In 1820, The Emancipator became the first newspaper in the country devoted exclusively to the cause of abolishing slavery. It was published in Tennessee, a slave state. Other abolitionist newspapers followed, such as The Liberator, published by famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded and edited by abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.

Today, The Emancipator rises again. This modern version is a multimedia collaboration with The Boston Globe’s Opinion team and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.

“Just as abolitionist publications in the 19th century called for the end of the enslavement of Black people, The Emancipator will amplify big ideas and solutions for achieving a racially just society,” Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, co-editors-in-chief of The Emancipator, wrote in their introductory essay.

Payne tells The Vermont Conversation that there is a difference between reporting about race and journalism that is intentionally anti-racist.

“I think about reporting on racism and race (is) reporting the facts, getting the story down," Payne said. By contrast, "Anti-racist journalism (is) centering the right voices in a story, centering those that are most impacted and empowering them to tell their story.”

“I don't know that we're trying to change people's minds,” Douglas said. “What we're trying to do is have a dialogue to give people the context to think about how they're implicated in the American project. So we can offer information that partially validates some of what they think but offers better information. Or we can just blow them out of the water with straight facts about how it’s different, or we can offer our own personal stories or allow our contributors to offer their personal stories and their own lived experience and just really flood the public conversation with a whole new set of narratives that previously there hadn't been much room made for. By taking up space, and giving people the opportunity to at least hear a different story or a different side of the story, then possibly we can embark upon this narrative change that we hope to effect.”

“We're in this shared mission drawing from that abolitionist spirit of this multiracial and diverse movement where there's shared equity around one focus," Payne said.

She hopes readers of this modern abolitionist newspaper “feel equipped to maybe have that conversation with their neighbor or their father or anybody (who) they felt a bit uncomfortable about and uninformed about when it comes to racial and social justice and equity, but they feel like they can have that conversation and have a better understanding.”

When residents of Wuhan, China, began mysteriously falling ill in December 2019, the Chinese government quickly moved to quash news about the disease outbreak. That crackdown on information proved to be the perfect accelerant for the Covid-19 pandemic to take off and spread throughout the world.

Censorship has been a deadly component of the pandemic, asserts Joel Simon, who is co-author with Robert Mahoney of “The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.” Simon is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School and the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

“Instead of communicating openly with citizens, governments suppressed critical information or actively misled or confused their citizens, a strategy that has been dubbed ‘censorship through noise,’” Simon and Mahoney argued. “Alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an infodemic, a deluge of lies, distortion, and bungled communication that obliterated the truth.” 

Lois Gibbs knew something was not right when her 5-year-old son began having seizures. She soon discovered the local school and playground in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic waste dump known as Love Canal. It was 1977. Gibbs soon transformed from a suburban housewife into a crusading activist who changed the face of the national environmental movement and whose work led to the creation of the federal superfund program. 

Love Canal has become synonymous with corporate greed and toxic pollution. Hooker Chemical, the largest employer in Niagara Falls, had been dumping highly toxic waste in the working-class community since the 1940s. The company covered the polluted landfill with dirt and sold it to the city’s board of education for $1, and a school was soon built on the site. Hundreds of community members and schoolchildren were poisoned, and some died. 

Echoes of the Love Canal saga can be felt today in communities including Bennington, where local residents just reached a $34 million settlement with Saint-Gobain, a multinational plastics company which, along with previous owner ChemFab, operated a plant that was responsible for contaminating the soil and water. On April 21, Gov. Phil Scott signed a law giving people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals the right to sue responsible companies for the cost of monitoring their health. 

The Love Canal story is told in a new book, “Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe,” by New York Times bestselling author Keith O’Brien, a former reporter for the Boston Globe. 

Jane Mayer has earned a reputation as one of the country’s top investigative reporters. As chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Mayer has been relentless in exposing the hidden forces shaping American politics. Her bestselling book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” documents the vast influence of the Koch brothers and was named one of the 10 best books of 2016 by the New York Times. 

In the past year, Mayer has exposed the right-wing funders behind former President Donald Trump’s big lie of a stolen election. She reported how Ginni Thomas secretly supported the Jan. 6 insurrection as her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, considered cases that involved her. And this month she exposed the shadowy conservative organization that smeared Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in a failed attempt to derail her Supreme Court confirmation. 

Mayer often provokes the ire of those she exposes. The Koch Brothers hired investigators to smear her, and the subject of her most recent exposé tweeted her personal contact information in an attempt to intimidate her. 

Mayer worked at the Wall Street Journal before joining the New Yorker in 1995. She has won numerous awards for her reporting. Esquire called Mayer “quite simply one of the very few, utterly invaluable journalists this country has.” 

Disclosure: Jane Mayer serves on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.

From Brattleboro to Newport and beyond, a crisis is brewing in the Green Mountains. Housing, especially affordable housing, is desperately hard to find.

“The state would have to build a minimum of 5,800 homes and apartments by 2025, and more than triple that to address the broader affordability crisis,” Seven Days reported, noting that the growth of Vermont’s housing stock has fallen to one third its 1980s levels. 

Solving the housing crisis is “going to take both public investment to bring the price down and it's also going to take less barriers in terms of our land use policies to get housing built,” said Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

An unspoken driver of the affordable housing shortage, Seelig said, “has been the growth of income inequality as a key factor in leaving folks behind. … It doesn't take a lot of people coming to Vermont with a ton of money to have a big impact on the housing crisis.”

We discussed the housing crisis and efforts to address it with Seelig and Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust in Brattleboro. 

Transgender Vermont educator responds to Fox News attack with ‘love and light’

Laws targeting LGBTQ+ people are proliferating across the country. Some 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have so far been filed — more than three per day — mostly targeting transgender people,.

In Idaho, Texas and Alabama, Republican leaders have passed laws criminalizing transgender health care, while Florida has banned discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary school in a law that critics dub the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Vermont is also under anti-trans attack. 

On April 6, conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a segment titled “Groom & Doom,” which singled out a webinar offered in February by the Burlington School District titled “Let’s Talk About Gender Identity and Expression.” The webinar was led by Nikki Ellis, an assistant principal at Edmunds Middle School who is transgender. Ingraham charged that middle school students are “bombarded by efforts to undo any semblance of traditional values that their parents might have taught them.”

In the days following the broadcast, Ellis and the Burlington schools were flooded with hate mail. Burlington School Superintendent Tom Flanagan denounced the attacks, reassuring LGBTQ+ community members that “we care about them and that we are here for them.” 

Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks are not limited to schools. The head of the Burlington Republican Party, who has a history of making transphobic social media posts, tweeted out photos of Vermont legislators who support a transgender rights bill and labeled each of them a “groomer.”

On Tuesday, transphobia took a deadly turn when a trans woman was killed in Morristown.

“It's sad and unfortunate that being transgender or being queer is being compared to sexual abuse and pedophilia because being who you are in your identity as a queer person doesn't mean that you're trying to impose on anyone else,” Ellis told The Vermont Conversation. “The reality is that there are traumas and turmoil and abuse that happen for kids across all identities and all experiences and all communities. But that's completely unrelated to, you know, being LGBTQ+.”

Rep. Taylor Small, Vermont’s first openly transgender legislator, said the anti-trans backlash comes at a time when LGBTQ+ people are winning legal protection in Vermont. 

“Last year, we were able to pass a bill to ban the LGBTQ+ ‘panic’ defense. And just last week, the governor signed a bill to make it easier for transgender and nonbinary people to amend their birth certificates to see themselves and their identity reflected on their vital records.”

Ellis is unbowed by the transphobic attacks. They responded to critics with an invitation: “Hey, Laura Ingraham, I'd love to take you out for coffee or dinner. And I'd love to be able to have an opportunity for you to see me for who I am, the person that I am, the passions that I have and the way that I care deeply about my community. And to everybody else out there, the love that I have and the love of this work is unconditional. And that means that we will just continue to wrap ourselves, wrap other queer folks up in love and light.”

How did leading Republicans go from being Cold Warriors to apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin? 

For insight, we turned to Stuart Stevens, who knows Republican politics from the inside. He was a top Republican political operative who worked on five presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. 

Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues that the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”

Stevens tells The Vermont Conversation, “I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it's a devastating conclusion. But I think it's the only honest one.”

“We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself,” Stevens said. “They'll be for democracy when they win and they won't be for it when they lose. That means you're not a democracy. And if we don't wake up and face this, we're going to lose democracy.”

The Vermont Land Trust, founded in 1977, is one of the oldest and largest land conservation groups in the country. It has helped protect more than 620,000 acres in Vermont, comprising about 11% of the state.

The land trust began with a simple goal of conserving land and supporting farmers. But with heightened awareness about equity and racial justice today, things are not so simple.

Who can claim the right to land that was stolen from Indigenous people? How has racism shaped who owns land? How can land conservation help combat climate change?

Last year, the Vermont Land Trust received a $6 million grant from the Vermont Community Foundation and High Meadows Fund to diversify farm ownership and address climate solutions, of which $2 million is “to expand land ownership and access among people who have been historically marginalized or oppressed based on their race or ethnicity.”

This grant, the largest of its kind in Vermont, raises challenging questions, concedes Nick Richardson, president and CEO of the land trust since 2017.

“When a white-led organization like ours is the recipient from a white-led foundation of funding that's meant to be directed towards BIPOC land sovereignty work, that's the indication of a problem,” he said, referring to Vermonters who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. “It shows how far we have to go as a state in terms of meeting our goals and … commitments that we should all make around BIPOC racial equity and justice. And that's really uncomfortable and hard work. And we're really committed to it.”

Education is the new frontline in America’s culture wars.

In Florida, teaching about LGBTQ+ issues has become a flashpoint. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently surrounded himself with smiling elementary school children as he signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that bars discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in the state’s primary schools.

Teaching about racism is also now perilous. At least 36 states have passed or proposed laws or policies that restrict the teaching of race or racism.

At the heart of this culture war is a struggle over who controls education. As a result of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions loosening restrictions on funding religious schools, some states are enacting policies permitting public funding of private schools, including religious schools. The Vermont Senate recently passed S.219 to restrict public funding for religious schools. But critics, including former Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, fear that Vermont may unwittingly establish a precedent that conservative legal groups will take to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to knock down the wall between secular and religious education.

I spoke with Holcombe and Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a leading expert on education law and policy, about the implications of allowing public funds to pay for private and religious education.

“The Supreme Court is moving toward a doctrine that suggests … that you can't exclude religion and that the state really can't control its dollars once they enter the private sector,” Black said.

If that happens, he said liberal states may simply end programs to pay tuition for some students to attend private schools, while other states may “run wild” with public support of religious schools.

“We may be leading to a tale of two different countries when it comes to public education and privatization in America,” Black said.

Ski mountaineer Kit DesLauriers skied off the summit of Mount Everest into history. 

DesLauriers is the first person to ski from the so-called Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent. Her 2006 descent of Everest capped a string of firsts: She was the first woman to ski the Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica, and Mt. Aspiring in New Zealand. She also made the first female solo ski descent of Grand Teton in Wyoming.

A two-time Freeskiing World Tour champion, National Geographic named her an Adventurer of the Year in 2015. DesLauriers was formally inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame this week, following her election in 2019.

Kit DesLauriers is the mother of two daughters with her husband, Rob DesLauriers, whose family runs the Bolton Valley ski area in Vermont. She is the author of a memoir, Higher Love: Skiing the Seven Summits, which was reissued last year. She is a member of The North Face global athlete team, the board of the Alaska Wilderness League and the riders team of the climate action group Protect Our Winters. I spoke with her from her home in Jackson, Wyoming.