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Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

the idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity

Inequality reproduces itself because help is typically reserved for people who are “like me”: the people who live in my neighborhood, those who attend my church or school or those with whom I have worked in the past

just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.

Seeing contemporary labor-market politics through the lens of favoritism, rather than discrimination alone, is revealing. It explains, for example, why even though the majority of all Americans, including whites, support civil rights in principle, there is widespread opposition on the part of many whites to affirmative action policies

my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.

The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs.

whites helping other whites is not the same as discrimination, and it is not illegal. Yet it may have a powerful effect on the access that African-Americans and other minorities have to good jobs, or even to the job market itself.

Why is it essential to save history and libraries? The best answer to that question comes from Benjamin Franklin. He was asked to design a curriculum for the school that became the University of Pennsylvania. He proposed that at least half the time, in each year, the future students should study history Nothing else could match history when it came to creating a useful citizen.  Without a grasp of history, Franklin maintained,  we will only repeat the blunders of the past.

Why is his opposition to immigrants and Mexicans in particular so resonant when immigration liberalization ostensibly has majority support in most polls?

Support for immigration “may be greatly overestimated.”

polls conducted by large survey organizations never ask about immigration in geographic contex

This kind of abstract framing tends to push respondents toward giving more “politically correct” answers to standard poll questions about immigration.

The quest by American liberals and progressives for support, or at least tolerance, of diversity, inclusiveness and multiculturalism is likely to prevail — particularly if the compulsory dimension of compliance is curtailed.

one way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called “psychological reactance.” Haidt describes reactance asthe feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

He has won a unique admixture of support, based in part on what might be called an anti-rational or irrational loyalty but also in part on his recognition of legitimate grievances among his adherents that many other politicians belittle or deny.

In both the workplace and academia, Haidt argues,the accusatory and vindictive approach of many social justice activists and diversity trainers may actually have increased the desire and willingness of some white men to say and do un-PC things.

Trump comes along and punches political correctness in the face. Anyone feeling some degree of anti-PC reactance is going to feel a thrill in their heart, and will want to stand up and applaud. And because feelings drive reasoning, these feelings of gratitude will make it hard for anyone to present arguments to them about the downsides of a Trump presidency.

Trump responded on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on May 2. What Clinton said “was a very derogatory statement to men,” Trump declared. “It was almost as though she’s going to tell us what to do, tell men what to do.” He continued, “It was a real put-down.”

many Trump followers respond to Clinton in a fashion similar to that of8th grade boys reacting to their homeroom teacher. But I think this has more to do with her gender than with any particular behaviors on her part — in other words, there are some who would respond to any woman running for president as an 8th grader in homeroom who resents the teacher.

since reactance is driven by perceptions rather than by facts, this works well in Trump’s favor, considering his often cavalier relationship with the truth.

research that shows that some people will reject a policy or action that is to their advantage when they feel pushed or forced into making the “correct” decision.

In other words, reactance can foster a totalizing loyalty that does not respond to reasoned fault finding. This might help explain Trump’s seeming immunity to criticism from his adversaries. His followers feel that they have experienced a “diminution of freedom” and believe that Trump can “restore their autonomy.”

I would say that decades of political correctness, with its focus on “straight white men” as the villains and oppressors — now extended to “straight white cis-gendered men” — has caused some degree of reactance in many and perhaps most white men.

Clinton remains the favorite, but she faces five months of treading water in a shark tank. She has yet to discover a compelling rebuttal to Trump on political correctness, and it will be difficult for her to placate opponents of immigration while holding her advantage with her bas

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

“Both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other characteristics, offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries,

Between 1982 and 2012, the Republican share of contributions from the Forbes 400 has been steadily falling, to 59 percent from 68 percent. As membership in the Forbes 400 changes, this trend will accelerate

the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory.

upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.

“The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude thatThe majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.

“These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:In some respects Democrats have in fact served this function in the social welfare domain. But in other domains, policies adopted under Democratic control are no more consistent with the preferences of the less well off than are those adopted during periods dominated by the Republican Party.

Gilens, in a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Politics, is critical of both Democrats and Republicans:On important aspects of tax policy, trade policy, and government regulation, both political parties have embraced an agenda over the past few decades that coincides far more with the economically regressive, free trade, and deregulatory orientations of the affluent than with the preferences of the middle class.

Most important, in recent years, the Democratic Party has become the political home for those whose most passionate cause is cultural, as opposed to economic, liberalism: decriminalization of drug possession; women’s rights; the rights of criminal defendants; and rights associated with the sexual revolution, including transgender rights, the right to contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.

the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.

College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men.

For many black and Hispanic voters who hold conservative views on social issues, the Democratic Party’s commitment on civil rights, immigration reform and the safety net trumps any hesitation about voting for Democratic candidates who hold alien cultural and moral views.

The same is not true for noncollege whites. Many of these voters hold liberal economic views, as evidenced by the passage by large margins of minimum wage referendums in four solidly red states last year. In the case of these white voters, however, animosity to Democratic cultural and moral liberalism trumps Democratic economic liberalism, as demonstrated by the near unanimous Republican-majority midterm and presidential voting in the poorest white counties of Appalachia.

The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.

And if you want to understand the ferocity of the opposition to him on the Catholic right, this is the key. His most determined opponents are far-right closet cases, living in palaces, leading completely double lives, backed by the most vicious of reactionaries and bigots on the European and American far right

As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness.

(Lepore hazards a guess that 80 percent of the Vatican’s population is gay.

as Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.”

it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse

Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead. There wasn’t a theological dissident he didn’t notice and punish, but barely a single pedophile he found reason to expose

Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers.

He notices simple things that some might call innuendo, but any gay man will instantly recognize, like the fabulous interiors of the gay cardinals’ palaces, always with their “assistants” or young “relative” on hand

take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.”

Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.

Or a confessor-priest in Saint Peter’s who guides Martel into the Vatican with the words: “Welcome to Sodoma.”

If you want to find a figure who crystallizes all this hypocrisy in the narrative, it would be the late Colombian cardinal, Alfonso López Trujillo, tasked by John Paul II in the 1970s to rid Latin America of liberation theology, and then to launch a global crusade against homosexuality and the use of condoms

Trujillo’s own master of ceremonies on these trips tells us: “López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups … He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.”

“López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism.”

if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church.

what was Trujillo’s task in Rome? You guessed it: president of the Pontifical Council for the Family! This was the figure who spearheaded the war on gays in the 1980s and 1990s, who forbade the use of condoms, who spread the lie that condoms don’t protect anyone from HIV. And yet when he died, Benedict XVI gave the homily at the funeral mass.

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try:

And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.

Critically, Martel reaches the same conclusion I did recently — the omertà of the closet was a core reason for sex abuse

Gay priests felt unable to report pedophiles or abusers or hypocrites because they too could be outed by the abusers and forced out

When Trujillo was promoted to Rome, the reckless excesses went into overdrive. A Curia source tells Martel: “Everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.”

There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.

only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option

Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God

Francis is nudging the church toward this more humane and Christian future, but the more he does so, the more fervently this nest of self-haters and bigots will try to destroy him.

Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.

the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.

It tells you a lot about the LGBTQIA++ movement that it’s now lost Martina Navratilova.

A pioneering open lesbian who had an openly transgender coach in her glory years, who did more for gay visibility than any gay group ever has, is now being disowned by Athlete Ally, a New York–based organization that supports LGBT athletes

She argued in an op-ed that a trans woman who started out in life as male has an unfair advantage in sports over women who have never biologically male. For this, her comments have been condemned as “transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.”

The truth, of course, is that the science is firmly behind Navratilova.

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt

denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people

if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

There is no “gay lobby.” There is a “honeycomb of closets,” often insulated from each other, built on deception and self-hatred, that amounts to a system where protecting the image of the church became far more important than saving children from rapists.

Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

Smollett was dumb and incompetent in his elaborate hoax. But he was smart about one thing. The most noble thing in our current culture is victimhood

Smollett aimed for the jackpot — physically attacked for being gay and black by Trump supporters

so all good liberals instinctively and with good intentions believed him, embraced him

His identity as gay and black rendered him instantly innocent, just as the Covington boys’ whiteness rendered them instantly guilty.

Booker, Harris, Pelosi: They’ll never apologize for their rush to judgment. This may not have been “precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” you see, but it was morally true.

Believe Jussie. Just believe. He may have made up an entire story, but “he’s not lying.”

It’s all wild hallucination, but he bellows nonetheless, because the television cameras eat it up

It’s not exclusive to Republicans. Howard Dean had a Giuliani moment all his own, suggesting that Trump, who doesn’t even drink alcohol, might have a nasty cocaine habit.

And it’s amazing how far they’ve fallen. For a significant stretch of the 2008 election cycle, Giuliani was the favorite for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, and not just any favorite.

If Trump fails, where does that leave Christie? He was once intent on proving the bipartisan breadth of his outlook and appeal, as his brief bromance with President Obama demonstrated.

On his first day in his new post, Mr. Grenell, 52 years old, sparked outrage in Germany with a tweet demanding German companies wind down their operations in Iran. The acrimony was compounded by his call in a Breitbart News interview for empowering conservatives across Europ

A senior member of a governing party compared Mr. Grenell to a far-right colonial officer

opposition politicians

called for the U.S. ambassador to be expelled.

Mr. Trump has often privately praised Mr. Grenell’s TV appearances and his social media presence—peppered alternately with criticism of German policy and pictures of his dog, Lola—and described the ambassador as someone who “gets it.”

Mr. Grenell “understands what his mission is—his mission is what my father gives him,” Donald Trump Jr.

Thanks to his direct access to the president, Mr. Grenell has extended his remit beyond Germany, holding meetings with conservative leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The president views Mr. Grenell “not just as his man in Germany, but his man in Europe,

The bar was hurting. Financially, obviously, but also because that sense of community that they had worked so hard to build had evaporated overnight. Romo says it was really painful.

So Romo decided to do something about it, and this is where things got interesting.Romo enlisted the help of René Cárdenas, in charge of marketing at Maverick. Cárdenas thought of the silence of the pandemic and he soon came to a realization: It was the sounds of the bar that really brought the sense of community home.

And they put all the sounds on a website, called IMissMyBar.com. The idea was customers could put all the sounds together, and feel like they were in Maverick, while sitting around their homes, drinking their cocktails (preferably bought to-go from the bar, of course). This is wat it sounded like.

So they modified the website to make it something where anyone, anywhere could play around and try to best recreate the bar they miss the most.It worked.

The website has been getting noticed — Maverick has been getting calls from everywhere: India, Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom. Thousands of miles away, Max Wolff, the general manager of a cozy cocktail bar called Swift in London, was going through the same feelings of loss as his counterparts in Maverick.

He shared the site with his customers. London is still in total lockdown, and bars like Swift are completely empty. Wolff says the city has lost part of its spirit — and sharing the sounds created by the Maverick team was about taking some of it back.

It isn't just those chaotic and surprising interactions that are missing. Bars all over the world are in danger of disappearing. Just in the United States, an estimated 100,000 bars and restaurants have closed during the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Marcio Duarte is one of those struggling bar owners around the world. He runs a small bar named Machimbombo in Lisbon, Portugal.

Like in many cities around the world, nightlife has been largely banned in Lisbon, though the restrictions are finally starting to lift.Duarte's bar has been hanging on by pivoting to selling food during the day, but it's been tough.So when he came across IMissMyBar.com, he put it on surround sound speakers. It gave him hope.

Oscar Romo, at Maverick in Mexico, says he's been surprised at how the website he helped create has taken off around the world.To him, it speaks to the importance of bars like his in the social fabric – and how IMissMyBar.com helped bring that reality home.

"The word impeachment is a dirty, disgusting word," Trump said."It's supposed to be for high crimes and misdemeanors. I can't believe that this wouldn't be a lawsuit."

His gripe is that he's being targeted without, as he puts it, "due process." But the Constitution and the courts are pretty clear that the House has leeway to impeach a President and it's the Senate's job to try him or her once they are impeached. That's the whole point of separation of powers.

"You know who was covered worse than me? They say Abraham Lincoln. I've heard the one person -- used to be five or six now it's down to one -- Honest Abe Lincoln. They say he got the worst press of anybody. I say I dispute it.

"When it's time to run, I'll run," he said, talking wistfully outside the White House about how soon his first term will end. "Can you believe we're getting down to 12 months. Can you believe it? When I first -- right in that corner of that beautiful building and I was in the first night with the first lady and I'm standing in an area where Abe Lincoln was and all of them were and that's the way it was and I'm standing there and I'm saying wow, four years, that's a long time.

"I give away my presidential salary. They say no other president has done it. I'm surprised, to be honest with you. They say George Washington may have been the only other president to do that. See whether or not Obama gave up his salary. See whether or not all of the other of your favorites, your other favorites gave up their salary. The answer is no."

Trump is right that the Founding Fathers were against the idea of any President trading on the office of the United States presidency. But he's also, it turns out, right that they didn't really close the loop and spell out how to make sure it didn't happen -- which is how he's been able to remain in possession of his real estate holdings, and to keep his business dealings private, while in office.

The Miami Herald reported Congressional Democrats plan to file plan to file a legal brief that alleges Trump's short-lived plan to hold a G7 summit with leaders of other developed democracies at his golf course in Doral, Florida, violates the emoluments clause. Democrats were already suing him for violating the foreign Emoluments Clause, arguing he must get the consent of Congress before accepting money from foreigners.

As much as Trump wants to be like Washington or Lincoln, he will always be synonymous with the Trump Organization.

Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.

Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.

ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Gone are countless old-growth redwoods, thousands of ancient sequoias and an estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees (which, of course, are a yucca).

“They are literally irreplaceable — unless you have 2,000 years to wait.”

This struck me as something we had not seen before, and we hadn’t: More than a million Joshua trees, torched.

Schranz’s supporters contended the mystery man had been a French policeman or soldier who had purposely interfered with the run to ensure Killy’s victory. The French hinted Schranz had made up the story."I was descending and I saw a dark shadow ahead of me," Schranz said at a news conference. "I wanted to avoid it, and I stopped. It was apparently a ski policeman."

The women's luge competition at the Grenoble Games was all but a lock for East Germany. Defending champ and gold-medal favorite Ortrun Enderlein stood in first; teammates Anna-Maria Müller and Angela Knösel were second and fourth. 

Jewtraw's win, by 1/5 of a second, stunned him. too. In a 1983 interview with Sports Illustrated, Jewtraw said he had never competed in the 500 prior to the gold-medal race and hadn't even trained for the Games.

A month before the 1994 Winter Games, a man wielding a metal baton attacked gold- medal favorite Kerrigan during a practice at the U.S. Nationals, paving the way for Harding to win the event and to qualify for the Olympics. Soon afterward, however, it was discovered that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, had planned the attack. With Kerrigan recovered—and Harding allowed to compete despite her not-yet-confirmed connection to the crime—the women’s figure skating competition became the hottest event at the Olympics. TV ratings soared.

Ice dancing got a dose of spy games in Nagano, Japan, when a Canadian judge secretly taped a conversation with another judge about picking winners before the competition.After her complaints to officials had been brushed aside, Jean Senft recorded Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov discussing skater placements as proof of her accusations. During the call, Balkov said he would vote for Canadians if Senft voted for a Ukrainian pair."The athletes are not competing on a fair playing field," Senft later told CBC News. "This isn't sport. Somebody had to get proof."

were made. (Ice dancing was not removed from Olympic competition.) "If [cheating] happens at the world championships in some small town, nobody notices," Pound said, according to The New York Times. "But in the Olympics, hundreds of millions of people are watching."

The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze edged Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier for the gold medal. But Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French judge, came forward, saying she was pressured by the French ice sports federation to put the Russians first. “I knew very well who would vote in favor of the Russians and who would vote in favor of the Canadians," she told Reuters. "I was almost certain that I was the one who would award the Olympic title. What I feared would happen really did.”

Le Gougne was suspended from judging for three years and banned from the 2006 Winter Games. The scandal led to sweeping judging reforms in the sport. 

in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

The Compleat Housewife would likely have been found in any well-to-do household in the late colonial era, when the mid-day “dinner” could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per course.

In an era long before refrigeration, popular methods of food preservation included drying, salting, smoking and brining, or some combination of these. Another method used to preserve meat was potting. This involved cooking the meat and packing it tightly into a jar, then covering it with butter, lard or tallow (beef fat) before capping it. Potting kept meat safe for weeks or even months; cooks would then open the pot and slice off pieces to serve for a meal.

Pickles

umble cookies—sometimes spelled “jumbal”—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early as 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. “You will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands,” says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to have her own.

Black pepper’s antibacterial properties make it a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-like loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits.

Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this popular drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped cream with wine or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was often served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States, included a recipe for syllabub that called for the cook to flavor cider with sugar, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor. 

No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.

we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.

These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile

The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.

they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.

Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.

The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.

It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.

It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.

The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.

the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers

these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman

To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.

for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear

One camp says yes, the kids are fine

adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.

One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan

But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.

The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25

developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now

You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.

And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear

No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.

This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.

so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,

In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,

what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.

This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin

For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.

No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.

But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us

To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.

The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?

this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.

I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.

whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.

And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics

most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.

What if a segment of the population actually supported, or at least tolerated, the CCP? And even if that segment involved both myth and fact, it behooves the CCP to keep the myth alive.

How does the CCP garner popular support in an information era? How does a dictatorship explain to its population that its unchallenged rule is wise, just, and socially beneficial?

All of this takes place against a backdrop of family and social developments in which we can explore household dynamics, dating habits, and professional aspirations—all within social norms for those honest party members and seemingly violated by those who are not so honest.

watch the television series Renmin de Mingyi (“In the Name of the People”), publicly available with English subtitles.

In the Name of the People is a primetime drama about a local prosecutor’s efforts to root out corruption in a modern-day, though fictional, Chinese city. Beyond the anti-corruption narrative, the series also goes into local CCP politics as some of the leaders are (you guessed it) corrupt and others are simply bureaucratic time-servers, guarding their own privileges and status without actually helping the people they purport to serve.

the series boasts one of Xi’s other main themes, “common prosperity,” a somewhat elastic term that usually means the benefits of prosperity should be shared throughout all segments of society.

The historical tools used to generate support such as mass rallies and large-scale hectoring no longer work with a more educated and communications-oriented citizenry.

So we see government officials pondering if they can ever find a date (being the workaholics that they are), or discussing housework with their spouses, or sharing kitchen duties, or reviewing school work with their child.

the central themes are quite clear: The party has brought historical prosperity to the community and there are a few bad apples who are unfairly trying to benefit from this wealth. There are also various sluggards and mediocrities who have no capacity for improvement or sense of public responsibilities.

The show makes clear that the vast majority of party members and government officials are dedicated souls who work to improve peoples’ lives. And in the end, virtue triumphs, the party triumphs, China triumphs, and most (not all) of the personal issues are resolved as well.

The show’s version of the CCP eagerly and uncynically supports Chinese culture: The same union leader from the wildcat strike also writes and publishes poetry. Calligraphy is as prized as specialty teas. And all of this is told in a lively style, similar to the Hollywood fare Americans might watch.

n the Name of the People was first broadcast in 2017 as a lead-up to the last Communist Party Congress, China’s most important decision-making gathering, held every five years. The show’s launch was a huge hit, achieving the highest broadcast ratings of any show in a decade.

Within a month, the first episode had been seen over 350 million times and just one of the streaming platforms, iQIYI, reported a total of 5.9 billion views for the show’s 55 episodes.

All of this must come as good news for the prosecutors featured so favorably in the series—for their real-life parent government body, the Supreme People’s Protectorate, commissioned and provided financing for the show.

At a minimum, these shows illustrate a stronger self-awareness in the CCP and considerable improvement in communication strategy.

Most important, it provides direction to current party members. Indeed, in some cities viewing was made obligatory and the basis for “study sessions” for party cadres

Second, the enormous public success of the series and acknowledging deficiencies of the party allows the party to control the criticism without ever addressing the fundamental question of whether a one-party system is intrinsically susceptible to corruption or poor performance.

As communication specialists like to say, There is already a conversation taking place about your brand—the only question is whether you will lead the conversation. The CCP is leading in its communications strategy and making it as easy as possible for Chinese citizens to support Xi.

it is not difficult to see that in this area, as in many others, China is breaking with tactics from the past and is playing its cards increasingly well. Whether the CCP can renew itself, reestablish that social contract, and live up to its television image is another question.