Chris Hedges's Blog, page 612

1 Killed, 7 Hurt as Jetliner Engine Explodes at 32,000 Feet

PHILADELPHIA—A Southwest Airlines jet blew an engine at 32,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window, setting off a desperate scramble by passengers to save a woman from getting sucked out. She later died, and seven others were injured.

Passengers dragged the woman back in as the sudden decompression of the cabin pulled her part way through the opening, but she was gravely injured.

The pilots of the plane, a twin-engine Boeing 737 bound from New York to Dallas with 149 people aboard, took it into a rapid descent and made an emergency landing in Philadelphia as passengers using oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling said their prayers and braced for impact.

“I just remember holding my husband’s hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed,” said passenger Amanda Bourman, of New York. “And the thoughts that were going through my head of course were about my daughters, just wanting to see them again and give them a big hug so they wouldn’t grow up without parents.”

The dead woman was identified as Jennifer Riordan, a Wells Fargo bank executive and mother of two from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was the first passenger killed in an accident involving a U.S. airline since 2009. The seven other victims suffered minor injuries.

The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team of investigators to Philadelphia.

In a late night news conference, NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said a preliminary examination of the engine showed evidence of “metal fatigue.” One of the engine’s fan blades was separated and missing. The blade was separated at the point where it would come into the hub and there was evidence of metal fatigue, Sumwalt said.

The engine will be examined further to understand what caused the failure. An investigation could take 12 to 15 months. Photos of the plane on the tarmac showed a missing window and a chunk gone from the left engine, including part of its cover. Sumwalt said part of the engine covering was found in Bernville, Pennsylvania, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) west of Philadelphia.

Southwest said Tuesday night that as a precaution it would inspect similar engines in its fleet over the next 30 days.

Passengers commended one of the pilots, Tammie Jo Shults, for her cool-headed handling of the emergency. She walked through the aisle and talked with passengers to make sure they were OK after the plane touched down.

“She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her,” said Alfred Tumlinson, of Corpus Christi, Texas. “I’m going to send her a Christmas card, I’m going to tell you that, with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground. She was awesome.”

Tracking data from FlightAware.com showed Flight 1380 was heading west over Pennsylvania at about 32,200 feet (10 km) and traveling 500 mph (800 kph) when it abruptly turned toward Philadelphia.

Bourman said she was asleep near the back when she heard a loud noise and oxygen masks dropped.

“Everybody was crying and upset,” she said. “You had a few passengers that were very strong, and they kept yelling to people, you know, ‘It’s OK! We’re going to do this!'”

In a recording of conversations between the cockpit and air traffic controllers, an unidentified crew member reported that there was a hole in the plane and “someone went out.”

Tumlinson said a man in a cowboy hat rushed forward a few rows “to grab that lady to pull her back in. She was out of the plane. He couldn’t do it by himself, so another gentleman came over and helped to get her back in the plane, and they got her.”

Another passenger, Eric Zilbert, an administrator with the California Education Department, said: “From her waist above, she was outside of the plane.”

Passengers struggled to somehow plug the hole while giving the badly injured woman CPR.

Passengers did “some pretty amazing things under some pretty difficult circumstances,” Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said.

As the plane came in for a landing, everyone started yelling to brace for impact, then clapped after the aircraft touched down safely, Bourman said.

“We were very lucky to have such a skilled pilot and crew to see us through it,” Zilbert said. “The plane was steady as a rock after it happened. I didn’t have any fearing that it was out of control.”

The last time a passenger died in an accident on a U.S. airliner was 2009 when 49 people on board and one on the ground were killed when a plane operated by Colgan Air for Continental Connection crashed on a house near Buffalo, New York.

Southwest has about 700 planes, all of them 737s, including more than 500 737-700s like the one in Tuesday’s accident. It is the world’s largest operator of the 737. The 737 is the best-selling jetliner in the world and has a good safety record.

Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said in Dallas that there were no problems with the plane or its engine when it was inspected Sunday.

The jet’s CFM56-7B engines were made by CFM International, jointly owned by General Electric and Safran Aircraft Engines of France. CFM said in a statement that the CFM56-7B has had “an outstanding safety and reliability record” since its debut in 1997, powering more than 6,700 aircraft worldwide.

Last year, the engine maker and the Federal Aviation Administration instructed airlines to make ultrasonic inspections of the fan blades of engines like those on the Southwest jet. The FAA said the move was prompted by a report of a fan blade failing and hurling debris. A Southwest spokeswoman said the engine that failed Tuesday was not covered by that directive, but the airline announced it would speed up ultrasonic inspections of fan blades of its CFM56-series engines anyway.

“There’s a ring around the engine that is meant to contain the engine pieces when this happens,” said John Goglia, a former NTSB member. “In this case it didn’t. That’s going to be a big focal point for the NTSB — why didn’t (the ring) do its job?”

In 2016, a Southwest Boeing 737-700 blew an engine as it flew from New Orleans to Orlando, Florida, and shrapnel tore a 5-by-16-inch hole just above the wing. The plane landed safely. The NTSB said a fan blade had broken off, apparently because of metal fatigue.

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Koenig reported from Dallas. Associated Press writers Kristen de Groot and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia; Susan Montoya in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Matthew Barakat in Washington, contributed to this story, along with AP researchers Monika Mathur and Jennifer Farrar.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush Dies at 92

HOUSTON—Barbara Bush, the snowy-haired first lady and mother of a president whose plain-spoken manner and utter lack of pretense made her more popular at times than her husband, President George H.W. Bush, died Tuesday, a family spokesman said. She was 92.

Mrs. Bush brought a grandmotherly style to buttoned-down Washington, often appearing in her trademark fake pearl chokers and displaying no vanity about her white hair and wrinkles.

“What you see with me is what you get. I’m not running for president — George Bush is,” she said at the 1988 Republican National Convention, where her husband, then vice president, was nominated to succeed Ronald Reagan.

The Bushes, who were married Jan. 6, 1945, had the longest marriage of any presidential couple in American history. And Mrs. Bush was one of only two first ladies who had a child who was elected president. The other was Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams and mother of John Quincy Adams.

“I had the best job in America,” she wrote in a 1994 memoir describing her time in the White House. “Every single day was interesting, rewarding, and sometimes just plain fun.”

On Sunday, family spokesman Jim McGrath said the former first lady had decided to decline further medical treatment for health problems and focus instead on “comfort care” at home in Houston. She had been in the hospital recently for congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In 2009, she had heart valve replacement surgery, and she had a long history of treatment for Graves’ disease, a thyroid condition.

“My dear mother has passed on at age 92. Laura, Barbara, Jenna, and I are sad, but our souls are settled because we know hers was,” former President George W. Bush said in a statement Tuesday. “Barbara Bush was a fabulous First Lady and a woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions. To us, she was so much more. Mom kept us on our toes and kept us laughing until the end. I’m a lucky man that Barbara Bush was my mother. Our family will miss her dearly, and we thank you all for your prayers and good wishes.”

George H.W. Bush held his wife’s hand all day Tuesday and was at her side when she died, according to Jean Becker, chief of staff at George H.W. Bush’s office in Houston.

A funeral is planned Saturday at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, which Mrs. Bush and her husband regularly attended. Mrs. Bush will lie in repose Friday at the church for members of the public who want to pay respects. Saturday’s service will be by invitation only, according to the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

“Barbara Bush challenged each of us to build a better world by empowering people through literacy. As only one of two women in American history who can be called First Lady and First Mother, she was matriarch of a family that remains as dedicated to public service as it was to politics,” said former Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff James Baker III.

The publisher’s daughter and oilman’s wife could be caustic in private, but her public image was that of a self-sacrificing, supportive spouse who referred to her husband as her “hero.”

In the White House, “you need a friend, someone who loves you, who’s going to say, ‘You are great,'” Mrs. Bush said in a 1992 television interview.

Her uncoiffed, matronly appearance often provoked jokes that she looked more like the boyish president’s mother than his wife. Late-night comedians quipped that her bright white hair and pale features also imparted a resemblance to George Washington.

Eight years after leaving the nation’s capital, Mrs. Bush stood with her husband, the 41st president, as their son George W. was sworn in as the 43rd president. They returned four years later when he won a second term. Unlike Mrs. Bush, Abigail Adams did not live to see her son’s inauguration. She died in 1818, six years before John Quincy Adams was elected.

Mrs. Bush insisted she did not try to influence her husband’s politics.

“I don’t fool around with his office,” she said, “and he doesn’t fool around with my household.”

In 1984, her quick wit got her into trouble when she was quoted as referring to Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, as “that $4 million — I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.”

“It was dumb of me. I shouldn’t have said it,” Mrs. Bush acknowledged in 1988. “It was not attractive, and I’ve been very shamed. I apologized to Mrs. Ferraro, and I would apologize again.”

Daughter-in-law Laura Bush, wife of George W., said Mrs. Bush was “ferociously tart-tongued.”

“She’s never shied away from saying what she thinks. … She’s managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment,” Laura Bush wrote in her 2010 book, “Spoken from the Heart.”

In her 1994 autobiography, “Barbara Bush: A Memoir,” Mrs. Bush said she did her best to keep her opinions from the public while her husband was in office. But she revealed that she disagreed with him on two issues: She supported legal abortion and opposed the sale of assault weapons.

“I honestly felt, and still feel, the elected person’s opinion is the one the public has the right to know,” Mrs. Bush wrote.

She also disclosed a bout with depression in the mid-1970s, saying she sometimes feared she would deliberately crash her car. She blamed hormonal changes and stress.

“Night after night, George held me weeping in his arms while I tried to explain my feelings,” she wrote. “I almost wonder why he didn’t leave me.”

She said she snapped out of it in a few months.

Mrs. Bush raised five children: George W., Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. A sixth child, 3-year-old daughter Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.

In a speech in 1985, she recalled the stress of raising a family while married to a man whose ambitions carried him from the Texas oil fields to Congress and into influential political positions that included ambassador to the United Nations, GOP chairman and CIA director.

“This was a period, for me, of long days and short years,” she said, “of diapers, runny noses, earaches, more Little League games than you could believe possible, tonsils and those unscheduled races to the hospital emergency room, Sunday school and church, of hours of urging homework or short chubby arms around your neck and sticky kisses.”

Along the way, she said, there were also “bumpy moments — not many, but a few — of feeling that I’d never, ever be able to have fun again and coping with the feeling that George Bush, in his excitement of starting a small company and traveling around the world, was having a lot of fun.”

In 2003, she wrote a follow-up memoir, “Reflections: Life After the White House.”

“I made no apologies for the fact that I still live a life of ease,” she wrote. “There is a difference between ease and leisure. I live the former and not the latter.”

Along with her memoirs, she wrote “C. Fred’s Story” and “Millie’s Book,” based on the lives of her dogs. Proceeds from the books benefited adult and family literacy programs. Laura Bush, a former teacher with a master’s degree in library science, continued her mother-in-law’s literacy campaign in the White House.

George W. was not the only Bush son to seek office in the 1990s. In 1994, when George W. was elected governor of Texas, son Jeb narrowly lost to incumbent Lawton Chiles in Florida. Four years later, Jeb was victorious in his second try in Florida.

“This is a testament to what wonderful parents they are,” George W. Bush said as Jeb Bush was sworn into office. Jeb won a second term in 2002, and then made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Sons Marvin and Neil both became businessmen. Neil achieved some notoriety in the 1980s as a director of a savings and loan that crashed. Daughter Dorothy, or Doro, has preferred to stay out of the spotlight. She married lobbyist Robert Koch, a Democrat, in 1992.

In a collection of letters published in 1999, George H.W. Bush included a note he gave to his wife in early 1994.

“You have given me joy that few men know,” he wrote. “You have made our boys into men by bawling them out and then, right away, by loving them. You have helped Doro to be the sweetest, greatest daughter in the whole wide world. I have climbed perhaps the highest mountain in the world, but even that cannot hold a candle to being Barbara’s husband.”

Mrs. Bush was born Barbara Pierce in Rye, New York. Her father was the publisher of McCall’s and Redbook magazines. After attending Smith College for two years, she married young naval aviator George Herbert Walker Bush. She was 19.

After World War II, the Bushes moved to the Texas oil patch to seek their fortune and raise a family. It was there that Bush began his political career, representing Houston for two terms in Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In all, the Bushes made more than two dozen moves that circled half the globe before landing at the White House in 1989. Opinion polls taken over the next four years often showed her approval ratings higher than her husband’s.

The couple’s final move, after Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, was to Houston, where they built what she termed their “dream house” in an affluent neighborhood. The Bush family also had an oceanfront summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

After retiring to Houston, the Bushes helped raise funds for charities and appeared frequently at events such as Houston Astros baseball games. Public schools in the Houston area are named for both of them.

In 1990, Barbara Bush gave the commencement address at all-women Wellesley College. Some had protested her selection because she was prominent only through the achievements of her husband. Her speech that day was rated by a survey of scholars in 1999 as one of the top 100 speeches of the century.

“Cherish your human connections,” Mrs. Bush told graduates. “At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent.”

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Online:

George Bush Presidential Library, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sean Hannity?

Fox News still has Sean Hannity’s back—for now. On Tuesday, execs at the conservative media empire that Rupert Murdoch built signaled their support following Monday’s big reveal that Hannity was the mysterious famous third client of President Trump’s embattled personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

Or so Cohen’s own legal team claims, anyway. For his part, Hannity begs to differ with that characterization. The trio of lawyers working to get Cohen out of the kind of trouble that brings federal agents crashing uninvited into office and living spaces may have had to out Hannity to a U.S. district judge, not to mention to the entire nation, but the Fox News personality is playing down his link to Cohen while the network continues to prop him up.

As Politico reported Tuesday, a Fox News spokesperson followed Hannity’s lead in a statement Tuesday by casting the Hannity-Cohen connection as an “informal relationship”:

Officially, Fox News is standing behind Hannity. A Fox News spokesperson said Tuesday that the network was previously “unaware” of the ties between Hannity and Cohen, but that the host “continues to have our full support.”

“While FOX News was unaware of Sean Hannity’s informal relationship with Michael Cohen and was surprised by the announcement in court yesterday, we have reviewed the matter and spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

But who ultimately gets to decide how such a relationship is best described? Presumably that job would fall to U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, the designated authority presiding over the criminal investigation into Cohen.

Meanwhile, Fox News’ willingness to echo a star anchor’s talking points illustrates the slippery ethical issues that arise when celebrity media figures get to choose their own job descriptions. Take, for example, Hannity’s repeated contention that he is not a journalist, as he argues in this 2016 tweet to another, very different Michael Cohen who had counted him as an industry colleague:

I'm not a journalist jackass. I'm a talk host. https://t.co/fj1ZCsAEL4

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 26, 2016

Yet at other times, Hannity has been willing to claim the label—on his own terms. He is an “opinion journalist,” see, or an “advocacy journalist.”

As the entertainer Rush Limbaugh has done for decades on his own radio show, and as the president is doing from the Oval Office when he denies he is a politician, Hannity’s opt-out strategy gives him license to sidestep any number of those pesky standards to which his peers are held. The main act of “The Sean Hannity Show,” also the main breadwinner in Fox’s lineup, can let fly with personal opinions on the air and openly stump for politicians. He may even neglect to inform his viewers about possible conflicts of interest, as he might have done in his reporting (or whatever he would call discussing news stories on the air) about the FBI’s April 9 raid on Cohen’s office and residences.

But who ultimately decides who qualifies, or doesn’t, as a journalist? Several commentators taking a journalism-is-as-journalism-does tack have used Hannity’s current quandary as an opportunity to restate ethical boundaries and to take Fox News to task. Media analyst Andrew Tyndall told Politico that “[i]f Cohen is telling the truth and Hannity is a bona fide client of his, then Hannity’s oversight, not mentioning, is completely inexcusable and under any normal organization would be a firing offense.”

Another expert, quoted by MSNBC was of a similar mind:

Samuel Freedman, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism specializing in media ethics, said Hannity’s omission was “clearly an ethical violation.”

“It’s so blatant, it’s not even a hard call,” Freedman said, adding that he thinks Fox should cut ties with Hannity over the potential conflict of interest.

“I don’t think they’ll do it, but I think they should fire him,” Freedman said. “This is a major breach.”

Fox News’ strategic contrarian Shep Smith on Monday called the breaking news of Hannity’s alleged status as Michael Cohen’s third client the “elephant in the room” at their shared workplace. But their bosses will evidently refer to it on Hannity terms, as long as he’s their star. Besides, only “conflicted, incestuous Washington hypocrites” would dare call it a conflict of interest—just take it from Rush Limbaugh.

 

We All Could Learn Some Valuable Lessons From Pope Francis

A news interlude dominated by speculation about “golden showers” and a graceless president who described his latest detractor as an “untruthful slime ball” invites us to search for higher moral ground.

So it might be Providential that Pope Francis chose to make news last week in two ways. First, he did something that comes very hard to most public figures, and particularly to the current occupant of the White House: He apologized fervently for “grave errors.”

He also issued a remarkable document on holiness that seemed made for the moment—and, by the way, noted that we can “waste precious time” by being caught up in “superficial information” and “instant communication.”

Francis continued to preach his gospel of economic justice by warning that it is a “harmful ideological error” to cast “the social engagement of others” as “worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist.” On the contrary, he saw holiness as demanding an engagement with “the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged.”

And he lifted up words from Leviticus that we are unlikely to hear cited by President Trump: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress him.”

It’s not often that public figures hold themselves to the standards they apply to others. There was thus an instructive symmetry between what Francis said in his Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”) and his own moment of necessary penance.

In the document, the Pope declared that “the lack of a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgment of our limitations prevents grace from working more effectively within us.” Humans—every single one of us—fail, falter and fall. We do far better when we admit it.

And this is what the Pope did last Wednesday when he apologized for his terribly misguided defense of a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse by an infamous pedophile priest.

Many of us who admire Francis feared his apparent standing up for the indefensible was a sign that the 81-year-old pontiff was incapable of recognizing the Church’s profound breach of trust when it placed institutional self-preservation above a concern for the suffering of those abused by priests.

Sometimes, your friends need to tell you how wrong you are. In this case, the task fell to Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a close Francis ally. O’Malley was appointed Archbishop of Boston to begin healing the deep gashes left by the scandal there, and he read Francis whatever the Roman equivalent of the riot act is.

Francis responded with a letter to Chile’s bishops. “As far as my role, I acknowledge, and ask you to convey faithfully, that I have made grave errors in assessment and perception of the situation, especially as a result of lack of information that was truthful and balanced,” he wrote. “From this time I ask forgiveness to all those that I offended and I hope to do so personally, in the following weeks, in meetings that I will hold with representatives” of those effected.

Aside from his reference to a lack of “truthful and balanced” information—honestly, he should have known—Francis’ letter suggested the determination of someone capable of learning from his mistakes. It’s more than we’re getting from some other leaders we can think of.

This enhanced the credibility of Francis’ exhortation to the rest of us to imitate the humble day-to-day saints whom he referred to as “the middle class of holiness.”

He reiterated that the Church would continue to defend “the innocent unborn,” but stressed the importance of seeing the “lives of the poor, those already born,” as “equally sacred.”

Francis added pointedly that while “a politician looking for votes” might see “the situation of migrants” as “a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions,” a true Christian would not.

It was hard to miss the message to American Bishops that letting anti-abortion politicians off the hook on immigration and refugees would be a denial of their obligation “to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children.”

Francis insisted that “the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions.” That’s excellent news, because in our era, many whom the history books will mention are leading us to nowhere good. Perhaps Francis can inspire in them some self-examination—and, more importantly, provoke a badly needed rebellion by the decent people who represent “the middle class of holiness.”

Bills to Curtail LGBT Rights Failing in U.S. Legislatures

NEW YORK — In a striking shift from recent years, major legislation curtailing LGBT rights has been completely stymied in state capitols around the country this year amid anxiety by Republican leaders over igniting economic backlash if they are depicted as discriminatory.

In the thick of this year’s legislative sessions, LGBT activists were tracking about 120 proposed bills that they viewed as threats to their civil rights. Not one of them has been enacted as many sessions now wind down; only two remain under serious consideration.

A key factor in the shift: In the Republican-led states where these types of bills surface, moderate GOP lawmakers and business leaders are increasingly wary of losing conventions, sporting events and corporate headquarters.

North Carolina, Indiana and Arizona were among the states that faced similar backlash in recent years over such legislation.

“Being anti-equality is not considered good politics anymore,” said legislative specialist Cathryn Oakley of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT rights organization.

Just two years ago, it seemed that the state-level bills might proliferate. North Carolina passed a bill restricting transgender people’s bathroom access and Mississippi enacted a sweeping law allowing state employees and private businesses to deny services to LGBT people based on religious objections. Seven states have passed laws allowing faith-based adoption agencies some degree of protection if they refuse to place children with same-sex couples.

To the extent that the tide has turned, it’s due partly to the fallout over the North Carolina bill in 2016. The NCAA and NBA pulled games from the state; there were projections before lawmakers rolled back the restrictions that the law would cost the state several billion dollars in lost business.

The change in momentum at the state level comes at a time when conservatives have a strong ally in President Donald Trump on the issue. His administration is seeking to exclude transgender people from military service and promoting exemptions that could enable businesses, health care providers and others to refuse to accommodate LGBT people based on their religious beliefs.

Later this year, perhaps in June, a potentially momentous ruling is expected from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether businesses that serve the public can cite religious objections to refuse service to LGBT people, even in states that protect them in their nondiscrimination laws. The case involves a Colorado baker who did not want to make a cake for a same-sex couple to celebrate their wedding.

Some conservatives suggest legislative leaders are treading softly on these issues now for fear of provoking big corporations and pro sports leagues that support LGBT rights.

“The left is leveraging the cultural and economic power of big businesses like Amazon and Apple to force smaller businesses and nonprofits that hold traditional views on marriage to shut down,” contends attorney Emilie Kao, a religious freedom expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“A lot of people feel they’re being bullied into silence, and the big businesses are all on the side of this new sexual orthodoxy,” Kao added. “For social conservatives, it feels very much like David and Goliath.”

This year, certainly, conservatives have struggled to gain much traction at the state level on LGBT-related issues. Among the many bills that failed:

—A Tennessee measure that would have required the state to defend schools in court if they were sued for limiting transgender students’ access to bathrooms.

—A South Dakota bill that would have required signs on some public restroom doors notifying users that a person of the opposite sex might be inside.

—A “religious liberties” bill in Georgia that would have given legal protection to faith-based adoption agencies that decline to place children with same-sex couples.

An ever-growing number of states — at least a dozen — have passed bills banning the practice of “gay conversion therapy” on minors. And voters in Anchorage, Alaska, rejected a ballot measure that would have restricted transgender people’s access to public restrooms.

The two remaining bills being tracked by LGBT groups — in Kansas and Oklahoma — are similar to Georgia’s adoption bill. Supporters say they are needed to ensure that faith-based agencies which oppose same-sex marriage can still help accommodate the rising number of children entering foster care due to the opioid crisis.

Without the bills, Kao says faith-based agencies face potential lawsuits by LGBT-rights groups “because they follow their beliefs that every child deserves both a mother and a father.”

The changing dynamics across the U.S. reflect the growing political clout of LGBT groups.

Megadonor Tim Gill has become one of the nation’s leading philanthropists for LGBT causes, spending tens of millions of dollars from his fortune accrued from a software company he started. One of his priorities now is to move beyond “the easy states” and build new alliances in Republican-controlled states that could pave the way for non-discrimination laws.

His Denver-based foundation is helping bankroll a national campaign being launched this week by the Ad Council, known for iconic public service ad campaigns including Smokey Bear and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” Called “Beyond I Do,” it makes the point that while same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide, LGBT people still face legal discrimination in a majority of states — including getting evicted, fired or denied services.

Only 19 states — mostly Democratic strongholds — offer comprehensive nondiscrimination protections for gays, lesbians and transgender people.

The new ad campaign is projected to get at least $15 million in donated media support — including TV and radio time, and billboard space. Among the people featured in more than 20 stories and video spots are a Michigan couple who said a pediatrician refused to treat their newborn daughter because of objections to their same-sex marriage, and an Ohio woman who says she was fired as a teacher because she is a lesbian.

“We have to make new and different friends,” Gill said. “Ultimately a federal solution is better, but it always comes after the states have demonstrated the need.”

Trump Welcomes Abe, Gives ‘Blessing’ to Koreas Peace Talks

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump on Tuesday gave his blessing for North and South Korea to discuss ending their decadeslong war and said that without his help, the two countries “wouldn’t be discussing anything.”

At Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump confirmed that the two Koreas are negotiating an end to hostilities ahead of a meeting between the North’s Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in next week. The meeting will be the third inter-Korean summit since the Koreas’ 1945 division.

“They do have my blessing to discuss the end of the war,” said Trump, who welcomed Abe to his Florida resort on Tuesday.

The White House has said Abe’s visit will give the leaders an opportunity to discuss Trump’s own upcoming summit with Kim, which the president is looking to hold in the next two months. Trump said the U.S. and Japan are “very unified” on the subject of North Korea, though privately Abe is expected to raise Japan’s concerns about the potential summit.

Trump said five locations are under consideration for the summit but offered no further details.

Trump took credit for the inter-Korean talks, saying, “Without us and without me, in particular, I guess you would have to say, they wouldn’t be discussing anything.”

The Abe summit will also serve as a test of whether the fond personal relationship the two leaders have forged on the golf course and over meetings and phone calls has chilled following Trump’s recent moves, including his decision not to exempt Japan from new steel and aluminum tariffs.

White House officials suggested that Trump was open to acceding to Abe’s hopes to obtain a waiver to the protectionist measure, which went into effect last month. Most other key U.S. allies, including Australia, Canada, the European Union, and Mexico, have been granted exemptions.

Issuing Japan the waiver to the Trump-ordered sanctions or opening negotiations on a new trade agreement with Japan are “all on the table,” Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said Tuesday. “That’s why this is such an important meeting.”

The official visit began Tuesday afternoon as an honor cordon of uniformed service-members lined the palm-fringed drive to the club. Trump greeted Abe at the red-carpeted door of the mansion as the pair posed for photos ahead of a planned one-on-one meeting. It will be followed by a small group discussion with top national security officials focused on the Kim summit. The president and first lady Melania Trump will also have dinner with Abe and his wife.

Trump welcomed the two days of meetings at his Mar-a-Lago club. “It’s an honor to have you in Florida with us,” Trump said.

On Wednesday, the agenda will broaden to include other issues affecting the Indo-Pacific region, including trade and energy, and Trump said he and Abe would “sneak out” to play a round of golf. Trump and Abe will also hold a news conference before the president and first lady host the Japanese delegations for dinner. Abe will return to Japan on Thursday morning.

The first time Trump hosted Abe at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the inauguration, North Korea conducted its first missile test of Trump’s administration, and the two delivered a joint statement denouncing the launch.

This time, Abe’s visit comes weeks after Trump took him — and the region — by surprise by announcing he had accepted an invitation to sit down with Kim following months of increasingly heated rhetoric over the North’s nuclear weapons program.

Abe will be seeking reassurance from Trump that security threats to Japan won’t be overlooked in the U.S.-North Korea summit, slated for May or early June. The Japanese premier has voiced fears that short- and medium-range missiles that pose a threat to Japan might not be part of the U.S. negotiations.

“I don’t think that Prime Minister Abe will leave Mar-a-Lago with anything other than a high degree of confidence in the health of the alliance, including as we go into the summit with the North Koreans,” Pottinger said.

Japan is also expected to express support for a U.S. return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Trump abandoned upon taking office. Trump opened the possibility of rejoining last week amid a trade dispute with China.

But Kudlow suggested that the U.S. rejoining the pact is far from certain, telling reporters Tuesday that “it’s more of a thought than a policy, that’s for sure.” Kudlow added that Trump does not share the view of many U.S. Pacific allies that the trade agreement can serve as an economic bulwark to contain a rising China. “The president regards them as two different issues,” he said.

Both sides insist that Trump and Abe remain close. U.S. officials stressed that Trump has met with Abe more than any other world leader and say they’ve been in “constant contact” since Trump accepted Kim’s invitation.

Abe is also expected to push the issue of Japanese abductees, one of his top policy priorities. Pyongyang has acknowledging abducting 13 Japanese, while Tokyo maintains North Korea abducted 17. Five have been returned to Japan. North Korea says eight others died and denies the remaining four entered its territory. Japan has demanded further investigation.

Shimada said Abe would make the case to Trump that releasing the abductees could help North Korea prove they can be trusted to negotiate in good faith.

The U.S. itself is pushing for the release of three Americans.

After five years in office, Abe is one of Japan’s longest-serving, post-World War II prime ministers but has suffered plummeting poll ratings over allegations that a school linked to his wife received preferential government treatment in a land sale.

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Associated Press writer Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. Will Pay the Price for Ignorance in Trade War With China

In the early 1980s, a delegation of Chinese businessmen invited me to Shenzhen, a former fishing village growing into a booming metropolis constructed with what looked to be gigantic Lego pieces. Since then, the many ports along its coastline have become home to some 39 shipping companies responsible for launching 131 international container routes.

Politicians may make promises to protect national boarders, but global markets will continue to shape the world. So it might be wise to remind ourselves just who is holding the checkbook these days. In the 1920s, British firms held 40 percent of the global stock of foreign direct investment. By the 1960s, America had assumed that mantle. China is likely to be next. It is the world’s largest nation. Its economy has quintupled in the last 25 years. And its state-sanctioned bank supplies over half the world’s liquidity. While the U.S. retreats from the world stage, China is engaging, learning and adapting. Along the way, it is developing more and more confidence at the global negotiating table.

China’s political talent advances up the political ladder step by step with a long-term view. Ministers are required to work in the poorest provinces before being considered for the highest posts within the central government. Donald Trump—real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity with no previous experience in politics—has pitted himself against China’s President Xi Jinping, an astute politician who has risen methodically through the ranks.

Whether Trump will make it to the end of his four-year occupancy in the White House is an open-ended question. Xi—recently enshrined in the constitution by the Communist Party—has power for life. But in order for the party to underwrite Xi’s political ideology, it must continue to deliver growth. For that, two things must occur: China’s judicial system must find a way to guarantee the protection of private assets, including intellectual property, and its financial system must accept further liberalization.

No one can argue that, for some time, China has treated American companies unfairly. Most would agree that change is needed to establish an acceptable degree of geopolitical parity with the U.S. It appears that Xi is not entirely opposed to this. He has navigated around Trump’s taunting tweets, retaliating in equal measure only when push comes to shove. On our end is a president wandering in and out of decision-making polices without understanding much of anything, which has resulted most recently in his sharp reversal of the multi-country trade agreement that he pulled out of immediately after being sworn in, despite warnings of the negative consequences by, well, everyone.

Trump is obviously unaware that, despite China’s staggering socioeconomic changes, its culture—rooted in thousands of years of tradition—continues to adhere to certain fundamental beliefs. Crucial in any transaction with the Chinese is mianzi, or “face.” There is no single-word translation for the idiom, but its meaning resides within close proximity to “dignity.” Among the Chinese, it is almost always more important a commodity than money. Keeping face is paramount. Losing it, disastrous. Taking it away, unforgivable.

China’s single-voice narrative and underlying unity is that nation’s inner cohesion. Americans have repeatedly proved that they have a low threshold for discomfort. It is not difficult to guess which nation will outlast the other in a trade war. If the goal is to bring China to the negotiating table to avoid that financial disaster, it is Trump’s ignorance of China that increases the risk of doing the opposite—forcing China to save face at all costs. Let us hope that someone in his administration impresses upon him the economic consequences of an ancient Chinese proverb, Qí hǔ nán xià: “When on a tiger’s back, it is hard to dismount.”

Supreme Court Strikes Down Portion of Immigration Law

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court said Tuesday that part of a federal law that makes it easier to deport immigrants who have been convicted of crimes is too vague to be enforced.

The court’s 5-4 decision — an unusual alignment in which new Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the four liberal justices — concerns a catchall provision of immigration law that defines what makes a crime violent. Conviction for a crime of violence makes deportation “a virtual certainty” for an immigrant, no matter how long he has lived in the United States, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her opinion for the court.

The decision is a loss for President Donald Trump’s administration, which has emphasized stricter enforcement of immigration law. In this case, President Barack Obama’s administration took the same position in the Supreme Court in defense of the challenged provision.

With the four other conservative justices in dissent, it was the vote of the Trump appointee that was decisive in striking down the provision at issue. Gorsuch did not join all of Kagan’s opinion, but he agreed with her that the law could not be left in place. Gorsuch wrote that “no one should be surprised that the Constitution looks unkindly on any law so vague that reasonable people cannot understand its terms and judges do not know where to begin in applying it.”

The case turned on a decision from 2015 that struck down a similarly worded part of another federal law that imposes longer prison sentences on repeat criminals. The majority opinion in that case was one of the last written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016 and whose seat Gorsuch filled.

The 2015 decision “tells us how to resolve this case,” Kagan wrote.

Tuesday’s decision involves James Dimaya, a native of the Philippines who came to the United States legally as a 13-year-old in 1992. After he pleaded no contest to two charges of burglary in California, the government began deportation proceedings against him. The government argued among other things that he could be removed from the country because his convictions qualified as crimes of violence that allowed his removal under immigration law.

Immigration officials relied on a section of immigration law that lists crimes that make people eligible for deportation. The category in which Dimaya’s convictions fell is a crime “that, by its very nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force…may be used in the course of committing the offense.”

Immigration judges would have allowed Dimaya to be deported, but the federal appeals court in San Francisco struck down the provision as unconstitutionally vague. The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling Tuesday.

The case was initially argued in January 2017 by a court that was short a member because of Scalia’s death and the refusal of Senate Republicans to act on Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland. Deadlocked 4-4, the justices scheduled a new round of arguments once Gorsuch joined the court.

The case is Sessions v. Dimaya, 15-1498.

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Follow Jessica Gresko on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jessicagresko

Goldman Sachs Reports Surge in Profits

NEW YORK—Investment bank Goldman Sachs said Tuesday that its first quarter profits rose by 26 percent, helped by a lower tax bill and a surge in market volatility.

The Wall Street bank earned $2.83 billion, or $6.95 a share, compared with $2.26 billion, or $5.15 a share, in the same period a year earlier. The results topped analysts’ forecasts, who were looking for Goldman to earn $5.58 a share, according to FactSet.

Revenue increased across all of its businesses, but most notably in trading, which saw revenue rise 31 percent from a year earlier. Trading-heavy firms such as Goldman Sachs tend to prosper when markets are more volatile, and Goldman was able to take advantage of a spike in market turbulence last quarter to lock in more profitable trades. Stock trading revenues more than doubled in the quarter.

The surge in trading revenue helped boost Goldman’s profit margins. The bank’s return on equity, a measurement of an investment bank’s ability to earn revenue off the assets they hold, was 15.4 percent in the quarter. Typically banks like Goldman want to earn a return on equity above 10 percent.

Goldman also reported a steep drop in its tax bill this quarter, reflecting a similar decline that other banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America also reported. Its effective tax rate was 17.2 percent in the quarter, compared to the bank’s historical tax rate in the high-20 percent range.

The bank has in recent years started to diversify out of its traditional businesses, advising clients and trading, and into more Main Street forms of banking like personal loans and savings accounts under the Marcus brand. That business has been growing rapidly, and so have profits. Goldman’s investing and lending division had net revenues rise 43 percent from a year earlier. Goldman Chief Financial Officer Marty Chavez told analysts Tuesday that the bank has originated $3 billion in personal loans under the Marcus brand, and now has more than $20 billion in deposits under Marcus.

Investment banking revenues rose a more modest 5 percent to $1.79 billion in the quarter. While Goldman saw more revenue from underwriting new bonds, the amount of money earned from advising clients was down 22 percent from a year earlier.

Total revenue for Goldman Sachs rose to $10.04 billion from $8.03 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Goldman Sachs’ main competitor, Morgan Stanley, will report its results on Wednesday. Morgan is typically thought to have the strongest stock traders in the business, so expectations are high for the bank. Analysts expect Morgan Stanley to report a profit of $1.26 a share, up from $1.07 a share in the same period a year earlier.

Goldman shares fell $3.94, or 1.5 percent, to $253.89 in late-morning trading.

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Ken Sweet covers banks and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for The Associated Press. Follow him on Twitter at @kensweet.

The Cult of Violence Always Kills the Left

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The Weather Underground, a clandestine revolutionary organization that advocated violence, was seen by my father and other clergy members who were involved in Vietnam anti-war protests as one of the most self-destructive forces on the left. These members of the clergy, many of whom, including my father, were World War II veterans, had often became ministers because of their experiences in the war. They understood the poison of violence. One of the most prominent leaders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), to which my father belonged, was the Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, who as an Army second lieutenant fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

The young radicals of the Vietnam era, including Mark Rudd—who in 1968 as a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led the occupation of five buildings at Columbia University and later helped form the Weather Underground—did not turn to those on the religious left whose personal experiences with violence might have saved SDS, the Weather Underground and the student anti-war movement from self-immolation. Blinded by hubris and infected with moral purity, the members of the Weather Underground saw themselves as the only real revolutionaries. And they embarked, as have those in today’s black bloc and antifa, on a campaign that was counterproductive to the social justice goals they said they advocated.

Rudd, 50 years later, plays the role once played by the priests Phil and Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Heschel. His book “Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen” is a brutally honest deconstruction of the dangerous myths that captivated him as a young man. I suspect that many of those in the black bloc and antifa will no more listen to his wisdom than did the young radicals five decades ago who dismissed the warnings from those on the religious left for whom violence was not an abstraction. Rudd sees his old self in the masked faces of the black bloc and antifa, groups that advocate violence and property destruction in the name of anti-fascism. These faces, he said, ignite his deep embers of “shame and guilt.”

“It’s word for word the same thing,” Rudd said of antifa and the black bloc when we spoke for several hours recently in Albuquerque. “You look on a YouTube channel like Acting Out. It’s identical. How can we as white people stand by while the nonwhite people of the world are suffering under imperialism? I think the shame of being white in this society is so great [that] people want to show that they’re aware of how terrible the disparities are, and how privilege and oppression distort everything. The urge to talk about violence and commit violence in response is a way of cleansing yourself of that privilege, of the guilt of privilege. It taps into this strain that I’ve identified as self-expression rather than strategy. That, to me, is the biggest problem.”

“The anarchist Andy Cornell makes a distinction between activism and organizing,” he said. “Activism is about self-expression. It often is a substitute for strategy. Strategic organizing is about results. These acts of self-expression, which is what antifa does and what we did in the Weather Underground, are exactly what the cops want.”

“The slogan ‘diversity of tactics’ used by the black bloc and antifa is ridiculous,” he said. “Even the term ‘tactic’ is ridiculous. What we need is a strategy. And let’s be clear, even when you adopt a nonviolent strategy it will be portrayed by the state as violent. This is what the Israelis are doing at the Gaza fence. I often tell the antifa kids here—there are about four antifa kids in Albuquerque and they hate my guts—this story. There was a spontaneous anti-war demonstration in 2003 by a thousand people in Albuquerque the night the [Iraq] war began. The cops, who support the military, were angry. They attacked the crowd with tear gas and clubs. There were a lot of arrests. The victims brought a civil suit against the police. It did not come to trial until 2011. The police and the city of Albuquerque were the defendants. They were charged with violating the rights of the protesters. It was a jury trial. The jury found for the cops. Why? It turned out the police attorneys brought in a photograph. There were about 200 or 300 people in the photograph. In the front were two people wearing bandannas [as masks]. Just wearing bandannas. They zoomed in on the people wearing the bandannas. They told the jury, ‘See these people wearing these bandannas? They’re wearing bandannas because they’re terrorists. And we knew they were about to attack us. So, we had to attack them.’ The jury went for it. We had not yet convinced our fellow citizens of the value of the right to protest. My conclusion: Don’t wear bandannas! Every time I see a kid wearing a bandanna, I say, ‘You’re so beautiful, why cover your face?’ They say, ‘Well, I have to, I’m a Zapatista.’ I say that’s nice but this is what happened in 2003 and 2011. It would probably be better for you to not wear the bandanna so they won’t think we’re violent. And they say, ‘You’re a stupid piece of shit’ or they walk away.”

Rudd said that the occupation of Columbia University in April 1968, an occupation that caused him to be expelled from the university, was an example of the kind of strategy that the left has to adopt. This strategy had its roots in the organizing techniques of the labor and civil rights movement.

“The means of transmission were red diaper babies,’ he said, referring to the sons and daughters of members of the United States Communist Party. “The red diaper babies at Columbia SDS kept saying, ‘Build the base. Build the base. Build the base.’ It became a mantra for years. It was all we could think about. This meant education, confrontation and talking, talking, talking. It meant building relationships and alliances. It meant don’t get too far out in front. In the spring of 1968 it all came to a head. It was the perfect storm. A few of us knew, now is the time to strike.”

“Columbia was a success,” he said. “The deed attracted attention. And because of the alliance with the black students, which has never gotten enough media attention in the story of Columbia, we closed down the university. We accomplished our strategic aim, which was to politicize more people and to build the movement. Our goal was not to end the university’s involvement with military research. That was a symbolic goal. The real goal was to build the movement. I got into a lot of trouble for saying the issue is not the issue.”

But Rudd and other radicals in the SDS soon became, he said, “enamored with the propaganda of the deed.” Self-expression replaced strategy. The organizing, which had made the occupation of the university successful, was replaced by revolutionary posturing. The radicals believed that more radical tactics, including violence, would accelerate political and social change. It did the opposite.

“After Columbia, it was failure after failure after failure in SDS for the next year and a half,” he said. “Then we doubled down on the failures.”

The SDS radicals came under the spell of revolutionary theories propagated by those supporting armed liberation movements in the developing world. They wanted to transplant Frantz Fanon’s call for revolutionary violence, Lin Biao’s idea of “people’s war” and Ernesto “Che” Guevara foco, or insurrectionary center, to the struggle in the United States. The radicals would go underground and carry out acts of violence that would ignite a national war of liberation. This call to arms was seductive and exhilarating, but it was based on a distorted and highly selective account of revolutionary struggle, especially in Cuba.

“Che put forward a phony analysis of how the Cuban revolution was won,” Rudd said. “According to him it was won solely by Fidel and Che going into the Sierra Maestra [mountain range]. Armed struggle was the only thing that was important to the Cuban revolution. All other aspects of the revolution, including 20,000 people who were murdered by [dictator Fulgencio] Batista in the cities, the national strikes by the unions, the street protests by women, university students and the Cuban Communist Party were wiped out of history. There was only one thing to do, pick up the gun.”

The cult of the gun was disastrous. It distorted reality. It elevated violence as the only real tool for revolution. Vijay Prashad in his book “The Darker Nations” spells out the incalculable damage caused by this cult, including the doomed attempt in 1967 by Che Guevara to form a foco in Bolivia, an effort that would cost him his life. The cult of the gun saw most third-world liberation movements, such as the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, devolve into squalid military dictatorships when they took power.

“My little segment of the left worshipped Che,” Rudd said. “We believed in the propaganda of the deed. We were so sure of our strategy, of leading the armed struggle, that we decided to destroy SDS and build the Weather Underground, a revolutionary fighting force. We decided on a tactic, which was to bring thousands of people to Chicago in 1969 for the conspiracy trial [of radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, charged with instigating riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention]. Very few people showed up. We got creamed with beatings, arrests, and even shootings by the cops.”

“After that we went from bad organizing to no organizing,” Rudd said. “It was purely about self-expression. That self-expression would take the form of bombs. The first thing we did was kill three of our own people.”

The premature explosion of a bomb in a New York City townhouse on March 6, 1970, that killed three of Rudd’s comrades sobered the radical group. The bomb was to have been placed at an officers’ dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. It surely would have killed and wounded dozens of people had it exploded at the Army base. The Weather Underground decided to bomb buildings that symbolized centers of power, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, the California attorney general’s office and a New York City police station, but to call in warnings beforehand so the buildings could be evacuated. The group was responsible for 25 bombings and in 1970 organized the prison escape of Timothy Leary, the famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, for which the group was paid $25,000 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a collection of drug dealers.

“A lot of Americans can accept their government’s violence, but they can’t conceive of political violence as anything other than criminal and mentally ill,” Rudd said. “And who has all the power, in terms of violence? Our means of violence is very little. The government’s means, the right wing’s means, are very great. So, we’ve got to adopt nonviolence. The research of Erica Chenoweth and others has shown that nonviolence is much more efficacious than violence. Gene Sharp approaches nonviolence from a practical rather than a moral point of view. It is the difference between moral pacifism and practical pacifism. The antifa kids are not moral pacifists. They believe in a cleansing moral violence. At its base is a desire to absolve themselves of white guilt.”

Rudd cautioned against the danger of intellectualizing the struggle against oppressive forces. He said all resistance had to remain rooted in practical realities and the hard, often anonymous and time-consuming work of organizing.

“As intellectuals, we can talk ourselves into anything,” Rudd said. “If we think it’s necessary we can probably figure out how to do it. David Gilbert is one of the gentlest people I have ever met. Yet he somehow talked himself into driving a getaway van with a bunch of black guys armed with automatic weapons. Gilbert left his kid at a daycare center, thinking he was going back at the end of the day to pick the kid up. Nobody picked up the kid. This is ludicrous. And that’s the point; you can talk yourself into anything. I have a bumper sticker on the back of my car that says don’t believe everything that you think.”

Rudd is acutely aware of the failure by most liberals to fight for the values they purport to defend. However, the repeated betrayal of the oppressed by the liberal class as it mouths the language of justice should not push radicals to acts of violence. Rather, radicals must make strategic alliances with liberals while being fully aware of their propensity to flee from struggle when it becomes difficult.

“The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] was a sister organization of SDS,” Rudd said. “They decided to go to the absolute worst place in the United States, Mississippi, to organize for voting rights. And they did. They lost a lot of people. A lot of people got arrested and beaten. A lot of stuff happened over a three-year period. But they won the right to vote. They organized a non-segregationist democratic delegation called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The real Democratic Party delegation was all-white. The Democratic Party worked out a deal with their allies in the North including the United Auto Workers and other liberals. They would seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Party Convention. They would exclude the segregationists. Busloads of mostly black people went to Atlantic City [site of the convention]. Lyndon Johnson had a change of heart. He feared if he seated the black delegates he would lose re-election. They didn’t get seated. That was an ultimate betrayal. Out of this betrayal came the impetus for black power. Black power was supposedly a strategy. But it was no more a strategy than the Weather Underground. It was another form of self-expression.”

“I was 18,” Rudd said. “I saw heroic SNCC people advocating for black power. The liberals betrayed them. Which side would you be on? Black power rejected the nonviolence of Martin Luther King. It rejected integration. Malcolm X used the slogan ‘By any means necessary.’ This was seized upon to justify revolutionary violence. It was the same fantasy of revolution. Black power was no more embraced by the black masses than the violence and rhetoric of the Weather Underground were embraced by the white masses. In the end, the white left became the base of the Black Panther Party. The Panther 21 was set up on charges of a bombing in April 1969. SDS in New York, which I was a part of, protested to defend them. Our demonstrations became more and more white. The black base was not behind them. I thought the reason was our presence. I was so steeped in black power ideology I thought the mere presence of white people would keep black people away. That wasn’t it. Black power made no sense to most black people. It was suicidal. Huey P. Newton’s autobiography, “Revolutionary Suicide,” captured it. What kind of a strategy is that? The black power movement was a cultural uprising. But it was not strategic. We fell for this bullshit.”

“White radicals felt personally challenged by black power,” he said. “Would we be liberals or would we be radicals? Would we go to the base, to the origin of the problem, which is capitalism and imperialism? Would we embrace ‘by any means necessary’? Would we overthrow the system? Or would we be liberal reformists? When you’re 18 or 20 that’s not much of a question. This is why David Gilbert is in prison for the rest of his life.”

“What we did was a historical crime,” he said of the destruction of the SDS. “At the height of the war in 1969 we decided to close down the national and regional offices and the newspaper of the largest student radical organization in the country. SDS had chapters in 400 campuses. We probably had 100,000 active members. It was crazy. Three of our people died immediately. We inspired copycat actions. One of them happened in the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1970. An anti-war graduate student died. Eventually, it led to the Brink’s robbery in 1981. The worst thing of all, of all the things we did, was we split the anti-war movement over the bogus issue of armed struggle, our right to an armed struggle. This is the same thing as the call by antifa for diversity of tactics, which is a code word for violence.”

“The thing about nonviolence is that it works,” he said. “But it only works if it’s total. The cops put the burden of violence on protesters. Our job is to do the opposite. Our job is to make it crystal clear it’s the government and the system that engages violence. We muddy the water when we use violence.”

“The left has not hit on a strategy analogous to the far-right strategy, which is to unite ideological conservatives with a base, especially the Christian fundamentalist base,” he said. “A base means people show up. They vote. They go where they’re told. That was the old union model for the Democratic Party. But with unions depleted we have no institutional or structural base. This is a huge problem. We have to rebuild structures. It’s going to take a long time, maybe 20 or 40 years. I’ll be 110.”

“Antifa claims to be anarchist,” he said. “But is not the same anarchism as, say, the Wobblies. Antifa’s version of anarchism is you can’t tell me what to do. It’s self-expression. I fell into the trap of self-expression. Self-expression is narcissistic. It’s saying my feelings are so important that I can do anything I want. It’s saying once other people see how important my feelings are they will join me. It never works. There’s only two kinds of people who advocate for violence—very stupid people, of which I was one, and cops. Which are you? Are you very stupid or are you a cop?”

“I can’t communicate with antifa because my own PTSD forbids me to say you are so morally right, so courageous and so morally pure,” Rudd said. “You understand how violent the system is. You understand what it’s like to be nonwhite. I understand your motives. I applaud you for it. This is the only thing they hear, words that feed their self-adulation.”

“I’m a veteran of all of this shit,” he lamented. “But that doesn’t count for anything. It’s all expired.”