Donald Trump administration attempted to bully Georgetown Univesity about Free Speech? Stupid Is As Stupid Does

"It is when our disagreements are sharpest that our liberties are most precious," David French in The New York Times.

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times with a social media insert post from Father James Martin, S.J. 

This might sound like a funny thing to say, but I’ve rarely read a more unconstitutional letter.

On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”

Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I. — which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people — from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”

This short letter, which was addressed to William Treanor, the dean of the law school, continued with the declaration that “no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize D.E.I. will be considered.”

Even a first-year law student knows that the federal government cannot dictate the viewpoint and curriculum of a private Christian school, yet here was a federal prosecutor opening an inquiry into a Jesuit school’s protected speech.

Father James Martin, S.J., reported the news about this outrageous letter on his social media. "This week, Edward Martin, the interim US attorney for Washington, DC, sent a letter to the dean of Georgetown University’s Law School threatening to investigate the school if it did not scrub its policies and curriculum of diversity and inclusion initiatives. Here is the Dean's response. 

As a member of the Board of Trustees of Georgetown, Father Martin supports this letter "wholeheartedly". Jesuit education means care for the whole person, in both their spiritual and intellectual lives. And Jesuit practice often involves speaking truth to power.
"As a Catholic and Jesuit institution, Georgetown University was founded on the principle that serious and sustained discourse among people of different faiths, cultures and beliefs promotes intellectual, ethical and spiritual understanding. For us at Georgetown, this principle is a moral and educational imperative. It is a principle that defines our mission as a Catholic and Jesuit institution."

David French in The New York Times opinion continues:  

But then, on Thursday, Donald Trump issued an executive order that may well have been even worse. He targeted Perkins Coie — a leading law firm with prominent liberal and Democratic clients — with comprehensive sanctions, in large part because it had engaged in legal work that Trump did not like.

“Notably, in 2016, while representing failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” the order says, “Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false ‘dossier’ designed to steal an election. This egregious activity is part of a pattern. Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.”

The order strips security clearances from Perkins Coie lawyers (an action that would inhibit their ability to represent clients engaged in serious disputes involving the government) “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.” It also limits Perkins Coie employees’ access to federal buildings, and it blocks the federal government from hiring Perkins Coie employees.

Trump’s order was his second major attack on a private law firm. Last month, he suspended the security clearances of attorneys at Covington & Burling, a large multinational law firm, who provided pro bono legal services to Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed criminal charges against Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for his removing classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them from his home.

The constitutional problem in each case is the same: The Trump administration is targeting the president’s perceived political opponents for investigation and punishment.

This is not new. Late last month, the Times editorial board wrote an outstanding editorial identifying a series of attacks on free speech from the Trump administration, including its decision to retaliate against The Associated Press for refusing to identify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and its decision to handpick the news outlets that make up the press pool that follows and covers Trump where there isn’t room for the full press corps.

The attacks on free speech and the First Amendment are so numerous that it’s difficult to keep up. And the attacks aren’t just against the prominent players in the political arena. Trump will take on religious institutions as well, 😓😡😒 even though their rights are just as firmly protected by the First Amendment.

On Feb. 24, my friend Theodore Chuang, a federal district judge in Maryland, entered an injunction against a Trump administration policy that removed restrictions on immigration enforcement actions in houses of worship.

Trump had reversed a decades-old policy that protected houses of worship from immigration raids in the absence of emergency circumstances — an imminent risk of violence, for example, or the hot pursuit of a person who poses a public safety threat, or a national security risk.

The previous policy respected the religious free exercise of a number of faith groups, including Christians, who believe there are religious mandates to care for refugees and other vulnerable immigrants. The new policy, in Chuang’s words, “abruptly removed all such limitations and safeguards and instead left decisions on whether to conduct such enforcement actions to the unilateral discretion of individual officers.”

In other words, if federal agents wanted to raid a church during a worship service, under Trump’s scheme, they could.

Chuang found that the Trump administration policy’s “lack of any meaningful limitations or safeguards” on enforcement activity chilled the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights in part by deterring believers from attending worship services.

For all of Trump’s talk about rooting out “anti-Christian bias” from the United States, one of his administration’s first executive actions violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of several Christian congregations. It turns out that Trump wants to protect only his Christian allies from government reprisals. Dissenting believers will face his wrath, and the wrath of the state.

Political and religious speech are the beating heart of the First Amendment. Protections for political speech even predate the founding of the United States. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 protected the right of British subjects to petition the king and protected free speech in Parliament.

There is a reason the founders enshrined these values first. It’s why viewpoint discrimination is the most disfavored form of government censorship.

Plaintiffs who can prove that they were targeted because of their political or religious perspective almost always win their case. 

And, make no mistake, attacks on Georgetown Law based on its alleged advocacy of or instruction in D.E.I., or punishment for Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling attorneys for their work with Democrats or Jack Smith, each represent textbook cases of viewpoint discrimination.

One of the most frustrating elements of our post-election national conversation was the insistence in some quarters that the election represented a repudiation of censorship and cancel culture. It did not.

Instead, nearly half the American people voted against the party that was actively moving away from extremism — including the far-left censorship regime that has long afflicted America’s elite campuses — and instead voted for the party that didn’t just weaponize government against dissenting voices (through book bans, various anti-“woke” bills and prohibitions against drag shows), it also created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation against its political enemies.

The MAGA movement relentlessly attacked election workers, school board members and anyone else who defied its will to power or dissented from MAGA’s version of American history. Trumpian political correctness is becoming so absurd that The Associated Press reported on Thursday that at the Pentagon “tens of thousands of photos and online posts” have been “marked for deletion,” including a photo of Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, presumably because its name included the word “gay.”

I spent much of my legal career combating censorship and defending free speech and religious liberty. I defended people from across the political spectrum, but I was also very familiar with censorship from the left. I filed lawsuit after lawsuit against universities that, among other things, imposed speech codes, discriminated against Christian student groups and retaliated against conservative professors.

When I filed those cases, I believed the American right had a basic commitment to individual freedom. Today, it does not. It is far more committed to fighting the left now than it was to defending liberty then. 

As the right rejected libertarianism, it turned against the First Amendment.

And now Trump’s administration and his MAGA movement are the most dangerous and powerful censors in the United States.

When an administration blatantly attacks the First Amendment, it attacks our national identity. The First Amendment is core to the idea of the United States of America. The Supreme Court has protected it even in our nation’s darkest and most dangerous moments.

In a 1943 case called West Virginia v. Barnette, the Supreme Court upheld the right of two sisters who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school. In defending their liberty, the court wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The court was far from perfect in World War II. The year after Barnette, it decided Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. But the Barnette decision endures, and its words resonate still today.

It is when our disagreements are sharpest that our liberties are most precious. Or, as the Supreme Court said in Barnette: “But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom.” That’s where Trump wants his opponents — in the shadows, suffering for their failure to support the man who would be king.

If Americans don’t have to salute the flag during a war for the survival of Western civilization, then they certainly don’t have to genuflect to Trump or Trumpism as a condition for exercising their unalienable rights.

Or put another way: If our liberties can survive a world war, then they can and should survive a culture war.

Essay about decision making learned from St. Ignatius of Loyola

What a 16th-century mystic can teach us about making good decisions - "Ignatian discernment"

An essay published in The Conversation by Annmarie Cano, Professor of Psychology and Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Faculty Success, Wayne State University

Decision-making is a complex process. 

As individuals, working through our daily lives, we often take a number of shortcuts that may not always serve us well. 

For example, we make impulsive decisions when stressed or allow others to make them for us, at times with disappointing or disastrous consequences.

But most of us can do better. Among the many decision-making methods for life’s big decisions, one that stands out is from an early 16th-century soldier-turned-mystic, St. Ignatius of Loyola.

As a clinical psychologist, I first became acquainted with Ignatian discernment during an internship program in spirituality and have found it useful to incorporate it in my research on mindfulness and other reflective practices.

St Ignatius at Boston College

Ignatius uses the language of faith, but, I believe, anyone can apply his method to make more informed decisions.
Who was Ignatius?

Ignatius, baptized Iñigo, was born into a noble family in the Basque area of Spain in 1493. After suffering a grievous leg wound during a battle with the French that affected his health for the rest of his life, Ignatius lay in bed for months reading and reflecting on his situation.

He realized that pursuing worldly honor was not as fulfilling as doing the work of God. During the next year and half of reflection and prayer, he experienced a profound spiritual conversion with spiritual insights that would form the basis of “Spiritual Exercises,” a program of prayerful self-examination aimed at developing a deeper relationship with God.

He decided to serve God by becoming a priest and with two of his University of Paris colleagues, was given approval by the Vatican in 1540 to found the Society of Jesus also known as the Jesuits. 

In fact, the Jesuits are known for their work in education, with a network of schools and colleges, and for running guided retreats.

Perhaps lesser known is the fact that Ignatius also developed a method of discernment or decision-making that is still relevant today and that can be applied by people of all faiths and adapted to those who are not religious.

1. Rely on reason and feelings

Ignatius advises creating a list, but also takes it a step further by urging people to listen to their feelings as they consider the pros and cons for each option.
Emotions act as compass points to one’s deepest desires. So, he asks individuals to consider: Do some pros or cons stand out because they bring you a sense of peace, joy or hope? Or feelings of dread, anxiety or despair?

He advises probing the origin of the feelings to find out if they come, for example, from desires for power or greed, fear of what others may think, a desire to do good or to be selfless.

Ignatius teaches that freedom from attachment to a particular choice or outcome is essential. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Faith is taking the first step, even if you can’t see the whole staircase.”

Ignatius also advises that individuals share their deliberations with a confidant, advice that he followed when making his own decisions. Modern psychological science too has found that the process of sharing emotions with others helps make sense of our thoughts and feelings.

He also urged people to make decisions for the “greater glory of God.” How can non-religious people use this advice? I argue they can consider how their decisions will affect the vulnerable, the poorest and the most marginalized.

2. Imaginative reflection

Ignatius offers three imaginative exercises if no clear choice emerges:

Imagine that a friend comes to you with the same situation. They describe their choices, pros and cons, and their thoughts and feelings about these proposals. What would you advise them?

Imagine that you are on your deathbed. Looking back at your life, and assuming you made the decision in question, how do you view it from that perspective?

Imagine a conversation with the divine. Those who do not believe in a God could have an imaginary conversation with someone they loved and trusted and who has passed away. What does this person say to you about your options? Would they be pleased, disappointed or neutral about your decision?

Imaginative reflections like these offer clarity to decision-making by providing another perspective to the decision at hand.

3. Seek confirmation
Ignatius advises individuals to act on reason, feeling confident that they have invested their time and energy to make a good choice. But he also says that people should seek out additional information to see if reason confirms the choice. The emotions they feel following a decision, such as peace, freedom, joy, love or compassion, might give an indication if it is the right choice.

In today’s hurried world, a 16th-century Catholic mystics’ advice may seem quaint or his process tedious. 

Yet, many modern psychological approaches confirm the value of such reflective practices.

In the Shadow of Statues ~ Mayor Mitch Landrieu discussion

New Orleans LA ~ Interview published in The Conversation~ Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s last day in office conversation with Chris Riback. 

An excerpt from Landrieu's book, In the Shadow of Statues:

Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Landrieu writes, "I was thirteen when the woman yelled those words at me, a newly minted eighth grader at Jesuit High School, where my father had been a star athlete a quarter century before. Earlier that day, Father Harry Tompson, the principal, a jovial man but quite the disciplinarian, summoned me to his office. "There has been a threat made against your life," he said gravely. Someone had called the switchboard with an alarming message. With a wary eye, Father Tompson escorted me across Banks Street to the gym, letting me go in for basketball practice.."

New Orleans ~ He was still packing up his office when we talked about why he removed statues from his city that honored the Confederacy, his new book — In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History — and of course the question many have for him: Are you running for president?
Transcript

Usually we drop these conversations on Friday mornings – you know, something to look forward to since the workweek excitement is about to end.

But we’re posting this on Monday, May 7 because of my guest: It’s his last day as Mayor of New Orleans.

Did you see the speech? (You can watch it above.) It was about a year ago and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu stood up and explained to his city and the nation, really, why he removed four statues that honored the Confederacy: Robert E. Lee; Jefferson Davis; P.G.T. Beauregard; and the Crescent City White League.

In that speech, Landrieu took on race and inequality and history. He asked: “Why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.”

It was a powerful 20 minutes, and if you haven’t watched it, you should.

For a mayor who had so much else to be proud of – his city: New Orleans has rebuilt itself incredibly since Katrina; and his family: his father Moon Landrieu was New Orleans mayor and HUD Secretary under Jimmy Carter; his sister was a U.S. Senator – the speech brought Landrieu into the national conversation at a time when there was a lot of yelling and not much talking.

Landrieu has written a book about the statues and race in America – it’s called “In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History,” and it’s excellent.

I spoke with Mayor Landrieu four days, before term limits meant he would give way to a new mayor. He was gracious with his time – and funny and thoughtful with his words.

I asked him about the speech, the book, New Orleans, and of course the question everyone has about him: 

"What about that running for President thing?"

Chris Riback: Mayor Landrieu, thanks so much for joining me, I appreciate your time.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: It’s great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: You won your first term in 2010 mayor, with 66% of the vote. You took 365 of the city’s 366 precincts. You won your second term with nearly 64%, and by all accounts you still seem to be extremely popular. Are you sure you believe in term limits?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: [laughing] Well, you know, I see it, I served for eight years as the mayor of a major American city, you come to realize that term limits are really good. It has been a great blessing to be the mayor but the responsibility is huge, but it’s time to turn the reins over to the next generation of leaders.

Chris Riback: Terrific. Let’s get right into it. Let’s talk about your book and your speech, the speech that captured so many of us when you made it, I guess about a year ago. You took on, perhaps, the single most divisive issue in our country, race, and you did it around the path that has become almost the physical representation of our divide: statues. Why’d you do it?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Well, you know, as I wrote in the book, which was not just about the statues, but about race in America, and how I came to live through it, I have come to the conclusion that we’re not doing well speaking about this issue towards each other and it’s holding us back. That we really have never dealt with it appropriately and, at least in New Orleans and in the Deep South, we confront this. It’s certainly not just an issue in the South, but all over the country.

As we rebuilt the city of New Orleans after it was totally devastated from Katrina, we were really forced to think about how we were going to build the city back. Not just the way it was, because Katrina and Rita didn’t cause all of our problems, but the way it should have been, if we would have gotten it right the first time. And when you asked the question that way, it forces you to go back and rethink decisions that had been made in the past that were helpful and those that were hurtful.

Of course, those statues in New Orleans, which is one of the great multicultural cities that values its diversity and has become, if not the soul of the country, very close to it, those statues stuck out like sore thumbs because they were not only symbols of hatred, but they were put up purposefully to send a message. There was really no way for the city of New Orleans to prepare itself for the next 300 years without dealing with that issue.

Of course, those statues are just pieces of stone, but what they actually represent, and so the speech was an effort to invite the people in New Orleans into a conversation about how we move past where we’ve been to where we all think we need to go.

Chris Riback: Would that opportunity have existed, in your mind, without Katrina?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: The opportunity’s with us every day, it’s just a question of whether or not we decide to do it, and unfortunately the United States of America really hasn’t. We don’t really talk to each other about race, we talk past each other. What I’ve learned is you can’t go around this, you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it. You really have to go through it, and in New Orleans we actually started that.

In 2014, we began an effort called The Welcome Table to bring different people of races, creeds, and colors into very small settings where they could get to know each other, to foster a better understanding. And it was out of that effort that about 600 people participated in, that we began to think about bigger things, like the monuments themselves.

Chris Riback: As you said, the book is not about the statues, per se, and it is also about race, but it’s also about your own personal journey, how you grew up, the friends you had, the things you saw or were done or said to you, like the threats against your life at age 13, visiting Auschwitz in 1979 I think it was, why was telling your personal-

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Yes, that’s correct.

Chris Riback: …And I’d love you to talk about that as well. Why was telling your personal journey integral to writing this book?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Well, because some people thought that I got to be mayor and I thought, “Oh gee, let’s take these statues down. That would be an interesting issue to talk about as it relates to race.” And what I was trying to point out to them was that there’s not a second in my life, from the moment of conception through today where, at some point, I personal have not had to deal with the issue, and of course that meant everybody else had to deal with it as well.

That’s why the book was really about race in America and how we deal with it, or how we don’t deal with it. How we remember our history, how we exclude other parts of our history. How we revere certain parts of it and completely forget about the rest. In other words, I was condemned pretty roundly by some people that purported to be members of “historical societies” that said I was taking away history.

And I reminded them that the city of New Orleans is actually 300 years old, the Civil War was only 4 years, and these monuments took up all of our time and all of our space, and that they were guilty of historical malfeasance by not remembering the other 296 years and all of the creativity that has gone on and diversity that’s gone on since then. And I pointed out, I think forcefully and correctly, that until recently there really were no monuments or any remembrances of some of the carnages of slavery.

Just the other day, Bryan Stevenson and his team opened up a compelling new monument in Birmingham that commemorates the lynchings, but we’ve never really remembered that appropriately either. So if we’re going to talk about it in a historical way, we have to talk about all of our history and not just some of it, and certainly not a false version of it. (See MaineWriter blog here)

Chris Riback: You know, I was surprised and taken by … You wrote that you had to relearn history yourself, and I imagine, on some level that journey must have surprised you. Your family is part of New Orleans and Louisiana history. You’ve spent most of your life there. I think you would have even, possibly viewed yourself at the least, as an amateur New Orleans historian. How’d you realize you needed to relearn history and what did that do to your sense of self?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: That’s a very good question because all of this requires intense self-reflection and discernment. One of the things I say is that I walked by those monuments every day and never thought that much about them until my friend Wynton Marsalis, who people in the world will know is the great jazz trumpet player, but he happens just to be a boyhood friend who was helping me curate the (New Orleans) 300th anniversary, said to me, “Have you ever thought about those monuments? Do you know why they’re there? Do you know who put them up? Have you ever thought about them from our perspective?” As a friend would challenge another friend.

And when he started asking me those questions, I have to admit I never really thought about them from that perspective, and when I did, and started doing extensive research, what I found was that those things weren’t put up by accident, they were put up well after the Civil War ended by people with a specific intent, to send a message to African Americans that even though the Confederacy lost the war, that the people who were supporting the Confederacy were still in charge.

I just thought it was really important to start talking about simply what actually occurred because it seems to me that people have a difficult time saying the very simplest things that are clearly true, which is this: the Confederacy fought to destroy the United States of America, not to unite it. They fought the war in an effort to preserve slavery, and that is not right, and it was on the wrong side of history.

Those statues were put up to revere the people who actually fought that war to destroy the country. I just thought that it was important to set out the distinction between remembering what people have done throughout our history and then revering them. They’re two very different things and they occupy different places and they should be remembered in different places as well.

Chris Riback: Yeah, you make that really clear through the book and through the speech. You mentioned your friend Wynton Marsalis, and you mentioned him in the speech as well. I watched that speech again, to prepare for this conversation, and there are so many powerful parts to it. One is where you said,

Mayor Mitch Landrieu Speech Audio: “Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father, trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter, why Robert E. Lee sat atop of our city. Can you do it? Can you do it? Can you look into the eyes of this young girl and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?”

Landrieu speech excerpt: "We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever..."

Chris Riback: And when you asked, “Can you do it?” You pointed to the audience. Who were you pointing to?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: I was pointing at everybody. You know, when you put … Here’s the thing, when you walk in another person’s shoes, you begin to see things more clearly. We can have all these theoretical arguments about who put them up, when they were put up, what they were put there for, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, when all the theory goes away, if my job as the mayor was to prepare the city for its next 300 years, who was I preparing it for? I was preparing it for the people who live here, particularly the children.

And I’m, every day, talking about creating a better future for them by encouraging them to go to school, go to college, help participate in building the new rocket to Mars that we’re building in New Orleans, encouraging these kids to go to college. But if you take that child and she’s walking past that monument, she says, “Why is that person up there still, if his whole life was designed to either keep me in chains or to send a message to me that I’m ‘less than’, how then are we living with integrity and repairing it?”

I wanted to personify this. I wanted everybody to put themselves in the shoes of a parent, explaining to the child why it was okay for that guy to be there. I think that that just put people back on their heels and said well, good. When you say it from that perspective, it gets pretty simple about what we ought to do. It clears away all the cobwebs and it gives us a pretty clear direction of which way we should go.

Chris Riback: Were you nervous to give the speech at all? Was it different? It must have been different then. You must give dozens of speeches every day, at least a couple every day, and that had to be different. Were you anxious at all?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: I wasn’t, actually. I had spent a lot of time thinking about it. Remember, I started working on this three and a half years before we took the monuments down, and of course a lot of these issues were things that had been part of my life. What I was, was certain that I wanted to give the speech. I gave it for a specific purpose which was to lay down a historical record that could be laid right next to a speech that a fellow named Charles Fenner gave in 1890, so that when people saw the historical record, I clearly explained why I did what I did and why it was necessary.

I felt very good about it. It was just a very direct talk to folks about the truth as I saw it. As a matter of fact, the name of the speech is “Truth” and in this day and age, talking and speaking the truth and relying on real facts and real history I thought was needed in order for the history books to record the actions of a mayor that is part of what I would I consider to be a continuous government that’s 300 years old, so that the records will reflect why we did what we did.

Chris Riback: I know that your concern, your focus is not just on racism and issues in New Orleans. Obviously, that’s the central while you’re the mayor of New Orleans but you’ve thought about, and you write about race in America, broadly, and you’ve been quite public, and you write about President Trump in your book. You associate I believe, you correct me if I have it wrong, a rise in white supremacy in this country with President Trump. Why do you say that, and what would you say to him? I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to talk with him. Have you ever spoken with him?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Yes, I have. Not in long conversations but I wouldn’t couch it that way, and I don’t mean to correct you, but I want to put this in perfect context.

Chris Riback: Thank you.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: I rarely mention President Trump in the book. I do a couple of times, not as the cause of any of this, but a participant in what I consider to be a very dangerous thing that’s going on, that he is either unwittingly participated in, encouraged or has refused to disavow, although recently he has done that. And that is the cause of white supremacy. There’s no question that all across the world, that this notion that whites are superior intellectually and genetically to other people, has led us into very dangerous territory, or that any group of people are superior to others.

We’ve had apartheid in South Africa, we had the tremendous atrocities in Germany. In the United States of America we have had slavery. All of those things are borne out of a sense of racial hatred or superiority that people have of others, and there has been a rise recently, across the world, which has also manifested itself in the United States.

When that happens, which is why I tell the story of Auschwitz, there’s only one thing that people can do, is stand up and say, “Look. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. It doesn’t matter you’re conservative or a moderate or a liberal. There’s a lot of room for us to disagree on a lot of things, but not on the cause of whether one group of human beings is superior to another, and that we have a right to oppress them.”

Slavery was an awful thing for this country, we’re still paying dividends for it. When that raises its head in the face of, or the mouth of David Duke or anybody else, that could potentially result in the kind of things that happened in Charlottesville, everybody’s got to stand up and say that’s out of bounds.

I called the President to task briefly in the book for false equivocation between protesters or acting like he didn’t know who David Duke was, and not just specifically saying, “Do not vote for me if you believe what white supremacists believe.”

Chris Riback: I wanted to ask you about religion as well. You went to Jesuit high school, Catholic university. You got your JD from Loyola University Law School, in New Orleans. How has religion … I’m assuming, based on that, you please again, please correct me if I have it wrong, that religion surely plays an influential part of your life is my belief from your background.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Well, you correctly point out that I was raised in the Catholic faith and I am a Catholic by choice as well. I went to Jesuit high school and Catholic university, Loyola Law School. I readily admit that I’m not very good at it, and that I make a lot of mistakes in my life so I’m not trying to preach to anybody about anything. But when you are raised that way, you have a pretty good reservoir of direction that you try to take in your life, and you try to rely on your faith to help keep you steady in good times and in bad.

Chris Riback: Understood. Let any of us, how we’re living our own lives, be the first to cast any stones, that’s for sure. Most us, just trying to do the best we can. To close out, and you understand, I just want to be helpful here. You may not have noticed mayor, and I have no other motivations. The last few Democratic Presidents, Clinton, Carter, LBJ, not Obama of course, came from the South. I, personally find that very interesting, and given that I’m talking with you today, I’m not asking you anything about yourself, you know that, I’m just wondering if you find that interesting also?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: [laughing] Well, of course it is, and it’s a noticeable thing. I think all of those guys did a great job.

Chris Riback: That’s the shortest answer I’ve ever heard you give. How do you feel about people asking you about that, about whether you may run. And I know … it’s meant in a positive way.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Yes, it’s very flattering, there’s no question about it. It would be disingenuous and a lie to say it’s not. I’ve been serving in office now for 30 years. I’ve served as a legislator for 16, lieutenant governor after 6, and the mayor after 8, and so you want to finish with people thinking well about the work that you did and the sacrifice that you made. And so, of course it makes you feel good.

Secondly, it makes me really proud because when people say that, they’re not just saying a good thing about me, they’re saying a good thing about the people of the city of New Orleans, who I think did miraculous work after Katrina, to stand our city back up. But it gets to be a horse race and people surmise about what other people are going to do. That’s always a very interesting conversation, but I have really been focused on getting the city through the eight years of recovery and rebuilding, and then finally just celebrating our 300th anniversary.

What the future holds, who knows. I think that’s unlikely. It’s not impossible, but what the heck, I don’t know what the future holds for me, but my sense is that it’s unlikely that that’s going to happen.

Chris Riback: Well there’s one day in the near future that you do know about, and to close out, I may publish this conversation on May 7th. What will that day be like for you?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: You know, it’s interesting because as we tape this, we’re a couple days away from it, and I’m cleaning out my office as we speak and I’m also working full time so I don’t really have a lot of time to focus. But my guess is that at 12:00 on the 7th, it’s going to be very bittersweet. There’ll be a huge sense of relief that the responsibility that’s so heavy, that you have to bear by yourself sometimes, has been lifted from your shoulders, but there’ll also be some sadness that you’re not at the helm anymore or in a position of, as a mayor of pretty extreme power to pull people together and to lift other people’s lives up and so I don’t know what I’m going to do in my future, but it’ll do something, hopefully, God willing, that helps other people, whether it’s in my private life or in a public life. That’s been the most gratifying part of serving the public for 30 years.

Chris Riback: Mayor, thank you. Thank you for your time and obviously, thank you for your service as well.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Well, great. Thank you so much for your interview. I enjoyed it.