VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.

This Vermont Conversation with professor Timothy Snyder was originally published in September 2020.

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale and a world renowned scholar of authoritarianism. His 2017 international bestseller, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” is a roadmap to how autocrats rise and democracies fall.

Snyder has frequently appeared in the news to discuss the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and he recently met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rep. Jamie Raskin consulted with Snyder during President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.

"Post-truth," Snyder wrote, "is pre-fascism."

In 2020, Snyder published “Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.” He described his near-death experience following a missed medical diagnosis the previous year, and he eviscerated America’s failed coronavirus response.

Snyder calls on us to rethink the fundamental connection between health and freedom. 

"Other countries look at us and for the first time ever, they sincerely pity us but also wonder, how can you have so much wealth ... and kill so many people?” Snyder asked.

"We're at a tipping point,” he said. “To say that it can't go on like this is an understatement. Things could get much worse than they are — and they might."

When Laurie Patton became president of Middlebury College in 2015, it marked the beginning of a quiet transformation at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. Patton is the first woman to lead Middlebury in its 223-year history.

Patton is changing the face of Middlebury. In more than a decade, Middlebury has roughly doubled the number of domestic BIPOC — Black, Indigenous and people of color — students, who comprise almost 40% of the class of 2026. The number of first generation college students at Middlebury has also nearly doubled, and now represent about 1 in 5 students admitted to the school.

Patton has also led Middlebury to make an about face on fossil fuel divestment. For years, the Middlebury administration rejected student divestment demands. But in 2019, Patton announced the Energy 2028 plan, in which Middlebury would divest its $1 billion endowment from fossil fuels and commit to having the college be completely powered by renewable energy by 2028.

“I feel (it) is something good I did for the world,” Patton told The Vermont Conversation when discussing the divestment and sustainability plan.

Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, who is a distinguished scholar at Middlebury, tweeted at the time that this move placed Middlebury “among the very greenest institutions in the world.”

Patton is now confronting a future in which diversity initiatives at Middlebury at other colleges face significant headwinds. A conservative Supreme Court is expected to end or curtail affirmative action later this year.

How will Middlebury maintain its diversity if affirmative action is struck down? 

“I feel deeply confident in Middlebury’s commitment to the principles and its savvy in figuring out how we move forward in a new environment,” Patton said. “As we continue to read applications, can we say that this student brings that diversity and can tell a story with us … about their experience that will enrich all of us?”

Soon after Patton became president, Middlebury found itself the focus of a national debate about free speech on campus when a talk by a conservative political scientist was shouted down by protesters, including students. Some five dozen Middlebury students faced disciplinary action after the incident, and the punishment further roiled the campus.

“Holding each other accountable is important,” Patton said, adding that in hindsight, “there are times when we probably could have taken a pause to reflect and talk to each other.” 

Last year, Middlebury received $25 million, the largest programmatic grant in its history, to launch a program on conflict transformation.

Patton is deeply concerned about censorship of school curricula — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s rejection of an AP African American studies course on the grounds that it had a “political agenda.” Asked whether students coming from schools with censored history classes are well prepared for a college such as Middlebury, Patton replied, “Absolutely not.”

“There's so much hope in inclusive storytelling, and I really wish that the frame of an uncensored way of thinking about history was about hope. And that is what I deeply believe the power of an education should be,” she said.

Patton is a scholar of South Asian history, culture and religion. In addition to being president of Middlebury, she is a professor of religion. Patton came to Middlebury from Duke University, where she was a professor and dean. She has also been on the faculty of Emory University and Bard College. She is the author or editor of 10 books and has written three books of poems.

Patton has advice for high students who are applying to college. “Think about the place where you want to be next truly as a form of community and of place. And as you are choosing the college, think about the ways in which that community thrives and what makes that community thrive. And then you'll find that when you end up at a college, you will have a sense of belonging that will really drive you and help you ask the most important questions of your life, because that's what college should encourage you to do,” she said.

The anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s spared no corner of the country or the culture. The FBI combed the Green Mountains looking for communists, and the University of Vermont ousted a suspected faculty member. In Hollywood, 10 screenwriters and directors refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, which led to a highly publicized hunt for supposed communist sympathizers and “subversives” throughout the entertainment industry.

The Hollywood 10, as they came to be known, used the HUAC hearings in 1947 to condemn the committee. Among them was Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s highest paid writers. His credits included “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (1944). As result of their defiance and principled stands, Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood 10 were convicted of contempt of Congress, fined, imprisoned and blacklisted from working in the film industry. Trumbo was unable to make a living under his own name for more than a decade, though he continued to write scripts under pseudonyms and use other writers as a front. He won an Oscar for “The Brave One” (1956), which he wrote under the name Robert Rich.

In 1959, former President Harry Truman denounced HUAC as the “most un-American thing in the country today.” The Hollywood blacklist ended in 1960, when Trumbo was publicly credited with writing two films, “Spartacus” and “Exodus.” In 1975, the Academy Awards officially recognized Trumbo as the writer of “The Brave One.”

“Trumbo: Red White & Blacklisted” is a two-person play featuring Trumbo’s letters that was written in 2003 by Trumbo’s son Christopher. The play is being performed in Vermont beginning Feb. 11 in Plainfield, Waterbury Center and White River Junction. It is directed by Monica Callan, narrated by Nick Charyk, and actor and former State Rep. Donny Osman plays Trumbo. Rick Winston, author of “Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960,” is an adviser to the play.

Trumbo served 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress. 

“As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had full contempt for that Congress,” he wrote.

When white supremacists launched a campaign of racist and misogynist attacks against former State Rep. Kiah Morris, they hoped to silence her.

They failed.

Morris has continued to fight back and speak out since resigning her seat as a state representative from Bennington. She stepped down out of concern for the safety of her family, but she has not stepped back. 

Her story is told in a new documentary, “Backlash – Misogyny in the Digital Age,” which has its U.S. premiere in the Vermont Statehouse on Feb. 7, during Black History Month. Morris is among four women profiled in the film who fight against cyberviolence. The women include “the most harassed politician in Italy” Laura Boldrini, French YouTube personality Marion Seclin and an Montreal elementary school teacher Laurence Gratton. 

All four women pursue their tormentors and demand accountability from those who are responsible, ranging from the tech giants, to the state, law enforcement and the perpetrators.

Morris says that the backlash is against women. 

“As women are stepping into our own power, as we are continuing to move with a society that's supposed to move with us, there are many who cannot handle that level of progress. There are many who actively want us to retreat back into subservient roles,” she said.

The backlash is also about race. When Morris was elected in 2014, she was the second African American woman to serve in the Vermont Legislature. In January 2019, Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan announced that he would not bring criminal charges against the white nationalist who was harassing Morris and her family, insisting that racially offensive speech was protected. Civil rights groups denounced the decision. Morris has continued to pursue justice.

In 2021, an investigator with by the Vermont Human Rights Commission found grounds that the Bennington Police Department violated the human rights of Morris and her family and endangered their safety by withholding critical information about the white supremacist who had been targeting her. As part of the settlement, the Bennington Selectboard paid $137,000 to Morris and formally apologized to her.

Was justice done? 

“Not really,” Morris said. “Nothing has changed in Bennington at all … to this day, not a single sanction, not a single call for resignation.” By contrast, she had to sell her house in Bennington and move to the Burlington area. She describes the settlement as “paltry.”

Morris says her case — and the documentary “Backlash” — have “raised the profile in a way that other people knew that they should try to fight back. And the system is so stacked against anyone who deserves to have justice and who deserves to have peace.”

“We have to continue to fight. I must not leave that legacy to my son to know that we said it was OK because it's not OK,” she said.

Erika Nichols-Frazer was like many kids growing up in the resort town of Stowe. She loved to snowboard and play hockey. But Erika hid a dark secret: She was at war with food. By eighth grade, she had anorexia, an eating disorder. She was starving herself, and her weight dropped below 80 pounds.

Erika ended up in a psychiatric institution as her family worked to help her with her eating disorder. But she continued to face other mental health challenges. Depression and anxiety was a constant. At the age of 29, Erika was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

What Erika guarded as her deeply private struggle is actually common. One in five adults and one in six youth experience a mental health disorder every year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Only around half of people with mental illness receive treatment, and the average delay between the onset of symptoms and treatment is 11 years.

“There's still a huge amount of stigma around mental illness, and many of us are afraid to tell people that we're not doing okay and that we're having a hard time,” Nichols-Frazer said.

Nichols-Frazer, now 34, is a writer, editor, and poet. She is a journalist for the Valley Reporter, a weekly newspaper that covers the Mad River Valley, where she lives. She shares the story of her journey to save herself in a new memoir, “Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness.”

Opening up about her struggles, she said, has been “really important for my own healing process, as well as for others who need to hear that they're not alone in their struggles.”

Nichols-Frazer has transformed her relationship to food. Instead of food being a source of isolation and pain, it is now a way to connect with the world. 

“It's been a yearslong process of really coming to a place where I love food. I appreciate it. I appreciate the nourishment and sustenance it gives us, and I think that it really is a way to build community,” she said.

For this 10th anniversary Vermont Conversation, we invited back our first guest. Bill McKibben was on the inaugural broadcast of the Vermont Conversation on Jan. 16, 2013. As a journalist, he has eloquently chronicled the impact of the climate crisis across the globe and put a human face on what too often is cast as a political or scientific problem. He is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker and his Substack site, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.”

McKibben acknowledges that most of his dire predictions about climate change have come true since he first started writing about it three decades ago. And yet he insists “we are actually at a moment of extraordinary opportunity, the convergence of this big mobilization of people around the world.”

McKibben has been a key figure in that grassroots mobilization. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org, and is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people older than 60 for progressive change.

“The remarkable fall in the price of renewable energy has left us in a place where it's possible to imagine, for the first time, really rapid change. Now, whether it'll come or not will depend on how hard we push. But there's nothing far fetched about it. In fact, it's very clear that 40 years from now, we'll run the world on clean energy, because it's cheap.”

Reflecting on key developments of the past decade, McKibben singles out the role of Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

“I just want Vermonters to be aware and proud of the fact that Bernie (Sanders) played an absolutely pivotal role in the transformation of how this country or large parts of it thinks about itself,” he said

McKibben believes that the failure of a “red tsunami” of Republican electoral victories last fall is an important signal. 

“It feels to me like there's people standing up for common sense, for the idea that science is a useful tool, that vaccines were a good development of the 20th century,” he said.

He concedes, "Yes, we're living in a country that still is riven, where there's people constantly trying to foment unpleasantness at all times. But that election result was kind of a quiet testimony to the quiet sanity of a fair number of people in this country. So one takes hope where one can find it.”

The past week has been filled with images of high conflict. There was the shocking violent right-wing attacks on government institutions in Brazil, which appear to be a copycat of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

Then there was the chaotic election of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a madcap four-day, 15-round epic in which a small far-right faction of the GOP held the rest of Congress hostage to its demands.

How do we break out of this cycle in which disagreements quickly spiral into good-versus-evil, us-versus-them battles? And how did we get here?

Journalist Amanda Ripley tackles these questions in her bestselling book, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.” Ripley was an investigative reporter for TIME Magazine and writes regularly for The Atlantic and Washington Post. She is also author of the bestselling book, “The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way,” and she hosts the Slate podcast “How To!” for which she interviewed then-candidate and now Vermont Rep. Becca Balint in a piece called, “How to Run for Office Without Being an A**hole.”

In "High Conflict," Ripley writes about “how good people get captured by high conflict — and how they break free.”

Ripley said there is a time-tested method for generating conflict. 

“When I look at mob activity like we just saw in Brazil, what I think most about is the climate of fear and threat and blame that has allowed this to happen,” she said.

Ripley cited the power of “conflict entrepreneurs,” such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News, to incite people. 

“Influential voices in the media and in politics (utilize) the same kind of recipe: … generate a feeling of threat, that there's a crisis, identify a villain and then proclaim yourself as the hero who can save the day. That is how, again and again, again, politicians and pundits have managed to cast a sort of spell of high conflict over people.”

She tweeted this week about how to avoid another Jan. 6, based on her conversation with security and democracy expert Rachel Kleinfeld: “For [journalists]: 1. Amplify non-extremists. 2. Report out disagreements within parties/groups, not just between. 3. Correct your audience's mistakes about the other side. They are vast. For Politicians: Call out your own party more — and the other party less. One works, the other doesn't. For Regular People: Don't share violent memes. It might sound kind of funny & not important, but in fact, jokes are one of those things that go beyond our rational brain & allow us to do things we would never normally say or do."

Ripley has also criticized the media for how it has helped stoke conflict. She confessed in the Washington Post that she often avoids the news because it can be depressing and “paralyzing.” She cites studies showing that 4 in 10 Americans do the same thing.

“Almost no one is really happy with the way politics is happening, the way the news is covered, the way we are treating each other,” she said. “I think there's a huge opportunity there.”

From politics to news, “most Americans are yearning for something different. Widespread dissatisfaction is what we need to change this,” Ripley said.

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy ended his remarkable 48-year career as the senator from Vermont.

Leahy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974 at the age of 34. He is now 82. He was the first Democrat elected to Congress from Vermont, and until this week, the only Vermont Democratic senator, since Sen. Bernie Sanders is an independent. Leahy was also the last of the Senate's "Watergate Babies" elected in the wake of former President Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.

Leahy is the third longest serving U.S. senator in history, after Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV (51 years), and Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-HI (49 years). He has served with nine presidents and has cast more than 17,000 votes as a senator. As a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he participated in some 18 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. His memoir, “The Road Taken,” was published in 2022.

Leahy’s last day as a U.S. senator was historic in another way: It was the first time in a century that the House of Representatives failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot. 

Leahy reflected on the political impasse, “This is hurting the United States. It is hurting our sense of democracy. When you have people from the former President (Trump) on say, ‘Well maybe we should just suspend a few of these parts of the Constitution because they're inconvenient for what we want to do’ — they weren't made to be convenient. They're made to hold a country together. And I fear for the country if it continues like this.”

The Vermont Conversation asked Leahy who of the nine presidents he served with were the most consequential. He replied, “It would probably be Trump because of all the things he did that we're still paying the price for.”

During the Jan. 6 insurrection, Leahy was evacuated to a secure room with other senators while police battled with the mob of Trump supporters who had invaded the Capitol. A Senate colleague suggested that the Senate finish its business in the secure room. The suggestion infuriated Leahy. He declared to his fellow Senators, “I'm the dean of the Senate. I'm the longest serving person here. I’m the president pro tem. And I'll be damned if I'm going to meet in secret.”

“Let us go back where the American people can see what we're saying, how we're voting, what we're doing. Don't hide,” he said. He received a standing ovation.

“I leave with pride in what I've done,” Leahy said. “I cast more votes than all but one person in history. I've actually served with 20% of the senators who have been elected in the history of this country. … I felt that gives me a responsibility to do what I think is right. And that's what I've tried to do.”

“But I gotta tell you,” the Vermont senator said after nearly a half-century of service, “Marcelle and I are just looking forward to coming home now.”

As one news outlet after another downsizes and closes, who is going to do the journalism in the future?

That’s the question asked by Ken Tingley, the former editor of the Post-Star, the newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y. Over the last decade, Tingley watched as his newsroom went from a staff of about 50 to just 7 people today. He chronicles what has happened to local news in his new book, “The Last American Newspaper: An Institution in Peril, Through the Eyes of a Small-Town Editor.”

Tingley’s experience in Glens Falls, a city of 15,000 located near the tourist centers of Lake George and Saratoga Springs, is part of a national trend. From 2005 to 2020, about a quarter of local print newspapers ceased publication in the U.S. Half of over 3,000 counties in the U.S. had just one local print newspaper. Only a third had a daily newspaper, and over 200 counties had no newspaper at all. Vast swaths of the country have become news deserts.

The Post-Star was founded in 1904. The daily newspaper in Glens Falls won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for the editorial writing of Mark Mahoney, who wrote about government secrecy and the public’s right to know.

Tingley and his colleagues have reported on the rise of a local Republican member of Congress, Elise Stefanik, who was elected to Congress in 2014 at age 30. Stefanik ran as a political moderate but has since become a staunch acolyte of former President Donald Trump. Stefanik is a rising star in the party who became the third-ranking House Republican after Liz Cheney was pushed out by Trump loyalists in 2021.

The Trump era has been marked by increasing threats against journalists. A pro-Trump protester in Glens Falls pointed a toy gun at one of Tingley's reporters and declared, “We’ve got one coming for you, Post-Star!” After the newspaper reported on the incident, Rep. Stefanik invited the protester to one of her town halls, and her staffer sent him an appreciative message.

An outraged Tingley contacted Stefanik’s communications director. “I asked her to immediately denounce this man, that he had threatened our reporters, he had threatened our editors, he had threatened people at our newspaper and put their lives in danger.”

“Never heard anything,” he said.

Tingley urges people to subscribe and support local news. If local news outlets don’t survive, he said, “the number of people who vote will be less [because] they don't know who's running for office, and …there's going to be less community engagement.” He also predicted that without local watchdogs, “You're gonna see your taxes go up.”

In addition to democracy taking a hit, Tingley predicts that without the public accountability that local media provides, “It's going to cost us all more money.”

“Greed is good.”

That idea was famously uttered by a fictional stockbroker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.”

That line leapt out at Jon Erickson. He was an undergraduate studying economics at Cornell University in the late 1980s and he was coming to believe that the misguided priorities of conventional economics did not lead to prosperity, but to a failed and grossly unequal society and was “a path to planetary ruin.” 

Erickson is now an ecological economist, and he champions a new kind of economics that fosters a healthy, balanced relationship between people and planet. Ecological economics has been gaining influence both in academia and in environmental and social justice movements.

“I think of it as 21st century economics. It's an economics that reflects the realities of living on a full planet,” Erickson said.

Jon Erickson makes the case for a new economics in a new book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” Erickson is the Blittersdorf professor of sustainability science and policy at the University of Vermont, a faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment. 

Erickson sees the current challenge as “taking power back from the wealthy elite and overturning the idea of a market society, returning back to democratic institutions and systems of trust and community. (It's) about social movement building.”

“The challenge now is that it can't be every four years. It's got to be day to day, week to week, month to month. It's got to be overturning the kind of brainwashing that we've all gone through.”