Author Archives: John S. Walters

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About John S. Walters

Writer, editor, sometime radio personality, author of "Roads Less Traveled: Visionary New England Lives."

News You Should View: Mostly About Trump Again, Sorry

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Well, I thought I had a nice varied collection of stories for this week’s Vermont media roundup. But heck, five of the eight nominees have something to do with how the excesses of Donald Trump are reverberating here in our B.L.S.

Apologies, but that’s the world we’re living in and my starship is on the fritz.

A stark warning about Trump from someone who’s been right more than most. Journalist David Goodman hosts “Vermont Conversation,” a blandly-named weekly show on Radio Vermont/WDEV available afterward as a podcast under the auspices of VTDigger. This week’s guest was author and Dartmouth prof Jeff Sharlet, who has spent years chronicling the dark corners of the far right. He has foreseen the persistence of the Trump phenomenon, its return to power, and its authoritarian intent. He told Goodman that he and his colleagues have “all been surprised by the speed with which it’s happening,” and said that the opposition has a lot of work to do.

Sharlet said he’s seen “a lot more people tuning out than in the first Trump administration. And I want to say to people, you don’t have that privilege.”

Echoes of fascism in a small rural library. In the latest installment of her podcast “Rumble Strip,” Erica Heilman takes us to the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, VT and Stanstead, QC for an audio accounting of authoritarianism’s jackbooted footprint. The feds’ crackdown on the security-imperiling cross-border traffic at the library, announced after a deliberately provocative visit from dog-killer and Trump functionary Kristi Noem has left both communities shaken. For no reason whatsoever except that our federal government feels compelled to act like a bully.

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Doing Something.

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Today I wrote an email to Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark urging her to take all possible steps against illegal detentions by ICE and the Border Patrol. Indivisible Blue State Defiance has set up a simple way to send an email to your attorney general. (It also put me on BSD’s mailing list, I’m sure.) The process begins with a form email, but you can customize it to your liking before it’s sent. I did a pretty thorough rework of the opening paragraph to make it more pertinent to Vermont.

The Inquisition Impulse Is Alive and Well

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An Evangelical Christian journalist named Mike Cosper has just produced “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” a six-part podcast about the Satanic panic that gripped the Evangelical community between 1981 and 1993. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I did hear an interview with Cosper and it feeds into a bunch of stuff that’s been on my mind since Donald Trump took office in January.

(Side note: Cosper previously produced “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” a podcast about an Evangelical megachurch whose pastor, Mark Driscoll, turned out to be a power-hungry sociopath. That podcast is worth a listen, although Cosper didn’t really address the factors innate in Evangelicalism that tend to enable the Driscolls of the world. He kind of treated it as a one-off instead of a sadly familiar story of charismatic religious leaders going off the rails and taking their followers along for the ride. So, grain of salt regarding Cosper’s new podcast.)

For those unfamiliar, many Americans were convinced that there was a widespread, secret, well-connected Satanic movement that was subjecting children to all kinds of unspeakable abuse. Cosper says the FBI received 12,000 complaints and conducted 11,000 investigations — and never found a single actionable case of Satanic activity. But in the process, many a life was ruined by baseless allegations.

When I was about two minutes into the interview, I thought to myself, “Wow, this sounds exactly like QAnon!” Well, QAnon but really the whole range of conservative moral panics fueling Trumpism, including the rage-induced policies targeting LGBTQ+ people. It is exactly the same thing. And the current panic is just as groundless as the Satanic panic of two generations ago.

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Doing Something.

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Another simple one today. I signed up to Third Act’s email list. Third Act — well, literally they call themselves Th!rd Act — is an activist organization centered on climate change for people of a certain age. Given that I crossed the AARP Rubicon about two decades ago, it seems like my people.

I hate to further clutter my inbox, but the anti-Trump “movement” is still pretty dispersed. A whole lot of energy, and scrappy bits of organization trying to channel it effectively. So I’m trying to cast my net a bit wider to stay informed about what’s going on and how I might participate.

Update. I also signed up for Third Act Vermont‘s email list.

Doing Something.

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Back to putting one foot forward every day. Today I wrote a note of encouragement to state Sen. Becca White, who accompanied her constituent Mohsen Mahdawi to his “citizenship meeting,” which turned out (as she suspected) to be a trap. She then bore witness to his detention by masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles — nothing suspicious there — and has since been his leading advocate. She deserves credit for stepping into the breach. A lesser politician (*cough*PhilScott*cough*) would have taken a safer course.

It’s important to be in touch with elected officials on critical issues. It’s also important to encourage them when they do the right thing.

It was a Press Conference, a Rally, a Call to Arms

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A crowd big enough to attract the ire of any passing fire marshal jammed into the Statehouse’s normally placid Cedar Creek Room for an event that was inspiring, worrying, and kind of all over the place. (More on the curious backstory of this event later. Stick around if you can.)

Technically it was a press conference led by state Senate leadership, but about 300 people packed into the room to cheer on the speakers as they called for due process under law, freedom for Mohsen Mahdawi, unlawfully detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a fight by any nonviolent means necessary against Donald Trump’s assault on democracy and justice.

There were statements and there were questions from the press, like any normal press conference. But there was also an awful lot of enthusiastic response from the crowd. And for maybe the first time at such an event, the featured lawmakers acknowledged that working through the legislative process would be far from enough. “What it’s going to take is slowing ICE down and coming close to illegal interference,” said Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale.

State Sen. Becca White, pictured above, led the crowd in “an oath of nonviolence and peaceful protest.” The voices filled the room as she led a brief call-and-response:

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It’s Not Just Mohsen Mahdawi

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I attended this morning’s Statehouse press conference slash rally slash call to arms in a packed Cedar Creek Room, and I’ll be writing about it. But something else has come up, and I think it’s even more urgent.

While dozens and dozens of like-minded people backstopped a group of lawmakers and advocates at the Statehouse, something very different had happened 24 hours earlier on a Franklin County dairy farm. According to a press release from Migrant Justice, agents of the U.S. Border Patrol entered the farm on Monday and dragged away eight farmworkers. The advocacy group called it “one of the largest worksite enforcement actions in recent Vermont history.”

The eight were taken to Vermont’s Northwest State Correctional Facility, which is where Mohsen Mahdawi is being held, illegally, without any charges against him.

Your taxpayer dollars at work. Doesn’t it make you feel proud to be a Vermonter?

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One Weird Trick to Save Your Local School

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Over the weekend, VTDigger posted a story about the good people of Westford bemoaning the potential fate of their local school. The Essex-Westford district is discussing a plan to move the sixth through eighth grades from Westford to the Essex Middle School, and some Westfordians (Ed: Reference needed) fear it’s the first step toward their school being closed entirely, a move that a town official described as “disastrous” for the town’s future.

They are right to be concerned. But there’s one big thing they could do to try to save their local school: Go all in on housing.

Single-family homes, preferably at moderate prices? Yes! Condos? Yes! Apartments? Yes! Trailer parks? Well, sure. More of everything, please. YIMBY, YIMBY, YIMBY.

Look. Westford is a tiny place, population a tick north of 2,000. But it’s absolutely close enough to Burlington to capitalize on the region’s overheated housing market, especially housing for young families. It’s about five miles east of Milton, which is rapidly becoming a bedroom community for Burlington. It’s about 10 miles north of Essex Junction. It’s less convenient to Burlington than either of those communities, but that wouldn’t keep people from moving there if the, uhh, town’s median housing price wasn’t MORE THAN HALF A MILLION DOLLARS, good God in heaven.

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