The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

The Vermont Conversation is a VTDigger podcast hosted by award-winning journalist David Goodman. It features in-depth interviews about local and national topics with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and ordinary citizens. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a news podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman, a news show with 300 episodes published.

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  ‘We are the patriots fighting for democracy.’ AG Charity Clark on suing Trump and winning $92.7M from Meta

  Sep 9, 202635 min

  Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark has had a busy summer. Since late June, she has sued the Trump administration an average of twice per week. That brings to 67 the number of lawsuits — as of midday Wednesday — she has filed or joined against President Donald Trump since January 2025. They include lawsuits defending birthright citizenship and challenging cuts to medical research funding, the dismantling of the Department of Education, voting restrictions and tariffs. Clark said her office has prevailed in 92% of the suits, including both final decisions and preliminary injunctions. Many of these decisions are being appealed, but “getting that initial win is hugely helpful in all the work that we are doing battling the unconstitutional and illegal acts of the federal government right now,” Clark told me. In August, the attorney general announced a landmark settlement of $92.7 million with the social media company Meta , which owns Facebook and Instagram, for designing its programs to addict young people and harm their mental health. The settlement resulted from a lawsuit involving 47 other states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Meta agreed to limit the time that teenagers can spend on its platforms and impose age restrictions. “I really think this is the dawn of a new era for social media,” Clark said. Clark, 51, won election as Vermont’s attorney general in 2022, the first woman to do so. She graduated from the University of Vermont, then worked as a policy analyst in the office of Gov. Howard Dean. She later graduated from the Boston College School of Law and worked as an assistant attorney general and later as chief of staff to her predecessor, TJ Donovan. In April, she was named Woman of the Year by the Boston College Women’s Law Coalition. She is currently running for a third term as attorney general. In a recent lawsuit, Clark joined 24 other state attorneys general challenging a new rule by the U.S. Postal Service that would grant it the authority to regulate mail-in voting. “This is such an egregious attempt to overtake the state's prerogatives with voting and elections. But more importantly, it is so wildly impractical,” said Clark, adding that it would take years to implement. “I can't imagine that the United States Supreme Court is going to say, ‘Yeah, we'll just do this and disenfranchise so many of these voters.’ I mean, it would be pandemonium if they did this.” Clark said that despite the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to overturn longstanding legal precedents, “I believe in America.” “We will keep exercising our rights under the Constitution and standing up for our country,” she said. “We are the patriots fighting for democracy and our Constitution, and we're going to keep doing it until this administration is gone. And we're going to keep doing it whatever the next administration is who comes in in 2028.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  Historian Jill Lepore on the threat of authoritarianism and how to counter it

  Sep 2, 202632 min

  Is technology killing democracy and destroying communities? Yes, argues acclaimed historian Jill Lepore in her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She writes that the artificial state is “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.” It is the fantasy of tech billionaires. And its goal is the end of liberal democracy. The artificial state is a “replacement of the liberal nation state, a constitutional democracy in which we are governed by our own consent, with a government by machine, in which many of the functions of democratic governments are automated, in which humans are replaced by bots as the predominant participant in public life,” she told me. When the titans of Silicon Valley sat behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January 2025, it marked “the coming out of the tech right,” said Lepore. Lepore is one of the country’s most acclaimed historians. She is a professor of American history at Harvard University, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the bestsellers “These Truths: A History of the United States,” which Time magazine named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of the 2010s, and “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in history. She hosts the podcast “The Last Archive.” She lives part-time in Brattleboro, which is where she spoke to me. Lepore said that efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize American history are “a form of McCarthyism.” She said that skewed versions of history have evolved that have deepened social divisions. These range from the “far-right version of American history in which everything is a march of freedom and progress and prosperity and America has never done anything wrong at home or abroad” to the “far-left account in which American history is a litany of atrocities, in which the United States has never done anything good at home or abroad.” “There was nothing that recognized there was plenty of truth in both of those accounts, and there was also unbelievable distortion in those accounts.” Lepore said history affirms that “the power of ordinary citizens working together has managed to defeat” forces like the artificial state and its techno-authoritarianism. “But the idea that we can sit in our living rooms and browse the news on our smartphones and post a few thoughts on social media, and that constitutes meeting our obligations as citizens is a false one.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  Alternative media pioneer Nat Winthrop on a half-century of covering Vermont

  Aug 26, 202639 min

  Journalist Nat Winthrop has been covering Vermont for a half-century, reporting stories that have surprised, infuriated and enlightened readers. From 1978 to 1990, Winthrop was publisher of the pioneering alternative weekly the Vanguard Press, and later the Vermont Times. These publications were launching pads for many journalists and were forerunners to Seven Days , the Vermont weekly that is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. He was also executive producer of “ Freedom & Unity ,” a six-part documentary film about Vermont that was led by Nora Jacobson. In 1987, he co-founded the online alternative news service AlterNet . Winthrop explained the niche filled by Vermont’s early alternative weeklies. “There's the myth of objectivity in the media,” he told me. But “the Vanguard, in particular, wore our opinions on our sleeves or on the editorial page.” The weeklies differ from newspapers with their “narrative style of storytelling, so that all of the important information isn't necessarily right up at the top of the article.” Winthrop, 74, has a new book, “On the Record,” a collection of 17 of his cover stories. The topics vary widely, from his reporting on a controversial physician at Gifford Hospital in Randolph who championed in vitro fertilization in the 1970s, to his coverage of Iranian cadets at Norwich University just after the 1979 Iranian revolution, to his stories about Bernie Sanders and ice cream icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield as they rose from obscurity to national fame. The book has many contemporary echoes and includes updates on what has happened with the subjects of each story. Filmmaker Jay Craven wrote in a foreword, “A newspaper in tune with its readers creates common ground and lets us know where we live in ways that are specific to ourselves, our towns, and our neighbors. Nat’s work strengthened our links to each other and helped move our state forward.” Winthrop earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and came to Vermont to attend Goddard College, where he received a master’s degree in media education in 1977. He lives in Montpelier. “Print media across most of the country are a lot smaller in numbers and some say a dying breed,” conceded Vermont’s alternative media pioneer. But he pointed to VTDigger, Seven Days and Vermont Public as indications that media “are actually doing quite a bit better in Vermont than in most states.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  ‘What can I do?’ Ami Fields-Meyer on what global dissidents can teach Americans

  Aug 12, 202643 min

  As President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign of retribution against his political opponents and unleashes masked federal agents on immigrant communities, many American citizens are asking: What can I do? For answers, we can look to dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism. “Authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money,” said Ami Fields-Meyer, co-author with journalist Julia Angwin of “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.” The authors spoke with over 100 dissidents in their research. These include a 73-year-old abortion escort in Virginia, young activists in Egypt who have challenged a dictator, students in Hong Kong defending democracy, and a civil rights lawyer who lost his job in the Trump administration while fighting for fair housing. Together, they offer a modern roadmap for resisting authoritarianism. Authoritarians start by targeting vulnerable groups, then extending to political opponents and the broader population. They say, “It's not me who's taking your money or your rights. This is happening because of somebody else. It's happening because of the trans people. It's happening because of the undocumented people,” Fields-Meyer told me. “The response has to be to expand the circle of who we are committed to.” Fields-Meyer has been a senior policy adviser to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a strategist to national civil rights organizations and political candidates. His articles on democracy and public policy have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other outlets. The authors share lessons from global dissidents. Fields-Meyer described how dissidents “repurposed their communities into extraordinarily powerful political forces. The dissident movement that helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia was a group of theater actors (who) repurposed their theaters into organizing hubs. They stopped printing playbills on their printers and started printing protest leaflets. This is something that we see all over the world.” This includes Fields-Meyer’s home community of Brooklyn, where mutual aid groups formed during the Covid-19 pandemic are now using the same texting groups “to protect people from the federal agents who are waiting outside their doors.” Fields-Meyer said that strengthening community helps counter the ways that autocrats seek to divide people. “Authoritarianism is all about saying, ‘Don't believe your lying eyes. You thought that you saw Renee Good shot in the street? No, you didn't. You thought that you saw Alex Pretti shot in the street? No, you didn't,’” said Fields-Meyer. “What we learned from Soviet dissidents is that when lies abound, you can work with other people and be with other people and be emboldened to say, ‘I do see what I see.’” “We need to be able to hold hope and hopelessness at the same time,” said Fields-Meyer. “If we do, history tells us that we're going to win.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  ‘You have a choice on how you respond.’ Kelly Brush on thriving after a life-altering accident

  Aug 5, 202641 min

  Few people have turned adversity into opportunity as dramatically as Kelly Brush. Brush was on the Middlebury College ski team when she was paralyzed in a ski racing accident in 2006. Twenty years later, Brush is a leader of a national movement to empower people with spinal cord injuries. “I'm so glad that I'm able to do that and support … thousands of other people that I don't even know and their families and create things that just feel a little bit better,” Brush told me. I asked Brush what enabled her to stay positive following her accident. “Whenever something happens in life, you have a choice on how you respond,” she replied. “Even when there's things that are really hard or really sad, you feel that, and then you make the choice to move you forward in a good direction.” Brush has mixed feelings about people calling her an inspiration. If “an understanding of who I am and what I've done creates inspiration, that's great. But not the inspiration that comes just because I exist and I'm in a wheelchair.” Brush is concerned about how people with disabilities are especially vulnerable to delays or cutbacks in health care. She has personal experience of this: she recently had to undergo major back surgery and had to seek care in an emergency room when her primary care provider couldn’t see her for several weeks. “People with disabilities have greater health care needs,” she said. “When the health care system isn't set up well, we are then paying more for those greater needs. I see it time and again with complications that come from spinal cord injuries.” Brush, who recently turned 40, is the founder and spokesperson for the Kelly Brush Foundation , which grants about $1 million per year to people with spinal cord injuries to purchase adaptive sports equipment and maintain an active lifestyle. Its best known fundraiser is the annual Kelly Brush Ride , which draws nearly 1,000 bike riders and will take place this year on Sept. 12 in Middlebury. There are also Kelly Brush Rides in Park City, Utah, and the Bay Area. Brush is especially proud of the community that she and her foundation have helped build. “When I got hurt, I didn't know anybody else with a spinal cord injury,” she said. Now her foundation connects people with spinal cord injuries with one another. “There's something really different about being able to build community with people who are doing things similarly to you, as well as just the ability to feel seen and be seen by other people who are living a similar life to you outside of adaptive sports.” Brush lives in Charlotte with her two young daughters. She worked for 10 years as a pediatric nurse practitioner, but is taking a break from that to lead her foundation and look after her children. I asked Brush what she hopes people take away from her story. “To be excited about the fact that I've been able to live such a full life and continue to have all the same highs and lows that so many people have and I do it from my wheelchair,” she replied. “I definitely have some more struggles than others. But my life is awesome and really fun. I hope people can see that and see the beauty in life, no matter what comes up and what happens, and find and follow that.”

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