For Noah Dines, life has been an uphill climb. And that is his dream come true.

Dines, a 30 year-old Stowe local, is in the process of setting a new world record for human powered vertical feet skied in one year. The previous record had been 2.5 million feet set in 2016 by Aaron Rice, another Stowe skier. Dines broke Rice’s record in September, then surpassed his original goal of skiing 3 million feet in October, broke 1 million meters — or 3.3 million feet — in early December, and will wrap up the year having skied 3.5 million feet.

Uphill skiing is known as skinning, so named for the strips of material that attach to the bottom of skis that enable skiers to glide uphill without slipping backwards. They used to be made from seal skins, hence the name skinning. Skinning up ski area trails has become a popular form of exercise in recent years, and backcountry skiers also use skins to travel where there are no lifts.

Dines began his uphill skiing quest on New Years Day 2024 just after midnight. He turned on his headlamp, snapped on his lightweight alpine touring skis and quietly skied off into the night up the trails of Stowe Mountain Resort. He has spent this year chasing snow around the world, from Vermont, to Oregon, Colorado, Europe and Chile. He has skied all but about 30 days this year. A typical day has him skiing uphill about 10,000 feet. At Stowe, that means he skis at least five round trip laps per day, often more. He will finish his quest at the end of this month and will be joined in his last days by his father, who has never skied uphill before.

I met up with Noah Dines on December 17 at the base lodge at Spruce Peak at SMR. It was raining, but Dines was still skiing.

“If you bail when it rains all the time, then you're not getting everything you could,” he said.

Dines explained that his record quest has required “a lot of saying no” to everything from friends’ weddings to having a beer, from which he has abstained. “Your response to anything has to do with, how will this affect my big year?” he said.

Conceding that "the money has definitely been hard," Dines has supported himself during his year of chasing snow through sponsorships from Fischer Skis, Maloja clothing and Plink electrolyte drinks. He also raised $10,000 through a GoFundMe and has drawn down his savings.

What has a year of living strenuously meant? 

"Friendships. I've met so many incredible people. It's meant learning how to persevere and work harder than I've ever worked before. It's meant seeing beautiful sunsets in Chile. It's meant cold mornings and crisp Alpine air. In Europe, it's meant croissants on the side of a mountain. It's meant more time with friends in Stowe."

By pursuing a dream, Dines hopes that he can be a model for others. “I have a passion and I pursued it and I've pushed myself as hard as I can, and you can too,” he said. “It doesn't have to be with sports or take a year, but there's no reason that you can't set goals and meet them, that you can't push yourself just because you didn't grow up doing it.”

What will the million meter man do to start 2025?

“Well first and foremost, I'll take a little nap, at least for an afternoon.”

Ben Jealous has a long and deeply personal perspective on the fight for social and environmental justice.

Jealous was elected president and CEO of the NAACP in 2008 at the age of 35, making him the youngest person to lead America’s oldest civil rights organization. Since 2022, he has been the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to lead one of the country’s oldest and largest environmental organizations.

In exploring his own history, Jealous learned that he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee and a former slave. He told this personal story in a memoir published last year, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing.”

Jealous has been working on the front lines of American politics. He was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and in 2018 ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Maryland.

After election day this year, Jealous wrote a letter to his children, nieces and nephews. He reassured them, “All of you descend from families that have been here since the very beginning of our nation and have survived and ultimately triumphed over tougher times.”

Jealous told The Vermont Conversation that he hoped to give his young family members “a little bit of the wisdom I got from my grandparents. Which is, whatever we're dealing with, it's been worse in this country and we still triumph over it. And I also wanted them to understand that our obligation was to fight.”

Jealous was in Vermont this weekend where he spoke at an event sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club.

Jealous blames Kamala Harris’s loss on her failure to champion people’s everyday economic concerns that Bernie Sanders had centered in his presidential campaigns. “What was clear back in 2016 is that Bernie's focus on the betrayal that was NAFTA, on the need for a better health care system, and on the need, most importantly, to really center kitchen table issues that vex all families across this country was something that was having a transformative and realigning impact on the electorate.”

“Corporate Democrats are afraid of that,” Jealous continued. "They are really dominated by a set of consultants who are as addicted to power as they are to corporate cash and they really make it hard for mainstream Democrats to deviate from that.”

Jealous said that under Trump, progressives need to work with people with whom they disagree and who make them uncomfortable. He cited his work with conservative senators to advance environmental issues.

“Hope is a discipline,” said Jealous. “My grandmother, who was the granddaughter of three enslaved people and a white man in Virginia, she would always say pessimists are right more often. But optimists win more often.”

Jealous said that his grandmother “saw life like a boxing match. Any battle usually has like 12 rounds. And if you got in every round expecting to get beat up and knocked down, you probably quit by the fourth.”

“But if you got in every round thinking that this might be the round you don't get knocked down, that you're focused on the victory, and by the time you get to the 12th you realize all you got to do is be the last one standing, at the end of that round, you've won everything.”

John Rodgers is the most interesting man in Vermont politics. And he just may be its future.

The Democrat-turned-Republican who just won the race for Vermont's lieutenant governor did something that has not been done since 1815: he became lieutenant governor by defeating the incumbent lieutenant governor in a general election.al election.

Rodgers’ 6,000 vote victory over sitting Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who ran as a Progressive/Democrat, was part of a statewide backlash that ousted numerous Democratic incumbents. Democrats lost 18 seats in the Vermont House and six seats in the Vermont State Senate, thus ending the Democratic supermajority in both chambers that enabled them to override vetoes by Republican Gov. Phil Scott. 

Scott, who endorsed Rodgers and campaigned with him, emerged as the election's biggest winner.

Rodgers’ election as lieutenant governor must still be confirmed by the Vermont Legislature in January, since he won with 46 percent of the vote, just shy of the 50 percent required by the Vermont Constitution.

John Rodgers’ upset win may help explain Donald Trump’s victory nationally. While Rodgers is a vocal Trump critic, both politicians tapped into a deep well of economic anxiety among voters who blamed Democrats for being out of touch with the day-to-day financial struggles faced by many people. In Vermont, those economic anxieties are rooted in double-digit spikes in property taxes and health care costs, compounded by a protracted and worsening housing crisis.

Rodgers is uncomfortable with the comparison to Trump, but he understands it. "There are a lot of the folks that supported me that are Trump supporters, and there were some people who wouldn't vote for me because I spoke outright that I would never support Trump because I value honesty, and the man is totally dishonest ... He's lied, cheated and stolen his way through his entire life, and I can't understand why people cling to him other than the fact that he's not a career politician, and people are so fed up with what's happened in Washington over the last 20 years."

The voter disillusionment that Rodgers channeled was best captured by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who issued a scathing indictment of the Democratic party following the 2024 election: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

John Rodgers said much the same thing throughout his winning campaign. “I think the Democrats in the legislature have lost their way and no longer are taking care of the working class people in Vermont,” he told The Vermont Conversation.

John Rodgers, 59, is new on the statewide political scene but he is a familiar face in Montpelier. He has served in the Vermont State House for 16 years, half in the House and half in the Senate. In 2018, he ran unsuccessfully for governor as a Democratic write-in candidate. He is known for being fiercely independent, often to the frustration of his former Democratic colleagues. Democrat Becca Balint, when she was Vermont Senate majority leader, said of Rodgers, "He sometimes votes with us, he sometimes doesn't, and sometimes we don't know until we get on the floor."

Rodgers lives on the 500-acre farm in West Glover where he grew up. He balances his work in Montpelier with making a living as a stone mason, running a construction company, and growing hemp and cannabis on his farm. He has spoken candidly about his experience growing up poor and the continuing struggles of working class people in Vermont.

Rodgers said that changing parties was a big risk. “I didn't put myself on a glide path in a Democratic state by switching parties to the Republican Party in a presidential year when Donald Trump was running in a state that Kamala Harris won ... It really gives me hope that there are enough Vermonters that are still independently minded that they can pick a person from any party if the message is right.”

Asked whether being a Republican in Trump's Republican Party — which has espoused anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ and pro-insurrection views — was comfortable, Rodgers replied, “Absolutely not. It is terribly hard for me to carry the R beside my name because of national Republican politics. But when I look here in the state, and I look at Phil Scott, and I look at a lot of the moderate Republicans that I worked with for years when I was in the State House and the folks that are new since I left, they are speaking up for working class Vermonters. And so I do not buy into any party platform.”

Rodgers said he is especially concerned by Trump's talk of mass deportation, noting that Vermont’s farms would be crippled without the work of undocumented immigrants. "Our economy can no longer run without them."

How far is Rodgers willing to go to protect the civil liberties of Vermonters if they are threatened in a new Trump administration?

“I'm a bit of a libertarian. I'm willing to go however far as is necessary, absolutely. Bad laws were made to be broken.”

Rodgers said he is often asked whether he is interested in running for governor. He replied that he is not sure he would be ready to run for governor in two years should Scott decide not to run for re-election, but “if it's four years, then maybe I've had enough time to have an impact and convince people of who I am and I'm the right person for the job.”

Rodgers paused, then added frankly, “When I look at the job of the governor, it's not really that desirable a job. It's super hard. I mean, we never have enough money to go around ... So it would take a lot to convince me that that was the next best thing to do.”

Rodgers hopes that his experience in both parties can make him useful in his new role. “When I was a Democrat, the Democrats said, Oh, he's not really a Democrat. Now I'm a Republican (and) there's a bunch of them on the right that say, Oh, he's not really a Republican. But I'm a Vermonter. And what I hope to be is a bridge ... helping in the negotiations between what is perceived as the two sides.”

One year ago, Elizabeth Price was awoken by a phone call with news that every mother dreads: Her son, Hisham Awartani, had been shot, along with his two best friends. It was Thanksgiving 2023, and the three 20-year old college students — all of them Palestinian or Palestinian-American — were taking a walk while visiting Awartani's grandmother in Burlington. The shocking, unprovoked attack against Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad made international news.

A year later, the families are still dealing with the fallout. Hisham Awartani was the most seriously injured. A bullet lodged in his spine, paralyzing him from the chest down. Yet, he has shown remarkable determination and resilience, returning to attend Brown University earlier this year even while undergoing grueling rehab at a Boston hospital. He is now back on campus at Brown, where he is a junior majoring in archaeology and math.

I spoke with Price on Monday, Nov. 25, the one-year anniversary of the attack. That morning, Price mentioned to her sister-in-law that it was “the anniversary of Hisham’s shooting.” She replied, "'No, today is the anniversary of his being alive.' That really is what I have been thinking about."

“Hisham is alive, and that is what we're going to be eternally grateful for ... (He) has demonstrated an incredible strength.”

Awartani now uses a wheelchair and continues to work on his recovery. This fall, he began driving a car outfitted with hand controls. He has finished over 400 hours of rehabilitation. He has moved into a fully accessible dorm room with roommates. He has acquired two cats. And he has returned to Vermont several times to his grandmother’s house, which is now wheelchair-accessible. A GoFundMe established to support his care has raised over $1.7 million from more than 22,000 donors, and it continues to receive donations.

As Hisham Awartani has regained his life, some 45,000 of his fellow Palestinians have lost theirs in a relentless, year-long Israeli assault. Awartani is keenly aware of this dissonance. In May, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he observed that thousands of young Palestinians like him are shot in Gaza and the West Bank but are treated as statistics. Being shot in Vermont was different.

“Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America,” he wrote. “Instead of being seen as Palestinians, for once, we were seen as people.”

Price echoed Awartani's concerns. She insisted that people consider her son’s experience in the larger context of Israel’s ongoing war against Palestinians. “There are still bombs being dropped in Gaza that are being paid for by U.S. tax money,” she said.

“I don't know why the war is still going on. My son is so lucky in everything he has, and I don't understand why Hisham — or anyone else like him — has lost so much.”

The man charged with shooting Awartani and his friends, Jason Eaton, has been held without bail since the attack. Eaton pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder and has been deemed competent to stand trial. Earlier this month, Chittenden County State's Attorney Sarah George announced that she did not have sufficient evidence to add a hate crime charge. The trial will likely be in 2025.

Elizabeth Price has been at her son’s side since last Thanksgiving. I last interviewed her on The Vermont Conversation in February, when she was with Awartani in the hospital in Boston. As Awartani has regained independence and moved back into a dorm at Brown this fall, she was finally able to return to her home in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which is where I reached her on Monday.

“When I look back on this last year, I am just immensely grateful and immensely proud of who (Awartani) is, and immensely moved by all the kindness and compassion and support that we've received. It was a terrible moment. But we've all come out of it healthy, happy and positive about the world.”

Price beamed with pride about Awartani. “I think people will look to him as a thought leader,” she told The Vermont Conversation. “He's so passionate about so many things that he ... will show others that anything is possible.”

“He's a thinker (who) will change the way people see the world and see what people like him can do.”

It has been nearly two decades since a Vermonter won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, widely considered the most prestigious scholarship in the world. The Rhodes Scholarship pays for international students to pursue postgraduate studies for up to three years at Oxford University in England.

This week, Lena Ashooh of Shelburne was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. She is one of 32 Rhodes Scholars chosen from the U.S. from over 3,000 students who applied. According to the Rhodes Trust, Vermont has had 43 Rhodes Scholars since the first cohort in 1903. The last Rhodes Scholar from Vermont was named in 2006.

"It's so special to be named a Rhodes Scholar as a Vermonter," said Ashooh. "People have such a special attachment to Vermont, even if they're not from there, it occupies this really beautiful place in their mind. It's a place of respite and joy and progressivism."

Lena Ashooh graduated from Champlain Valley Union High School in 2021. At CVU, Ashooh was active with 4-H and she founded Mi Vida, MiVoz (“my life, my voice”), a group that brought together the children of migrant farmworkers in Vermont with other youth to share stories and discuss how to make change. In 2020, she was named one of Vermont’s top youth volunteers and was recognized with a national Prudential Spirit of Community Award.

Ashooh is now a senior at Harvard. She is pursuing Harvard’s first major in animal studies, an interdisciplinary program that she designed that combines philosophy, psychology, biology, and political science. She explained that animal studies is a way to study social injustice.

“Looking at the ways that animals were mistreated or their freedom was being restricted also allowed us to attend to ways that people, and specifically vulnerable people, are also being mistreated, being subjected to exploitation or to disease and illness and pollution from farms,” said Ashooh.

While in college, Ashooh has lobbied legislators on environmental justice, worked as an intern for Vermont Rep. Becca Balint, and has done research in Puerto Rico on macaque monkeys. She is co-president of Harvard College Animal Advocates and she also plays the classical harp. At Oxford, Ashooh plans to study animal ethics, and address the question: “What does it mean to respect an animal as an individual?”

“My hope is that working on this question seriously as it pertains to animals might give us better philosophical concepts to be applied with humans as well. That can enable us to ensure that each person's individual value and the valuing of their contributions can be protected.”

Ashooh will pursue a postgraduate degree in philosophy at Oxford and is considering attending law school. She leaves open the possibility of returning to Vermont. 

“I've always found Vermont to be a front runner in spearheading progressive ideas that might change the way the country is thinking … I think Vermont would be a very exciting place to return to to try out some progressive policies that might help us head down that path towards a brighter future.”

President-Elect Donald Trump has vowed to take revenge on his enemies. He promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on Day 1 and to further restrict reproductive rights. And he is threatening to overturn longstanding environmental protections and public health measures.

With Republicans now in control of all three branches of government in Washington, state attorneys general are being described as "a last line of defense against Trump."

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark says she is ready for the fight.

“The federal government can't break federal statute. They can't violate the Constitution, and it's attorneys general like me who will represent the states in making sure that that doesn't happen,” said Clark. During Trump’s first term as president, Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration 155 times, winning 83 percent of the cases.

Clark noted that Trump “has a penchant for breaking the law. He doesn't respect the law in his personal life. He didn't respect it as president, and we can anticipate that he's not going to respect it again.”

“We're going to be ready on day one,” she said.

Clark was first elected attorney general in 2022 and re-elected this November. A native Vermonter whose family owned a popular grocery store in Londonderry, Clark is a graduate of the University of Vermont and Boston College Law School. She went off to New York City to work for a large law firm for six years before returning to Vermont in 2014 for a job in the attorney general’s office. Eight years later, she became Vermont’s top prosecutor. She is the first woman to be elected attorney general in Vermont (her predecessor, Susanne Young, was appointed by Gov. Scott to serve the final six months of Attorney General T.J. Donovan’s term when Donovan resigned in June 2022). Clark is currently one of just a dozen female attorneys general in the country.

“One of the things that I feel almost resentful about is the chaos that a Trump presidency is going to bring on us,” said Clark. “I think about especially my daughter and kids who are in elementary school now and pretty much their whole lives, have had either this chaos or the specter of this chaos and the fear of the second Trump term, and now we're getting it again. …Except this time, we're going to be ready.”

What happens if federal agents attempt to round up people living in Vermont who are undocumented, as Trump has threatened? 

“How is he going to pay for it? Who's going to perform the work? How many immigration officers do we even have here in Vermont?” replied Clark “I think we need to sort of stay calm, but we also need to plan and prepare.”

Clark believes that Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, passed in 2022, will protect reproductive rights in the state, but a national abortion ban could upend it.

Abortion is “symbolic of the concept that women are independent human beings who deserve to control their own bodies. And it's appalling to me that we are where we are in this country,” said Clark. “I'm proud of where we are in Vermont, but it is hard to imagine we live in this country where people in Vermont, in every single town, voted to enshrine the right to abortion in our state constitution. And how can our viewpoint be so different from other places in this country? It's honestly disturbing that we are a part of the same union, and yet we have such differing views on this fundamental question of bodily autonomy for women.”

Attorney General Clark concluded with a message to Vermonters.

“I want to reassure them that as their attorney general, I'm going to fight to protect them. I'm going to use every tool in the toolbox to do that.”

“We also have to keep faith in our democracy. And in Vermont, we have a very strong, robust democracy. And we need to keep reinvesting in that vision and participating, even as we look to the future to another four years of Donald Trump.”

America has chosen a strong man — with an emphasis on “man.”

Donald Trump wagered that that a key to victory was appealing to men. His misogynist comments, his contempt for social and political norms, his embrace of authoritarian strongmen around the world was aimed at winning over men, especially young non-college educated men. It worked: the 2024 election results reflected an historic gender gap, in which most men voted for Trump, while most women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The two century-old tradition of electing men to lead the U.S. continues, at least for another four years.

At the age of 91, Gov. Madeleine Kunin has a unique and long perspective on politics. She is the only woman to be elected governor in Vermont, serving three terms from 1985 to 1991. She went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Deputy Secretary of Education under Pres. Bill Clinton. Kunin founded Emerge Vermont to recruit and train Democratic women to run for office.

Kunin’s politics have long been informed by her personal experience with authoritarianism. A Swiss Jew, her family fled Europe in 1940 as Nazism spread.

“I'm inspired in a strange way by my proximity to the Holocaust,” she said the morning after Trump’s election. “We have to speak up. We have to participate. We can't just sit down and shut the door and stay by the fire. We have to fight more than ever and figure out how to be most effective.”

“We will have to fight hard to protect democracy from here on in.”

As a pioneering politician herself, Kunin said she was “very excited about the possibility of electing the first woman president. I hoped I would live that long.”

She mused, “In a time of uncertainty, the public likes a strong man.”

Kunin reflected on the need to “have more of a dialogue with young men so that they begin to understand who we are. That schism, that gap between men and women is not good for democracy.”

In the aftermath of defeat “your first reaction is to retreat,” Kunin conceded, “but I don't think we can afford to retreat. We have to still be activists. We still have to participate and make our voices heard… We just have to force ourselves to keep democracy alive and to express our political and social views and make sure that as women, we remain active.”

Kunin’s advice to women is to “keep on doing what you're doing … I would urge women to continue to strive for top offices and not be totally discouraged by this election.”

Kunin confessed that on the morning after the election, “I felt the real doom and gloom. But as the day goes on and as I'm talking to you, the fighting spirit is fighting its way back into my mind, into my psyche. I know we can't give up.”

As the 2024 presidential campaign hurdles to a climactic finish on Nov. 5, the two major candidates made their closing arguments. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where she promised to be a unifier, casting Trump as a “petty tyrant” who wanted Americans to be “divided and afraid of each other.”

Trump made his final case in a six-hour long rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that featured a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and mocked Jews, Hispanics, Blacks and Palestinians. The New York Times described it as a “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” Many observers and historians have noted that Trump's rally evoked memories of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden that was captured in an Oscar-nominated film, “A Night at the Garden.”

The 2024 presidential race remains razor close. But longtime campaign strategist Stuart Stevens is confident of the outcome.

“I think Harris is going to win easily. I don't think it's going to be particularly close,” said Stevens.

“It's the most stable race I can remember. 47% of the country is either MAGA or open to MAGA and 53% isn't. So the Harris campaign's goal, task, challenge has been to get as much of that 53% as they can and get them to vote. So we wake up in a world where our Senator Bernie Sanders and my old friend Liz Cheney are on the same side. That's not a bad coalition.”

Stevens was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.

Stuart Stevens now contends that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian movement. Vanity Fair recently described him as “the campaign cowboy who famously left the GOP to turn his fire on Trump.” He has written several bestselling books about his political conversion, including his latest, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy To Autocracy.”

Stuart Stevens is now a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. He grew up in Mississippi but has lived for many years in Stowe.

Stevens pointed out that early voting turnout, especially by women, is breaking records. “What is striking about the early vote is that women are voting at 10% higher than men ... (and Harris) is winning women by 14 points ... Even I can do that math," he said.

“When this race is done, it's going to be seen as the women of America spoke,” Stevens asserted.

What happens to Trump if he loses?

“Trump is never going to concede,” Stevens predicted. “They will attempt to have the House (of Representatives) not certify. I think the period from election night until January 20 is going to be the most dangerous period in America since the Civil War.”

Stevens anticipates that if Trump loses he will quickly declare that he is running for president again. “No question. That’s all he does. It's his business. He's not going to go out of business.”

Stevens rues that “Trump didn't hijack the (Republican) party. He revealed it. And the reason that Trump is popular in the Republican Party is because he's what Republicans want.” Even if Trump loses, “it's not going to be the end of Trumpism." 

Stevens said that he is not optimistic about the Republican Party, “but I'm very optimistic about America. I just don't think that this is what the country is.”

America is drowning beneath a tsunami of lies.

The 2024 presidential campaign may be distinguished by the sheer volume and audacity of lying. Donald Trump has made embracing The Big Lie—the false claim that he won the 2020 election—a condition of entry into the MAGA universe. Once you accept The Big Lie, similarly brazen but smaller lies flow easily. And so Trump falsely claims that immigrants are eating pets and that disaster relief money is being stolen by Democrats and given to immigrants.

Lying is a bipartisan phenomenon, but Republicans dwarf Democrats in the number of lies that they tell. In September, New York Times fact-checkers analyzed a single stump speech made by both presidential candidates. Former President Trump made 64 false or inaccurate statements in his speech, while Vice President Kamala Harris made six such statements. In October, CNN determined that Trump made 40 false claims in just two speeches.

During the course of his presidency, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day, according to the Washington Post. 

“This is the flood-the-zone concept that … Steve Bannon articulated early in the Trump presidency,” said Bill Adair, who founded the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization PolitiFact in 2007 when he was Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). “The other practitioner of this is Vladimir Putin.”

Adair is now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. He has a new book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”

“I think the consequences (for lying) are minimal, if any, now for Republican politicians, because the echo chamber repeats the lies so easily and Republican politicians are not held accountable,” explained Adair.

Fox News has shown that political lying can be profitable. “Conservative media not only has looked the other way when Republican politicians lie, but conservative media has echoed the lies brought in by commentators that have repeated the lies, and conservative media, interestingly, has found there's money in those lies,” said Adair. “Fox found if it did not repeat the lies about the 2020 election, that it lost viewers.” 

There is also a price for lying: In 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $788 million for peddling phony conspiracy theories claiming that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden. 

Adair argued that the disparity in political lying between Republicans and Democrats “has serious consequences. It not only makes it impossible for us to have a serious conversation about climate, to have a serious conversation about immigration, but it threatens our democracy. Because we can very easily envision not just a rerun of 2020 come the results of the November election. We can see that this time it could turn into a real crisis for our country all because of li

Can social media bring people together rather than divide and deceive us?

In the world of corporate social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, the notion of a nontoxic public forum seems quaint. These are places where political and personal brawling goes on 24/7 and disinformation flows as freely as cat videos. The platforms rely on high conflict to attract eyeballs and make money.

Vermonters have another option. Front Porch Forum (FPF), co-founded in 2006 by Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife Valerie, is a decidedly friendly online place where neighbors go to interact civilly with one another, and do what neighbors do: seek advice, buy and sell things, and discuss local issues without resorting to personal attacks. The site is heavily moderated by real people who read each posting and filter out items that offend, incite or misinform. It operates in every town and has nearly 235,000 members, including nearly half of Vermont’s adults.

The discord common on conventional social media is “not an accident,” said Wood-Lewis. "Another way of saying people are attacking each other and acting cruel is Ooh, member engagement is up. We can sell more ads. We can collect more data to sell to huge data brokers who do God knows what with people's private information. That's the business model of Twitter and Facebook and all these others.”

The idea of an online forum that builds community instead of dividing it is attracting national attention. The Washington Post recently reported, “At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community — and what Big Tech could learn from it.”

The best indication of FPF’s influence is the way that it builds civic engagement. According to a new study by the nonprofit New_ Public, 61 percent of FPF users reported that they had attended a local event or public meeting as a result of something they read on the forum, over half reported that they had discussed issues with a neighbor and one fifth of users said they had volunteered locally in response to a posting on FPF.

FPF, which is headquartered in Burlington, employs 30 people, including many content moderators. Wood-Lewis said that a “critical part of our model is that each member-submitted posting is reviewed by our professional staff before publication (which) is absolutely not how any other social media works.”

FPF enforces a strict set of rules in its online public square, including no personal attacks. “We're not going to let people basically weaponize Front Porch Forum to do harm to our democracy, to our public health, things like that,” he said.

Elon Musk, who owns X, and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg insist that the unfettered exchange of views on their platforms is just free speech. Wood-Lewis begs to differ.

“I do not think the folks you mentioned have any real interest in protecting free speech. They have an interest in amassing power and money.”

Front Porch Forum “has felt better and better as the divisiveness in our national scene has gotten worse, and as the isolation brought on by the pandemic and social media and smartphones and so many different things in modern life has gotten worse,” said Wood-Lewis.

Despite requests to expand to other states, Wood-Lewis insisted that FPF will stay local. The online forum proved its value by connecting people impacted by flooding in Vermont in 2011, 2023 and 2024 with help and resources.

“As long as Vermont communities are struggling in significant ways, Front Porch Forum wants to be there as an ally and a partner.”