The Washington Post National Weekly - July 16, 2017

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

the calling Why do people become activists?

Ten stories of tenacity in action.

PAGE 12

Politics Trump campaign’s scramble 4

Nation Shkreli trial has novel defense 8

5 Myths Hippies 23

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

2

RTH CENT

RAL WAS

HINGTO

N

s l l i h t oo

WENATCH

EE u LEAV

ENWOR

TH

D AL AN AN u CH EL u

L OF NO

st 2017 July-Augu

Inside

ca Region’s

cream We apullnksIce Cream Whistle flavor is a local

of the July-August 2017

Foothills Magazine Whistlepunk Ice Cream • Camping in NCW • Local Rodeo Riders • Beaumont Cellars • Summer Punch Recipes

h e punc m o s d Ad er r summ u o y o t he stars Undermtping spots offer variety

Pick up a copy

Nose Mr. Religdht treatment

ts Spot L-Bow ge

CHECK OUT OUR NEWLY REDESIGNED WEBSITE AT

NCWFOOTHILLS.COM • Foothills FREE RACK locations • Subscribe - have Foothills mailed to your home • Link to read Foothills online • Social media links

Read Foothills Magazine online with our new Digital Edition at ncwfoothills.com/digital • Flip pages digitally • Switch to “dynamic view” with thumbnails of each story - looks great on mobile!

• Zoom in and out or double click the story to read in “article view” • Email and share stories on social media right from our digital magazine

NCWFOOTHILLS.COM FACEBOOK.COM/FOOTHILLS.MAGAZINE @FOOTHILLSMAG

@FOOTHILLS_MAGAZINE

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Takeaways from Wray’s hearing BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

M

ore than two months after President Trump fired FBI director James B. Comey, Congress is very carefully, very warily considering his replace-

ment.

The person Trump picked to replace Comey, former Justice Department official Christopher A. Wray, could be taking over an intelligence agency that has been simultaneously investigating the president and attacked by him.

Wray’s task this week was to persuade the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will vote to send his nomination to the full Senate for approval, that he would rather get fired than bend to political pressure. And he attempted to do just that. Here are five key takeaways from the Wednesday hearing: 1. Trump could fire Wray, too At least one powerful Republican laid the groundwork for the president to do just that.

In his opening statement, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) reminded everyone that, yes, FBI directors are approved by the Senate to serve for 10 years, but the president has unilateral authority to fire them at any time.

“The term limit is a ceiling, not a floor, and while independence from partisanship is critical . . . history shows a 10-year term limit isn’t there to protect the FBI from politicians or politics,” Grassley said. “It’s to help protect the FBI director from overreaching or abusing power.”

2. Wray said he’d probably resign first if things got really sticky Trump’s firing of Comey because of “this Russia thing” spooked members of Congress.

So Democrats and some Republicans were almost singularly focused on drawing commit-

KLMNO WEEKLY

ment from Wray that he would push back against political pressure on the FBI. Wray appeared to say all the right things about independence. He said he’s never been asked nor would he give the president a loyalty pledge, as Trump allegedly asked Comey for.

And, perhaps most importantly, he said he’d resign if asked by the president to do anything “illegal, unconstitutional or even morally repugnant.” He specifically drew the line on

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Christopher Wray during his confirmation hearing to be the FBI director.

Trump trying to interfere with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian meddling and the president’s alleged attempts to obstruct justice. Wray also said he didn’t know whether the president had the authority to fire Mueller.

3. Wray and Trump are polar opposites on some big issues Trump thinks torture works; Wray thinks torture is “wrong” and “ineffective.”

Trump thinks the investigation into him and his presidential campaign is “the greatest Witch Hunt of a politician in American history. Sad!” Wray said he does “not consider Director Mueller to be on a witch hunt.”

Trump’s allies have tried to discredit Muel-

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 40

ler as Trump has toyed with firing him; Wray says Mueller is a “straight shooter.”

Trump won’t say whether Russia alone meddled in the U.S. election; Wray says he has “no reason whatsoever to doubt the assessment of the intelligence community” that Russia did meddle.

Trump thinks Comey was a “nut job;” Wray doesn’t: “In all my dealing with Jim Comey, he was a terrific lawyer, a dedicated public servant and a wonderful colleague.”

Trump shared highly classified information with Russians; Wray says it’d be extremely dangerous to share classified information that could put U.S. sources abroad at risk.

4. Wray thinks the Trump administration should have handled its Russia interactions differently Wray wouldn’t comment specifically on news that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. But he did underscore that it was probably not a good idea by saying two things in particular.

First: “Russia is a foreign nation that we have to deal with very warily.”

Second: Any politician who gets approached

by Russia (or Ukraine) about their election shouldn’t take the meeting. Legal red flags should go up, and they should call the FBI. “Any threat or any effort to interfere in our election from any nation state or nonstate actor is the kind of thing the FBI would want to know,” Wray said.

5. It doesn’t look like he’ll have a problem getting confirmed A couple hours into the hearing, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said what seemed even the most skeptical Democrats were thinking: Wray passed the test. “I think you had a good hearing today, and I wish you luck.” n

© The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS XYXXYYX

4 8 10 12 18 20 23 X

ON THE COVER Jenny Beth Martin became part of the tea party movement at its inception. She is one of 10 activists who shared the story behind their journey.

Photograph by KK OTTESEN for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

A campaign pushing to catch up

JUSTIN LANE/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Email to Donald Trump Jr. came amid scramble to gain ground on Hillary Clinton BY

A BBY P HILLIP

I

t was June 7, 2016, and Donald Trump stood on the stage at his Westchester County, N.Y., golf club to launch his general-election race against Hillary Clinton with a big promise.

“I am going to give a major speech,” Trump declared, before his gaze drifted away from the prepared remarks on the teleprompter at the close of an unusually subdued primary-night speech. “Probably Monday of next

week. And we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.

“I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting,” he added.

Hours earlier, his son Donald Jr. hit send on an email confirming a meeting with a lawyer with alleged ties to the Russian government with the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

The meeting occurred two days later on June 9 in Trump Tower,

attended by Trump’s chief campaign strategist, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But it was a disappointment, according to Trump Jr., who said last week that the Russians didn’t have what they promised.

And the major speech about the Clintons that Trump promised never materialized.

The two events, just hours apart, are now part of a ballooning controversy over the Russians’ efforts to intervene in the 2016 election and investigations

Donald Trump Jr. gets in an elevator in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, where he met with a Russian lawyer for information about Hillary Clinton in June 2016.

by an FBI special counsel and Congress into whether Trump campaign associates might have colluded with them. They also highlight the freewheeling nature of the Trump campaign, which at that moment found itself unprepared and underfinanced to face Clinton’s machinelike campaign in the general election.

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Trump denied that he knew about his son’s meeting with the Russian lawyer until recent

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

5

POLITICS days, but he defended Trump Jr.’s decision to hold it.

“No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” Trump said. “I think many people would have held that meeting.”

In early June of last year, Trump and his children were itching for a fight with Clinton but had little in the way of experienced political hands with clout to navigate the complexities of a presidential general-election contest. Some Trump associates say Trump Jr. was responding to a real need within the campaign to catch up with Clinton — and fast.

“You always take those meetings because you never know when someone will come in with something that’s a game changer, especially with this campaign that didn’t have a research operation,” said one former Trump campaign adviser still in touch with the White House who, like several others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “They were so desperate for research that they would meet with anyone.”

The day of Trump Jr.’s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer with alleged ties to the Kremlin, was a busy one on the campaign trail. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus had arrived in New York to join Manafort at a meeting of major GOP donors at Trump Tower aimed at jump-starting the campaign’s general-election fundraising efforts as they pushed to catch up with Clinton.

At the same time, Trump faced the prospect of an open revolt at the Republican National Convention and a fierce fight for delegates at state conventions. Meanwhile, his public poll numbers were in a free fall, taking him from a virtual tie with Clinton to a six-point deficit, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polls.

Before the end of the month, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — and elevated Manafort — as his two eldest children, Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, flexed their power.

The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, was flush with cash and preparing to tout the endorsement of President Barack Obama.

They had finally secured the Democratic nomination and felt confident that they had settled on a strong argument against Trump.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Former Trump aides paint a picture of a campaign that — much like the Trump White House now — was consumed by shifting power dynamics. Manafort’s feud with Lewandowski had deteriorated into an “ugly” war, according to one former Trump adviser, and Trump Jr. had taken Manafort’s side.

So when the candidate’s son — who had no previous political experience — accepted the meeting at the behest of a wealthy friend and business partner, he was able to recruit serious campaign firepower to attend.

According to Veselnitskaya, Kushner and Manafort seemed distracted. Kushner, she claimed last week in an interview with NBC News, left the room after 10 minutes while Manafort passed the time by looking at his phone.

Yet, if either man had reservations about the meeting, they did nothing to keep it from occurring.

“Paul Manafort should have stopped this,” said one former Trump campaign official, but he didn’t want to anger Trump Jr. because “he was about to ascend.”

Trump Jr. explains away the meeting as a fruitless, but standard attempt by the campaign to gather damaging information on a political opponent.

“Honestly, my takeaway when all of this was going on, is that someone has information on our opponent,” he told Fox News last

week. “Things are going a million miles per hour.”

“You know what it’s like to be on a campaign,” he added.

But according to multiple former campaign officials and observers, Trump’s children knew very little about how campaigns were supposed to respond to offers from foreign, adversarial governments.

“I worked on a campaign in 2007 and 2008, and I was the Russia adviser to President Obama and we vetted these kinds of meetings very closely, precisely to avoid even the appearance of something like this,” said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. “That was my experience, that was my job. I’m not sure who did this for the Trump campaign, but that was my job.”

On the campaign trail that week and on social media, Trump had begun ramping up his attacks on Clinton, drawing attention to her “missing” emails and promising to unspool a web of corruption during her time as secretary of state.

To former Clinton aides, Trump’s promise of damaging information at the June 7 news conference takes on new meaning in light of the revelations about Trump Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya.

“This one is pretty intriguing,” former Clinton aide Brian Fallon said. “It’s just like him to go off

President Trump leaves the White House on July 12 for a trip to France. He denied knowing about his son’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer until recent days but defended his decision to hold it.

“Honestly, my takeaway when all of this was going on, is that someone has information on our opponent.”

Donald Trump Jr. on taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer in 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

half-cocked and make an announcement in anticipation that he’s going to have some info that he doesn’t have yet.”

Like Trump, the general election officially began for Clinton that day. But her fight with Trump really started days earlier in San Diego in a June 2 speech that her aides viewed as a turning point in the race.

In it, she gave her most fullthroated criticism of Trump to date in an acerbic, mocking address on foreign policy.

“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes,” Clinton declared. “Because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.”

“He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals and admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has ‘a very good brain,’ ” she continued, eliciting from the crowd the very sort of reaction that would irk her opponent: a cackle of laughter.

It is not clear what information Trump may have been referring to at his news conference, but Clinton campaign aides who had been girding for another Trump curveball saw the moment come and go.

Trump’s aides saw it as a sign of his urge to engage with Clinton.

“My sense is that it’s what he wanted to have happen and for whatever reason it didn’t,” said Ed Brookover, a former campaign adviser to Trump and former campaign manager to Ben Carson’s presidential bid.

As Trump’s children ascended within the campaign, experienced political hands were marginalized, according to another former Trump campaign aide. Trump’s meteoric success despite mounting controversy only bolstered their view that experienced political professionals were overpaid and ineffectual, pushing them to find their own solutions to the campaign’s problems.

“Every time some Washington political person, Reince or somebody else, told them that what just happened was lethal and it wasn’t, all they learned was not to listen to the Washington people — they didn’t need them,” said the former aide.

“My guess is that Don Jr. had never seen an opposition research book,” the former aide added. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Lost and crowned BY

B EN T ERRIS

hungry to figure out who could potentially fill it.”

And Kander has raised his profile so much since the election that many have been wondering whether he might be better off than had he won.

“I don’t know about that,” said Abe Rakov, Kander’s former campaign manager and longtime political guru. “But from his personal perspective, he is happier than I’ve ever seen him. He’s fighting the battles he wants to every day and doesn’t have to do some of the things he’d have to had he won.”

J

ason Kander doesn’t feel like a loser.

He doesn’t feel much like a millennial either, whatever that means.

But having lost his bid to represent Missouri in the United States Senate at the age of 35 last year, he is, technically, both of those things. And so, on a recent Wednesday evening, one of the oldest, losing-est millennials in American politics headed to the annual gathering of the High School Democrats of America to speak about, what else, the future of their party.

“We are, believe it or not, in the same generation,” Kander, now 36, told the group of about 100 17-year-olds seated in a George Washington University auditorium. “It’s our generation that will have to fix all this stuff.”

He might seem like an odd person to deliver this message, considering that voters decided against sending him to Washington to be the fixer of things. But Kander still has a lot to offer — and Democrats aren’t in a position to turn away young talent.

The Army veteran and former Missouri secretary of state rose to national prominence thanks to a quirky campaign ad in which he assembled a rifle blindfolded; he went on to outperform Hillary Clinton by 16 percentage points in his state, winning over about 200,000 voters who also pulled the lever for Donald Trump. But in the end, he came up just short against the Republican incumbent, Sen. Roy Blunt.

Kander wasted no time turning a loss into a win. He started a nonprofit aimed at fighting voter suppression, giving him a campaign-like infrastructure to raise money for Democratic candidates and speak at events throughout the country. In the past six months he has been to Iowa and New Hampshire twice and attended events in Colorado, Arizona and Tennessee, to name a few.

So when Kander speaks in front of groups such as this, they don’t ask what gives him the right to

I TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST

Jason Kander was defeated in his Senate race.

In today’s Democratic Party, he’s still a rising star. lecture anyone about the path forward. Instead, people say things like this: “I’m wondering,” a young woman from New York broached during his Q&A segment, “if you will ever run for president.”

“It is always very flattering when people ask that,” he replied.

“I’m just really focused on making sure we still hold elections. And then maybe one day I’ll be in one.”

Democrats are desperate for something, for someone, to get excited about — and these days, some of their most thrilling figures are losers. None more so than Jason Kander.

I

n 1996, the author Michael Lewis spent 10 months following the presidential candidates he knew would never win, for a book he titled “Trail Fever.”

He wanted to call it “Losers,” he wrote later, but the publisher said no.

It was the losers, he contended,

who took real risks, who shaped debates — and whose best ideas were stolen by the focus-grouped weenies who actually won.

“I’m biased, but I think that you can accomplish more with a transformative loss than with 100 mundane victories,” said Tom Perriello, the young liberal who maintained such hero status after losing the central Virginia congressional seat he held for one term that he was hailed as a game-changer when he entered the 2017 Democratic gubernatorial primary (which he lost).

How’s that?

Perriello didn’t get to become governor, but he’s stumping for the Democratic nominee, Ralph Northam, and he takes pride in helping the state party lurch leftward.

“The party is yearning to figure out its next-generation leaders,” said Brian Fallon, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman.

“There’s a void, and people are

Jason Kander calls President Trump’s voter fraud claims “the biggest lie a sitting president has ever told.”

n 2016, Kander was widely considered the best Democratic recruit running for Senate.

He had the look: young and fit, a guy comfortable in a skinny tie or fatigues. He had the life story: Married to his high school sweetheart, he had joined the military after 9/11, served in Afghanistan and came home to enter politics, eventually becoming the first millennial to hold statewide office in the country.

And perhaps most impressive for a politician, he kind of seemed like a normal guy.

“That’s a compliment reserved only for politicians,” Kander said.

But to a lot of folks in the Democratic Party, there’s nothing normal about his charisma.

“There is a reflectiveness, a coolness, a reasonable approach to talking about politics that he shares with President Obama,” said Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the Obama White House. And bear in mind: “Obama did lose his first race for federal office, too,” said Dan Pfeiffer, another veteran of the 44th president’s communications shop.

The night Kander lost, he stood in front of a ballroom of supporters in a neatly pressed suit to offer a concession speech he hadn’t bothered to prepare beforehand.

He urged young people not to give up on politics, that it would personally offend him if they did.

Shortly thereafter, Trump began proclaiming, without a shred of evidence, that millions had voted illegally to rob him of a popular-vote victory — and Kander

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

7

POLITICS found his new mission.

“That’s the biggest lie a sitting president has ever told,” he says now.

Republicans, he feared, could use this bogus claim to usher in efforts to make it more difficult for some people to vote, such as stringent photo-ID requirements.

So he created Let America Vote, an organization dedicated to ousting Republicans he considered to be on the wrong side of the issue.

It’s a platform that has kept Kander in the public eye, especially now that Trump has moved forward with establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

He speaks to Democratic groups about progressive values and what it took for a liberal to almost win in a red state (“Voters are okay with you believing something they don’t believe, as long as they think you genuinely believe it, and you believe it because you care about them”), and tries to remind a despondent party that maybe there are still some reasons for optimism.

Or, if you will, hope.

B

efore speaking to the High School Democrats, Kander made a surprise appearance at a rally against the Republicans’ health-care bill, held outside the Capitol. Police tape kept him, and protesters, away from the building where he might have been casting a vote to save Obamacare, had things broken differently for him in November.

Yet in this crowd, it was as if he had won that race and was on his way to something bigger. Mobs of young activists hounded him for photos.

“Can I take a snap with you?” asked Jessica Blum, 23.

“Can I take a snap, too?” asked Meghan Mahoney, also 23.

Kander moved on, to join the hosts of the popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America” as they did a broadcast from the scene, and the young activists walked away, uploading their photos to social media.

“It’s just really refreshing to see someone like Jason out here,” Blum said. “He’s hope at a moment when there isn’t any hope.”

“If he runs for something again, I’m moving there to help him,” Mahoney said. “Wherever it is. I don’t care. I’m there.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Health-bill revision could help the upper middle class BY

M AX E HRENFREUND

A

new tax break for the upper middle class was offered up Thursday in Senate Republicans’ revised version of their bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. The legislation would make health insurance premiums more affordable for consumers who buy the kinds of inexpensive policies that are crucial to the GOP healthcare agenda. Yet independent analysts caution that the benefits would mainly accrue to affluent households, and the provision might not substantially expand coverage among the uninsured.

The language relates to health savings accounts (HSAs), vehicles that allow consumers to set aside a portion of their income without it being taxed and then use that money to pay for medical expenses.

Currently, the accounts can be used only for out-of-pocket costs such as insurance deductibles and co-payments. The GOP bill would allow owners of these accounts to use the money to pay for premiums, as well. Doing so would make the accounts much more attractive, allowing taxpayers to claim a break on a major monthly expense rather than only on their out-ofpocket costs for doctor visits and other health-care items.

The provision would primarily benefit more-affluent households, in part because they are the ones that can afford to divert money into the accounts. And because marginal rates on income are steeper for wealthier taxpayers, they save more when they are able to write off an expense and reduce the income on which they have to pay taxes.

About 44 percent of households — mostly those that are less well off — do not pay any federal income tax, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These households would not benefit from being able to pay premiums out of HSAs. Additionally, the most impor-

OLIVER CONTRERAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Thursday at the Capitol. A bill change he pushed for could make health savings accounts more common.

tant benefits would go to people who are too affluent to qualify for the federal subsidies that would be available to help modest-income households buy private coverage on the individual market. Since the subsidies cover part of the cost of premiums, those who receive them would be able to deduct less from their incomes.

Under the GOP bill, the subsidies would be available to households at up to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $71,000 for a family of three.

For that reason, critics of the GOP bill were skeptical that the change with HSAs would help uninsured Americans obtain coverage, noting that many who would be wealthy enough to benefit meaningfully already have insurance — coverage typically through an employer.

“It’s going to provide the greatest benefits to higher-income people who already can afford health insurance, so it’s not going to do much in the way of helping people afford coverage who are going to lose it,” said Edwin Park, a vice president for health policy at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — the two nonpartisan agencies responsible for supplying lawmakers with information about federal taxes and

spending — have forecast in a preliminary analysis that the latest change to the rules around HSAs would increase coverage, according to a Senate aide. But a precise estimate was not yet available.

Predicting exactly how the provision would affect the number of uninsured Americans would be extremely difficult, outside experts said, and the result would depend on how the change would interact with other revisions. For instance, another element of the bill — put forward by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — could also make HSAs more common.

Under current federal law, the accounts are available only for people who purchase plans with higher deductibles. Cruz’s proposal would make it easier for insurance companies to offer such policies, and if HSAs were more widely available because of the GOP legislation, more people might take advantage of the opportunity to write off their premiums.

Since policymakers have to date not allowed taxpayers to pay for insurance out of their HSAs, any forecasts are part guesswork.

Tom Miller, an economist at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said: “It will be a pretty imprecise guess.”

“The only number that will matter will be supplied” by the CBO and JCT next week, he noted. The two agencies will release a comprehensive analysis of the revised bill.

That new bill would keep several of the ACA taxes paid mainly by the very rich. Initially, GOP lawmakers had proposed repealing those.

One is a levy on the salaries of people earning more than $200,000 a year as individuals, or $250,000 for married couples. The other taxes include a surcharge on certain investments for households in that income category and what is effectively a special tax on the compensation executives receive from their firms in the insurance industry. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

A novel defense in the Shkreli trial R ENAE M ERLE New York BY

N

ot much Martin Shkreli has done the past few weeks has helped him in a trial that could put him behind bars for 20 years for eight counts of securities and wire fraud.

He was personally rebuked by the judge for speaking to reporters about his case inside the Brooklyn courthouse and on the streets outside where jurors could potentially hear him. He has mocked prosecutors on a live stream on his Facebook page and called them a “junior varsity” team to news outlets.

And yet, despite the antics and his attorneys’ acknowledging that Shkreli is an “odd duck,” legal experts say the flamboyant former hedge fund manager is putting on a novel defense that may resonate with jurors.

At the heart of his team’s legal argument is this question: Is his alleged wrongdoing worth a criminal conviction if his investors did not lose money?

Shkreli — who is often called “Pharma Bro” on social media — became infamous for increasing the price of a vital drug used by AIDS patients by 5,000 percent and then publicly lamenting that he didn’t raise it more. But federal authorities say they arrested him because he also lied to his investors about how he was using their cash. None of those investors, however, lost money. Some even made a big profit, largely because Shkreli’s bet on a biopharmaceutical start-up paid off.

If he gets off, it would be an embarrassing loss for federal prosecutors struggling to prove that they can put away prominent Wall Street figures.

“If Shkreli is acquitted, jaws will drop. Given the time, taxpayer money and resources devoted to this case, a defense win would be a huge embarrassment for prosecutors,” said James Goodnow, an attorney with Fennemore Craig, a corporate defense firm.

He added that a defeat could make “prosecutors gun-shy about pursing other high-profile cases,”

KEVIN HAGEN/GETTY IMAGES

The ‘no harm, no foul’ standard at the heart of his team’s argument may resonate with jurors at least in the short term.

To the wealthy elite he courted, Shkreli was a savvy if eccentric Wall Street insider. Shkreli collected millions from those willing to bet on the market instincts of a self-made hedge fund manager from a working-class family in Brooklyn. His investors would reportedly crow about Shkreli’s smarts, including an encyclopedic knowledge of drugs and the ability to memorize medical journals.

Susan Hassan, the daughter of pharmaceutical industry giant Fred Hassan, former chairman of Bausch & Lomb, heard from a friend that Shkreli was a “rising star” in the hedge fund industry and forked over $300,000. She was new to the opaque hedge fund world and considered Shkreli a potential “mentor,” she told jurors.

In the end, she walked away with $400,000 in cash and more than 50,000 shares in Retrophin, a biopharmaceutical company that Shkreli launched. She eventually sold those shares for $900,000, three times her initial investment.

“At the end of the day, you made a hefty profit?” Benjamin Brafman, Shkreli’s bulldog defense attorney, asked her recently. “Yes,” Hassan said, “even more than I asked for.”

During a surprise visit to reporters after Hassan testified, Shkreli made light of her remarks.

“We should all only be this victimized in life,” he said.

“This is a very unusual fraud case in that there aren’t a line of people who lost money, can’t pay rent, and the like,” said Jeff Cramer, managing director of investigations firm Berkeley Research Group and a former federal prosecutor. It is “an enticing argument to a jury.”

But prosecutors say these handsome payoffs were possible only because of an elaborate shell game in which Shkreli used Retrophin cash and assets to pay off discontented investors in his hedge fund, MSMB Capital. MSMB Capital sustained significant losses in 2011 after an investment by Shkreli went sour. After the faulty trade,

Martin Shkreli leaves a Brooklyn courthouse on June 26. Former clients viewed him as a savvy if eccentric Wall Street insider.

one employee testified that Shkreli seemed depressed and sat at his desk with his hoodie up, not speaking.

“I definitely sensed something was wrong, but there was no talk,” testified Caroline Stewart, who conducted research for the hedge fund. “It was like somebody had died. In essence that somebody was the fund.”

Rather than tell his investors of the massive loss, Shkreli raised more money for another hedge fund and then started Retrophin, according to prosecutors. Then as pressure built from unhappy investors, Shkreli gave them Retrophin cash and stock. He looted the company of more than $10 million, according to prosecutors.

“Telling lies on top of lies — this is what that man, Martin Shkreli, did for years,” G. Karthik Srinivasan, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn, told jurors.

Indeed, Brafman, Shkreli’s attorney, acknowledged during opening statements that “not everything he [Shkreli] said was 100 percent accurate, but he was truthful to the mission” of making Retrophin successful.

But simply showing that his investors didn’t lose money might not be enough to save Shkreli from a conviction, according to some legal analysts following the trial.

“The ‘no harm, no foul’ standard may have intuitive appeal, but that’s not the way the law works,” said Goodnow, the Fennemore Craig attorney.

Still, the prosecutors will have to show that Shkreli lied to investors, legal experts say. Based on testimony from investors, the prosecution has already provided evidence that Shkreli mischaracterized the size of his hedge fund, lied about having an independent auditor and exaggerated his connections to high-ranking pharmaceutical executives.

“We’ve got the prosecutors pretty freaked out,” Shkreli said on a Facebook live stream. “The case is falling apart before their eyes, and they don’t know how it’s happening. Sad.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

9

NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Alaskans shrug off missile threat

BY J ULIA

O ’ M ALLEY Anchorage

T

here have been times in Alaska’s history when people have had deep anxiety about foreign threats. The state was bombed and two of its islands were occupied by the Japanese in World War II. And it is, after all, the closest anyone can get to Russia and still be on American soil.

But nobody here seems all that worried right now.

With North Korea’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile earlier in July, the news has been filled with speculation that a nuclear warhead could reach the Last Frontier and that Anchorage could be the most realistic U.S. target for destruction. But people here have been talking about the possibility of missile strikes for decades, and Alaskans tend to focus on more tangible hazards, like avalanches covering the highway, bear maulings at campgrounds, boating accidents and earthquakes.

“I’m worried about moose, not missiles,” quipped Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz. “Bears, not bombs.”

Besides, it’s summertime. The residents of this far-flung outpost are obsessed with the outdoors.

The days are long. The salmon are running.

They have other things on their minds.

“It’s not something that keeps me up at night,” said Christine Homan, an elementary school teacher sitting at the counter at Wild Scoops ice cream shop with her husband, Zach, and sons, Leland, 4, and Colton, 6.

Between bites of salmonberry ice cream, Todd Sherwood, an attorney who served in the Air Force for 15 years, said that if North Korea were to do anything serious, the U.S. military reaction would probably be “disproportionate” and severe. He doubts the threats are legitimate.

“I’m more worried about whether I’m going to fall off my paddleboard on an Alaska glacier lake this summer,” he said. “And I’m not all that worried about that.”

ASH ADAMS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Residents are staying calm amid reports that a North Korea ICBM could reach the state Part of Alaskans’ dismissive attitude about North Korea might have something to do with the state’s history of serious threats from foreign powers, said Michael Carey, a journalist and historian who grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska.

During World War II — on June 3, 1942 — the Alaskan town of Dutch Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, and days later two Aleutian islands, Attu and Kiska, were occupied. Lots of people who lived in Alaska in the 1950s and 1960s remember civil defense drills, siren tests, blackout curtains and radioactive isotopes in milk because of atmospheric nuclear testing. There are still homes in Anchorage with Cold War-era fallout shelters. The proximity to Russia made the fear real, Carey said.

“We knew, if the balloon went up, as they said it, that Fairbanks would be a smoking irradiated

ruin,” Carey said. “The Russians were a really serious adversary we feared and respected. Just the hairdo of our friend Kim, he’s just a sendup. We’re supposed to think the fate of Earth is determined by North Korea? It might be, but it’s just so easily laughed at.”

Ben Clayton, 65, a retired Anchorage fire captain, said he’s not afraid.

“Here’s the deal,” Clayton said, as he got a haircut at Bunn’s Barbershop downtown. “We’ve always been within reach of nuclear weapons, we’ve got some proximity to some fairly well-known bad actors.”

Alaska has a number of military bases with the primary mission of fending off these kinds of threats, Clayton said, noting that the bases are strategic, their soldiers and airmen well-practiced.

As he spoke, the sharp triangles of two military fighter jets from

Cipriana Williams fishes at Ship Creek in Anchorage with her niece. Williams said being hit by an earthquake like the catastrophic one in Anchorage in 1964 is more likely than a North Korean missile.

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson thundered overhead.

What is uncharted territory, he said, is the diplomatic style of the nation’s current leadership in Washington.

“There was a period of time when I thought the State Department and the professional diplomats and, God help us, the president, could keep it even,” he said.

“This is a true political black swan event.”

Adak, at the end of the Aleutian chain, is Alaska’s westernmost town, so far from Anchorage it’s in another time zone. It was once a Navy base, home to thousands of people and specialized radar that was part of the country’s missile defense system. The base closed in the 1990s, and about 100 people live there now. Locals are worked up about a schedule change in the island’s twice-weekly jet service.

North Korea doesn’t figure.

“You’d have to be pretty crazy to pick Adak as a target,” said Adak resident Elaine Smiloff. “What’s the reward for that?”

Last week, Cipriana Williams, 32, cast her line into Ship Creek near downtown Anchorage, looking for sockeye salmon. Her niece Yukari Williams, 5, sat next to her, playing games on an iPad. She said she went fishing to get away from the ugliness of the news.

There are all kinds of risks in life, she said, especially living in Alaska.

Anchorage had a catastrophic earthquake in 1964, for example.

“You live here and you love it, but you know at any moment it could be like ’64, and we’re out,” she said. “It’s just like a shake of the dice, I guess.”

Anchorage, like many cities, has a response plan for both man-made and natural disasters, said Berkowitz, the mayor.

Chances are, if that plan gets activated, it won’t be North Korea that prompts it.

“I’m worried about Juneau’s ability to come up with a fiscal plan. I’m worried about Washington’s ability to come up with a solution on health care,” he said.

“Those are things that have more impact on people here.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

When toothpaste becomes a luxury R ACHELLE K RYGIER Guarenas, Venezuela BY

F

ive years ago, when Hugo Chávez was president and Venezuela was a much different place, Ana Margarita Rangel could still afford to go to the movies and the beach, or to buy the ingredients she needed to bake cakes.

Even three years ago, when the country’s economy was beginning a severe contraction, Rangel earned enough for an occasional treat such as soda or ice cream.

Now she spends everything she earns to fend off hunger. Her shoes are tattered and torn, but she cannot afford new ones. A tube of toothpaste costs half a week’s wages.

“I’ve always loved brushing my teeth before going to sleep. I mean, that’s the rule, right?” said Rangel, who lives in a hillside slum 25 miles west of Caracas, the capital, and works in a cosmetics factory down in the suburban city of Guarenas.

“Now I have to choose,” she said.

“So I do it only in the mornings.”

Rangel earns minimum wage, as does 32 percent of Venezuela’s workforce, according to the most recent official numbers available, released in 2015. That used to mean something in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and a socialist government, led by Chávez, that presented itself as a champion of Venezuelan workers.

But 700 percent annual inflation and chronic shortages of food and medicine have changed the meaning of Venezuela’s “minimum” in profoundly painful ways.

“I remember the times when, like they say around here, we were millionaires and we didn’t know it,” Rangel said.

Venezuela’s intensifying economic and political crisis has brought thousands of anti-government protesters into the streets over the past three months, and at least 75 people have died in the unrest. A large number of Venezuelans are spending everything they earn to avoid starving.

The minimum wage is enough to buy just one-quarter of the food

WIL RIERA/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Despite minimum-wage hikes, Venezuelans are struggling to earn enough to avoid starving needed by a family of five in one month, according to calculations by the Center of Documentation and Analysis for Workers, an independent advocacy group.

On July 1, President Nicolás Maduro raised the monthly minimum wage for the third time this year, to about 250,000 “strong bolivars’ ” worth of cash and food stamps — a 20 percent increase.

With Venezuela’s currency rapidly losing value, the new minimum wage is enough for only about six pounds of milk powder or five cartons of eggs. At the country’s informal exchange rate, the raise brings the average worker’s income to roughly $33 per month.

That is far below the minimum monthly wage in neighboring Colombia — about $250 — or even Haiti, where it is $135.

The government sets price caps on some basic food items, such as pasta, rice and flour. But those items can usually be obtained only by standing in lines for hours or by signing up to receive a subsidized monthly grocery box from the gov-

ernment with enough to feed a family of five for about a week.

Since 2014, the proportion of Venezuelan families in poverty has soared from 48 percent to 82 percent, according to a study published this year by the country’s leading universities. Fiftytwo percent of families live in extreme poverty, according to the survey, and about 31 percent survive on two meals per day at most.

Households that depend on breadwinners earning up to twice the minimum wage are in the latter group.

Rangel considers herself lucky, because she pools her income with the earnings of her three sons. But even with four adults making minimum wage, the refrigerator is almost always empty.

The family has eliminated beef, chicken, salad and fruit from its diet. Instead, Rangel and her sons eat rice, beans, yucca, plantains, sardines and sometimes eggs. “We used to be able to have juice with our meals,” Rangel said. “I miss it so much.”

Bakery workers in Caracas, Venezuela, in March. The government has ordered bakers to use scarce supplies of flour to produce price-controlled loaves.

In Rangel’s neighborhood, it is not uncommon to find people like Rainer Figueroa, a 30-year-old with sleepy eyes who has lost a significant amount of weight.

Figueroa has shed 24 pounds in the past six months, he said, because his minimum wage is only enough for him to eat small portions of food twice a day. The rest of the groceries are for his wife and three children.

Figueroa said he stopped playing soccer this year. “I can’t afford to burn calories or wear out my sneakers,” he said.

Just three years ago, the family would go to a nearby shopping mall for fast-food meals to celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. “It didn’t use to be like this,” he said, with his 7-year-old son standing barefoot beside him.

Figueroa works at a diaper factory that has stopped producing diapers. With shortages of raw materials and imports falling, many Venezuelan plants are operating at half-capacity or less, a situation many economists blame on government mismanagement of prices and currency rates.

Since taking office in 2013 after Chávez’s death, Maduro has decreed 16 increases to the minimum wage. But the purchasing power afforded by the raises in pay is wiped out almost as soon as the ink dries on Maduro’s orders.

In the past three years, the country’s economy has contracted by 24.5 percent, including 11 percent in 2016, according to the independent data firm Ecoanalítica.

Every weekday, Rangel wakes at 4 a.m. to take two buses from the slum to the factory. When she comes home around 2 p.m., she doesn’t do much.

She said she doesn’t even like meeting with her friends anymore. “We always end up talking about all those things we can’t get anymore,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.

She turns on the television instead. “I love watching the Kardashians, because you see how people that have everything live,” she said. “And for a moment you forget what your life is like.” n

©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Celebration and shock in Mosul L OUISA L OVELUCK Mosul, Iraq BY

A

s the sun sank Tuesday over Iraq’s northern city of Mosul, sounds of elation were filling the air.

Families cheered and sang as they clutched their national flag, drivers blasted their horns, and, for a moment, it seemed that the city was united in victory against the Islamic State.

Across the country, the party has also started. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s declaration Monday that the nine-month battle was officially over sent revelers pouring into the streets of Baghdad. In the southern city of Basra, fireworks crackled late into the night.

The celebrations mark a muchneeded respite for a nation in which the traumas of the Islamic State marked only the latest chapter in a years-long unraveling. Defeat here dealt a heavy blow to the militants, robbing them of one of their most important strongholds and dashing their dream of a proto-state.

No one knows how many people have died here during nine grueling months of urban warfare. Half the city’s residents have been displaced; its landmarks and most populous districts are shattered beyond recognition.

The example of other cities recaptured from the Islamic State suggests that the Iraqi government may struggle to rebuild and to resettle the most vulnerable, most of them now packed in displacement camps or the homes of relatives whose houses remain standing.

Sitting still and stunned amid the chaos of an aid distribution point this week, Shaimaa, 17, said she had escaped the fighting alone.

Her sister died in a bombing.

Her three brothers have been missing since they were hauled off to an Islamic State prison last year.

And her parents? “There was an airstrike,” she said, and that was the last time she saw her mother.

“I saw my father’s body in the rubble and I walked away. We got our city back, but there is nothing for me in it.”

Every family around her said they had lost someone to an air-

FELIPE DANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

‘We got our city back, but there is nothing for me in it,’ a survivor said strike or Islamic State shelling.

Sometimes that meant one child; other times it meant five.

Looking back, the fight to retake the city now resembles two separate battles. First, Iraqi security forces took the eastern half of the city. Then they moved on the more densely populated west, relying more heavily on U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and taking heavy casualties as they went.

The eastern districts have sprung back to life. Fruit-sellers line the roads, peddling melons and mulberries in the heat of the day. And shops run a roaring trade, packed at lunchtime, and bustling with life as the sun sets.

But cross the Tigris River heading west, and the cityscape shatters into an ugly sea of broken buildings.

In the Old City, it can be hard to tell where one structure ended and another began.

The only way through some al-

leyways is over the top of those homes. And as you clamber, you see remnants of the lives they once held. Baby clothes and a cheese grater were mixed into the rubble of one house. The stench of rotting flesh suggested the occupants were still there, too — buried, somewhere, deep under the rubble.

Security will remain a huge challenge. The militants have already proved their ability to launch wildcat bombings in neighborhoods long retaken by the security forces. Residents are still uneasy at the prospect of sleeper cells.

“Of course their men are here; everyone knows it,” said Ahmed Wadallah, manning a Mosul nut shop Tuesday. His family have installed security cameras at the door to record the movements of men they know to have joined the Islamic State.

On the eastern bank of the Tigris River, an old fairground has

Airstrikes target Islamic State positions on the edge of Mosul’s Old City a day after Iraq’s prime minister declared “total victory” early last week.

been turned into a screening point to stop fighters from leaving among the civilians. Inside an old bumper-car rink, dozens of men sat in rows last week and waited for their judgment. Military intelligence officers in balaclavas sporadically moved among them to pull out an evacuee accused of working with the militants.

Some went quietly. Others wanted a fight.

“I swear I only prayed in their mosque. I have nothing to do with them,” shouted one man, his back covered in what appeared to be fresh welts.

Speaking from behind his face covering, a thick-set officer waved his colleagues to drag the man away.

“You were walking through the streets with your gun,” he said.

“We saw you.”

The man hung his head, then began to cry. n ©The Washington Post

Photographs, introduction and interviews by KK Ottesen. Lettering by Sawdust

Freedom Rider. Labor leader. Whistleblower. Tax reformer. Activists — in their many forms and with their varied causes — have long challenged and reshaped our social and political consciousness. And their attempts to safeguard our democracy have been critical to the continued success of the American experiment. From sit­ ins to marches to, more recently, offering a rallying cry on Twitter, the following activists have moved us to confront often uncomfortable, sobering realities in our society for more than a half­century. Although the circumstances giving rise to each activist’s campaign are different, all are rooted in a common sense of moral imperative and personal urgency — a feeling that, as John Lewis says, you “cannot be at home with yourself” unless you act. At a time of deep division and resurgent activism around the country, these leaders from across the political spectrum reveal the stories of what has sustained them on their journeys and how they — or how any of us — can heed the call to make a difference. n

Rep. John Lewis (D­Ga.), 77, was a student leader in the civil rights movement, organizing sit­ins and serving as one of the original 13 Freedom Riders. From 1963 to 1966, Lewis was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He has served in Congress since 1987. In 2011 Lewis received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I grew up in rural Alabama. And when we would visit this little place called Troy about 10 miles from our home, I saw the signs that said “white” and “colored.” I didn’t like it. I would ask my mother and my father and my grandparents and my great-grandparents why.

They would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t get in the way. Don’t get in trouble.”

But one day I heard Dr. King speak on the radio. 1955. I was 15. It was an African American station called WRMA. Based in Montgomery. Seemed like he was speaking directly to me. Saying, John Robert, you can do something. You can make a contribution.

And so I followed everything I could about Martin Luther King Jr. and the bus boycott.

The words of Dr. King and the action of Rosa Parks stirred something up. That you cannot be at home with yourself when you see something that you know is not right. You have to do something. You have to say something. It gave me a sense of hope.

I met Rosa Parks when I was 17. The next year I met Dr. King. Changed my life. Inspired me to get involved in the movement. And James Lawson, a young minister, who started teaching us students in Nashville the way of peace, the way of love — the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. Preparing us to go and sit in on a lunch counter, stand in at a theater, preparing us to be leaders, to be activists. And I knew that I was on the path.

The moment I was first placed under arrest at a sit-in, I felt free. I felt liberated. I

Dolores Huerta, 87, rose to prominence as an or­ ganizer, labor leader and civil rights activist in California. In 1962, she and Cesar Chavez found­ ed the National Farm Workers Association (now United Farm Workers), through which they led boycotts and negotiated better conditions and pay for farmworkers. Huerta received the Presi­ dential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

felt like I crossed over. That this is not just for this moment or this day or next week or next year. But a way of life. There’s something I call the spirit of history: Sometimes you’re tracked down by a force, and you cannot turn away. So I never thought about saying I’m tired, I’m ready to drop out. You have to continue to pick ’em up and put ’em down.

Because there’s so much work to be done.

And you never know how much time you have. And you have to use your time wisely.

You have to believe, somehow and some way, in the possibility that we will reconcile to each other as humans. So you study. You meditate. And you forgive. On the Freedom Ride in Rock Hill, South Carolina, members of the Klan beat us and left us in a pool of blood. In 2009, one of the guys that beat us came to this office. He was in his 70s. He came with his son. He said, “Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people that beat you and your seatmate. Will you forgive me? I want to apologize.”

His son started crying first. Then he started crying. They hugged me. I hugged them back. And the three of us cried together.

That is the power of the way of love.

So even if someone is beating you, knocking you down, even if you’re down on the ground trying to protect your head, you try to maintain eye contact. Let the person who’s trying to hurt you see your humanity.

I was actually very shy as a child, but my mother was always pushing me to get out there and be active. So I got involved in a lot of organizations in our community: the Girl Scouts, a church club called the Teresitas after St. Teresa, a club called Azul y Oro. In high school I organized a teen center. A lot of my friends were poor and didn’t really have money to go places. We brought in a jukebox, table tennis, just trying to create a space where kids could come together and socialize. But the police shut us down. They didn’t want the interracial — we were a very multiethnic group.

We had white kids, African American friends and Asians, Filipinos and Mexicans, all together.

All the time I’d been doing the social organizing and never being able to do anything that I thought really changed things. But in college, one of my professors invited me to this house meeting with a man named Fred Ross.

Mr. Ross was organizing the Community Service Organization, CSO. He showed us how they had brought streetlights and clinics into East Los Angeles, how they had organized to get a Latino elected to the City Council, how they had sent these police to prison for beating up Mexican Americans. That meeting transformed my life. I had to belong to that organization. I set up house meetings, would register voters, went to Sacramento to lobby. I became the legislative advocate and then political director. We took on all different issues with CSO, but the farmworker issue was the one that really got me. The fact that ordinary people — poor people, farmworkers — have that power to make changes in the community. Both Cesar Chavez and I wanted to organize a farmworkers union, and CSO didn’t support that, so we left CSO. Talk about a big moment: I’m going through a divorce. I had seven kids by then. And I make a decision to go to Delano to start the union with Cesar, leaving a job with stable income and not knowing literally where our next meal was coming from. The only thing that worried me was my kids. Because I had a wonderful middle-class upbringing — music lessons, dance lessons, able to go to movies and all that.

And my kids, we had really come down to the poverty level of the farmworkers. Cesar’s wife, her sister would go down to the food bank and get the beans and rice, oatmeal and cornmeal so that we could eat.

I’m 87 years old. People say, “Why don’t you retire?” Well, if I can reach more people and get them involved in organizing to make a change in their lives, I think that’s worth every single additional year that I can live.

Harry Belafonte, 90, an award­winning singer, songwriter and actor, became active early in the civil rights movement, helping finance SNCC, the Freedom Rides and voter registra­ tion drives. He served as confidant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped or­ ganize the March on Washington.

I became an activist because I was born into poverty. And the experiences of poverty and the cruel way in which it treated my family and the members of my community and the members of my race constantly imposed itself on my sense of What do I do about it?

The indignities that were heaped upon my mother. Her valiant struggle against being undereducated and being unskilled and being a woman of color and being an immigrant was a cruel burden. There was always the suggestion that there was a life to be aspired to that was better than the one we were experiencing. And I never could quite understand why it was denied us.

I think what to do about this poverty, this disparity was nurtured by my mother’s tenaciousness, her dignity, her wit — and her instruction. I remember once she came home from an unrewarding day trying to find work, very despondent and just sitting down and staring at the wall in our oneroom apartment. After a fairly lengthy silence, I asked her what was the matter. She stared at me for a while, and all she said was, “Harry, boy, just promise me one thing.

That as you’re growing up and you see injustice, never fail to stop and do something about it.” And though that was a rather confusing and daunting instruction for a 7-year-old, it lingered. The thought rooted itself. And wherever I went, I would find zero tolerance for injustice.

After serving in the Second World War, after the great victory against Hitler and fascism, I came back and found that black people, who fought the same battle and died the same death, were denied the right to vote, denied access to schools, to places to live. I was working as a janitor’s assistant in an apartment building, and one day I was given a gratuity for doing a repair: two tickets to the American Negro Theater. The evening was an epiphany. In the arts, I found a platform where people were saying things that needed to be said, defiantly and poetically and with reward. And through the instruction of people like Paul Robeson, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and others, I began to understand the power of art. I could do something, say something about oppression.

I could use my voice in the service of their social agendas.

So I did my “Banana Boat,” my “Day-O,” because these songs, while they entertain, were songs of the peasants in Jamaica working on the banana plantation. I found all the songs I could that were filled with social content. There were those who denounced me for bringing politics into art; there were

* Pictured on the cover

Jenny Beth Martin, 47, became active in the tea party movement at its inception, first locally in Georgia and then as a co­founder and now pres­ ident of the national Tea Party Patriots, which focuses on fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government.

those who rewarded me handsomely. And when the blacklist really energized itself to destroy careers, my audience stayed fiercely loyal. So any television show or sponsor that didn’t want me: fine.

And what do we get as a result of that struggle, at least at the moment? A campaign to dismantle everything we gained. But it’s not Trump that bothers me. There’s always a Trump somewhere. A McCarthy. It’s that we let the moment get away. But giving up? How do you do that? I see activists at all levels of our civil society. We’re in abundance.

“In the arts, I found a platform where people were saying things that needed to be said, defiantly and poetically and with reward.”

I’ve lived through financial crisis. And it puts things in perspective. In 2007 and 2008, my husband at the time, his business went through trouble. He wound up having to close his business, and we ultimately filed personal bankruptcy.

So that fall, when the TARP bill passed, the bank bailouts, we sat there watching and going: Wait a minute, this is wrong.

Businesses fail. Our business failed. And as much as life sucks right now, we’re rolling up our sleeves and finding a way to rebuild. I don’t want the government taking care of me, and I sure don’t want the government taking care of these other businesses. So fast-forward a couple months. Rick Santelli has this rant on CNBC: The stimulus bill is awful. Our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves. Who here wants to pay for your neighbor’s home who has more bathrooms than you, and they can’t even afford it? We should have a tea party just like our Founding Fathers. I heard that on the radio and knew I had to be involved. I started tweeting about it using #TCOT and #SGP. Smart girl politics and top conservatives on Twitter.

The next day, we got on a conference call, about 22 of us, and decided we’re going to have a tea party. Seven days later, we had 48 tea parties across the country with 35,000 people in attendance. I had never even been to a protest before. Initially, the protests were focused towards Democrats, because they were in control, but when Republicans began to have control of the House our focus wound up being on Republicans as much as Democrats. But it wasn’t about elections. It was about issues and legislation. The debt that our country faces.

I think one moment when I really did stop and just go, I can’t believe that I’m doing this — this is not what I ever pictured my life to be, was when Obamacare was being argued in front of the Supreme Court in 2012. I was out there for all three days. I just remember thinking: I’m one of those people who protest outside of the Supreme Court. Wait, I’m one of those people who organized a protest outside the Supreme Court.

There is always a struggle between people who have power and people who want to be free. This isn’t new. But the desire to be free is such a strong, innate desire in all of us that I am optimistic. So as difficult as things are in our country, we’re not in the middle of a revolution, we’re not in the middle of a civil war, and we’re not in the middle of World War II. We have repealed constitutional amendments. We ended slavery. We stopped segregation. And the problems that face us today, we’re going to be able to overcome them.

Ralph Nader, 83, has championed consumer rights, environmental protection and public ac­ countability in his decades of activism. Nader’s advocacy has led to the enactment of several major pieces of legislation, including the Free­ dom of Information Act. He has founded several watchdog groups and has run for president of the United States.

We didn’t start with any money or power. Just knowledge and action.

People would say to my mother, “Mrs. Nader, you’re raising four children. How do you find time to be active in the community?”

And she said, “There’s really not that sharp a line, is there? If the community isn’t good, what kind of environment is it to raise a family?” That was part of growing up. “You like to be free, Ralph?” “Yeah.” “Okay, well, you have to be responsible for that.”

The other side of freedom is citizen responsibility. You’ve got to go to town meetings. You’ve got to vote sensibly. My parents used to take us to the town meetings so we could watch and listen. My dad would say, “If you don’t use your rights, you lose your rights.” That is incredibly profound.

Because that’s what’s happened to our society in the last 40 years.

The best example is my mother. Our town of Winsted, Connecticut, was destroyed twice — 1938 and 1955 — by huge floods. In ’55, Hurricane Diane took half of Main Street down with it. Eleven people died. And my mother got fed up. Because people in town would be talking about a dry dam, but they’d just talk. So one day, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W., came to campaign.

She went to the reception and stood in line patiently until she got to him. And she

grabbed his hand and said, “Senator Bush, we’ve lost life here. We’ve lost property. This dry dam is long overdue. Will you promise that you will get it done?” He tried to sweettalk her. And she wouldn’t let go of his hand.

Until he said yes. He got the Corps of Engineers to do it. We’ve never had a problem since.

See, most people know about injustice. They feel it. They complain about it. They grumble.

And we just sort of said, “Okay, what do we do about it?” Are you going to wait around for somebody to say, “I read your article, and I’m rolling up my sleeves?”

Look, all justice movements start from a few citizens. Then they get into the public arena.

Then maybe into legislation. People grow up thinking, Oh, you can’t fight City Hall. Well, if you grow up that way, you don’t even try. You don’t even develop the tools of democracy. Not just the values of justice, fairness and all that.

Instruments, however intangible, of sustaining civic engagement. It’s so easy to have a vibrant democracy. We just have to want it. Value it.

Grover Norquist, 60, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has been a powerful conservative voice advocating for limited government and lower taxes. He is best known for his Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which asks lawmakers to promise no net increases in taxes. Norquist was also an author of the “Contract With America” in 1994.

I grew up during the expansion of the Soviet Union, and I think my first political thoughts were from reading books about it. My public library sold off all their conservative books, so I picked them all up for, like, a nickel. So even as a kid, I had a pretty good idea of what I didn’t want: communism, overbearing government.

And in ’68 — I’d be 12 — I took a train into town

and worked on the Nixon campaign. Then, in ’72, I worked on the campaign again and on House races.

I’ve ended up being in political places where nobody else was doing what I thought needed to be done. The Reagan campaign in ’80, they were taking all the literature out to the suburbs. So we’d go to South Boston and do the bars. Hispanic bars, Eastern European restaurants, different churches.

These guys all were big on Reagan and down on Carter and weren’t being invited to the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan changed the party, changed the country, changed the world. That’s the model: Change the party.

Change the country. Change the world.

When I created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which says no net tax increase, it was for a particular piece of legislation. But then I realized: That’s not what this is. This is redefining the modern Republican Party as the party that won’t raise your taxes, which then forces them to be the party of entitlement reform and government reform.

Because unless you take tax increases off the table, you never reform government.

To expand the coalition, you look for people who are being picked on by the government. And then you bring them in on the pro-freedom thing that motivates them.

So you have evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Mormons — each one thinks everybody else is going to Hades, but: I need to be free to go to heaven and practice my faith with my kids, and I understand that if I’m going to be left alone, we all have to be left alone. Gun people. Home-schoolers. Vapers.

Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, Airbnb. They all want to be left alone, all want freedom.

There’s no excuse for why the United States does better than other places other than freedom. We’re not nicer. We’re not bigger. What made the United States different is a focus on liberty.

If you lived in Belgium, it wouldn’t matter.

You could get everything right in Belgium and still get eaten by the French or the Germans or the Russians or someone. But the whole world moves in a good direction or a bad direction based on whether we are being a free country and good model — or not paying attention.

their own power.

Ezra: We saw the tea party effectively assert that power and take down an incredibly popular president — with huge congressional majorities. So we believed that was a strategy that could work in this environment. By Sunday night, we had hammered out a first draft. Then it was about two weeks of getting comments mostly from former congressional staff and revising.

Within an hour or two of tweeting it out, you couldn’t download or print the guide — there were just too many people trying to view it.

Leah: But it took over our lives immediately. First, we were super excited that people were reading the guide at all.

Then there started to be these Facebook groups like Indivisible Rochester and Indivisible Columbus. People were really running with it.

Ezra: Now we have 5,800 groups. There are at least two groups — and an average of 13 — in every single congressional district in the country.

Leah: We had a lot of volunteers, but in early January it was clear that we needed to figure out a real institutionalized way of continuing to be supportive. Because people were reaching out.

Ezra: We could have said, “Look, we wrote a Google doc and that’s all. More power to you. Figure it out.” But there was this movement growing, asking us for support.

Once all this energy was out there, a lot of members of Congress were saying, I’m not going to hold town halls. They don’t want to look bad in local media. They’re worried about having engaged constituents tell them that they don’t like the Trump administration’s agenda. So we put out a guide on what to do when your member of Congress is hiding from you and how to form these constituent town halls.

The thing is, there was a ton of energy out there. Individuals taking it upon themselves to build groups at the local level. The fact that they’re taking inspiration from the Google doc and calling themselves Indivisible, that’s great.

But the really meaningful thing here is that this is a movement of thousands of people taking control of their country.

Jeanne Mancini, 45, is the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, which hosts its annual march around the anni­ versary of Roe v. Wade. She previously worked at the Family Research Council and the De­ partment of Health and Human Services.

Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, 30 and 31, both worked as congressional staffers on Capi­ tol Hill, as have their Indivisible co­founders, Angel Padilla and Jeremy Haile. Indivisible be­ gan with the publication of a 23­page Google document, “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” Greenberg and Levin married in 2015.

Ezra: After the presidential election, we were going through the stages of grief just like everybody else and started pulling together a group just in our living room to talk about, Okay, what do we do? Then for Thanksgiving, we were back in Austin, where I’m from, meeting in a bar with a college friend. She was telling us about this Facebook group she was part of and how there’s a ton of energy out there, but Congress is a black box if you’re new to the process. So the huge goal of

resisting the Trump administration’s agenda when there is unified conservative government looked hopeless.

Leah: We were like, We need a clear tool kit that explains how members of Congress respond to stimuli and what organized constituent action is. And we were immediately excited because it was something that we, with our congressional experience, could do to give people a sense of

“We put out a guide on what to do when your member of Congress is hiding from you.”

My family was a bit of a leftward-leaning Catholic family. We went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals, and social justice was very much instilled. But I turned out a little differently than most of my siblings, a little more quote-unquote religious.

I had an experience when I was in high school that was profound and life-changing for me, a retreat called Youth Encounter. I think it was the combination of getting away in nature, of hearing affirmations that they had gotten friends and family to write, and a series of talks there about how there was a plan for my life, that I’m a unique, unrepeatable person —

and that’s true of everybody. It was just a beautiful experience of God’s love. And I came away from it with a sense of mission. Which, in some ways, informs what I do now.

After college, I went into the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked in a youth crisis shelter and in residential treatment homes with kids who had either been sexually abused or even had been molesters. We’re talking deep, deep wounds. And I went through a whole kind of philosophical grappling: Would it have been better if these kids never lived? Would that have been more merciful? I came to the opposite perspective: Every life is a gift. Who am I to judge the value of this one’s life or that one’s? So that was very formative in my ultimate calling to pro-life work. I believe that everybody has inherent human dignity, from conception to natural death. And each person has the right to live out their unique mission. I can’t think of a more important social justice cause.

Waking up after the 2016 election, I will say I thought of the Supreme Court. That was really important to me. I’m actually an independent voter. But I feel so strongly about the pro-life issues that I usually end up voting pro-life, which, these days, tends to be more Republican. And it’s incredible what we’ve seen in the first months; the conservative voice is being taken more seriously. And right now, we’re being asked, the March for Life, to submit our founding documents and all of our papers to the women’s history library up at Radcliffe. They came down and visited and basically said, We know that we haven’t always given both sides a voice.

That’s important, because there’s so much divisiveness right now. And for folks like me, whose issues can be considered a little bit more contentious, there can be so much animosity directed towards us. Frankly, it’s a scary time to be a person that cares so much about this that you’re going to put your neck out. You kind of want to go back into your little cave because it’s gotten so ugly. That’s what really makes me cry, that you can’t even stand up for what you believe without being attacked for it anymore. But you can’t back down because of fear, or what people think, or your reputation. You have to do what you know in your heart is right. How can you not?

Alicia Garza, 36, has been an advocate on issues of reproductive health, rights for domestic work­ ers, police brutality, racism and violence against trans and gender nonconforming people of color. Garza co­founded Black Lives Matter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013.

My mom has this thing where she doesn’t sugarcoat stuff. She would tell me growing up that it used to drive her crazy how we use code words to talk about things. She was like, The impacts of that are really serious. There’s no “stork,” for example. Sex makes babies, and babies are expensive. That was her

regular refrain to me. So when I was in middle school and there was a debate happening in my school district over whether or not to allow school nurses to provide condoms, I had strong feelings about it. Bush — the first one — had the “global gag rule” cracking down on any public institution that had any kind of honest conversation about sex and the effects and impacts. So I got involved. I did sex-health education counseling with my peers and wrote op-eds in our local paper.

Black Lives Matter started from a post that I put on Facebook after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing, just trying to process what had happened and wanting to

“You can’t back down because of fear, or what people think, or your reputation.”

find community around being in a lot of grief and having a lot of rage. I woke up the next morning to see that the post had been shared and liked and all these different things. And my sister Patrisse put a hashtag in front of it, which — I didn’t even really know what hashtags were — certainly helped to put the conversation out there much farther. We then had to figure out what our next step was going to be, because there was so much response. I think people were moved in a way that inspired them to want to organize. Basically people were contacting us, saying things like: How can we be a part of this? We want to start a chapter. We want to be a part of this thing called Black Lives Matter.

I’m often surprised at how many people care and want to get involved, and they’ve just never been asked. I’ve been in conversations with family and colleagues where I say to myself, Wow, I assumed that that wouldn’t be something that you cared about. And silly me for assuming that. The best advice I ever got as an organizer was that if you can organize your family, you’re a good organizer. Because it’s not just rhetoric then. These are people who changed your diaper, people who loved on you at your 9th birthday party. And if they know that there’s something that’s really important to you, it does have the potential to change — not just minds, but the way that people act politically.

These things happening now at the federal level are literally impacting whether or not people live or die. More changes are coming, and more suffering is coming. I’m not under any illusions about that. But I am hopeful that people won’t take it lying down.n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

When evangelical life troubles the soul N ONFICTION

A

THE GOSPEL OF SELF How Jesus Joined the GOP

By Terry Heaton Or. 209 pp. $18 paperback

l

REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH B RUENIG

merica’s conservative evangelicals — the individuals behind that Republican bloc known as the religious right — are living in strange times. After eight unhappy years under President Barack Obama (only 24 percent of white evangelicals viewed him favorably as he prepared to leave office), evangelicals can now look to a Republican president and Congress to carry out their political will. Yet it remains to be seen whether President Trump and his crisis-besieged administration will do much good for the religious right and what their future may hold.

How evangelicals became wedded to the political right is a drama in many acts that plays out on a grand stage. It takes in cosmic questions of providence and apocalypse threaded together with earthlier (though no less moving) concerns about money, power and identity. In his book “The Gospel of Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP,” Terry Heaton offers a view of that vast narrative from the personal level. Instead of telling the story of the religious right from a historical or sociological standpoint, Heaton narrates it from the inside, as a producer for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and right-hand man to televangelist and one-time presidential hopeful Pat Robertson. In many ways, the account Heaton supplies is far more disturbing than the big-picture plots.

Heaton, a prolific writer on modern mass media, recounts how he came to work for Robertson at the CBN, the contributions he made to Robertson’s ambitious Christian programming and political mission, and his mentor’s eventual run for president and 12-year tangle with the IRS over the funneling of ministry funds to his political campaign, an activity that caused the CBN to lose its tax exempt status for a while. Heaton was moved to become a television

GARY C. KNAPP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pat Robertson, pictured in 2003, emphasizes God’s miracles and conservative politics on his TV show “The 700 Club.”

producer in the service of the Lord after an intense conversion experience in 1980. He had struggled with “depression, sex, suicide, drugs, and alcohol,” but after his conversion he regained control of his life, and began to read the Bible and watch Christian television, then in its infancy. By 1981, he had taken a job with the CBN, producing stories for Robertson’s “The 700 Club.”

The show is a kind of news magazine comprising several different segments centered on Robertson’s view of the world: Commentators unpack the proper Christian reading of daily news, special features track trends and crises in the church, those miraculously saved or healed appear or call in to tell their tales, and Robertson’s sermons fill in the gaps.

Though the focus is on faith, Robertson’s politics are clear. Robertson informed “700 Club” viewers that Obama was a secret Muslim intent on instituting sharia law around the world; that political assassinations are licit; that welfare programs for the poor are morally wrong; and that food stamps for hungry families lead only to fraud and dependency.

Heaton produced the show’s news segments, personal-interest

stories and miracle reports until 1986, working behind the scenes and growing closer to Robertson.

It’s easy to trace, in his narrative, the ascendency of the religious right as a potent Republican bloc, not least by watching Robertson’s ever-growing designs on the presidency through Heaton’s up-close vantage.

The past several years have yielded a number of books that provide a very clear (and edifying) picture of the movement’s origins.

In 2013, there was “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel,” by Kate Bowler, which traced the unfolding of America’s unique tradition of money-grubbing televangelists squeezing congregants for cash while living large themselves. This year, Frances FitzGerald published “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” which traced today’s demotic, emotive evangelical politics back to the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The tragedy that emerges in “The Gospel of Self ” is what Heaton’s immersion in Robertson’s politicized Christianity did to his own newfound faith. “Little did I realize at the time how [fighting the culture wars] dramatically

weakened my/our beliefs in the capabilities of an almighty God,” he writes. “The 700 Club” aired many segments on miracles, but Robertson refused to broadcast any reports of Christians asking for God’s help and not receiving it.

Heaton reports that Robertson told him that doing so would “cost [his] ministry millions.”

One day, Heaton received a letter from an Indiana father who was an avid “700 Club” fan. He tore into Heaton and Robertson for making his 9-year-old daughter’s death from cancer not only painful but spiritually agonizing.

She, like her father, had been a faithful viewer and had believed Robertson’s claim that true believers receive the miracles they pray for. Worse than her painful illness, the father wrote, “was the rejection she felt from God, because He would not heal her.” Heaton writes that “to this day I pray for that little girl . . . and beg forgiveness for playing a role in what she went through.”

Heaton’s troubles mounted. He found himself lying to Robertson about the miraculous healing of his own back spasms (in reality, despite Robertson’s charismatic prayers, the spasms did not relent), and about helping to direct ministry monies (illegally) to Robertson’s failed 1988 presidential campaign. By the end of his time at the CBN, Heaton writes, he “started drinking heavily, something that would profoundly alter my relationship with the God I loved.”

Robertson presented himself as a shepherd of souls, but in his quest for temporal power, he led his flock astray and left their faith to wither. This isn’t the story one usually hears about the rise of the religious right, but for Christians, it is perhaps the more important one. n Bruenig is an assistant editor for Outlook and PostEverything at The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Growing up gay, lonely in France

A Boston Red Sox legend, unfiltered

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

“T

REVIEWED BY

R ICK W HITAKER

he End of Eddy” is the first novel by a young French writer named Édouard Louis, who is garnering attention around the world. Just 24 years old, Louis has already edited a volume of essays about the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu and co-wrote a leftist manifesto that appeared on the front page of Le Monde and was subsequently reprinted in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“The End of Eddy,” which was a bestseller in France, where it was first published in 2014, is labeled a novel, but it reads like a harrowing memoir, and the author has said publicly that “every word of this book is true, every scene of this book I have experienced.”

Eddy, the narrator, describes at length his miserable adolescence, which was an unrelenting gantlet of abuse.

The book begins: “From my childhood I have no happy memories.” His abusive father dropped out of school to work in a factory like most of his peers, tough guys who drank, fought and passed out more or less every night. He is unloving with Eddy, a gay boy whose gestures and high-pitched voice make him an object of bullying by almost everyone he encounters. His mother stands by her man, not her queer son, and Eddy is increasingly bereft, lonely and wounded: “As I grew up, I could feel my father’s gaze, when it fell on me, grow heavier and heavier, I could feel the terror mounting in him, his powerlessness in the face of the monster he had created and whose oddity became clearer with each passing day. The whole situation seemed too much for my mother, and quite early on she gave up trying to do anything about it.”

Eddy withdraws into a cool shell of inwardness, biding his time, pretending to be unperturbed. “I wandered without seeming to wander,” he says,

“walking with a sure step, always pretending I had something specific to do, someplace to go, and I did such a good job at this that no one could have told I was being shunned.” But his torment only gets worse, culminating in a scene of complete humiliation.

Finally, he flees, as young gay people everywhere have long been compelled to do, to a more urban, safer environment. Eddy Bellegueule disappears; a Parisian Édouard Louis emerges out of the wreckage, damaged and vulnerable but nonetheless a figure of power for those who see the miracle he represents.

What is most impressive about “The End of Eddy” is that its author turned himself into a man capable of creating such a vivid and honest self-portrait. Telling the truth about growing up gay among bigoted, bullying people requires bravery and brio; shaping that story into a memorable dramatic narrative takes not only nerve but intelligence, skill and a mysterious jolt of je ne sais quoi.

Edmund White’s 1982 autobiographical novel, “A Boy’s Own Story,” is a famously unnerving account of growing up gay surrounded by antipathetic Americans in the 1950s. White, who chose to live for many years in Paris, went on to write the authoritative English-language biography of Jean Genet, a Frenchman whose wild, wayward gay life was likewise the primary subject of his own books. Louis is situated now in this line of powerfully, almost scarily, honest gay storytellers who need make nothing up, since their lives — especially their lonely childhoods — provide them with material beyond the scope of the imagination. n Whitaker is author of “Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling” and, most recently, “An Honest Ghost,” a novel. This was written for The Washington Post.

O THE END OF EDDY By Édouard Louis Translated from the French by Michael Lucey Farrar Straus Giroux.

192 pp. $23

PAPI My Story

By David Ortiz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

262 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

B RENDAN O ’ T OOLE

n Jan. 22, 2003, the Boston Red Sox signed a $1.25 million contract with a 27-year-old first baseman who had been released the month before by the Minnesota Twins. They saw in him a potential complementary bat for their high-powered offense, one who was worth the modest financial gamble. Thirteen years, three World Series wins and almost 500 home runs later, David Ortiz retired from baseball as arguably the most important player in the history of the Boston franchise.

The rise of Ortiz from scrapheap bench player to Hall of Famer is an unlikely and entertaining story, and engagingly told in “Papi: My Story” (by Ortiz with co-author Michael Holley). Starting with his early life in the Dominican Republic and concluding with his 2016 retirement tour, the memoir is largely a straightforward narrative of Ortiz’s time in baseball. Those looking for a deep dive into the inner life of a baseball star or the intricate strategies of a modern franchise will probably be disappointed. As the unpolished reflections of one of the few ballplayers to redefine a club, though, it works perfectly.

The casual, conversational tone of the book reflects one of Ortiz’s best qualities as an icon of the game. His skill with the blunter Anglo-Saxon elements of English (most famously in the post-Boston Marathon bombing declaration) adds a refreshing directness to his voice but is probably worth considering before giving a copy to the 10-year-old Sox fan in your life.

The Boston fan base has a welldeserved reputation for passion verging on extremism, and Ortiz does not shy from talking about everything that involves. His first season in Boston culminated in a legendary playoff series that ended in a devastating extra-inning loss to the archrival New York Yankees.

As any New Englander alive at the time can attest, the mood in the region afterward can best be de-

scribed as funerary. Ortiz took it as the moment he understood his fans.

A year later, he’d live up to that goal, leading Boston to an unprecedented comeback victory against the Yankees, followed by the franchise’s first World Series win since World War I. Had he retired at that moment, he’d have cemented his legend. But of course, he had a great deal of baseball left, and he grew into one of the best hitters in the league over the remainder of the decade. Injuries and age started to sap this a bit between 2009 and 2011, leading to the grandest of Boston traditions: the moment when “What a player!” turns into “What have you done for me lately?” Ortiz speaks candidly of disrespect from local writers and perceived disrespect from Red Sox management during contract negotiations, as his production dipped.

Many of the most vivid passages in the book are devoted to addressing slights and grudges, primarily involving former coaches and media members. That so much time is spent on these in what is overall a story of remarkable success is a fascinating window into the motivations of star athletes. It’s clear that even after more than a decade, Ortiz is still rankled by his treatment in Minnesota and that to some extent it fueled his play in Boston.

The intended audience for “Papi” is clearly those of us for whom Ortiz is a defining feature of our baseball experience: the New Englanders who, before 2004, as Ortiz puts it, “looked forward only cautiously” for fear of another heartbreak. For that group, who cried in 2003, cheered in 2004, 2007 and 2013, and still hasn’t fully adjusted to Ortiz not playing every day, this book will provide an engaging few hours of nostalgia. n O’Toole’s work has appeared on OvertheMonster.com. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

With the IOC, pass on the costs and pass the cocktails SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

The Olympic host bidding process is exactly backward.

It’s the suite­dwellers at the Lausanne Palace and Spa Hotel Luxe who should be begging capital cities to host them, between their bites of sea bream carpaccio. It’s the International Olympic Committee members who ought to be making concessions, while trying not to bruise the gin with too much vermouth. They should be making anxious pitches to heads of state to allow them to come to town, with their archduke manners and lavish spending habits.

On Tuesday, representatives from Paris and Los Angeles went to Lausanne, Switzerland, to bid for the 2024 Games, a process that mainly consisted of trying to convince a lot of Olympic yachting blazers, over dinner at the Beau Rivage, to please let them plunge their cities into incalculable debt. But why should the burden be on French President Emmanuel Macron or the mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti to sweeten proposals in a “race” for 2024? From now on, the burden should shift to the IOC to make fiscal guarantees that putting on an Olympics won’t imperil the local economy on the level of Athens or Rio. After years of IOC abuses, the leverage belongs to the prospective hosts, not to the Campari sippers. Cities are in a position to make demands, and they should start by demanding a larger cut of the TV and sponsor money as the price of doing business.

The IOC has created a veritable financial dust bowl with its epic waste and costs, until only these two cities will have anything to do with them. Whoever loses out on 2024, will get 2028 — and inevitable overruns. The price of Tokyo 2020 already has doubled from its original estimate to $12 billion. Hamburg, Rome, Boston and Budapest all dropped out of 2024 bidding because their citizens wouldn’t stand for the

excesses and corruption. Another half-dozen countries bailed out of contention for the 2022 Winter Games. The IOC, apparently realizing that it has run out of pockets to pick, launched something called Agenda 2020 to try to rein in waste and to stress “after-use” and “sustainability.”

Funny though. The IOC hasn’t addressed one very large reason the Olympics are such a burden: its hoarding of the lion’s share of TV and sponsor-marketing revenue that could relieve some of the financial pressure. The IOC does almost none of the work, yet strictly controls what economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson term the “monopoly rents.”

Study after study shows that hosting an Olympics enriches only a few local industrialists, while making cities poorer.

Whoever is designated to host 2024 — the IOC will make the announcement in September — will be left with a river of graft from building and renovation projects, a huge security bill, and potential white elephants. So the real question for Paris and Los Angeles is not who gets to host first, but how to offset the damage when they do?

By far the main source of Olympic revenue is TV rights fees, which amounted to $4.1 billion in 2016. The IOC pockets fully 70 percent of that. Why? For

VALENTIN FLAURAUD/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

People form the Olympic Rings by Lake Geneva in Lausanne, Switzerland, which hosted the International Olympic Committee.

what? Shouldn’t host cities command a larger cut — because their citizens’ safety will be imperiled, their skylines provide the beauty shots, and they are required to provide 40,000 hotel rooms, including five-star accommodations for NBC? Unless it drives a harder bargain, the city that hosts the Summer Games can expect only fractional help from the IOC. The price tag for the troubled Rio Games was about $13.1 billion according to a recent analysis by the Associated Press. The IOC contributed just $1.5 billion in one form or another — a lot of that was goods and services.

Nor is Rio an outlier. Every Olympics from 1968 to 2012 has been over budget, by a median of 150 percent. But that’s just the part of the financial damage, which starts in the incredibly expensive bidding process — Chicago spent $70 million on a failed plea for 2016 — and lasts for years. As Garcetti cautioned in Tuesday’s formal presentation, which stressed a low-risk budget and fiscal conservatism, “None of us can afford more of the same.”

The IOC gives lip service to reform. It recently announced the results of a governance review by an independent evaluator in Lausanne, which recommended 33 changes it should make to keep up with “societal expectations.” The IOC would not commit.

Real reform of the IOC won’t

come from within. Rather, it will come from heads of state such as Macron who have a strong enough hand to pry concessions from the IOC as well as greater accountability and transparency.

Where does all that money go?

The IOC claims it sends 90 percent of its funds down the chain to the members of its “Olympic movement,” sports federations and national Olympic committees. A 2016 Washington Post inquiry found that only a tiny percentage ever makes it to the athletes.

At its core, the IOC is not a “movement”; it’s an operation, a racket. Its existence depends entirely on business contracts — and those can be renegotiated.

Once the 2024 host city is announced, it will be presented with a contract to sign by the IOC. Currently, the deal only promises Paris or Los Angeles $1.7 billion in various kinds of support, including goods in kind, and the language in it is incredibly arrogant.

Cities could and should get more. You’ll know the IOC has truly reformed only when they stop demanding hotels that once served as residences for Empresses. You’ll know it when they open their numbered accounts for public inspection.

And you’ll know it when they revise the Olympic contract to give the host city a fairer cut to defray the cost and risks they take on. n

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

America at its best: helping others MICHAEL GERSON is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post.

habaswein, kenya

Who is Medina, and why should we be mindful of her?

She tells me she is 40, but she looks more like 30. She smiles beautifully and vulnerably through a cleft lip. She has, she explains, “lost everything” in the drought. And it is nearly true.

Medina’s household once boasted 600 goats. Now most of their carcasses lie exposed, picked over by hyenas, in the whipping, sandfilled wind. Medina’s husband has been gone for four months, seeking more fertile pastures for the 100 animals that haven’t died from starvation. Medina was forced to send away two of her four children to live with an aunt, including her 1-year-old daughter. With the goats gone, there isn’t enough milk to feed the infant.

Medina’s diminished family is down to one meal a day. Breakfast is “strong tea.” The price of a container of clean water for cooking or drinking has gone from about 2 cents to 50 cents.

Without rice provided by the Kenyan government and a small cash benefit from World Vision (which hosted my trip), more than Medina’s livestock would starve.

Who really cares about such things, about such people, in an era of “America first”? We are, thank God, sometimes better than our slogans. The U.S. Congress and other donors have been relatively openhanded in trying to prevent another major famine in East Africa. Even the Trump administration sought

credit for its generosity at the recent Group of 20 summit.

But why, when it comes down to it, should events in rural Kenya matter to well-fed, largely goatless, non-pastoralists living on the other side of the Earth?

There is a theoretical response: Starvation and resulting mass migrations are destabilizing. Bad actors such as al-Shabab thrive in such chaos. (The day I talked to Medina, there was a terrorist attack in southeast Kenya.) Such terrorist threats are hard to isolate once they are fully emerged (as we’ve seen in Somalia and Nigeria). The prevention of conflicts and threats is more than worth the tiny portion of the U.S. budget —

less than 1 percent — that is currently dedicated to foreign assistance. All true.

Yet if this were the only, or even the main, response, it would likely be insufficient. A country without a creed of universal human rights would find excuses for indifference and callousness, as most nations throughout most of history have done.

The United States, however, has been inflicted with idealism since the day of its founding. The assertion is still shocking: that a life on the other side of the world is created equal — honestly, objectively, God-blessedly equal — to our own.

So we are left with a constant struggle and a glorious guilt.

There are limits to the resources and capabilities of any nation. But Americans who do not feel a stab of pride at the liberation of Nazi death camps, and the reconstruction of postwar Europe, and the sacrificial spirit of the Peace Corps, and the extraordinary achievements of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — such people do not fully understand their own country. They have somehow missed one of the primary things that make it lovely — our holding of the truth that Medina is not beyond or beneath the demands of human dignity.

This conviction is now being tested in four nations across East Africa — South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya — where some 20 million human beings urgently need help. Season after season of sporadic and inadequate rainfall, complicated in some cases by conflict, have brought many places to the verge of famine. Here in Kenya, I consistently heard that conditions are “worse than 2011” — which is like an economist saying that conditions are worse than the Great Depression. The analogy holds. In both cases, the assets built over a lifetime — whether measured in stocks or goats — are lost.

The global response, so far, has been better than in 2011. A famine warning was declared last year, and in Kenya, the government and the charitable sector, with help from the U.S. government, have been encouraging resilience with water trucks, school feeding programs, and small cash benefits to buy water and food. But this success is partial and fragile. If the next rainy season, four months from now, is inadequate, the coping mechanisms will break down on a massive scale.

Whatever happens, Medina says, will be “God’s will.” But a failure of compassion would be entirely our own. n

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Doomsday scenarios aren’t helping MICHAEL E. MANN, SUSAN JOY HASSOL AND TOM TOLES Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. Hassol is the director of Climate Communication LLC. Toles is the editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post.

It is easy to understand why advocates for climate action have become somewhat dispirited in recent months. In the space of less than a year, we’ve seen the United States go from playing a leading role in international climate negotiations to now being the only nation in the world to renege on its commitment to the 2015 Paris climate accord.

It is in this environment of defeat and despair that we’ve witnessed a dramatic rise in the prominence of climate doomism — commentary that portrays climate change not just as a threat that requires an urgent response but also as an essentially lost cause, a hopeless fight. Some of the more egregious examples can be found among fringe characters such as ecologist Guy McPherson — a doomist cult hero who insists that exponential climate change likely will render human beings and all other species extinct within 10 years.

Such rhetoric is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction.

Whether climate change is a hoax (as President Trump has asserted) or beyond our control (as McPherson insists), there would obviously be no reason to cut carbon emissions.

Doomist narratives, albeit of a more nuanced and subtle variety, are now starting to appear in respected, mainstream venues, written by otherwise able and thoughtful journalists. In this vein comes a recent New York magazine article “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells.

It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and it is critical to keep in mind the potential for unpleasant surprises and worstcase scenarios, the so-called fat tail of risk. It is, moreover, appropriate to criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstatement that presents the problem as unsolvable and future outcomes as inevitable.

The New York magazine article paints an overly bleak picture, arguing that climate change could render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this

BY JOEL PETT FOR THE LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

century. Its opening story about the “flooding” of a seed vault in Norway leaves out that one of the vault’s creators told NPR “there was really no flood.” It exaggerates the near-term threat of climate “feedbacks” involving the release of frozen methane. It mischaracterizes one recent study as demonstrating that the globe is warming “more than twice as fast as scientists had thought,” when in fact the study in question simply showed that one dataset that had tended to show less warming than other datasets has now been brought in line with the others after some problems were corrected for. The warming of the globe is progressing as models predicted.

And that is plenty bad enough.

The evidence that climate change is a serious challenge that we must tackle now is very clear.

Fear does not motivate. It tends to distance people from the problem.

There is no need to overstate it, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness. Some seem to think that people need to be shocked and frightened to get them to engage with climate change. But research shows that the most motivating emotions are worry, interest and hope. Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counterproductive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.

It is important to communicate both the threat and the opportunity in the climate challenge. Those paying attention are worried, and should be, but there are also reasons for hope. The active engagement of many cities, states and corporations, and the commitments of virtually every nation (minus one) is a very hopeful sign. The rapid movement in the global energy market towards cleaner options is another. Experts are laying out pathways to avoid disastrous levels of climate change and clearly expressing the urgency of action. There is still time to avoid the worst outcomes, if we act boldly now, not out of fear, but out of confidence that the future is largely in our hands. n

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Hippies BY

J OSHUA C LARK D AVIS

During a special summer 50 years ago, young people from all over Amer­ ica flooded into San Francisco’s Haight­Ashbury neighborhood in hopes of joining the hippies, a new group of rebellious dreamers vowing to teach anyone who would listen how to find peace, love and happiness. It was the Summer of Love. Reporters and curious tourists came to San Francisco check out these strange kids for themselves. But the deluge of media attention launched a set of spurious myths about the hippies, many of which have been perpetuated by overly nostalgic idealists and unduly harsh critics. Here are five of the most persistent.

MYTH NO. 1 Hippies were a phenomenon of the 1960s.

Hippies might be the most famous symbol of the 1960s; after all, they emerged in the middle of that decade.

But they didn’t really hit their stride until the early 1970s, when their numbers and influence peaked. The hippies’ drug subculture in the 1960s became youth pop culture in the ’70s. Rock-and-roll, once seen as a frivolous hobby for teenagers, became a serious art form, and publications such as Rolling Stone became national tastemakers. And a quick perusal of nearly any high school yearbook well into the late ’70s shows that long hair became standard for teenage boys across the country. Even some of the male teachers had shaggy cuts. The frequency of the term “hippies” peaked in books in 1971 and stayed above 1967 levels until 1977.

MYTH NO. 2 Hippies lived only in coastal cities or rural communes.

It’s easy to imagine hippies clustering in California’s Bay Area or among the Ivy League campuses of the Eastern Seaboard. But hippies lived all over the United States, even in small and mid-size cities in the South and Midwest. The earliest flowering of hippie culture took place in coastal cities such as

San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, but head shops — purveyors of psychedelic posters, black lightbulbs and rolling papers — were popping up by 1967 in such cities as Atlanta, Cleveland and Omaha, as well as Austin, Ann Arbor and other college towns.

MYTH NO. 3 Hippies were the ones protesting in the streets.

It’s true that some countercultural groups, most notably the Yippies and the White Panther Party, blended radical politics with the hippie lifestyle. But antiwar protesters and hippies were usually two distinct groups. Hippies, often known as “freaks,” prioritized spiritual enlightenment, community building, and, of course, sex, drugs and rock-androll. Activists, often known as “politicos,” opted for more traditional forms of left-wing political organizing.

Rather than protesting, hippies hoped to change America by seceding from established political, social and cultural institutions. No one expressed this sentiment more memorably than the LSD guru Timothy Leary when he exhorted young Americans to “Turn on, tune in, drop out√” — meaning, in essence, get high, disregard popular norms, quit bothering with mainstream society, and look inward for

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Hippies in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in August 1967, during the Summer of Love. The hippies’ influence peaked in the 1970s.

peace and wisdom.

MYTH NO. 4 Hippies were all about sexual liberation.

While hippies were more sexually adventurous than mainstream Americans (one aspect of the counterculture that has had a lasting impact), they mostly stuck to heterosexual monogamy. As one aging hippie recounted decades later, “free love” was more legend than fact.

Even within open relationships, hippie men often seized the freedom to sleep with multiple women but discouraged their girlfriends and wives from doing the same.

Sadly, sexual relations in the counterculture weren’t always consensual. Women in hippie neighborhoods — especially teenage girls who had run away from their parents — were often vulnerable to sexual assault as they faced peer pressure to embrace drugs and abandon sexual restraint.

MYTH NO. 5 The hippie fad eventually vanished.

It’s less the case that the hippies died out, disappeared or faded away, and more that all of us became hippies. Indeed, a number of countercultural practices that were once seen as fringe are now widely accepted parts of American life. Yoga, to name one example, was championed by hippies long before it became a mainstream phenomenon. The same goes for organic food and vegetarian, whole-grain diets. And hippies celebrated casual dress, especially blue jeans and androgynous styles, rejecting the conventional wisdom that clothing should be formal and gender-specific. All of these things, once considered symbols of the hippie lifestyle, are now fully entrenched in American culture. n Davis is the author of “From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2017

24

GREAT WINE. GREAT FOOD. GREAT FUN.

It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com or at the door Presented by Foothills Magazine

oothills

Interested in having a booth at this event?

E-mail us at info@wenatcheewineandfood.com

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON

Sponsored by

Port of Chelan County • Banner Bank • Tastebuds Coffee & Wine • Spokane Industries • Port of Douglas County • Moss-Adams, LLP • Great Northwest Wine Visconti’s Italian Restaurant • Blue Horizon Insurance & Financial Services • Haglund’s Trophies • Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center • Town Toyota Center