Episodes

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launched an immigration raid in South Burlington on March 11, they ran into a wall of resistance. Neighbors linked arms in an attempt to stop the masked agents from entering a house in their effort to arrest and deport a Mexican-born man. Protesters blocked an ICE vehicle and hurled insults and objects. ICE agents deployed flashbang grenades. Vermont State Police and local police shoved, dragged and even choked some protesters, according to p...

Millions of Americans have attended “No Kings” protests, voicing outrage that President Donald Trump has turned the presidency into an imperial platform from which to launch wars of choice, levy illegal tariffs, and unleash armed agents against his political adversaries. Isn’t the American system of checks and balances supposed to prevent this? “The Kingmakers” is a new podcast hosted by journalist David Sirota that looks at how those checks have been steadily undermined. The podcast explores ...

Mohsen Mahdawi has come a long way since being released from a Vermont jail in April 2025. Mahdawi is a Palestinian student at Columbia University and a green card holder who lives in Vermont. He co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union and was president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association. The Trump administration has relentlessly pursued Mahdawi. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified Mahdawi’s arrest last year by saying that his advocacy of Palestinian human rights could...

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision in 2022, it was the culmination of a successful half-century movement to ban abortion. Despite the fact that 60 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases, it is now difficult to nearly impossible to get an abortion in most of the country. Forty-one states now have abortion bans, including 13 states with total bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Vermont is one of just nine states that do not restr...

Thousands of Vermonters from nearly every county took to the streets to voice their outrage at the Trump administration on Saturday, March 28, in the third No Kings protest. About 50 rallies were held around the state. Nationally, 8 million to 9 million people turned out to over 3,000 demonstrations in what organizers say was the largest day of protest in American history. The Vermont Conversation spoke with a number of people at the Statehouse in Montpelier, where thousands of protesters came ...

In February, I was surprised to receive a phone call from jail. It was Steven Tendo calling from the Strafford County jail in Dover, New Hampshire, where he was being held after being violently arrested by ICE agents on Feb. 4 at the Vermont assisted living facility where he works. Tendo was determined that his voice be free even if his body was not. That determination is a throughline in his life. It is why he is alive to tell his story today as a free man, at least for now. Steven Tendo is a...

When President Trump threatened to annex Greenland earlier this year, the vast Arctic island with a population slightly larger than Burlington was dragged from the periphery of world affairs to the center. The threat that the U.S. might forcibly take Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. How did Greenland become a geopolitical flash point? What is the experience of traveling through its frozen landscape? An...

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 t...

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 ...

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 sai...

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 Vermo...

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 Minne...

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 d...

“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 ...

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 o...

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 neve...

“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 y...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 Comm...

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 educatio...