing The Big Lie—the false claim that he won the 2020 election—a condition of entry into the MAGA universe. Once you accept The Big Lie, similarly brazen but smaller lies flow easily. And so Trump falsely claims that immigrants are eating pets and that disaster relief money is being stolen by Democrats and given to immigrants.
Lying is a bipartisan phenomenon, but Republicans dwarf Democrats in the number of lies that they tell. In September, New York Times fact-checkers analyzed a single stump speech made by both presidential candidates. Former President Trump made 64 false or inaccurate statements in his speech, while Vice President Kamala Harris made six such statements. In October, CNN determined that Trump made 40 false claims in just two speeches.
During the course of his presidency, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day, according to the Washington Post.
“This is the flood-the-zone concept that … Steve Bannon articulated early in the Trump presidency,” said Bill Adair, who founded the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization PolitiFact in 2007 when he was Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). “The other practitioner of this is Vladimir Putin.”
Adair is now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. He has a new book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”
“I think the consequences (for lying) are minimal, if any, now for Republican politicians, because the echo chamber repeats the lies so easily and Republican politicians are not held accountable,” explained Adair.
Fox News has shown that political lying can be profitable. “Conservative media not only has looked the other way when Republican politicians lie, but conservative media has echoed the lies brought in by commentators that have repeated the lies, and conservative media, interestingly, has found there's money in those lies,” said Adair. “Fox found if it did not repeat the lies about the 2020 election, that it lost viewers.”
There is also a price for lying: In 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $788 million for peddling phony conspiracy theories claiming that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden.
Adair argued that the disparity in political lying between Republicans and Democrats “has serious consequences. It not only makes it impossible for us to have a serious conversation about climate, to have a serious conversation about immigration, but it threatens our democracy. Because we can very easily envision not just a rerun of 2020 come the results of the November election. We can see that this time it could turn into a real crisis for our country all because of li
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Can social media bring people together rather than divide and deceive us?
In the world of corporate social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, the notion of a nontoxic public forum seems quaint. These are places where political and personal brawling goes on 24/7 and disinformation flows as freely as cat videos. The platforms rely on high conflict to attract eyeballs and make money.
Vermonters have another option. Front Porch Forum (FPF), co-founded in 2006 by Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife Valerie, is a decidedly friendly online place where neighbors go to interact civilly with one another, and do what neighbors do: seek advice, buy and sell things, and discuss local issues without resorting to personal attacks. The site is heavily moderated by real people who read each posting and filter out items that offend, incite or misinform. It operates in every town and has nearly 235,000 members, including nearly half of Vermont’s adults.
The discord common on conventional social media is “not an accident,” said Wood-Lewis. "Another way of saying people are attacking each other and acting cruel is Ooh, member engagement is up. We can sell more ads. We can collect more data to sell to huge data brokers who do God knows what with people's private information. That's the business model of Twitter and Facebook and all these others.”
The idea of an online forum that builds community instead of dividing it is attracting national attention. The Washington Post recently reported, “At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community — and what Big Tech could learn from it.”
The best indication of FPF’s influence is the way that it builds civic engagement. According to a new study by the nonprofit New_ Public, 61 percent of FPF users reported that they had attended a local event or public meeting as a result of something they read on the forum, over half reported that they had discussed issues with a neighbor and one fifth of users said they had volunteered locally in response to a posting on FPF.
FPF, which is headquartered in Burlington, employs 30 people, including many content moderators. Wood-Lewis said that a “critical part of our model is that each member-submitted posting is reviewed by our professional staff before publication (which) is absolutely not how any other social media works.”
FPF enforces a strict set of rules in its online public square, including no personal attacks. “We're not going to let people basically weaponize Front Porch Forum to do harm to our democracy, to our public health, things like that,” he said.
Elon Musk, who owns X, and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg insist that the unfettered exchange of views on their platforms is just free speech. Wood-Lewis begs to differ.
“I do not think the folks you mentioned have any real interest in protecting free speech. They have an interest in amassing power and money.”
Front Porch Forum “has felt better and better as the divisiveness in our national scene has gotten worse, and as the isolation brought on by the pandemic and social media and smartphones and so many different things in modern life has gotten worse,” said Wood-Lewis.
Despite requests to expand to other states, Wood-Lewis insisted that FPF will stay local. The online forum proved its value by connecting people impacted by flooding in Vermont in 2011, 2023 and 2024 with help and resources.
“As long as Vermont communities are struggling in significant ways, Front Porch Forum wants to be there as an ally and a partner.”
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The war between Israel and Hamas is now grinding into its second year. The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking civilian hostages. In retaliation, Israel launched a devastating bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The toll of the war is staggering. In the past year, some 42,000 people in Gaza have been killed and nearly 100,000 injured, according to the Gaza health ministry, and about 8,700 Israelis have been injured, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.
Gaza is now experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The health care system has collapsed and a “full-blown famine” is occurring in parts of Gaza, according to Cindy McCain, head of the United Nations World Food Program.
Now Israel’s war in Gaza is threatening to spiral into a regional conflict. In recent weeks, Israel assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese political party and militia, launched a ground invasion of Lebanon and attacked Syria and Yemen. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at Israel, many of which were intercepted by Israeli and U.S. military forces.
The war in Gaza has led to the biggest displacement in the region since the creation of Israel in 1948. That event is known by Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe, when there was a mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians by Israeli forces.
The current war in Gaza is now the deadliest and most destructive of the five wars fought between Israel and Hamas since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
That’s right, five wars in 16 years.
What is the deeper story behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? When did the Occupied Territories become occupied? What is Hamas? What is Zionism? Who are the Jewish settlers? How did the violence begin, and how does it end?
For answers to these and other questions, we turned to two experts at Dartmouth College, one Egyptian, the other American Israeli, who teach a course together on “The Politics of Israel and Palestine.” Ezzedine Fishere is a senior lecturer in the Middle Eastern Studies program and a former Egyptian diplomat. Bernard Avishai is a Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth and a journalist. He lives half the year in Israel. Shortly after I spoke to them last year, Fishere and Avishai were featured on CBS 60 Minutes, NPR, PBS and other media outlets.
As the world marks the first anniversary of the war in Gaza, we are rebroadcasting the 2023 discussion with Fishere and Avishai about the roots of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
“I'm deeply concerned that Israel's actions may create a larger conflagration,” Avishai said last year. “The radical zealot minorities in each people are like tails wagging the dog… People committing atrocities have kept the moderate center of each people away from each other.”
Fishere said that he wavers between being a realist who sees no end to the conflict and a dreamer who believes that a peaceful solution is within reach. “Bring the parties together around a political solution that number one, gives Israel security so that this doesn't happen again. Number two, gives Palestinians hope so that they have something positive to look to… a Palestinian state that garners support, that becomes a beacon of hope for those people, that allows them equality and dignity.”
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In the last week, Israel bombed Beirut, assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, and launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Israel claimed that its attacks were a response to rockets being launched by Hezbollah into northern Israel. The invasion of Lebanon marks an escalation of Israel’s year-long war in Gaza that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians. In the past few days, Iran fired missiles at Israel in retaliation for the attacks on Hezbollah, and there are now fears that these conflicts will spiral into a regional war.
For Tarek El-Ariss, the scenes of devastation in Beirut and civilians fleeing fighting are eerily familiar. El-Ariss grew up in Lebanon and survived its 15-year long civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. He is now James Wright Professor and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College.
Prof. El-Ariss has been deeply engaged in facilitating dialogue in the Dartmouth community around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past year. This campus-wide conversation was featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes, in the New Yorker, and other national media. But these peacemaking efforts fractured on May 1, when Dartmouth’s president called in police to break up a small student encampment protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. This resulted in the arrest of 89 students, faculty and community members, some violently.
“I don't think police has any room on campuses,” said El-Ariss, who said that members of his class went out to support the protesters. “I think campuses are places of intellectual engagement and dialog. This is what I do and this is what I focus on.”
Prof. Tarek El-Ariss has a new book, “Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.” He writes that he had “to learn to cohabit with war,” but that the experience continues to live inside him like a bullet buried in his body.
“The war is in us. It manifests itself in different shapes and forms and pain,” said El-Ariss. “Sometimes the bullet burns you, and sometimes you forget about that pain, and then it comes back. But you're always reminded of that which you have experienced, and you take this experience with you wherever you go, both with its bad parts, like the pain and the anxieties, but also in the survival mechanisms that you develop in order to survive this experience.”
El-Ariss said that to find a solution to the conflict in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, “You need to begin to acknowledge the humanity of the other and not think that I can eliminate the other so that I can preserve myself.” Attempting to wipe out a perceived adversary has “led to more instability and to more long term danger for those who are applying this model.”
“It's been 75 years at least, and that model is not working.”
El-Ariss said that as he views the spiraling Middle East conflict, “the despair and the hope coexist. There is the pain and the possibility of overcoming the pain. And these two things I have to hold on to, both at the same time.”
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In 2017, Timothy Snyder wrote a short book, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” It was a cautionary tale drawn from Snyder’s studies of totalitarian regimes. He mused about how lessons from foreign regimes like Hungary, Russia, and Eastern Europe applied to the U.S. The lessons were warning signs that signaled when a country was veering toward totalitarianism. “On Tyranny” was the New York Times bestelling nonfiction book of 2017 and stayed on bestseller lists for years.
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The Guardian wrote, “In the years since the 2016 U.S. presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder.” This year, he has testified before Congress about foreign influence in the U.S. and has campaigned tirelessly in support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Snyder has a new book, “On Freedom,” in which he reflects on what it means to be truly free. He talks about the difference between “freedom from” – or negative freedom – and “freedom to,” which he says is what a free society must embrace.
Snyder said that “freedom from” leads to “a clash of all against all. Because if freedom is just me against other stuff and I never have to ask who I am or what I want, then eventually I start to see you as a barrier.”
Sen. J.D. Vance is an example of someone who espouses negative freedom. “His view is that government can't do anything and therefore it won't do anything and therefore my oligarch friends get to run everything. And the only task that I have as a politician is a kind of performer who makes up stories that get people angry at one another and fight one another. Negative freedom leads …to a moral vacuum. It leads to political helplessness, and eventually it leads to social self-destruction.”
By contrast, “freedom to” is “not just a matter of … women not being oppressed, it's also a matter of their having health care so they can be free.”
“There's a positive feedback loop between doing things together and being more free as individuals.”
Is the U.S. on a glide path to fascism?
“Not a glide path, because I think history is made up of the structures and the trends but it's also made up of the funny little bumps that nobody expected,” Snyder replied. “I think it's fair to say that we are at a moment where things can go either way, and I think it's quite clearly defined now, precisely because the way Kamala Harris is talking about freedom. She's very much in a future orientation.”
By congrast, Donald Trump “is a guy who, facing prison and thinking about nothing except himself, needs to die in bed and that bed has to be in the White House and the rest of us be damned,” said Snyder. “He's also a person who's filled with grievance about a story that he made up himself. The internet is full now of people who use AI to generate fake images and then get mad at the fake images.”
“This is not a time to be unaware of choices or to be cynical about voting or to imagine that history or something is going to take care of us. Only we are going to take care of this for us.”
Snyder writes that “being joyous is the first step to freedom.”
“Freedom should make us happy because freedom is about caring about the little things that people care about and about being able to put those things together in our own unique ways and maybe to bring them to life, whether that's a family or whether that's a hobby or whether it's a profession or whether it's a sport or whether it's a getaway,” said Snyder.
“Freedom is the condition in which we're actually able to bring other values together. So it's inherently a happy thing.”
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What do Nazis, fascists, incels, skinheads, misogynists, insurrectionists and Proud Boys all have in common? Many of them confide in reporter Elle Reeve.
It was around 2015 and Reeve was reporting for Vice News about the rise of the “alt right,” a term coined by its leader, Richard Spencer. She spent time on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan where far right activists communicated, trolled liberals, and began to coalesce as a movement. These were often ordinary people who increasingly embraced conspiracy theories and violence.
This was during the presidency of Barack Obama, when many people were imagining that the U.S. was in the glow of a “post-racial” era. Reeve knew better.
“Racism wasn't dying off with an older generation,” she told the Vermont Conversation. “There was a strong beating heart right there on the internet.”
In 2017, Reeve was there when the alt right burst out of obscure Internet chat rooms and into public consciousness in a violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her documentary account, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” earned her and Vice News Tonight a Peabody Award, four Emmys and a George Polk Award.
In 2019, Reeve became a correspondent for CNN, where she works today. She was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 reporting on the attack on Congress by Trump supporters, many of whom she knew well.
Why do they talk to her? “They want to tell their story, they want to confess, they want to unburden themselves,” she said.
Reeve has a new book, “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.” The title refers to how far right activists speak of taking the “black pill” of nihilism to justify their cruelty and violence. “It's this dark nihilism that the world is doomed. There's nothing you can do to change it, and you at best, can hope for it to collapse.”
Reeve traces how far-right rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance channeling extremist ideas and language.
Vance has denounced the “woke ideology” of “white women who are miserable about their own lives, enforcing codes about racial justice, gay rights on other people to make other people miserable, to account for how miserable they are in their own lives,” Reeve explained.
Vance’s use of the term “childless cat ladies” is another far right meme. “I've read that on 4chan six or seven years ago,” said Reeve. “It has trickled upward.”
Another far right notion that is now embraced by mainstream Republicans is that diversity is bad. “They think that racial and ethnic and gender diversity makes us weaker. It makes us fools. This is just something that they ridiculed all the time.”
Reeve explained the far right context of Trump’s attacks on people of color. “If a white person commits a crime in their world, it's because they're a bad guy. But if a Black person commits a crime in their world, it's because they're Black.”
Reeve warned that many people “are vulnerable to those ideas. I just interviewed a ton of people at a Trump boat parade. They were so nice to me, and then they started talking to me about how it's not right to eat people's cats, and these people do animal sacrifice, and they're dirty and they bring disease.”
“It's not all crazy people who believe this stuff. It's regular people and your neighbors," said Reeve. “You have an obligation to push back against that, whether or not they'll listen to you."
Reeve said about the future, “There has been an escalating radicalization among the Republican elite and a softening among the voters… People speak freely about civil war. That is dangerous.”
“I don't like it but I don't know where that balance ends up after the election. You can't do something like Jan. 6 without a feeling that there's an army behind you of supporters who will back you up.”
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The much-anticipated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took place on Tuesday night. It was the first time the two politicians had met.
With national polls showing the race for the White House a tossup, this debate, currently the only one that is scheduled, has outsized significance. In a CNN flash poll following the debate, 63% said that Harris performed the best. This flipped the script from the Trump-Biden debate in June, when 67% of respondents said that Trump outperformed President Joe Biden.
In other breaking news following the debate, pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. In a post on Instagram to her 283 million followers, Swift wrote, “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them." She highlighted “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.”
Vermont Sen. Peter Welch spoke this morning about his thoughts on the debate, the 2024 election, cutting off arms sales to Israel, voter suppression and election violence, and his reflections on the 9/11 attacks.
In July, the Democrat sent shock waves through the political establishment when he became the first U.S. senator to call for Biden to withdraw from the race. Eleven days later, as other Democratic leaders made similar calls, Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. The vice president officially became the Democratic nominee in August, launching one of the most compressed presidential races in history.
“I was just saying out loud what many of my colleagues and many Americans were saying privately,” Welch said.
After watching the Biden-Trump debate in June, Welch concluded, “It was terrible, and it was not about a bad night. It was about an apprehension that there was a serious condition that was affecting the president who served us very well.” Welch insisted that he was neither asked nor dissuaded by his colleagues or the White House when he told them what he was going to do.
Welch had a very different reaction to Harris’s debate performance against Trump. “I thought she did absolutely everything she had to do,” he said. “She was strong. I love the way she started out by crossing the stage, extending her hand to Trump, taking over the physical space and not letting him do his physical intimidation moves that are his favorite.”
Welch said that Harris “was able to parry his attacks, and she had a capacity to do something effectively, and that's ridicule and belittle a guy who is well deserving of ridicule and belittling.”
Vermont’s junior senator said that the most memorable part of the debate was the discussion of abortion rights. Harris, Welch said, “combined clarity with compassion and a deeply grounded, deeply felt moral sensibility about the right of women to make their own decisions. And she did that in a way where she was rightly and justifiably condemning a totally incoherent policy by Trump, somebody who bragged about getting the Supreme Court stacked to get rid of Roe v. Wade.”
Welch said the race for president is too close to call. He believes that if Trump loses, he will once again declare that the election was stolen. “That's the pitch he's making to prepare his voters for an explanation of his loss as fraud,” he said.
Welch, who was in the House chamber when Trump supporters attacked on January 6, 2021, asserted, “I don't think you'll get away with that kind of insurrection again.” But he warned against a raft of voter suppression efforts, such as in Georgia “where that very Trumpish legislature is stacking the deck with partisan folks on their election commission.”
Voter suppression and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power is “a real live issue for us. When I say us, I mean our country,” he said.
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When Corinne Prevot was attending high school and ski racing at Burke Mountain Academy in 2008, her colorful hand-sewn hats were an instant hit with her friends and fellow racers. As she moved on to attend Middlebury College, where she raced on the ski team, her stretchy form-fitting hats continued to be a hot item both around campus and on the ski racing circuit, where she sold them from a shoebox.
With lots of enthusiasm but little business acumen, Prevot turned her side hustle into the clothing brand Skida (Swedish for “skiing”). Her signature hats and neck gaiters can now be found everywhere from New York City to California to the Green Mountains. A Skida neck gaiter was recently featured in a New York Times Wirecutter column about the best sun-protective clothing.
Prevot, 32, now has more than two dozen employees, mostly young women. Skida has expanded to make pants, running wear, and even mittens. The business is headquartered in Burlington but much of the clothing is sewn by women working from their homes all around the Northeast Kingdom and beyond.
Just down the road in Randolph is another young entrepreneur who is innovating with a traditional brand. Sam Hooper is the 30-year old owner and president of Vermont Glove in Randolph, the century-old business that he bought in 2018.
Vermont Glove is one of the last glove companies left in the U.S. It makes high quality hand-stitched goat leather gloves. The gloves are considered the gold standard among utility lineman who use them to handle powerlines. The company also makes popular gloves for gardeners, skiers, and others.
Prevot said that the key to Skida’s success is that the brand conveys a “sense of joy and self-expression. And I think that that's kind of what propelled us forward year after year, especially as our market becomes more crowded.”
Skida also distinguishes itself by its public stance in support of abortion rights, including donating to national abortion access funds and the campaign for Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which passed in 2022 with 77 percent of voters in support.
Prevot said that her business is “value aligned. And I think just when we look at the makeup of our team and our organization and our culture, women's rights is a really important thing for us to stand behind.” More recently, Skida raised money for Vermont flood victims.
Vermont Glove is also mission driven. When the Covid pandemic hit, Hooper transformed his manufacturing facility to make masks and personal protective gear, which were distributed free to towns and hospitals around Vermont.
“There was a need, and we had a skill to meet it, so we wanted to step up and do our part,” said Hooper, adding that his goal was also “to keep people employed.” At one point, Vermont Glove’s mask making operation was threatened by a shortage of elastic for ear loops. Skida “saved the day” by providing the elastic. Hooper and Provot have lately collaborated on a line of Skida mittens that are made by Vermont Glove.
Vermont’s labor and housing shortages have impacted both businesses. For Vermont Glove to grow, new employees needed housing, which is in short supply in Vermont. So Hooper recently bought a former inn and converted it into 10 units of affordable housing for his employees and the community. “It's given us the ability to hire new employees and it creates a stepping stone for current and future employees,” he explained.
What does success look like for these young entrepreneurs?
“Sustainable growth where we can still have a significant impact on our local community through meaningful job creation, and continued product quality (compared) to what is out there,” said Hooper.
For Prevot, “Success would be for the Skida brand to be cherished and loved and that people continue to find joy in our products, and that it keeps them warm in the winter -- and that we still have winter.”
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What used to be called 100-year floods are now annual occurrences. Summer 2023 was the wettest ever in Vermont, with 2 feet of rain falling on the state. One storm submerged the capital of Montpelier. This July saw towns such as Plainfield ripped apart by raging rivers. In Connecticut this month, a storm dropped more than a foot of rain, leading to deadly and destructive flooding.
Author Porter Fox says the source of these deluges — as well as heat waves, fires, and floods — is the ocean, where about 90% of global warming is occurring. This is the inexorable consequence of human-caused climate change. The top layer of the ocean has warmed about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is “large enough to transform marine biodiversity, change ocean chemistry, raise sea levels, and fuel extreme weather,” reports the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Fox explains the connection between oceans, climate change and extreme weather in his new book, “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them.”
Fox has a personal connection to the ocean. He grew up on Mount Desert Island in Maine, home to Acadia National Park. His father was a renowned boat builder, and Fox learned the craft of ocean sailing by trial and lots of error.
He later attended Middlebury College and wrote about skiing adventures all around the world as an editor of Powder Magazine but has now returned to his first love, the sea. Fox’s other books include “The Last Winter” and “Northland.”
In “Category Five,” Fox captures the awesome power of the ocean by profiling a legendary storm sailor, a mapmaker and a maker of sailing drones, among others.
“The ocean is the mother of all weather. It's like a battery that is getting charged up by this excess heat that we have,” Fox said. This is creating squalls and hurricanes with “metrics that we've never seen before.”
These monster storms are “traveling farther while moving slower, thus dumping more water and the ferocity of their winds has more time to wreak havoc as they go,” Fox said.
“A full throated ocean gale is absolutely terrifying,” he said. These storms have an “explosive sound and shrieking and raging wind and waves that are so powerful they can toss around a 30,000 pound boat like it's a little toy.”
Even landlocked places such as Vermont are experiencing the power of the ocean.
“Most of the rain that you see in Vermont comes off of the ocean and evaporation. So we have a hotter climate over the ocean. We have more evaporation. We have more energy being infused into the atmosphere,” Fox said. “So every front, every thunderstorm, every squall, every rainstorm is directly connected to the ocean.”
The warming ocean has transformed how and when storms occur. “Hurricane season used to be roughly from June to November,” Fox said.
Hurricanes have recently occurred in January and May. "Now there is no off season,” he said.
What would it take to fix what is broken?
“It's kind of an obvious answer: just a little bit of everything,” Fox said. That includes “changing how we create and consume energy around the world, closing down coal-fired power plants, changing from gas cars to electric cars or hydrogen batteries.”
“Without the ocean, we'd be gone by now," Fox said. "That 90% of the heat that it is absorbed (by oceans) would be right up in the atmosphere. Temperatures would be unbearable. Storms would be so much more powerful. And yet the ocean is this buffer.”
“There's a lot of checks and balances, and it's perhaps the reason that this little blue ball of a planet has maintained life for so long,” he said.
“If we can just be aware of that and kind of nudge some of those balances," Fox said, "you could bring the planet back to the way it was pre-1800s.”
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Among the thousands of delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, two dozen represent Vermont.
On Tuesday, these delegates cast their ceremonial votes for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to be the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. The Vermont delegation includes elected officials such as Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint. But the delegation is mostly composed of party activists who may not be well known but are fiercely committed.
On this week’s Vermont Conversation, we speak with four Vermont DNC delegates in Chicago.
Addie Lentzner of Bennington is a rising sophomore at Middlebury College. She has been an outspoken advocate on housing and homelessness since she was a student in high school. At age 20, she is the youngest Vermont delegate.
Lentzner is determined for youth to have “not just a seat at the table, but a leading voice in the conversation.” She said that the climate crisis, structural inequality, racism and abortion bans are a direct attack on her generation. “Young people need to be co-pilots and not just passengers on the plane to our future,” Lentzner said.
The convention has been accompanied by protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Lentzner, a grassroots activist herself, said, “The protesters are doing the right thing.”
“They should be there standing up for human rights,” she said. “I also believe that that is part of our democracy, and the candidates should respond to that.”
C.D. Mattison is a tech adviser to startups and a former candidate for mayor in Burlington. She is a former vice chair of the Burlington Democrats and serves on a variety of nonprofit boards.
Mattison, who identifies as “a biracial, Black, gay woman,” said that following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, “it became incredibly clear that I couldn't just be on the sidelines. I had to be involved.” She said that Trump's candidacy in 2024 “is what I hope will be the end of our civil war. I don't think it ever ended.”
Amanda Gustin is the vice chair of the Vermont Democratic Party and a Barre city councilor. She works for the Vermont Historical Society. Gustin said she was especially inspired by former First Lady Michelle Obama’s invocation to “do something.”
“Stop agonizing and start organizing,” she said, quoting a sticker that adorns her water bottle.
“Get out there, talk to your neighbors, make sure your neighbors are out there and voting,” Gustin said. “This big American experiment works when we all show up and when we all lend our voices and our votes.”
Don Hooper is a former Vermont state representative and was elected Vermont’s secretary of state in 1992. He was a longtime board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
Hooper, 79, is just two years younger than Pres. Joe Biden. He said that Biden should not have run. “I know what it feels like to be older. He still got it, but not every day. It's hard, it's tiring,” Hooper said. But he also said that Democratic fortunes have dramatically turned since Harris became the nominee.
Channeling Michelle Obama, Hooper said, “Hope is making a comeback, and we're joyous.”
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Zephyr Teachout has blazed a high-profile path on state and national political stages. But lately, the 52-year-old law professor and politician has been spending her time on a tiny stage in Vermont, directing a play about the saga of Israelis and Palestinians.
Teachout, who grew up in Norwich, gained national attention in 2004 when she was director of internet organizing for former Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, helping to vault the small-state governor to briefly run at the front of the pack.
In 2014, Teachout ran for governor of New York against the powerful incumbent Andrew Cuomo, winning one-third of the vote (Cuomo resigned in 2021 over sexual misconduct allegations). Two years later, Teachout ran for Congress. And, in 2018, she ran for attorney general of New York. She won the endorsement of the New York Times but lost to Letitia James, who later appointed Teachout as a special adviser on economic justice.
Teachout is a professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of "Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money."
Far from the halls of power in Albany or the bright lights of Broadway, Teachout has maintained another passion: acting and directing at Unadilla Theater in Marshfield. When Unadilla founder Bill Blachly, who turned 100 this year, asked if she would direct the play “Returning to Haifa” this summer, Teachout quickly agreed.
“The more intensely one is involved in whatever it may be professionally and certainly involved in politics, the more that I seek and need art, whether that's visual arts or music or theater as a way to be fully human, to experience both the joys and the griefs that we experience,” she said.
“Returning to Haifa” links two tragedies: the Nakba (“catastrophe)” experienced by Palestinians when more than 700,000 of them fled or were driven from their homes following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors moved to Israel, many of them into homes abruptly abandoned by Palestinians.
The play is based on a novella by Palestinian activist and writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated at the age of 36 in an operation by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. The story was adapted into a play by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. It was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York in 2016, but the production was canceled due to political pressure. It finally premiered in the United Kingdom.
“Returning to Haifa” depicts a Palestinian couple returning to Israel in 1967 and visiting their house and their son who they abandoned 20 years earlier in a terrified flight from Israeli forces. The play is described by the Guardian as “a poignant family drama, as a plea for Israeli-Palestinian understanding and as a warning of what will follow without some form of reconciliation.”
Teachout was moved to direct the play by a current catastrophe, Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed some 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel invaded Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.
“It feels very important right now to celebrate Palestinian culture, to introduce people to great writers like Kanafani" who understood "the critical role that literature plays in tying together a community of people,” Teachout said.
On the political stage, Teachout offered insights about the special challenges that Vice President Kamala Harris and other women face when running for high office.
“It is harder to express anger as a woman and not be dismissed,” said the former gubernatorial candidate. “Men expressing anger on behalf of an angry public don't get the same kind of scrutiny and, frankly, sometimes disdain or disgust that women expressing anger get.”
“You've noticed that Harris has chosen to run as a happy warrior,” she said. “If you're in politics, you know these things are choices. It is also a choice that I made in my campaigns and that you see Elizabeth Warren making. There's a lot more comfort with joyful women than angry women … Harris, as a Black woman in particular, faces extraordinary challenges, and she's doing an extraordinary job not letting those challenges define her candidacy.”
Teachout credits Harris’ rise in the polls to the desire that people have “to see past the next two years, to see a collective future. What I think Harris is tapping into in the last few weeks is a sense that a future is possible. … We're not stuck with these frankly ancient politicians. And I also think that is insufficient," she said.
Teachout, who has been a leading scholar and critic of corporate monopolies, said Harris needs to “take on big power.”
People “think everybody's in big money's pockets. There's no point to politics (so) why don't we just cause chaos,” Teachout said. “There's kind of a real nihilism to those who either don't vote or decide to vote for Trump just out of a kind of irritation with what's going on.”
Harris needs to show that she is “willing to fight, to actually make enemies … (and) take on corporate power,” Teachout said. “For Harris to beat Trump, really leaning into that populism is critical.”
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For more than a century, New Hampshire sent its troubled youth to the same juvenile jail. It was called the Youth Development Center, or YDC. The young people were supposed to be cared for and then live productive lives. Instead, many of them were physically and sexually abused. More than a thousand people have said that the adults in charge at the YDC abused them. A statewide settlement fund established by NH lawmakers has so far paid out over $95 million to settle lawsuits filed by former detainees.
Jason Moon is a senior reporter and producer on the Document Team at NHPR. Moon’s investigation into the abuse at the YDC is now a three-part investigative podcast called “Youth Development Center.”
Moon’s other work includes “Bear Brook,” an investigative podcast into a brutal murder in New Hampshire that has been downloaded more than 31 million times. He also contributed reporting and music to The 13th Step, an NHPR podcast about abuse in New Hampshire’s addiction recovery centers which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award.
Moon said of his investigation into the Youth Development Center, “A lot of these kids didn't necessarily have very strong advocates for them at home coming to try to find out what they could. So you have that enormous power dynamic, you have the secrecy that's built into the system, where really the only information that can make it out of the system is written by the adults in charge. They write all the reports, they have complete control over the narrative that makes it out of the building, and if anything does make it out of the building that they don't like, there's an easy kind of response to it, which is ‘these kids they lie, they manipulate, that's why they're here.’”
“I would hope that all of us reflect on in the wake of a situation like this the extent to which we as a society sort of buy that argument,” Moon said.
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Last week, I received an unexpected call from Bill Mares, an old friend. Bill told me that he had terminal lymphoma and had only days to live. He was home in hospice care, which focuses on a person’s quality of life as they near death. And he had chosen to make use of Vermont’s medical aid-in-dying law, which passed in 2013.
He had a few things on his mind that he wanted to share. He was medicated when we spoke but still sharp, thoughtful and funny.
Bill died on Monday, July 29, just a week after our conversation. He was 83 years old. His wife Chris told me that his final week was filled with visits from over 70 friends. Bill regaled them with stories from his long and colorful life. No matter how serious the topic or dire the situation, he would find the humor in it. He believed deeply in the power of a good laugh.
Bill Mares was raised in Texas and educated at Harvard, where he majored in history, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, where he received a master’s degree. He was a former journalist, state representative and high school history teacher in Vermont. For over a decade, he was a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio.
He authored or co-authored 20 books on subjects ranging from the U.S. Marines, to desert travel, to Vermont humor. His books include Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats (with Frank Bryan), and his latest, I Could Hardly Keep From Laughing: An Illustrated Collection of Vermont Humor (with Don Hooper). His memoir, Better to Be Lucky Than Smart, will be published posthumously later this year.
Among the many nonprofit organizations to which he gave his time and talents, Bill was a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
Bill called me to talk about how he was approaching his last days. He especially wanted others to know that the end of life could be peaceful and beautiful with medical aid-in-dying. Vermont is one of 11 states that has such a law. In 2023, Vermont revised it to become the first state to permit medical aid-in-dying to qualifying patients from anywhere, regardless of the state in which they live. To qualify, a patient must meet strict criteria, including having a terminal illness with six months or less to live and have two physicians sign off.
"I had the chance to drive the bus of my own disappearance," he said of how he was ending his life.
Bill asked me if I would record our conversation. We both knew it would likely be the last time we talked.
"I was never an expert in anything. But I was good enough to pass the giggle test," he told me.
I asked him what his advice was for young people. "Start by serving other people. It said on the wall of my camp as a kid, 'God is first, others second, I am third.' And you can't go wrong with that."
"You just have to remember those two beings, which is you and everybody else. You're sharing this planet with 8 billion other people. And that's enough work to do for anyone."
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When the covid pandemic hit in March 2020, stores ran out of toilet paper. Then it was infant formula, personal protective equipment, computer chips and everything else on which our modern lives depend.
What caused these worldwide shortages? In his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” New York Times global economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman explains how and why the global supply chain broke – and why it might happen again. In it, he says that inequality and corporate greed have left the world with a supply chain on the brink of collapse.
“Most of us understood that the businesses that dominated the supply chain were making the economy more unequal, enriching executives who frequently abused the rank and file, poisoning our democracies and sowing toxicity in our political discourse, to say nothing of the natural environment,” Goodman writes. “To the extent to which we thought about it, we generally recognized that our mode of consumerism was threatening humanity with extinction via climate change, while exploiting labor from South Asia to Latin America.”
Goodman has reported from more than 40 countries over the past three decades. He came to the Times from the Washington Post, where he was the Shanghai bureau chief. His work as part of the Times’ series on the roots of the 2008 financial crisis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include, “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.”
Goodman said that when people conclude "that the powers that be don't value them, don't prioritize their needs and the needs of their families, and at the same time you have trade animosities and then migration ...that is a very toxic prescription. That creates opportunities for parties that tend to demonize outsiders, immigrants, or in our case, Chinese workers supposedly stealing our jobs. And that doesn't go well."
"Much of the West is engaged in a kind of process of looking for scapegoats, as opposed to looking at how we have allowed billionaire interests to dominate our politics and deliver scarcity,” Goodman said. “I think that's a very concerning combination."
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A political tsunami rolled ashore on Sunday, July 21, in the form of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
This move, about 100 days before Election Day, is unprecedented in American history. Biden’s withdrawal followed his disastrous performance in a debate last month with former President Donald Trump, during which Biden struggled to find words, trailed off mid-sentence and often stared blankly at the camera.
Biden’s meltdown on national TV sparked panic among Democrats, who feared an electoral blowout that could cost them the presidency, Congress and statewide races.
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., participated in three weeks of fraught discussions among her colleagues over whether to urge the 81-year old president to get out of the race.
Balint said that conversations in the Democratic caucus “were raw, they were honest, there was screaming, there was crying, there (were) people trying to see it from every possible outcome, thinking about their constituents and their relationships with both the president and the vice president.” She said that calls to her office ran 10 to 1 in favor of Biden quitting the race, but among her colleagues “there was a strong diversity of opinion. And we all felt an incredible responsibility to bring into the room what we were hearing from rank-and-file voters.”
Balint pushed back against the charge that Harris has not been adequately vetted by participating in primaries. “She was vetted. She was the vice president…for years,” Balint said. “She's been out making the case for a set of policy priorities that she was right by the president's side passing them.”
Balint advised Harris to “articulate a very forward-looking message for the nation. Because what you have in Trump and [Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s newly named running-mate] is this effort to drag us back to another time when people did not have their rights guaranteed. And we see this not-so-coded language in the last few days around ‘DEI candidates.' They are basically coming right up to the line around racism and sexism. And so she is going to channel the anger and frankly the disgust that many American women feel around overturning Roe, trying to restrict access to mifepristone, threatening to enforce the archaic Comstock Laws.”
Balint insisted that the presidential race “is going to be won and lost around bodily autonomy and freedom.”
The first-term representative wanted “to just name the elephant in the room that is kicking around here where people say, ‘Oh, well, America is not ready to elect a woman — America is not ready to elect a Black woman in particular,’" she said.
"Let's not have a failure of imagination here,” Balint said. “Of course we can elect a woman… And of course we can elect a Black woman. We have to stop parroting this notion that we are only as good as the most racist and sexist people in this nation. We're not. We're better than that. And we have to believe in what is possible.”
In April, Balint, who is Jewish, voted against sending offensive military aid to Israel, and she boycotted Wednesday’s address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I am disgusted that he was invited,” she said, adding that Netanyahu leads “the most extremist government that Israel has ever seen.”
“Netanyahu should be spending every waking moment bringing about an end to this horrible war, getting the release of the hostages, getting Israeli troops out of Gaza,” Balint said.
Vermont’s lone congressional representative bemoaned “the cynicism that's taken hold in this country. And the sense that everyone's on the take or everybody's out to get you and that sort of permeates the work that I do here.”
Balint said she is focused on “how to not give in to cynicism. And that's where I get a sense of renewal is thinking about the language that I use and how I interact with my constituents and also my colleagues so that we don't lose hope.”
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Ethan Allen is lionized as the founding father of Vermont. But filmmaker Jay Craven has reimagined the story of the Revolutionary War figure and leader of the Green Mountain Boys to tell a fuller story of patriotism laced with greed and ambition.
In Craven’s latest epic film, “Lost Nation,” Ethan Allen meets Lucy Terry Prince, a formerly enslaved woman in Guilford who scholars believe was the nation’s first African American poet. The improbable duo have a shared conviction to protect their land and people. Their fictionalized connection lies at the heart of Craven’s saga.
“Lost Nation” opens with a quote from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who wrote, “All history is current.”
“One of the questions we pose in the film is whether the promise of the American Revolution would be fulfilled,” said Craven. “There was a belief and a hope that slavery would be abolished as a result of the American Revolution. Of course, that did not happen. And some of the racial tensions of that time, unfortunately, have persisted … And today we're facing the problem of even banning African American history.”
“Maybe this film itself would be banned, frankly, because it tells some African American history about struggle,” he mused.
Jay Craven is one of Vermont’s cultural visionaries. He is a founder of Catamount Arts, co-founder of Circus Smirkus, and co-founder of Kingdom County Productions, which he runs with his wife, documentary filmmaker Bess O’Brien. Craven has directed 10 films, including “Where the Rivers Flow North” (1993), “Disappearances” (2006) and “Northern Borders” (2013).
Craven is also artistic director of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival and a former professor of film studies at Marlboro College.
Craven attended Boston University, where he was student body president and led protests against the Vietnam War. He formed a lifelong friendship with radical historian Howard Zinn and traveled with a student peace delegation to North Vietnam.
Filmmaking is an extension of Craven's lifelong social justice mission. Some 45 students from 10 colleges were involved in making “Lost Nation,” part of his commitment to empowering a new generation of filmmakers through Semester Cinema.
Making films “gave me voice, it gave me agency and also instilled in me a certain activism that became a guiding force when I moved to Vermont in wanting to work within the arts to connect communities and to work with this idea of community and culture,” Craven said. “Making movies based on stories from where I lived, as an alternative to the Hollywood narrative, was part of that activism.”
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When flood waters tore through parts of Vermont last July, countless lives were upended. Barre, the Granite City, was especially hard hit. Parts of downtown were buried in thick mud, and the city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear them.
This week, virtually everyone I talked with in Barre expressed anxiety about heavy rains and potential flash flooding expected on Wednesday and Thursday.
I stopped by Dente’s Market, Barre’s last corner grocery. The store dates back to 1907. Last year when I visited, the sodden contents of the store were heaped on the sidewalk. I found its owner, Rick Dente, standing on the porch of a house that he owns just behind the market. Locals affectionately call him the Mayor of North Barre.
When I met Dente last year, he told me of his harrowing near-death experience during the flood. He was in water up to his neck, pinned to a door in the back of his market, his legs about to give out. Just when Dente thought it was over, three tenants who lived above his store came down, ropes around their waists. They banged open the door and rescued the exhausted shopkeeper.
“Someone was watching over me,” Dente told me last year inside his mud filled market.
Today, collectible glass milk containers and old Coke bottles once again sparkled on the shelves, and coolers offered an assortment of food and drink. Rick Dente was behind the counter in his usual post where he has been greeting his Barre neighbors for decades.
Dente said that he has had health impacts related to the 2023 flood. “I've had some physical issues that I'm told can be the result of your body experiencing some serious, serious stress.”
“Hopefully I can stay in good health and keep going for at least a few more years,” he said of his 117 year old family business. “Time will tell.”
When I visited Vermont Bicycle Shop, I discovered that it had moved from its location on Main Street. The new store opened this week a few blocks away at a location that did not flood.
“I always describe last year as both the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me,” said bike store owner Darren Ohl, whose basement stocked with over $100,000 in inventory was under 8 feet of water last year. Community members created a GoFundMe for the bike shop that raised over $26,000.
“The flood was terrible to go through," said Ohl. But it "was wonderful was seeing how much our community came out. We had over 25 volunteers with over 20 volunteers for almost 30 days straight. So many people would just come to the shop and just write us a check and donate money. That was astounding to experience as a business owner. And without that we would have folded. We would have gone out of business.”
“That community response is one of the things that holds neighborhoods and communities together,” said Pam Wilson, a founder of Barre Up, a group working on long term recovery. “That's how you survive an unpredictable climate future. It's based in community care.”
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