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.’”

Jeffrey Amestoy, chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court from 1997 to 2004, is best known for authoring the 1999 decision in Baker vs. Vermont that legalized same-sex civil unions. That case laid the groundwork for the legalization of same sex marriage in Vermont a decade later and ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing same sex marriage in 2015.

At the age of 79, Amestoy is still a prolific writer, but in a different genre. His latest book is a true crime legal thriller that he spent years researching. Winters’ Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont, is the story of when celebrity attorney Clarence Darrow came to Vermont to defend a convicted murderer before the Vermont Supreme Court. The book was just published by the Vermont Historical Society.

Winters’ Time recounts the brutal murder of Cecelia Gullivan, who was killed in her home in Windsor, Vermont in November 1926. Gullivan, a single woman, was the treasurer of the Cone Automatic Machine company in Windsor. Police quickly arrested John Winters, a machinist at her company, and he was promptly tried, convicted and sentenced to death. That’s when Clarence Darrow entered the case after the Winters family called in a favor promised by Darrow’s son.

Amestoy, who was Vermont's attorney general from 1985 to 1997, set the scene for what would become one of Vermont’s most sensational trials. “By the 1920s you had the first real mass media with radio and newspapers racing to outdo each other in circulation wars that focused primarily on murders and then a tremendous interest in celebrities," Amestoy said. "Darrow sort of combined two of those: he was an extraordinarily successful defense lawyer, adamantly opposed to capital punishment … And then he was famous for his ability to speak to larger social issues.”

The death penalty was among the issues at play. “There was a tremendous amount of focus on capital punishment in Vermont but not, in fact, from those opposed to it, more about making sure that Vermont had a method of execution that would work,” said Amestoy. Winters would be only the second person executed by electric chair, which had recently been installed at the Windsor prison.

Vermont executed 26 people between 1778 and 1954. The state abolished capital punishment in 1972 following a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The most sensational aspect of the trial of John Winters was the prosecution’s use of the victim’s severed head as an exhibit. “That had never happened in Vermont legal history and as far as I was able to determine, hadn't ever happened in American legal history either,” said Amestoy.

Amestoy said that the Winters case “gave us a lens on Vermont in the 1920s in terms of gender.” Cecilia Gullivan was an “extraordinary single woman, sort of a modern woman of the time.” He noted that Gullivan was “probably the highest ranking female executive in Vermont, a tremendously capable woman who had the authority for managing the plant.” Her murder was “extraordinary because of the status of the victim, and it immediately became front page news, not only in Vermont, but in Boston and really all over the country.”

There were rumors raised at Winters' trial that Gullivan was in a relationship with Frank Cone, the owner of the company, who some thought was a suspect in her death. Amestoy noted that women did not sit on juries at that time. Vermont in the 1920s was "not attuned to issues of gender," said Amestoy.

Clarence Darrow succeeded in winning a retrial for John Winters, who then pleaded guilty to second degree murder on Darrow's advice, though Winters publicly maintained his innocence. After serving 20 years in prison, Winters was pardoned in 1949 by Gov. Ernest Gibson. Clarence Darrow had saved the convict’s life.

Amestoy is no stranger to sensational cases himself. His civil unions decision, which he famously wrote “is simply a recognition of our common humanity,” changed the national conversation about same sex unions.

“I thought that opinion helped move that issue in a way that allowed Vermonters to address a social issue of extraordinary importance in a way that I think stood as an example to the country. So to have been able to play a part in that was obviously something I was thankful for.”

Democratic and Republican political leaders have universally condemned the killing of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But President Donald Trump lashed out at Democrats and other political opponents, charging without evidence that their “rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.” Trump and other top officials are now promising a broad crackdown on the free speech of his opponents.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she would “absolutely target” protesters engaging in what she called “hate speech.”

Critics, including many conservatives, have noted that the first amendment right to speech does not include an exception for “hate speech” and that it would be unconstitutional to target people for their overheated rhetoric.

“So-called ‘hate speech’ is free speech,” asserted Aaron Terr in an essay for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where he is director of public advocacy. FIRE is a national group that advocates for and defends free speech.

“The ever looming threat is that when people are in power, they always are going to have this motivation to crack down on speech that threatens their hold on power, that opposes their policies and their views,” Terr told The Vermont Conversation.

“I'm worried that (Trump) is setting the stage for a broader government crackdown on speech on the administration's political opponents and that will really only make the situation worse,” said Terr. “The remedy that our First Amendment envisions for speech that we find potentially harmful is not to suppress it. It's not to silence the speaker, but to push back against it, to call it out, to counter it with better ideas.”

Notably missing from Trump’s broadsides are actual examples of leading Democrats or liberal organizations “celebrating” Kirk’s murder.

The baseless argument that Democrats and “the Left” are responsible for a violent conspiracy against the country obscures the reality that the overwhelming source of political violence in the U.S. comes from the far right. A study examining terrorism in the U.S. in recent years showed that violent far-right extremists have been responsible for 87% of the terrorism fatalities in the United States and 69% of the attacks.

In a political environment in which the president characterizes his opponents as "evil" and "scum," violence has become normalized. FIRE recently published the results of a survey of college students that revealed that in 2020, about 1 in 5 students said it was "ever acceptable to use violence" to stop a speaker. That number has since risen to 1 in 3 students, a 50% increase in the level of support for political violence among college students over the last 5 years.

“Free speech isn't a conservative or liberal value. It's a constitutional value. It's a check on power," Terr said. "We need the First Amendment because power brings with it the temptation to silence dissent. That's human nature. And the beauty of free speech is it ensures that no single person or administration can declare by fiat what's true or false, what's right or wrong and make it illegal to disagree. And wherever you fall politically, you have a stake in being free from that kind of authoritarian control. My biggest worry is that people are just losing faith in the importance of free speech.”

As President Trump’s immigration crackdown intensifies, many immigrants who have lived, worked and paid taxes in the United States for years are getting snatched by masked agents and disappeared into a vast network of jails across the country.

In Vermont, a small but growing group of young attorneys have thrown themselves into the fight to defend the immigrants’ rights. Newly minted lawyers, including recent graduates of Vermont Law and Graduate School, are now going head to head with lawyers from Trump’s Justice Department.

The attorneys have been going into Vermont’s jails and encountering terrified immigrants, many of whom are being repeatedly shuffled between states in what appears to be a deliberate effort to frustrate their attempts to obtain effective legal representation. Some detainees do not even know where they are. 

Vermont Asylum Assistance Project  (VAAP), headed by immigration attorney Jill Martin Diaz, has been a driving force behind the effort to mobilize lawyers and defend immigrants. VAAP has grown from one staff member in 2024 to what will be a staff of eight by November, including four new attorneys who are part of the national Immigrant Justice Corps. VAAP recently received a $100,000 grant from the recently established Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund to hire staff, bring in attorneys and train Vermont lawyers to handle immigration cases.

Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid. They currently are a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont. In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40.

I visited VAAP’s headquarters in Burlington, where I interviewed Martin Diaz, staff attorney Leah Brenner and volunteer staff attorney Andy Pelcher.

“I'm looking around at our office that's not even unpacked and we barely have lights and WiFi. How are we holding our own against Trump's Department of Justice that just got a big, beautiful raise?” marveled Martin Diaz, who described fighting the Trump administration as akin to David vs. Goliath.

Martin Diaz said that immigrants are “canaries in the coal mine.”

“People are really starting to look at what's going on in the immigration system as a microcosm for what could happen to our democracy if left unchecked, not just for noncitizens, but for everyone.”

Pelcher, who graduated Vermont Law and Graduate School in 2018 and went on to get an LLM, or master of laws, described a recent visit to Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, where he encountered a Palestinian man who was a survivor of torture who “had been bounced around to a number of facilities during the 14 months that he had been detained.” Somehow he landed in a Vermont jail. 

“People are being frequently transferred from facility to facility, seemingly as a means to deny access to counsel, family, local networks of support, and any other means by which these individuals can meaningfully prepare for their defense against removal,” said Pelcher. VAAP, together with the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, took on the man’s case.

VAAP’s experience finding and aiding immigrants in Vermont’s jails has led Martin Diaz to oppose the idea of closing Vermont’s jails to ICE. “I would not advocate for more beds, but I would also strongly caution against a wholesale end to ICE's ability to detain people in our state,” they said. “The truth is that there is no substitute for lawyers getting in their cars, going to a facility with our bodies and meeting one on one in private with our clients directly.”

“It's really, really difficult to provide people with legal help telephonically, when the people who have your clients in custody have no respect for the rule of law and for individuals rights.”

Is America’s legal system up to the task of defending rights and institutions in the Trump era?

“I do have hope that the rule of law will prevail and that this horrible, horrible, tragic moment in our history, this painful moment for our community members who are being directly impacted, can also be a galvanizing opportunity for us to rethink what do we want our laws to say? What do we want due process to look like? What checks and balances do we want?” said Martin Diaz.

The Centers for Disease Control, the nation’s top public health agency, is in chaos following the firing of its director by President Donald Trump and the resignations of its top leaders last week. Nine former CDC directors wrote in the New York Times this week that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who spearhead the purge of the CDC and is a longtime leader of the anti-vaccine movement, is “endangering every American’s health.”

States are increasingly spurning Kennedy and taking health matters into their own hands. Northeastern states, including Vermont, have formed a regional health coalition in response to concerns about federal vaccine guidance. The governors of California, Washington and Oregon declared this week said that the CDC has become “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science … that will lead to severe health consequences.” The three western states are banding together to coordinate their own vaccine policy.

Meanwhile, the state of Florida has just announced that it will become the first state to do away with all childhood vaccine mandates, eliciting strong objections from public health experts.

Can Vermont trust the health advice coming out of the federal government? What are the leading threats to public health confronting the state and country?

“It pains me to say, I don't know that you want to trust the CDC,” said Dr. Becca Bell on The Vermont Conversation. Bell is associate professor of pediatrics at the Larner College of Medicine and a pediatric critical care physician at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital. She is the immediate past president of the Vermont Medical Society and of the Vermont Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Bell noted that she is speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of the organizations with which she is affiliated).

Bell said that “the officials that have left the (CDC) have really raised the alarm that … we shouldn't trust what's coming out of the CDC in terms of some immunization guidance in particular.”

She encouraged families to look to other sources for accurate information, especially the parenting website of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 67,000 pediatricians. She also recommended the Vermont Department of Health and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“Then I ask families to talk to their own child's doctor, because that's going to be a great source as well.” 

Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, announced in May that the CDC would no longer recommend a COVID shot for healthy children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued contrary guidance, recommending a COVID shot for all children under the age of 2 since they are “especially vulnerable to severe COVID-19.”

Bell credited Vermont with being proactive “about how we can keep Vermonters safe," but added, “I feel really sad for the future of this country's child's health, because I think that we're going to see a lot of disparities, not just with access to vaccination but access to health care in general, with the big Medicaid cuts that are coming up as well.”

Bell warned that Medicaid cuts, which will result in some 45,000 Vermonters losing health insurance, will fall hardest on children. One third of Medicaid enrollees in Vermont are children.

“What we're about to see with that One Big Beautiful Bill Act (is) a huge transfer of resources from low income folks to the highest earners in this country,” said Bell. “Accessible, affordable health care is what kids need to succeed and for families to succeed, and so we are deeply concerned about the future of pediatric health care because our foundation is Medicaid. This is how we care for kids. It's what supports our clinics.”

“The lack of investment in children is just really concerning and very short sighted.”

Bill McKibben is one of the world’s leading writers and organizers on the issue of climate change. He admits that his message about the perils of a warming planet can leave some people in despair. Now, with the U.S. at an authoritarian tipping point, McKibben has chosen an improbable time to offer hope.

McKibben has a new book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.” He takes readers on a far-flung journey to show how solar and wind energy have suddenly become the cheapest power in the world. People are installing solar panels equivalent to a coal-fired power plant every 18 hours. This is the fastest energy transition in history — and it may just help save democracy.

“There is one big good thing happening on planet Earth and it's so big and so good that it actually has the capacity to help not only with the overwhelming climate crisis, but also with the crisis of inequality and of democracy that we're facing now,” McKibben told The Vermont Conversation. “That one big thing is this sudden surge of clean energy, especially from the sun, that over the last 36 months, has begun to really rewrite what power means on planet Earth.”

McKibben explained that what used to be called “alternative energy” is now mainstream. “Four years ago or so we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning things. And that's a completely epochal moment. Most days, California is generating more than 100% of its power for long stretches from renewable energy.”

“Here's a statistic just to stick in your mind that will give you hope, too,” he offered. “A single boatload of solar panels coming from someplace like China will, over the course of its lifetime, produce 500 times as much energy as that same ship filled with coal. We're not talking about a slightly better version of what we have now. We're talking about a very different world.”

McKibben is currently spearheading Sun Day, which will take place on Sept. 21, 2025. It will be a global day of action celebrating solar and wind power and the movement to leave fossil fuels behind.

“Think about what the foreign policy, the geopolitics of planet Earth would have looked like in the last 70 years if oil was not a valuable commodity,” he said. “Human beings are extremely good at figuring out how to start wars, but figuring out how to start one over sunshine is going to be a trick.”

Vermont is already feeling the impact of this energy shift. “The biggest single power plant in Vermont is now the collection of batteries that Green Mountain Power has helped people put in their basements and garages and that they can call on in time of need to provide power,” he said

Bill McKibben is the author of over 20 books and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He has won the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize.

Alongside his writing, the Ripton resident has founded the global grassroots climate action group 350.org, and Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization now boasts some 70,000 members.

As the country and world teeter on a precipice, what gives McKibben hope?

“Just that we're still here and fighting and that we have this new tool. It's like a Hollywood movie: the bad stuff is happening all around us and here's this new force riding to the rescue over the hills carrying not carbines and repeater rifles but carrying solar panels and lithium ion batteries.”

As President Trump orders federal troops into the streets of Washington, D.C. to “do whatever the hell they want” to stop crime, Sen. Peter Welch is traveling across Vermont to share what he insists is the real news that Trump is trying to divert attention from.

Welch has tallied the impact of President Trump’s economic policies and determined that they will cost families in Vermont an average of $2,120 each year. He says that 99.5% of all Vermont families will lose money as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his budget reconciliation bill, which the Senate narrowly passed in early July after Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote.

The Vermont Conversation caught up with Welch at Snow Farm Vineyard in South Hero, where Welch held a listening session attended by about 150 people.

Welch conceded that even he is “shocked” by the devastating impact of what he calls the “big ugly bill.” His office released a list of those impacts, including:

As many as 45,000 Vermonters will lose health care

As much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue for Vermont hospitals

Over 26,000 Vermonters will lose access to discounted premiums on the Affordable Care Act marketplace

6,000 Vermonters are at risk of losing SNAP assistance

Annual energy bills for Vermonters will rise by $290

The state will lose 1,400 jobs by ending green energy projects

Mortgage payments will rise by $1,060 annually

78,000 Vermonters with student loans will pay $3,694 more over the course of their loans

These cuts will shred the country’s social safety net, undoing social programs that date back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“There (were) a lot of lies that were peddled by the administration and frankly by many of my Republican colleagues about how great the bill was," Welch said, while "ignoring the concrete reality” of how it will hurt the people they represent. Welch said Trump’s budget will add about $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit.

In a rare criticism of Governor Phil Scott, Welch slammed the governor’s recent decision to provide the Trump administration sensitive data on thousands of Vermonters who receive nutrition assistance. “We should not be providing the private information of our citizens to the federal government,” said Vermont’s junior senator. “We should be protecting the privacy of Vermont citizens.”

All together, Welch said Trump’s actions are part and parcel of an authoritarian push. He accused the president of employing a “dual standard” around crime in the nation’s capital. “You had a riot that was inspired and incited by President Trump and those folks who were intent on doing real violence and hurt many of these law enforcement officers have been pardoned by the president.” Welch was in Congress hiding from mobs of Trump supporters who rampaged through the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Abroad, Sen. Welch was also sharply critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Since the October 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took hostage some 250 soldiers and civilians, Israel has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, detained about 3,000 people — none of whom have been charged with a crime — and waged a campaign of starvation against a desperate population. In response, Welch has called for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and a cutoff of sales of offensive weapons to Israel.

“Being against starvation is not at all being against the endurance of the democratic Jewish state of Israel. It's about being against starvation and that starvation being inflicted by the authority of the state.”

American democracy is “fragile," Welch said.

From the moment that Wilmer Chavarria was pulled out of line by immigration agents at an airport in Houston on July 21, he sensed that he was a marked man.

Chavarria is the superintendent of schools in Winooski. He was returning with his husband from Nicaragua where they were visiting family — a trip they take every summer. Chavarria grew up in Nicaragua, then received scholarships to attend high school in Canada and Earlham College in the U.S. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018, after marrying his college sweetheart, an American citizen.

Without explanation, a federal agent pulled Chavarria out of line at the Houston airport and ordered him into a windowless room. He was separated from his husband and subjected to five hours of interrogation, an experience that he described as “psychological terror.” Agents demanded the passwords to his computers and phones, and he initially refused, since he had his school-issued laptop with student information that is protected by federal student privacy laws. He finally relented after being threatened by the agents.

“You have no rights here,” Chavarria says the agents told him.

Chavarria’s story has made national news. But often overlooked is why Chavarria believes he was singled out.

“I was flagged and put on some sort of list before I even arrived at that airport,” Chavarria told The Vermont Conversation. “When was it that my profile was flagged? And the even better question, why?”

Chavarria has been an outspoken defender of the rights of immigrants, who comprise a large part of the student body in Winooski schools. In February, he led an effort to make Winooski the only sanctuary school district in Vermont.

In April, he publicly refused to sign a certification demanded by the Trump administration that his school not promote diversity, equity and inclusion. When Vermont’s agency of education asked schools to comply, Chavarria responded that the state should “grow some courage and stop complying so quickly and without hesitation to the politically-driven threats of the executive.”

Winooski is Vermont’s most diverse school district, with a majority of families living under the federal poverty line and dozens of languages spoken in the schools. Nearly 800 students attend the Winooski school, which is home to pre-K through high school.

Chavarria said that the effect of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is “instilling fear and making people afraid to just coming to school because they don't want to be separated from their children."

The line the administration is taking is clear to Chavarria: immigrants don't belong here. "Only one type of people, only one type of language, only one type of race, only one type of culture is considered American. Everything else does not belong," Chavarria said. “They want us to feel like we will never be accepted here, and that if we can leave, then we should leave.”

Chavarria said that his experience of being targeted by federal agents was terrifying because it clarified that even U.S. citizen's are not protected.

“This is not North Korea taking you into an interrogation room and doing all that to you. This is your own U.S. government that's supposed to be there to protect you.”

Chavarria noted that he and his family fled a dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1980s. “The fact that I'm terrified what the government is doing to U.S. citizens right now should speak volumes.”

He said that constantly having to defend himself and other immigrants, whether to fellow Vermonters or to federal agents, has left him “exhausted” but committed.

“Vermont is a good state and the majority of people in Vermont are good people but … that's not enough," Chavarrias said. "The times call for more than just being a good person. The times call for more than just being proud of our reputation of being a good brave state. ... The times call for action.”

“Eighty years ago this week,” writes Vermont journalist Garrett Graff, “a group of physicists and military leaders changed warfare — and the world — forever.”

August 6 marks the 80th anniversary of the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which was followed three days later by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. These two bombings are estimated to have killed over 200,000 people.

Graff recounts the scientific and political backstory of the dawn of the nuclear age in his latest book, “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.” This exhaustive work includes testimonies from 500 people who “tell the intertwined story of nuclear physics, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the arrival and advance of World War II in the Pacific, and the tremendous effort of the Manhattan Project to deliver two atomic bombs that helped end the war, as well as the haunting on-the-ground stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves,” writes Graff.

Graff says that the story of what gave rise to the nuclear age is “as important now as ever,” as countries around the world, such as Iran, are racing to start or expand their nuclear arsenals.

“The world actually stands much closer to the edge of nuclear danger than we have for most of the 80 years since the end of World War II,” Graff told The Vermont Conversation. “This year has already seen two major world conflicts set against nuclear tensions. We've seen open warfare between India and Pakistan already this spring, the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict in world history. And we also saw, of course, the US and Israeli strikes against the Iranian nuclear program.”

“There's a possibility, ironically, 15 years after Barack Obama tried to set us on a path toward nuclear abolition, where in the 2020s and 2030s we may actually see more countries join the nuclear club than have ever existed before.”

Garrett Graff describes himself as a historian whose work is often filed under current events. He writes about inflection points in history with an eye towards how they impact the present and future. This includes his 2024 book, “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” and his 2022 book, “Watergate: A New History,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He is also the editor of an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont that was published earlier this year by the Vermont Historical Society.

Graff has had a busy 2025. This spring, his 7-part podcast series dropped, “Breaking the Internet.” In it, he explores how a tool that promised to bring people together has instead driven them apart and has fueled authoritarian movements. This is the fourth season of Long Shadow, Graff’s award-winning history podcast.

Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario.

Graff said that as the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, “We are witnessing an unraveling of our small-d democratic traditions in the United States and sort of backsliding in our democracy and the creeping approach of authoritarianism.”

“It doesn't feel [like] a coincidence to me that we are watching this backsliding in our democracy at the precise moment 80 years later where we are losing the last members of the Greatest Generation,” those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. 

“There is no preordained rule that America remains a democracy," Graff said. "And there's no preordained rule that we remain an economic hegemon. We let both of those things disappear at our own societal and national peril.”