The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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The Vermont Conversation is a VTDigger podcast hosted by award-winning journalist David Goodman. It features in-depth interviews about local and national topics with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and ordinary citizens. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.

  1. 5d ago

    ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ Bestselling author Richard North Patterson on how American democracy was undermined.

    “Gradually, then suddenly, America reached the precipice of authoritarianism.” That’s how author Richard North Patterson begins his exploration into key turning points in the last quarter century that have altered the course of American history. He breaks it down in his new book, “Tripwires: 15 Twenty-First-Century Events That Undermined American Democracy — and How to Reclaim It.” “The fire hose of stuff around Trump has been so great that we can't keep track of it,” Patterson told me. “If we don't understand how we got here, then we can't figure out how to get out of this place and restore and reinvigorate our democracy.” Starting with the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore that awarded George W. Bush the 2000 presidential election, Patterson itemizes the fateful turns. There was the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008; the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 that unleashed unlimited campaign cash; future President Donald Trump’s demand for then-President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in 2011; and Sen. Mitch McConnell's refusal to convict Trump for the Jan. 6 attempted coup by supporters in 2021. The culmination of the events that undermined democracy was Chief Justice John Roberts’ Supreme Court ruling in 2024 that the American president had immunity for his actions, thus creating an unbounded presidency. Patterson is internationally renowned as the author of 23 novels, 16 of which have been New York Times bestsellers, including “Protect and Defend” and “Degree of Guilt.” Patterson is a former trial attorney whose articles have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Times and elsewhere. For the last decade, Patterson has devoted his energies to political commentary because, as he wrote in The Atlantic, “Trump rendered fiction redundant.” As a fiction writer, Patterson recognized Trump’s gift for crafting a compelling story. “Trump creates a fantasy world in which we are beset by numerous forces, some real in themselves, some not real at all, like the great attack of communism and socialism he claims that we are suffering from,” he told me. “And then he creates the heroic narrative where Trump and Trump alone can save us from all of this.”  Patterson understands the allure of the story and its inherent danger. “You had a meeting of the man and his megalomaniacal fantasies in a moment of extreme unease in the American polity, where people were willing to turn to someone who promised to be the all-purpose solution to their unease.” “He claimed to make America great again. I would argue he made America hate again,” Patterson continued. “If you look at authoritarians throughout time, they've always found an enemy. And for Trump, they were racial minorities.” Patterson predicted that “2026 and 2028 are really democracy's last good shot at getting itself turned around.” “If we have a JD Vance or somebody else who's going to pick up on Trump's proto fascism, then we are farther down the road to going from democracy to the authoritarianism in Hungary under (Viktor) Orban and beyond, where we simply can't retrieve what we — what we once believed was secure.”

  2. Sep 23

    ‘There was some justice.’ Hisham Awartani on enduring and speaking out for Palestinian lives.

    Hisham Awartani thought he was going to die. That’s what he told a police dispatcher in desperation as he lay on the ground after being shot by Jason Eaton in November 2023. Awartani and two friends, all of whom are of Palestinian descent, were walking down North Prospect Street in Burlington when Eaton, whom they did not know, stepped off his porch and began firing at them without saying anything. All three friends were wounded, but Awartani, who was 20, was the most seriously injured. A Vermont jury delivered a measure of justice this week when it convicted Eaton of three counts of attempted second-degree murder for the unprovoked shooting of the three young men. The weeklong trial included searing testimony from the survivors and the replaying of Awartani’s call to 911. “There was some justice dealt, but obviously it doesn't change what happened,” Awartani told me about the verdict.  Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad have been friends since childhood in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They were classmates at a Quaker high school in Ramallah and were all attending universities in the U.S. They were on Thanksgiving break and were visiting Awartani’s grandmother, who lives in Burlington. The jury delivered its verdict in under two hours and rejected Eaton’s insanity defense, holding him fully responsible for his actions. The verdict offered some closure on a shocking act of violence that drew national and international attention, coming two months into the latest Israel-Hamas war.  Awartani was gravely wounded in the attack. A bullet lodged in his spine, and he is now paralyzed from the chest down. Awartani told me he is grateful for the medical care he received at UVM Medical Center and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, as well as an outpouring of community support in Vermont. But he has had mixed feelings about the extensive attention to his case. “To have access to such great healthcare and then at the same time, just see the large-scale destruction and death that was happening in Palestine … that part was dissonant for me definitely.” “In Palestine, every single person who died, their life is just as rich as mine.”  The death toll from the war in Gaza has topped 73,000 since Hamas forces attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. More than 1,200 Israelis were killed that day.  Awartani said there is a connection between what is happening in Palestine and what happened to him. “Palestinian identity has become vilified,” he told me.  “Violence against Palestinians being excused on a mass scale in Palestine … carried over to here, where simply wearing Palestinian clothing and outwardly identifying yourself as Palestinian is enough to be considered a terrorist and therefore getting shot.” The families of the three young men released a statement after the verdict. “After three years of sorrow, loss, and struggle, our families finally feel relief,” they wrote. Although Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George said the evidence did not support a hate crime charge, the families insist that the young men were targeted in an act of hate. They wrote, “We continue to work toward a world where hateful violence against Palestinians is called out for what it is — and stopped.” Awartani is now 23. He graduated with honors from Brown University in May with a degree in archaeology and math. He plans to return to the West Bank for a year and then pursue graduate studies, perhaps in archaeology.  As a Palestinian survivor of violence, Awartani feels a special responsibility. “I've been given a voice, and I would like to use that voice to amplify other people's voices that have been silent or silenced,” he said.  What gives him hope? “Being surrounded by friends and family, both in the United States and in Palestine … helps us endure and be together,” he replied. He is also encouraged by the shift in public opinion toward Palestine and the campus protests in support of Palestinian rights. “It's building political machinery that hopefully … can effect large-scale positive change both in the United States domestically and internationally.”

  3. Sep 16

    Filmmaker Bess O’Brien on connection, resilience and joy after tragedy

    Bess O’Brien is best known for making award-winning documentary films that take deep dives into difficult issues like addiction, hunger and homelessness. With her latest film, she is taking a different approach: She is inviting audiences on a feel-good journey about resilience and joy. “Every Day: Big and Small” is about the unsung ways that Vermonters show up for each other in good times and bad to create change. O’Brien introduces us to a writers group for people in recovery from substance use, a boisterous drag show at the Elks club in Rutland, a group of men talking about domestic violence, a horse farm for people with PTSD, a couple recovering from a recent flood, a military museum run by a 13-year-old boy, and girls who want to go into farming. These are among a series of cinematic vignettes that tell a larger story of how people cross divides and lift each other up. “A lot of times we are told things about how people are acting or feeling that actually aren't true,” O’Brien told me. People “are actually more generous and more open-hearted than we often assume.” The inspiration for O’Brien’s new film was seeing what happened after the floods in 2023 and 2024 that ravaged some Vermont communities. “We all recognize that our neighbors came together to help each other. However, this happens every day, and we don't even know it, and we don't acknowledge it all the time,” she said.  O’Brien’s previous documentary films have raised awareness about vulnerable people and social justice. Her 2013 documentary, “The Hungry Heart,” about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont, sparked a statewide conversation about opioids.  O’Brien’s 2016 documentary, “All of Me,” focused on the lives of people with eating disorders, and in 2018 she directed “Coming Home,” about five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison. Her 2024 film, “Just Getting By,” was about Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity. As she does with most of her films, O’Brien is embarking on a statewide tour with “Every Day: Big and Small.” Her goal is to spark a statewide conversation about the issues in the film.  Chronicling recovery and resilience has been a throughline in O’Brien’s work. In 2014 she co-founded Writers for Recovery to help people who are struggling with addiction. She is now expanding what recovery means.  Recovery is “what we do 55 times a day, just as human beings, because we're depressed, or we're bummed, or we're angry at our kid, or we're frustrated, or we can't get our Google to work,” she said.   “It's the old Vermont thing: You get stuck in the mud and somebody comes and pulls you out. That is recovery. That is somebody coming and helping you. So this film is really about all those small little things that human beings do every day that get us through life. Because if we didn't have that, we'd be fricking in big trouble.”

  4. Sep 9

    ‘We are the patriots fighting for democracy.’ AG Charity Clark on suing Trump and winning $92.7M from Meta

    Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark has had a busy summer. Since late June, she has sued the Trump administration an average of twice per week. That brings to 67 the number of lawsuits — as of midday Wednesday — she has filed or joined against President Donald Trump since January 2025. They include lawsuits defending birthright citizenship and challenging cuts to medical research funding, the dismantling of the Department of Education, voting restrictions and tariffs. Clark said her office has prevailed in 92% of the suits, including both final decisions and preliminary injunctions. Many of these decisions are being appealed, but “getting that initial win is hugely helpful in all the work that we are doing battling the unconstitutional and illegal acts of the federal government right now,” Clark told me. In August, the attorney general announced a landmark settlement of $92.7 million with the social media company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, for designing its programs to addict young people and harm their mental health. The settlement resulted from a lawsuit involving 47 other states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Meta agreed to limit the time that teenagers can spend on its platforms and impose age restrictions. “I really think this is the dawn of a new era for social media,” Clark said. Clark, 51, won election as Vermont’s attorney general in 2022, the first woman to do so. She graduated from the University of Vermont, then worked as a policy analyst in the office of Gov. Howard Dean. She later graduated from the Boston College School of Law and worked as an assistant attorney general and later as chief of staff to her predecessor, TJ Donovan. In April, she was named Woman of the Year by the Boston College Women’s Law Coalition. She is currently running for a third term as attorney general. In a recent lawsuit, Clark joined 24 other state attorneys general challenging a new rule by the U.S. Postal Service that would grant it the authority to regulate mail-in voting.  “This is such an egregious attempt to overtake the state's prerogatives with voting and elections. But more importantly, it is so wildly impractical,” said Clark, adding that it would take years to implement. “I can't imagine that the United States Supreme Court is going to say, ‘Yeah, we'll just do this and disenfranchise so many of these voters.’ I mean, it would be pandemonium if they did this.” Clark said that despite the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to overturn longstanding legal precedents, “I believe in America.”  “We will keep exercising our rights under the Constitution and standing up for our country,” she said. “We are the patriots fighting for democracy and our Constitution, and we're going to keep doing it until this administration is gone. And we're going to keep doing it whatever the next administration is who comes in in 2028.”

  5. Sep 2

    Historian Jill Lepore on the threat of authoritarianism and how to counter it

    Is technology killing democracy and destroying communities? Yes, argues acclaimed historian Jill Lepore in her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She writes that the artificial state is “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.” It is the fantasy of tech billionaires. And its goal is the end of liberal democracy. The artificial state is a “replacement of the liberal nation state, a constitutional democracy in which we are governed by our own consent, with a government by machine, in which many of the functions of democratic governments are automated, in which humans are replaced by bots as the predominant participant in public life,” she told me. When the titans of Silicon Valley sat behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January 2025, it marked “the coming out of the tech right,” said Lepore. Lepore is one of the country’s most acclaimed historians. She is a professor of American history at Harvard University, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the bestsellers “These Truths: A History of the United States,” which Time magazine named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of the 2010s, and “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in history. She hosts the podcast “The Last Archive.” She lives part-time in Brattleboro, which is where she spoke to me. Lepore said that efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize American history are “a form of McCarthyism.”  She said that skewed versions of history have evolved that have deepened social divisions. These range from the “far-right version of American history in which everything is a march of freedom and progress and prosperity and America has never done anything wrong at home or abroad” to the “far-left account in which American history is a litany of atrocities, in which the United States has never done anything good at home or abroad.” “There was nothing that recognized there was plenty of truth in both of those accounts, and there was also unbelievable distortion in those accounts.”  Lepore said history affirms that “the power of ordinary citizens working together has managed to defeat” forces like the artificial state and its techno-authoritarianism.   “But the idea that we can sit in our living rooms and browse the news on our smartphones and post a few thoughts on social media, and that constitutes meeting our obligations as citizens is a false one.”

  6. Aug 26

    Alternative media pioneer Nat Winthrop on a half-century of covering Vermont

    Journalist Nat Winthrop has been covering Vermont for a half-century, reporting stories that have surprised, infuriated and enlightened readers. From 1978 to 1990, Winthrop was publisher of the pioneering alternative weekly the Vanguard Press, and later the Vermont Times. These publications were launching pads for many journalists and were forerunners to Seven Days, the Vermont weekly that is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. He was also executive producer of “Freedom & Unity,” a six-part documentary film about Vermont that was led by Nora Jacobson. In 1987, he co-founded the online alternative news service AlterNet. Winthrop explained the niche filled by Vermont’s early alternative weeklies. “There's the myth of objectivity in the media,” he told me. But “the Vanguard, in particular, wore our opinions on our sleeves or on the editorial page.” The weeklies differ from newspapers with their “narrative style of storytelling, so that all of the important information isn't necessarily right up at the top of the article.” Winthrop, 74, has a new book, “On the Record,” a collection of 17 of his cover stories. The topics vary widely, from his reporting on a controversial physician at Gifford Hospital in Randolph who championed in vitro fertilization in the 1970s, to his coverage of Iranian cadets at Norwich University just after the 1979 Iranian revolution, to his stories about Bernie Sanders and ice cream icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield as they rose from obscurity to national fame. The book has many contemporary echoes and includes updates on what has happened with the subjects of each story. Filmmaker Jay Craven wrote in a foreword, “A newspaper in tune with its readers creates common ground and lets us know where we live in ways that are specific to ourselves, our towns, and our neighbors. Nat’s work strengthened our links to each other and helped move our state forward.” Winthrop earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and came to Vermont to attend Goddard College, where he received a master’s degree in media education in 1977. He lives in Montpelier.  “Print media across most of the country are a lot smaller in numbers and some say a dying breed,” conceded Vermont’s alternative media pioneer. But he pointed to VTDigger, Seven Days and Vermont Public as indications that media “are actually doing quite a bit better in Vermont than in most states.”

  7. Aug 19

    Grace Potter on how she achieved musical stardom by trespassing

    Vermont-born rock star Grace Potter releases her seventh studio album on Aug. 21. “Trespasser” is the latest offering from the four-time Grammy nominee. Potter burst onto the music scene in 2002 with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Since that group disbanded in 2015, Potter has gone on to tour with some of the country’s top musical acts, including the Rolling Stones, Kenny Chesney and country star Chris Stapleton, with whom she is touring this fall. Potter will bring her act to Burlington on Sept. 18 when her annual Grand Point North festival kicks off. Profits will go toward Potter’s Grand Point Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the arts in Vermont. Potter, 43, divides her time between homes in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, where she grew up and attended high school, and Topanga Canyon, California. “Trespasser” was produced by her husband and frequent collaborator Eric Valentine. The two have a son together. “Trespasser” was partly inspired by a line from the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land.” Potter sang it: “As I was walking that ribbon of highway, there was a wall that said private property, but on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side is made for you and me.” That idea of crossing boundaries “was the engine that was running all of my lyrical landscaping at that point.” The title song includes a refrain, “As I hurried home … I heard an icy refrain … bow to the master.” What did she mean? Potter said she wrote the lyrics “in an early round of rounding up immigrants, and it wasn't called ICE at the time. … Little did I know that a few years later there would really be this icy refrain.” Potter — who says she got kicked out of band at Harwood Union High School when it was discovered that she could not read music — said she feels she has been trespassing her whole career. “I will often get off stage and look at my bandmates or look at whoever is there side-stage and go: I just got away with it again, like I'm robbing a bank,” she said. “My passion and my commitment to basically all forms of art is mostly based on my fascination with how I'm able to get away with this over and over again. I don't think I've ever said that out loud.”  “If you want a scoop,” she told me, “it's just that I continue to be rewarded for something that comes extremely naturally to me, and I'm lucky enough to have been kind of cattle prodded into it by really encouraging, inspired, wonderful family members and friends and cohorts who saw what I had better than I— better than I did.”

  8. Aug 12

    ‘What can I do?’ Ami Fields-Meyer on what global dissidents can teach Americans

    As President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign of retribution against his political opponents and unleashes masked federal agents on immigrant communities, many American citizens are asking: What can I do? For answers, we can look to dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism. “Authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money,” said Ami Fields-Meyer, co-author with journalist Julia Angwin of “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.” The authors spoke with over 100 dissidents in their research. These include a 73-year-old abortion escort in Virginia, young activists in Egypt who have challenged a dictator, students in Hong Kong defending democracy, and a civil rights lawyer who lost his job in the Trump administration while fighting for fair housing. Together, they offer a modern roadmap for resisting authoritarianism. Authoritarians start by targeting vulnerable groups, then extending to political opponents and the broader population. They say, “It's not me who's taking your money or your rights. This is happening because of somebody else. It's happening because of the trans people. It's happening because of the undocumented people,” Fields-Meyer told me. “The response has to be to expand the circle of who we are committed to.” Fields-Meyer has been a senior policy adviser to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a strategist to national civil rights organizations and political candidates. His articles on democracy and public policy have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other outlets. The authors share lessons from global dissidents. Fields-Meyer described how dissidents “repurposed their communities into extraordinarily powerful political forces. The dissident movement that helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia was a group of theater actors (who) repurposed their theaters into organizing hubs. They stopped printing playbills on their printers and started printing protest leaflets. This is something that we see all over the world.” This includes Fields-Meyer’s home community of Brooklyn, where mutual aid groups formed during the Covid-19 pandemic are now using the same texting groups “to protect people from the federal agents who are waiting outside their doors.” Fields-Meyer said that strengthening community helps counter the ways that autocrats seek to divide people. “Authoritarianism is all about saying, ‘Don't believe your lying eyes. You thought that you saw Renee Good shot in the street? No, you didn't. You thought that you saw Alex Pretti shot in the street? No, you didn't,’” said Fields-Meyer. “What we learned from Soviet dissidents is that when lies abound, you can work with other people and be with other people and be emboldened to say, ‘I do see what I see.’” “We need to be able to hold hope and hopelessness at the same time,” said Fields-Meyer. “If we do, history tells us that we're going to win.”

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The Vermont Conversation is a VTDigger podcast hosted by award-winning journalist David Goodman. It features in-depth interviews about local and national topics with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and ordinary citizens. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.

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