The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

As the world contends with increasingly destructive and costly climate-fueled disasters, the Trump administration has announced that it is eliminating the government’s ability to fight climate change.Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is erasing the scientific finding, known as the “endangerment clause,” that permits it to take action to protect public health and the environment.“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be,” reported the New York Times.I turned to Bill McKibben to glean the significance and implications of this latest development. McKibben is arguably the world’s foremost reporter and organizer on the climate crisis. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about climate change, and he has gone on to author over 20 other books.He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and to his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. McKibben is also the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change.

When cross country skier Ben Ogden won a silver medal in the classic sprint at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, he broke a 50-year medal drought for American men. The last American man to medal in cross country skiing was Bill Koch, Ogden’s Vermont neighbor and skiing mentor. Ogden, who began skiing in Koch’s backyard as a kid, followed those ski trails right into the Olympics. He celebrated by doing a backflip off the podium. Ten days later, Ogden raced to a second silver medal in the men’s team relay with teammate Gus Schumacher. Ben Ogden is now the most decorated men’s cross-country skier in U.S. Olympic history. Ogden grew up in Landgrove, Vermont, and attended the University of Vermont, where he was a three-time NCAA cross country ski champion. This was Ogden’s second Winter Olympics.Less than a week after standing on an Olympic podium, Ogden is back racing on the World Cup circuit in Europe. That’s where I caught up with him. 

When Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., traveled to Minneapolis on a Congressional oversight mission several weeks ago, she saw a city under siege. Some 3,000 masked federal agents dispatched by President Donald Trump were roaming the city, snatching people from their homes and streets, often without warrants or explanation. Balint fears Vermont could be next. “This is not a law enforcement effort, this is about power and control and submission,” Balint said of what she observed in Minneapolis. She said that the killing of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis “just absolutely shook me to my core, not just because of the violence and the loss of life, but also immediately the lying about these two people” by the Trump Administration. “This is about the president punishing states and municipalities that he does not feel like give him enough fealty,” Balint said. “Any state that did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, they're in the crosshairs. And we must assume that at some point this President will try to make an example of us, and we can't be caught flat footed.”Last week, Balint said she and Senators Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., met with Gov. Phil Scott to prepare for that potential day.Though in another sense, that day has already arrived. Just this week, FEMA denied disaster aid to Vermont for 2025 flooding in the Northeast Kingdom. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “also oversees FEMA," Balint said. "And the President is using FEMA right now to pick winners and losers. And the winners are Republican states, and the losers are so-called democratic states,"

Young Bernie Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964 as part of a counter-cultural wave. The tall Jewish kid with the thick Brooklyn accent who spoke of socialism and revolution fit right in with the communards and hippies, though he was neither. Sanders was then, as now, his own man, raging against the establishment while simultaneously seeking to lead it, albeit in a very different direction.As author Dan Chaisson writes, the story of Bernie Sanders is also the story of Vermont. “To see how Vermont changed, simply look at how Bernie’s message, reiterated for fifty years, migrated from the fringe to the heart of Vermont’s political discourse.”In the early days, Burlingtonians knew Bernie “as a perennial political loser” who typically garnered a slim percentage of the electorate in in the 1970s, recounted Chiasson. “But also he was just an indefatigable kind of force.”Dan Chaisson is a Burlington native and the author of five books of poetry. He is a professor of English and chair of the English department at Wellesley College. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, his new book is Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. Chiasson weaves together his own story of growing up in hardscrabble Burlington in the 1970s with Sanders' own, whom he observed throughout his life go from gadfly to mayor, to the most influential progressive political figure in the country.Chaisson traces Sanders’ politics to his experience growing up poor in Brooklyn “in an economy that was designed to kill" him and his family. "His mother died in her 40s of a congenital heart condition.”Sanders attended the University of Chicago where he participated in civil rights protests. “He thought that things like racial and other kinds of traumas in our country stemmed directly from economics,” said Chiasson. “Moving to Vermont was a way of thinking, could we start society over?”What explains Bernie’s appeal to conservatives in areas like the Northeast Kingdom? Chaisson said that Sanders admired and channeled George Aiken, the Republican Vermont governor and senator who famously opposed the Vietnam War, declaring that the U.S. should “say we won and get out.” Aiken “had a sort of similar kind of flintiness to him, a similar kind of orneriness or cantankerousness,” Chaisson said.Sanders, a lifelong independent, has long reserved some of his harshest criticism for Democrats. “He feels that the Democrats are the party of the educated elite and he feels much more comfortable among working people.” When he disagrees with someone, Sanders “has a talent for steering the conversation away from those differences and towards places of common interest and common ground.”Asked what he thought the legacy of Sanders would be, Chaisson said, “Just the tenacity, the temerity, the moral vision that Sanders laid out.” He quoted former Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, who described Sanders as “a moral visionary.”“Somebody with Bernie's fight in him and with his sense that there are right and wrong sides of the question morally when we engage with politics, that makes me feel pretty hopeful.”

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota has sparked furious backlash. Protests have been held around the country following the killing by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott characterized the immigration raids as “a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans.”Last week, a group of over a dozen Vermont faith leaders responded to a national call for clergy to come to Minneapolis to bear witness and support besieged local religious leaders. On this Vermont Conversation, I spoke with two Vermont clergy who have just returned from a tumultuous and emotional trip to Minneapolis. Rabbi David Fainsilber is the rabbi of the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe, and Rev. Dr. Becca Girrell is the pastor of United Community Church of Morrisville.“Minneapolis is serving as a testing ground. That is true both for the operations of ICE and Border Patrol and other federal enforcement (using) pretty brutal tactics, but it's also true of the community response and resilience,” said Rev. Girrell. “What moved me and stays with me the most is the way in which the people of Minneapolis are drawing together peacefully and legally and in strong solidarity and support."Rev. Girrell said that the brutal tactics of federal agents are “meant as a warning to people like me, to people of good faith or no faith all around the country, that we should not stand up for our neighbors, and we should not protect them with ourselves and our very lives if necessary. And what I saw was the people of Minneapolis will not comply with that order."Asked whether he saw parallels between the actions of federal agents in the U.S. and how immigrants were rounded up in Nazi Germany, Rabbi Fainsilber said the link wasn't necessary. "You don't need to look far to see slavery, to see genocide. Let's look in our own backyard here and our history to make the point that today is not okay. What is happening feels like a direct line from American history to today.”Fainsilber added that it is “time for people to raise their voices, to not sit on the sidelines, … to make sure that there's legal accountability when officers kill civilians, that there's no additional federal funding for ICE right now, for corporations to become Fourth Amendment businesses so that they're not aiding and abetting ICE activity.”Rev. Girrell returned from Minnesota with a warning. “The violence we see in Minneapolis may come here to Vermont. But the strength of community resilience is already here, and we continue to build that, and we continue to know our neighbors well, so that if there is a crisis, we can respond immediately, and we can respond with strength and love for our neighbors.”

Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, was elected Speaker of the House in 2021. It was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and state coffers were unexpectedly flush with federal relief money. But just as that federal pot of dollars has since dried up, property taxes have risen and voters took out their frustration at the ballot box. In 2024, Vermont Democrats lost the most Democratic seats in the country, and with them their veto-proof supermajority in the Legislature.This month, as Gov. Phil Scott declared his roadmap for the Legislative session, Krowinski’s skills as a diplomat are being tested as never before. Scott unveiled a $9.4 billion state budget this week, and declared that he would essentially hold that budget hostage — that is, unless the Legislature comes up with a plan to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts into a few larger districts.Krowinski bristled at the governor’s approach. “Our goal here is to ensure that our kids are getting the best education at a price that Vermonters can afford. I will say that threatening a budget veto is really not helpful at this time, we need to be working together to find solutions and not making threats.” The governor also plans to end Vermont's emergency motel voucher program to combat homelessness, and re-invest in affordable housing development and social services. Krowinski said the move falls short of the current, critical need.“We don't have the shelter capacity right now to help the thousands of Vermonters that are unhoused, and we have 1,000 kids right now that are unhoused, and that really is going to keep me up at night thinking about this weekend” when sub-zero temperatures are forecasted. She noted that money allocated to nonprofit housing organizations had not been distributed by the Scott administration, and said he House will be investigating the matter to “ensure that we're not leaving money on the table.”The governor must now win over Krowinski and her legislative colleagues as he attempts to pass his agenda."We're not coming in just starting from fresh," Krowinski said. "The progress that we've made on issues like child care that's made a huge difference in affordability for Vermont families, the tax credits that we've put out there to help to help older Vermonters and to help families with kids, looking at our long term investments in housing, how we've been able to bend the cost curve some on health care.”Krowinski has also seen the impacts of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown across the country. “I am so completely outraged, disgusted, frustrated with what's happening across our country. I actually witnessed an ICE arrest while I was in Washington, DC, and the illegal excessive force used was shocking.” Krowinski said that Vermont is prepared in some ways and unprepared in others.The turmoil is also personal. Last June, the 45-year old Burlington Democrat was deeply shaken by the politically-motivated assassinations of her friend and colleague, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.“It is important for Vermonters to know that these threats do happen in Vermont,” said Krowinski, who in 2022 was stalked by a man with a gun in his car at the State House. “I'm just angry about it,” she said of the threats. “I'm not changing anything. … I'm not going to let them control my life or change it in ways that I don't want it to be changed. It took me some time to come to this place, but I'm fired up now, and it's important for me to offer this type of support to other members or elected officials who have gone through it.”

“Who can draw when the world is burning?” asks celebrated Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel in her new graphic novel, Spent.This tension between the political and personal has been a deep well for Bechdel in her art. Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont, as well as a recipient of a MacArthur "genius award" and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was named Best Book of 2006 by Time. It was adapted into a musical that won five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how, after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide.The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.Bechdel is now a professor in the practice at Yale University. She divides her time between teaching for a semester at Yale and living and drawing at her home in West Bolton, Vermont. Bechdel’s wife Holly has been the colorist for her last two books. This week, she had an op-ed cartoon featured in the New York Times about how to stand up to tyranny.She spoke to me from her home in Vermont.

President Donald Trump marked the new year by launching a military assault on Venezuela and abducting President Nicolas Maduro. Some 75 people in Venezuela were killed in the Saturday attack and 7 U.S service members were injured, according to the Washington Post. Many Democrats and some Republicans have denounced the act as unconstitutional, while Trump has followed up by threatening more military action against Cuba, Mexico, Columbia and Greenland. This week also marks the fifth anniversary of the January 6th insurrection on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who were attempting to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. I spoke with Vermont Sen. Peter Welch about these escalating domestic and international crises under the Trump administration just before he returned to Washington. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.David Goodman  Let's begin by getting your thoughts on the US actions against Venezuela this weekend.Peter Welch  It's reckless and it's wrong. I mean, let's acknowledge the military did a very professional job, but the decision the President made to depose the leader of another country, authoritarian that he was, and then to say that this is about us running Venezuela, and then to say that he wants our big oil companies like Exxon to take over Venezuelan oil brings us back to gunboat diplomacy. It's very, very dangerous. I’m adamantly opposed to what the President did.David Goodman  What did you as a United States senator know about this operation in advance?Peter Welch  Absolutely nothing. I'm a United States senator and the United States Senate is the institution that has the authority to authorize a military action. This was an act of war. We were never consulted. We were never involved. So we knew no more than any other citizen who woke up that morning. And what you're seeing is that the President is completely acting beyond the authority of an executive. In my view, Congress has to stand up and resist that. But we don't have Republican support, and we need that. I am a co sponsor of a resolution condemning this and I'm going to be urging my Republican colleagues that we not relinquish our authority and have a president who is exceeding the powers that the Constitution gives him.David Goodman  How is this supposed to work? For example, what happened when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003?Peter Welch  The President comes to Congress and asks for an authorization to use force, and in the case of President Bush, he did that before he went to Iraq. I was opposed to that and many members of Congress were, but a majority supported him. But the President did come to Congress. There's a reason for that. When we're going to put our men and women in harm's way, that's a major decision. Deciding to use military force is an easy decision for a president like Trump, but the consequences of it are paid for by our country and by men and women who are willing to serve at the call of the Commander in Chief. That decision should be deliberated. There should be a discussion, there should be a debate. There should be accountability by members of Congress that they said yes or they said no to this request by the President. What there shouldn't ever be is the arbitrary capacity of an individual who happens to be president to plunge us into a war.David Goodman  President Trump said in his address to nation on Saturday that this is all going to be free. It's going to be paid for by Venezuela. Do you believe that?Peter Welch  No, absolutely. He said that about the (border) wall too. Let's just discuss this. There is a decision that only the President made. Number one, the decision was to take out Maduro. Number two, everybody in Maduro's government is still in power. Number three, the President says we're going to run the country. How are we going to do that? Number four, he says our oil companies like Exxon are going to take over the Venezuelan oil fields. None of those things can happen and none of them should happen. So the President is saying, “they're going to pay for it.” This same president won't lift a finger to extend the health care tax credits that have already expired and where we're going to have about 25,000 Vermonters without health care as a result of that. No, this is bogus.David Goodman  Right now there are Vermonters in the Caribbean, the Vermont Air National Guard. What do we know about the role that they are playing in this operation?Peter Welch  First of all, we are all so impressed and appreciative of our Guard. They got 11 days notice right around the Christmas holidays and had to pick up and leave their families behind. There was no notice for them. What we do know is that none of them have been injured, and I am so pleased that that is the news that we have, and we are awaiting a report about what role they did play. But of course, we have the Air National Guard and they have air assets, and obviously those were a big part of this operation, so we'll find out. But I don't know exactly what they were requested to do.David Goodman  The President has described the strategic principle here as the “Donroe Doctrine,” his update of the 200 year old Monroe Doctrine. What do you understand Trump’s doctrine to be?Peter Welch  The Monroe Doctrine was an assertion by President James Monroe that European powers could not colonize countries in this hemisphere. What the “Donroe” Doctrine is is the United States can impose its will on countries in this hemisphere. Totally different. It's more about gunboat diplomacy. It's more about imperialism. These are the President's words: “we're going to run the country in Venezuela,” “we're going to have our oil companies there.” That has absolutely nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. If the President is, in a kind of pathetic way, trying to make a new word of “Donroe,” the Don is more like a mob boss than it is a diplomat or a statesman.David Goodman  The United States does not have state-run oil companies, but President Trump is saying that private American oil companies are going to rebuild the infrastructure of Venezuela's oil industry. Does that make sense to you?Peter Welch  No, absolutely not. I first started getting interested in Latin America during the President Kennedy administration. There had been a history of the United States companies essentially toppling governments to their own advantage. United Fruit in Nicaragua, of course, the United States toppling an elected government in Guatemala in 1954. What President Kennedy did was really started moving us to where we were promoting democracy. The Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps -- they became the United States engagement in Latin America and South America, which were more premised on the ideals of democratic participation and democratic rule. President Trump has repudiated that totally and completely. What he wants to do is have transactional engagements with these countries that benefit him or benefit American companies. The aspiration for democratic rule or facilitating the path to democracy is totally rejected by this President. It is completely the wrong way to go.David Goodman  In the first year of President Trump's second term, the United States has taken military action against seven different countries, including three that we've never waged war against. After attacking Venezuela, Trump threatened action against Cuba, Mexico and Greenland. What can or will constrain him?Peter Welch  It has to be Congress and the American people. But right now, the biggest dilemma we have in Congress is that my Republican colleagues have abdicated the constitutional authority that we have as members of Congress in so many areas that the President is acting more like a king. Under Article One of the Constitution, Congress has to vote on war making and authorize it in Appropriations. It's up to Congress, the power of the purse. The President is disregarding that. In area after area, my Republican colleagues have been willing to abdicate their authority and their responsibility and delegate it to the President. So you're having this undemocratic concentration of power in a president who knows no limits and thinks that because he is president, he can do whatever he wants. That's a real threat to our democratic governing system.David Goodman  This seems to have opened up some cracks in the MAGA coalition. We are hearing about opposition from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Thomas Massie, also Senator Rand Paul, who have opposed this break with the idea of “America First.” Do you think this could cause other fractures within that coalition?Peter Welch  I do. Americans do not want us getting involved in foreign wars. They support our military, and we need our strong military to make certain that we're defended. But this action in Venezuela is not to protect us from a threat to our country from Venezuela. His talk about taking over Greenland is not to protect us from a threat by Greenland or Denmark, and likewise, Colombia. Most Americans know that asking our citizen soldiers to go to war for presidential preferences is absolutely wrong. We've got to take care of things that are really tough for everyday working people in our country. Right now, Vermonters are losing health care. The President hasn't lifted a single finger to extend those tax credits so that Vermonters and Americans won't lose health care. The president ran as a person who was against these “forever wars” and now he's embracing these wars, not just in Venezuela, but also the threats In Colombia, the threats in Greenland and in Cuba. Why?David Goodman  Why do you think he has pivoted in such a dramatic fashion from a core principle that he has run on?Peter Welch  The biggest support group he has is the billionaires. If Venezuelan oil is now suddenly run by American oil companies, they benefit. And I'm not even certain the oil companies want what he's doing. The Pre

For 90 years, Yankee Magazine has been telling stories of and about New England. And for more than half of the magazine’s life, Mel Allen has been Yankee’s foremost storyteller. Allen wrote his first stories for Yankee in 1977, then held various editorial roles before becoming Yankee’s fifth editor in 2006. He retired as editor earlier this year after 48 years with the magazine, which is based in Dublin, NH. I first got to know Mel Allen in the 1980s, when I began writing for Yankee. I had never had an editor quite like him. He didn’t just assign stories. He coached, shaped, cajoled and encouraged me and countless other New England writers to do our best work. He even came to Vermont with his two sons to go backcountry skiing with me. They loved it, (he, not so much) and a friendship was kindled. Allen has taught magazine writing and creative nonfiction for the past 25 years at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University. In 2018, Mel Allen was inducted into the Folio Magazine Hall of Fame for editorial excellence.Mel Allen, 79, recently published a book of essays, Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All. The stories take us along on his journey to meet the last horse-and-buggy egg delivery man; the tragic search for a lost boy in Maine; to a town in Maine that refused to die; to meet Stephen King, the “King of Horror”; and to the son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant who graduated at the top of his class at Bowdoin College and worked to bring his mother back home to Arizona where he was raised. Allen is sometimes a participant observer in his stories, as immortalized by Stephen King. “I may be the only writer who not only helped King round up pigs for the market when they escaped, but who also ended up as a character named Mel Allen from the Portland Sunday Telegram in 'The Dead Zone,'" Allen writes in his book.Allen believes in the power of stories to build bridges. These “are stories that transcend the current climate of disunity. That's why I believe these stories can connect us,” Allen told The Vermont Conversation. He said that there a “sense of place in New England that I don't know exists anywhere else.”I asked Allen what makes a good story. “You want to keep turning the page,” he said. “You want to know what's going to happen to this person. You want to care about the person.”With journalism in a state of upheaval, I asked Allen what his advice is to young journalists. “You are drawn to tell stories because of something in you. It's not something that somebody puts on your shoulders and says, Now I want you to go out and to tell those stories,” he said. “If you're called to do that, you follow that calling.”

“Plastic is everywhere — wrapped around our food, stitched into our clothes, even coursing through our veins.”That’s how Judith Enck begins her new book, "The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and our Planet Before It’s Too Late," co-authored with Adam Mohoney. A former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, Enck warns that plastics are a toxic industry that are poisoning people and the environment. Plastic production has gone from two million tons per year in 1950, to 450 million tons per year today. The plastics industry has spent millions selling the material as safe and sustainable, but only 6% of plastic is recycled. Plastic recycling is a “false solution,” Enck said. “Plastic recycling has never worked. Never will work.” The plastics industry has “spent millions of dollars advertising, telling us, 'don't worry about all the plastic you're generating,' just toss it in your recycling bin. That is deceptive, and it is so deceptive that the Attorney General of California Rob Bonta sued the nation's largest maker of plastic, the little mom and pop company known as Exxon Mobil, for deceptive claims around plastics recycling and chemical recycling.”Plastic never breaks down. It breaks up into smaller microplastics, circulating in the environment for centuries, said Enck. “16,000 different chemicals are used to make plastic, and the chemicals will sometimes hitchhike on the microplastics. So we're having the physical presence of microplastics in our bodies, but also the presence of chemicals that are used to make plastic, including PFAS chemicals, lead, mercury, formaldehyde.” Microplastics have been found in lungs, testicles, blood, breast milk and semen. They are associated with a rise in reproductive cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, among other ailments.The plastics industry has deployed an army of lobbyists to beat back attempts to limit the use of plastics. As an example, Enck cites New York’s effort this year to consider “a comprehensive packaging reduction bill that will reduce all single use packaging by 30% over 12 years.”“This was the most lobbied bill in the 2026 legislative session in nearby Albany,” said Enck, noting that “there were 106 registered lobbyists against this bill, and 24 in support. I have never seen so many special interest lobbyists wandering the halls of the State Capitol in Albany, including the final night of the legislative session, where they killed the bill on the assembly floor after it passed in the State Senate.”That experience has led Enck to conclude that "reducing plastic in our bodies, in our environment, in Lake Champlain, in the ocean, is more of a political science issue than a science issue. We have enough science to act.”Judith Enck was appointed EPA regional administrator by President Obama and she has served as deputy secretary for the environment in New York. She is now a professor at Bennington College and the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, a group that works to eliminate plastic pollution.Enck insisted that in addition to political action, individuals can take steps to minimize their exposure to plastic. “I suggest that people start with their kitchen, because that's where most of the plastic is, and that's where the greatest risk is in terms of exposure in your food. Do not put plastic in your microwave. Get rid of black plastic utensils in your kitchen drawers, because black plastic is made from recycled electronic waste. Get rid of your plastic cutting board. Replace it with either wood or steel. Do a little audit of what's your heaviest use of plastic. For instance, if you drink a lot of juice, instead of buying it in plastic jugs, buy frozen concentrate and make it in a glass pitcher. There are steps like that we can take.”

Leila Stillman-Utterback graduated from Middlebury Union High School in June and decided to take a gap year to pursue a dream. The 18-year-old Vermonter traveled to Israel to participate in a solidarity program that included volunteering with Rabbis for Human Rights in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help Palestinians harvest olives. She was part of an effort to provide “protective presence” for Palestinians who are under constant attack from right-wing Israeli settlers. She said she wanted to live the Jewish values of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and b’tselem elohim (a belief that everyone is created in God’s image). On October 29, Stillman-Utterback was detained by Israeli soldiers, spent a night handcuffed in a police station and was accused of violating the terms of her tourist visa by entering a closed military zone. After being hauled before a judge at 3 a.m., she was deported and banned from Israel for 10 years.Leila’s treatment at the hands of Israeli authorities was deeply personal for her mother. Danielle Stillman is the rabbi of Middlebury College. She teaches the values that Leila is living. Her daughter is now paying the price. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu may have hoped that by coming down hard on a young American activist that it would silence her. The opposite has occurred. Stillman-Utterback has spoken out in multiple interviews in the Israeli press. “My deportation felt like a betrayal,” wrote Stillman-Utterback in a powerful essay about her ordeal in The Forward, an independent Jewish American news publication. “Israel was supposed to be for me, for every Jew. But the settler movement and the current government would like to redefine what it means to be Jewish along political lines.”Stillman-Utterback rejects the notion that criticizing Israel is somehow antisemitic. “I've grown up my entire life with a connection to Israel, with a love for it even,” she told The Vermont Conversation. “I have also grown up my entire life being allowed to be critical of Israel and … frustrated [and] angry.” She added that it was essential that “in a time of real rising antisemitism globally, that we are able to hold criticism and love at the same time. I really do think that it's possible.”Stillman-Utterback’s treatment is part of a larger crackdown on Palestinians and Jewish activists by the Israeli government and right-wing settlers who operate with near impunity in Palestinian communities. In October, there were 126 olive harvest-related settler attacks against Palestinians, and Israel detained and deported 32 foreign activists who were accompanying Palestinian harvesters near the town of Burin, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.Stillman-Utterback, who two years ago was named a Bronfman Fellow, a cohort of high-achieving Jewish teens, is appealing her ban from Israel and is committed to staying engaged. “We need to maintain our relationships in order to show that there are people who are committed to a peaceful and just future. It doesn't matter what it looks like, whether it's a two state solution, whether it's binational, it only matters that that we end the violence and that we end the occupation, that we move towards equality. Any movement towards equality and towards an end in violence, towards accountability for settler actions, is a move in the right direction.”Rabbi Danielle Stillman said that she’s “inspired by [Leila’s] principled willingness to hang in with Israel despite this really harrowing, dramatic experience, and that that really comes from her Jewish values … to contribute to building a better society in a place that she's come to really care about.”Rabbi Stillman said that American Jews are deeply divided about Israel, especially along generational lines. A recent Washington Post survey found that just over half of Jewish Americans — and two thirds of those over 65 — say they are emotionally attached to Israel, but only about one third of those ages 18 to 34 feel that attachment. About half of younger Jews are more likely to say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, compared to about one third of older Jews.Leila’s arrest and expulsion “just makes me really concerned about the future of the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, between American Jews and Israeli Jews,” said Rabbi Stillman.Rabbi Stillman criticized how antisemitism is being “used in a certain way to further an agenda of silencing solidarity with Palestinians and silencing speech in general on many college campuses.”Leila Stillman-Utterback is now back home in Middlebury figuring out what she will do with the rest of her gap year before attending Williams College in the fall of 2026. She expressed gratitude towards her parents.“I was taught to always stay in a place of not knowing, even if it's uncomfortable, and I feel immensely grateful for never being told that only one answer is right, and for always being taught to live in that liminal space.”

Every week, two local newspapers close somewhere in the country. Some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. That may increase with loss of public media funding. What is the future of journalism in an age where truth itself is under attack? Local news is essential because “that's where rebuilding confidence in facts and truth starts,” said VTDigger editor in chief Geeta Anand. We spoke at a public event at the Manchester Community Library on Nov. 11. “If you've actually gone to a meeting and seen a story based on it and met the reporter and it actually seems the article matches what you heard, then you begin to disbelieve the discrediting of journalism that is happening, led by the leaders of our country, which is having a devastating effect on our democracy.”Anand’s career as a journalist and author spans the globe. Her stories on corporate corruption in the Wall Street Journal earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was a finalist again in 2003. Her book, "The Cure," about a father’s fight to save his kids by starting a company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, was made into the 2010 movie, Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford. She was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India. Anand’s roots in journalism are in covering local news. She worked at Cape Cod News and then covered local government and courts at the Rutland Herald. In 2018, she became a professor at the UC Berkeley journalism school, where she was dean in 2020. She was at Berkeley until taking over leadership of VTDigger in July 2025. Anand spoke about how local journalism is a critical link in the information ecosystem. “Our coverage right now of immigrants getting picked up and spirited off to other parts of the country -- that's the way the world finds out that these things are happening. Our stories get picked up by national media, and the national media hold our national leaders accountable. We matter to you here in Vermont, but we're also a key part of the web of national and international news.”Anand said that for community and democracy to function, it is critical to support local news. “If we aren't vibrant, if we're not there at the city council meeting or at the school board meeting and telling those stories, government isn't held accountable. It's almost like these things haven't happened if we're not there.”Thanks to Greater Northshire Access Television for recording this conversation. 

The health care apocalypse has arrived. In the past month, many of the 30,000 Vermonters who get their health insurance through Vermont Health Connect — part of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it's popularly known — are experiencing sticker shock. Average health insurance premiums on Vermont Health Connect are projected to more than double, the highest rate increases countrywide.This is a disaster foretold. Democrats in Congress have warned for months that unless pandemic-era health insurance subsidies were extended, the 24 million Americans who get their health insurance through ACA marketplaces would see astronomical price hikes. Yet, despite a 43 day government shutdown, Republicans in Congress and President Trump refused to extend subsidies. The price tag for inaction has just arrived.Vermonters are now faced with excruciating choices. Middle-income participants are facing additional premiums of $10,000 per year for individuals and $32,000 for a family of four. Others are considering going without insurance all together. “We can't take out a second mortgage on our house to afford one year of health insurance,” said Arica Bronz, a pilates instructor in Williston, where she lives with her husband, a primary care physician, and their two daughters. Bronz’s monthly family premium will rise from $1,100 to $2,700 per month in 2026. After factoring in a $15,000 annual deductible, she said that in case of a serious medical event, her family will pay $47,000 before their insurance kicks in. Bronz feels she has no choice. She is going to cancel health care coverage for her family. “We're trying to get all the scans done and just make sure we're tip-top healthy before we make the leap. I can't tell you how much sleep I've lost considering what it's like to jump in this day and age to no health care for a family.”If too many people drop health care coverage, experts warn that Vermont’s struggling health care financing system could enter a death spiral. “I have a tremendous fear that what we are watching before us is the undoing, the dismantling of our healthcare financing system,” said Michael Fisher, Vermont’s chief health care advocate. “This is devastating and it's self-inflicted. And the majority in Congress think it's the right thing to do."Fisher nevertheless said that those whose income falls within 400% of the federal poverty level — around $130,000 for a family of four — may still qualify for subsidized health care premiums.As Arica Bronz contemplates a future without health insurance, she said, “We don't have a safety net. Hopefully that will inspire us to just be really thoughtful and careful. ... It's kinda terrifying.”

The No Kings protests in October, which drew over seven million people across the country, were hailed as the largest demonstrations in American history. Now the question for many people is: What works to stop authoritarianism?Maria Stephan has been studying this question. Her award-winning book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” co-authored with Erica Chenoweth of Harvard, examines a century of resistance movements around the world. They determined that nonviolent protests are more than twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts. Chenoweth went on to coin the widely cited 3.5% Rule, which states that when 3.5% of the population protest nonviolently, the movement will win. “When you have 3.5% of a population, which in the United States is roughly 12 million people, that means a movement is representative. It's hard to ignore. It's highly disruptive. And behind those 3.5% are many, many more people who support the aims of the movement,” Stephan told The Vermont Conversation.Maria Stephan was a strategic planner with the U.S. Department of State and founded and directed the Program on Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She is the author and editor of five books on authoritarianism and civil resistance. She was born and raised in Vermont and currently lives in New York City, where she is chief organizer with the Horizons Project, which she describes as “building a strong pro-democracy front that brings people together from different parts of society to effectively counter authoritarianism in the U.S.” Stephan highlighted the many tactics of the movement against authoritarianism. “We know from studying nonviolent resistance campaigns against authoritarian regimes around the world that it's the organized acts of non-cooperation — when people withhold their consumer buying power, when workers withhold labor, when security forces refuse to use repression vis a vis peaceful protesters — these acts of non-cooperation are what is really key to the success of pro-democracy movements, and we're seeing this across the country.”She cited examples of “people taking courageous stands both as individuals and collectively.” These include “the powerful image of the Idaho teacher, Sarah Inama, who refused to take down the sign ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ in her classroom, which resulted in the whole community mobilizing in support of inclusive classrooms.”There was Rachel Cohen, “the young lawyer who left her law firm after it capitulated to Trump. She not only left the firm, she organized thousands of lawyers to similarly commit to not be part of firms that engage in that type of capitulation.” Stephan said that in the higher education sector, “seven out of nine universities have refused a higher education compact offered by the Trump administration that would have offered access to federal funding in exchange for various forms of censorship on campus.” And the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, she said, refused ICE agents access to their grounds to coordinate arrests of immigrants and undocumented people.“For all these reasons and all the powerful, joyful, creative acts of defiance and community care I'm seeing across the country. I believe we will prevail.”

On New Year’s Day 2020, Adam Tendler unexpectedly received his father’s final gift: a wad of cash stuffed into a manila envelope handed over in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in West Lebanon, NH. The strangely furtive exchange launched a musical journey.Tendler, a renowned concert pianist who grew up in Barre decided to use his inheritance to commission an all-star cast of modern composers to compose piano pieces exploring the theme of inheritance. In his pitch to his composer friends, Tendler wrote that he wanted “to plant that cash in the soil of something that may actually grow and — if you'll forgive me — live on.” To his amazement, every composer he wrote to agreed to contribute. The result is a critically acclaimed album and concert tour called Inheritances, which the New York Times has called a collection of “little masterpieces.” Tendler will perform Inheritances at the Barre Opera House on November 16.Tendler initially did not know what to do with the money that he received. Taking a trip or paying down a credit card seemed inadequate. “This is an inheritance so something should be done with it that sort of honors the gesture,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “The thing I do for a living is ideally creating experiences for people … which [are] cathartic and beautiful and [provide] a sense of connection,” he said. “What if I use it to facilitate that experience for people?” Tendler originally told his story in a 2023 essay for the New York Times, “My Father’s Death, An Envelope of Cash, A Legacy in Music.”Adam Tendler is a Grammy-nominated pianist and a recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the Yvar Mikhashoff Prize. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called him "currently the hottest pianist on the American contemporary classical scene." After graduating from Indiana University, Tendler performed solo recitals in all fifty states as part of a grassroots tour he called America 88x50. He has appeared as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony and at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and other venues. He is on the piano faculty of the Steinhardt School at New York University. Tendler took a circuitous route from Barre to the concert stages of the world. After college, he worked at the landfill in Coventry and was a substitute teacher at U32 and Twinfield high schools. His relationship to his hometown is both affectionate and ambivalent. “I love Barre, I love Vermont, but it wasn't really the most easy place to grow up as a queer kid,” he recalled. “Music was a safety hatch … a real place within which I could hide, protect myself, express myself. I created a little fortress within it.""That vessel motivated me to actually start to really train to the point of getting into conservatory.”Tendler said that his work on Inheritances transformed his complicated feelings about his “semi-estranged” father “into something that feels like a companion in a good way.”“This project and having to sort of confront him on a human level, even though we're talking about music, has brought me back to him. I am my father's son. We are family.”

In 2016, Jamie Raskin was elected to Congress from Maryland just as Donald Trump was first elected president. Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, and Trump, a real estate developer who flouts rules and shatters norms, have been locked in a struggle ever since.When Congress impeached Trump in 2021 for inciting an insurrection, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tapped Raskin to be lead impeachment manager, essentially Trump’s chief prosecutor. He subsequently served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Raskin is now the Ranking Member of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal adversary of the Trump administration. In the past few weeks, he has accused U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem of “unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens,” demanded that Trump explain “a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people” and denounced “military-style tactics” in Chicago. Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, which borders Washington, D.C. He has authored several books, including the bestseller “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy,” a searing exploration of the death of his son and the struggle to defend democracy under Trump. I spoke with Rep. Raskin on Tuesday as the government shutdown approached the one month mark. 

They are being described as possibly “the biggest ever mass demonstrations in American history.” More than 7 million people participated in No Kings protests on Saturday, October 18 across more than 2,700 events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and in cities around the world.In Vermont, organizers estimate that some 43,000 people participated in more than 40 events around the state. People came out to protest the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants, LGBTQ+ rights, public education, the government shutdown and more.At the Vermont State House, where some 6,500 people gathered in cool fall weather, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., fired up the crowd with a call to fight back against Trump’s authoritarianism. Then she talked about the hero’s journey, an archetype in mythology and narrative storytelling (think Star Wars and the Hunger Games) that involves an ordinary person who faces a challenge, embarks on a journey, triumphs over adversity and returns transformed.“I know that many of you feel anxious, you feel scared, you feel overwhelmed,” Balint told the crowd. “We have to see this as part of a hero's journey that we are all on together. We must shift our thinking into believing that we, each of us, embody that hero is going to lead us to a better day. And what I know is the first step on the hero's journey is answering the call. And that is what you have done today. You are answering the call.”Asked about the deepening impact of the federal shutdown, Balint told the Vermont Conversation, “Millions of people are at risk of losing their health care, and we know that health care right now is one of the things that is making it incredibly emotionally, psychologically, economically devastating for families. We have to fight for health care, and we also have to say to this President, No, you will not bully us into submission. We're not going to sell out our people back home because we're afraid of your wrath.”Millions of Americans are receiving notices of soaring health care premiums as Congress remains deadlocked over extending Covid-era subsidies, as demanded by Democrats. Premiums will rise by 18 percent on average, according to the nonpartisan health policy group KFF.Sen. Peter Welch advised Vermonters to hang in there. “We don't know how this is going to end, but we know that the only real chance it has to end well is if we show that we are committed to democracy and we're willing to act together.”Welch said that Trump sending troops to cities led by Democrats is “just a lawless exercise. It's a prelude to him potentially sending troops in if he doesn't like the vote outcome in the next election.”I asked Paul Burns, an attorney and the longtime executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, whether he believed the legal system was up to the task of defending democratic institutions.“We're seeing a Supreme Court where decisions appear no longer based on legal principles or court precedents," he said. "The court has no compunction about turning its back on long standing principles on any sense of consistency under the law. Absent that, we have to wonder whether the law can be there for us in any way that it has been in the past. And so I am deeply concerned.”Burns said that what gives him hope is “looking over at my 14 year old son and he and other young people who bring to this an earnestness and an openness and interest in just living their lives in a free way, a belief still that we can and must have a democracy here. They are not tainted or jaded or cynical." He vowed to do "everything that I can to try to make this better.”Clara White, a 14-year old eighth grade student from Montpelier, had a distinctive voice and message among the lineup of politicians and activists. She said that “people my age, we are not just sitting around waiting. We are more connected than generations before us. We care about each other. We know how to share information, organize online and learn from people all over the world. We are creative problem solvers because we have had to be.”She cited examples of of how young people in her community “started a Green Up Day program, came together to feed families in need, and volunteered at a summer camp to help other girls feel empowered.”"I choose hope because I've seen what happens when people come together. I choose hope because giving up is not an option. I choose hope because I believe in us."

The world’s attention is focused on the Middle East this week as a fragile ceasefire takes hold in Israel’s two-year long war in Gaza. Split-screen images show joyous reunions as Palestinians and Israelis who had been held captive greet their families, alongside scenes of shocking devastation in the Gaza Strip.For Mohsen Mahdawi, this story is personal. In April, Mahdawi sat in a Vermont jail cell for more than two weeks fighting for his freedom. Mahdawi is a Palestinian-born student at Columbia University who was arrested by immigration agents at what he was told would be a citizenship interview in St. Albans. Mahdawi, 35, grew up in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but is now a legal permanent resident living in Vermont. He is a practicing Buddhist, was president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association and co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union.The Trump administration is trying to deport Mahdawi, claiming that his pro-Palestinian campus activism poses a threat to national security. Vermont federal Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Madahwi’s release on bail on April 30, comparing his arrest to the unlawful repression of free speech under McCarthyism. But the Trump administration appealed, arguing that Crawford did not have the right to intervene in Mahdawi’s detention. Madahwi vs. Trump was argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Sept. 30. Madahwi has a separate deportation case in immigration court that is ongoing.“It's not my case that is on trial,” Mahdawi said. “It is the constitution that is on trial. One of the most important and significant principles of democracy is the ability of expression and free speech. That's the first amendment right in this country, and what we've seen through targeting me and other students and other even journalists is a direct violation of this principle that every American is so proud of and they hold very dearly.”This legal drama has not slowed or silenced Madahwi. While out on bail this spring, Mahdawi graduated from Columbia University, receiving a standing ovation from his classmates as he walked across the stage to receive his diploma. This fall, he began a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.“I felt validated, that my efforts and the risk that I have taken is being honored and respected,” he said of the support from his Columbia classmates. “I felt that I'm not alone, and I felt a strong level of solidarity and that the community here made it very clear to the government and to those who have been targeting me that they are standing on the right side of history.”Mahdawi was just named a 2025 Beerman Foundation Fellow for Peace and Justice for his work that “bridges faith, activism, and dialogue to advance nonviolence and dignity for all.”Mahdawi is guardedly optimistic about the new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.  “While there is a sense of relief and ability to say 'I'm glad this is happening', there is also still suspicion about how long this would last,” he said.“I pray that the war is over, but at the same time, I see that Israel now is saying that they have a historic right to the West Bank, which would prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, something that the majority of the world, more than 80% of the international community, the states, have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state, except America, and America has vetoed it,” Mahdawi said. “So I don't say the war is over before giving Palestinians their rights, the right to self-determination, the right to freedom, the right of return and the right to live in dignity.”The Vermont Conversation also spoke with Bernard Avishai, a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College, and the author of four books including “The Tragedy of Zionism.” He writes regularly about Israeli politics for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Politico and other publications. He lives half the year in Israel.“I do feel much more sense of hopefulness that both sides have learned what losses are entailed by this kind of war, and that it might be time to turn the page,” Avishai said. Avishai is a strong critic of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who he believes “is slowly converting (the) country from an open society to a closed and authoritarian one.”“The real divide in Israel is between supporters of Greater Israel," the nationalist movement intent on taking over Palestinian lands — “and supporters of global Israel," or those who want to integrate Israel into the global economy.Avishai believes that the Netanyahu government must go. “A change of government, a change of face to Israel, will at least begin the process of having Israel kind of rebuild relations with the Western world, but it's a fundamentally dangerous economic situation for Israel to be on the one hand trying to build a global technological center, a hub in the global economy, and at the same time be alienating all the people they have to work with.”Avishai said that Israeli media largely showed images of Israeli losses over the past two years, not Palestinian suffering. “It became tremendously numbing, and we have not, with all that numbing and self absorption and grief, really been able to focus on the cruelty and the difficulties we created in Gaza,” he said. “And I would like to believe that over the next five, six years, we will.”

Chuck Collins, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, gave away his millions to progressive political causes when he was in his twenties. Ever since, the resident of Guilford has fought to expose how the rich make themselves richer at everyone else’s expense.In his new book, "Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet," Collins shows how the actions of the top .01% have dire consequences for everyone else. He argues that when the system is rigged to favor to rich, working people pay the price in higher taxes, fewer affordable houses and a health care system stripped of both health and care. Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org. He writes the Oligarch Watch column for The Nation. He is the author of a number of books, including "Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good"; and with Bill Gates Sr., "Wealth and Our Commonwealth," a case for taxing inherited fortunes. Collins says we are living through a new Gilded Age. In the first Gilded Age, which lasted from about the end of the Civil War to 1900, “there were 400 wealthy families that by some estimates may have had 40 to 50% of all the wealth in the country,” Collins told the Vermont Conversation. But from 2020 to 2022, “the flow of billionaire wealth, not just to the 1% but the top one tenth of 1% in the billionaire class, is dizzying.” He said that the combined wealth of US billionaires went from under $3 trillion at the beginning of the pandemic to $7.8 trillion by the end.“Pretty much everything you care about is undermined by that concentration of wealth and power: your health, your housing, the quality of your environment.”Collins warned of the danger of “billionaire capture.”“You have the billionaires lining up behind one particular presidential candidate who has totally delivered for the billionaire class to the point where our political system is captured. ... They are using that government shutdown as a way to shrink government and lay off workers. And we're not even going to publish unemployment rates and the data necessary for us to understand what's happening in the economy.”Collins believes that change will come from both the grassroots and from “cracks within the billionaire elites that we should be paying attention to,” such as those who want to address climate change.“As people start to see how their pockets are getting picked, they will wake up and want to push back on this oligarchic capture of our society.”Collins says that change begins by taxing enormous wealth, reinvesting in social programs, and in grassroots mobilizations such as “No Kings Day” that represent “an awakening that we have never seen.”“We have to say, Look, we're not going to vote for people who are going to be lapdogs of the billionaires. ... We're going to see people run for Congress and win and run for higher office saying, I want an economy that works for everybody, not just the billionaires.”

The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is the latest in a growing list of incidents of political violence. There have been 150 politically motivated attacks just this year, and a 2000% increase in targeted violent plots over the past two decades.What explains this surge in political violence?Extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss confirms that this is “the worst moment of political violence since the 1970s,” adding, "We are in an era of mass shootings." She argues that rising polarization and “the common thread" of misogyny links many recent attacks. Miller-Idriss is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, where she is also a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education. Her latest book is “Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism.” She is an MSNBC columnist and regular commentator who appears frequently on CNN, PBS and other news outlets.President Donald Trump has vowed to mount a government assault on “the left” in response to Kirk’s assassination. But a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that despite a small uptick in “left-wing” violence this year, ”right-wing” terrorism has far exceeded all other forms of political violence in the number of fatalities and attacks in the past decade.Miller-Idriss contends that most mass shooters, terrorists and violent extremists have two things in common: Nearly all are men, and they are almost always “virulent misogynists, homophobes or transphobes.” She says that the media — herself included — have long overlooked this link between political violence and misogyny.The U.S. now averages more than one mass shooting per day. “Virtually every mass shooter in the U.S. has a history of gender-based violence in some way,” with 60% of them having documented histories of domestic violence or “stalking, harassment, rape threats, cyber porn, revenge porn, sexual assault, rape, anti-LGBTQ violence,” Miller-Idriss said. “Even when the targets are not very clearly women or the LGBTQ community … gender or homophobia really significantly play a role.”Miller-Idriss highlighted two factors that make this era of political violence unique — the proliferation of guns and online communities that traffic in hate.“We have a lot of shootings that don't seem to have any ideological motivation at all but are really at the hands of extraordinarily online young people … who spend a lot of time in online spaces, in gaming spaces, in very meme-driven, irony laden spaces,” she said. Attackers “are kind of communicating, almost in a way that may be detached from reality, with online communities as part of the attack.” Shooters are “not just highly online but expressing a lot of online misogyny and gender-based harms or harassing teenage girls online,” she said.Miller-Idriss said that even “everyday forms of misogyny” that she and other women face are linked to more extreme forms. She said she observed that in the hate mail that she receives that there was “a very clear pattern of containment, that what they wanted was for me to not be front and center.”“There's some sort of anger there about a person, a woman, being in a public space at all, and it makes you realize that phrases like ‘lock her up,’ ‘send them back,’ ‘get back in the closet,’ ‘get back in the kitchen’ (are) containment metaphors (that) are very, very common in everyday life directed toward women or LGBTQ folks who are seen as being too public or too flamboyant or too out,” she said.Everyday misogyny “can evolve into a trajectory in which some young men are conditioned through online influencers to believe that they have lost their rightful place, that women belong in a more submissive role,” Miller-Idriss said.“Some men are so easily mobilized to anger if they're denied what they think they're entitled to (and) that might escalate eventually into rage in a more public way,” she said.Miller-Idriss and her colleagues at the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab work with young people to “off-ramp” violent online hate. “If you start to recognize that part of the problem of mass shootings and mass violence is rooted in very everyday harms, then you can take action on those everyday harms,” she said. “It should be an empowering message to say, ‘Let's have a conversation about what this looks like, and let's have a conversation about the experience of boys compared to girls.’”