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"Harvard got what it wanted. Mediocrity in the name of diversity. It was a classic example of how the white power structure plays people of color. It decides whom to promote and whom to silence. When then-Maj. Colin Powell helped cover up the 1968 massacre of some 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam he was assured a glittering career in the Army. When Barack Obama proved obedient to the Chicago political machine, Wall Street and the Democratic Party establishment he was promoted to the U.S. Senate and the presidency. Diversity in the hands of the white power elites-political and corporate-is an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front, accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the white power structure, as long as the game is played. There is no shortage of women (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile), Latinos (Tom Perez and Marco Rubio) or blacks (Vernon Jordan, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson) who sell their souls for a taste of power."

The common challenge of covid-19 has produced very different outcomes around the world, leading to many questions about the determinants of national performance and shortcomings in global performance. Problems of reporting and standards do not make precise comparisons easy, but few would disagree that the roughly 1400 deaths reported by South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam together represent far better results than the roughly 700 000 deaths reported by Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States.1 Adjusting these figures for population-the first group has about a third of the citizens of the second group-does not explain why covid-19 mortality differs by a factor of nearly 500. Neither typical proxy measures such as gross national income per capita nor national rankings on the 2019 Global Health Security Index have any meaningful association with performance on covid-19.2