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What has changed are the willingness of women to come forward in ways that would have been unthinkable in the past and, as a result, the pressure on institutions to respond to issues that were once allowed to fester just out of sight.

in the case of all violence, there are matters ingrained in the culture that experts on sexual violence say go far beyond the institutions now under fire.

“The fix that I’d like to see,” said Erin Buzuvis, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Western New England University School of Law, “and one that is relevant whether we are talking about Cosby or the military or UVA. is to cultivate as individuals and society intolerance to the ways violence against women is normalized in the media, through sports, on TV and in movies, in video games, in advertising and online.”

“What you’re seeing with Cosby and college campuses and the military is that victims are gaining strength by seeing the courage of other victims,” she said. “I have seen this incredible increase in the number of people who have come out and are saying, ‘I want people to know that this happened to me.’ ”

Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”

As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”

This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.

It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.

Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.

That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.

All of the pathologies evident in the 1930s, which weighed so heavily on the minds of the EU’s architects, are resurgent—the high unemployment, the economic extremes, the perverse austerity policies, the popular backlash against ineffectual parliamentary politics, and the resulting ultra-nationalism.

For the right, the remedy was a return to a more laissez-faire model, even though there was little evidence that Europe’s social market had anything to do with the economic slowdown

For the first four postwar decades, democratically mobilized citizens in strong nation-states anchored the social part of Europe while the European Economic Community, predecessor of the EU, promoted the market part

WHEN JACQUES DELORS, a moderate French socialist, launched a full-blown European Union in the 1980s, the hope was to expand social Europe and market Europe in tandem. But in the actual Maastricht Treaty of 1992—Europe’s de facto constitution—free movement of goods, services, capital, and people are fundamental rights, and social protections are add-ons

IF EUROPE NEEDED ONE more assault to further undermine the model, it came via the refugee crisis. The crisis laid bare two awful fragilities. The first is the dysfunction of the EU as a confederation with multiple veto points and little capacity for leadership in a crisis

Politically, the collision of a lingering and needless economic crisis with a random refugee crisis has energized nationalism, both moderate and neo-fascist. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Austria, and elsewhere, the second- or third-strongest party is far-right populist. Much of this support is working-class, at the expense of social democrats.

he refugee crisis also makes clear that much of Europe’s social compact assumes a common national identity, to which foreigners do not easily fit in.

Europe might be able to accept a million refugees economically, but it cannot do so politically. The refugee crisis is simply an overlay on a deeper crisis of solidarity and common purpose. Unless there is a renewal of popular energy and a burst of progressive leadership, the three-decade era of broadly shared prosperity—les trente glorieuses, as the French call it—will be remembered as a historical blip. The EU aspired to combine that impossible trinity of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. All three are now on the defensive.

Francis' comments came hours after he concluded a visit to Mexico, where he prayed at the border for people who died trying to reach the U.S. While speaking to reporters on the papal plane, he was asked what he thought of Trump's campaign pledge to build a wall along the entire length of the border and expel millions of people in the U.S. illegally.

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," he said. While Francis said he would "give the benefit of the doubt" because he had not heard Trump's border plans independently, he added, "I say only that this man is not a Christian if he has said things like that."

Immigration is among the most contentious issues in American politics. Republicans have moved toward hardline positions that emphasize law enforcement and border security, blocking comprehensive legislation in 2013 that would have included a path to citizenship for many of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.

Trump also raised the prospect of the Islamic State extremist group attacking the Vatican, saying that if that happened, "the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened."

Francis, the first pope from Latin America, urged Congress during his visit to Washington last year to respond to immigrants "in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal." He irked Republicans on the same trip with his forceful call for international action to address climate change.

Trump, a Presbyterian and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, responded within minutes. "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful," he said at a campaign stop in South Carolina, which holds a key primary on Saturday. "I am proud to be a Christian, and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened."

Hispanics, an increasingly large voting bloc in U.S. presidential elections, have flocked to Democrats in recent years. President Barack Obama won more than 70 percent in the 2012 election, leading some Republican leaders to conclude the party must increase its appeal to them.

However, the current GOP presidential primary has been dominated by increasingly tough rhetoric. Trump has insisted that Mexico will pay for his proposed border wall and has said some Mexicans entering the U.S. illegally are murderers and rapists.

While Trump's words have been among the most inflammatory, some of his rivals have staked out similar enforcement positions. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson are among those who have explicitly called for construction of a wall.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the few GOP candidates proposing a path to legal status for people already in the U.S. illegally, said Thursday he supports "walls and fencing where it's appropriate." Bush said that while he gets his guidance "as a Catholic" from the pope, he doesn't take his cues from Francis on "economic or environmental policy."

Marco Rubio, another Catholic seeking the GOP nomination, said that Vatican City has a right to control its borders and so does the United States. Rubio said he has "tremendous respect and admiration" for the pope, but he added, "There's no nation on Earth that's more compassionate on immigration than we are."

Cruz said he was steering clear of the dispute. "That's between Donald and the pope," he said. "I'm not going to get in the middle of them." Ohio Gov. John Kasich, on the other hand, said he was staunchly "pro-Pope."

The long-distance exchange between the pope and Trump came two days before the voting in South Carolina, a state where 78 percent of adults identify as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Of that group, 35 percent identify as evangelical and 10 percent as Catholic, the survey found.

It's unclear what impact, if any, the pope's rhetoric will have, here or in other states. An October poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans had no strong opinion on the pope's approach to immigration issues, though he was overall viewed favorably.

the Costa Rican government has been feeding them and housing them in shelters.

Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís eased the migrants' worries by reiterating that his country will not send them back to Cuba in a message posted Wednesday on YouTube.

It has certainly been regrettable that that government of Nicaragua, in a move that is still incomprehensible to me, has denied free transit through its territory. This attitude, in my opinion, harms the spirit of integration and fraternity of Central America.

We would like to thank Costa Rica for everything it has done for us, the help for children, the elderly and pregnant women; but we don't want to stay in Costa Rica. We want to go on toward the United States,"

The government of Nicaragua accused Costa Rica of generating "a serious crisis" and of "violating treaties, borders and rights."

its role is simply to protect these migrants as they travel through its territory.

Adopting physical or cultural characteristics of those with higher status/more power is fine. Adopting the same characteristics of those lower in status or power is risky. For example, virtually nobody would be offended if someone dressed up in full preppy regalia, complete with lacrosse stick, Dartmouth ring, and golden retriever. Many people would be upset if someone dressed up with a huge hooked nose, greasy cheek curls, and fur hat. Both costumes would be based on ridiculous stereotypes, but one would be funny and the other offensive

Students at various schools said in interviews that they viewed racial tension as the driving force behind many of the warnings, especially in the last few weeks, since stories about a fraternity party gone wrong at the University of California, Los Angeles, raised concerns at many schools. Some white students at the party dressed as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, with smudged faces and exaggerated, padded body parts.

And at the University of Michigan, the dean of students has a webpage titled “Cultural Appropriation — what is the big deal?” It urges students to ask themselves why they are wearing a particular costume, and then to consider how accurate it is in depicting a culture or identity.

I'm gay and there are lots of men dressing in drag at the local college. A woman dressed as a football player. So what? I laughed because some of them looked so ridiculous. I would look ridiculous dressed as a Samarai warrior. Isn't that the point? To be silly and ridiculous on Halloween. Maybe everyone should just wear black t shirts and grey trousers which is about the only thing left that seems to be safe to wear.

Mocking someone's culture is a cheap shot and often leads to worse. Also, if it's such a heinous imposition on you to respect other people's benign wishes regarding how you treat their culture, then maybe the problem isn't their sensitivity but your own.

There is a difference between dressing up as Kim and Kanye, both of whom have made a career of being campy exaggerations of themselves, and being culturally insensitive. Kim and Kanye, as willing celebrities, are legitimate subjects for parody.

One right our constitution does NOT bestow is the right to NOT be offended. Quite the opposit, the First Amendment, the right of freedom of speech, bestows the right TO offend.The harsh realities of being alive in an insane world ARE offensive. Being offended is a GOOD thing. It builds resilience, and character. It provides for personal growth. It toughens you.

It is somewhat different if you want to go as a celebrity. Suppose you want to go as Lebron James. The #23 jersey, and the baggy shorts, and the ball all make a great costume. If you are short like me, the joke is even funnier. If like me you are white, however, don't go in blackface. People who go in blackface (or something similar) know it offends and intend to offend. You might as well wear a sign that says, "I'm supposed to be Labron James, but in real life I'm am just a jerk."

Halloween, Ms. Garcia said, is now often about ridicule. “Dressing up as Pocahontas (or Sexy Pocahontas, let’s get real), is offensive because it takes the whitewashed version of a whole group of people that have been victimized and abused in their own land,” and presents it as “a thing one can just try for a night,” she said.

I find it quite sad that so many commenters here have such an odd interpretation of what's going on. What these Universities are so boldly doing is teaching our children how to navigate the increasingly diverse world we live in, and that mutual respect and understanding are more important than being able to act stupidly without regard for how it affects others. Do we expect everyone to be perfect? Of course not. All that is being asked is that we THINK before we act (or dress up), and use good judgement -- anyone that thinks that isn't a worthy aim by dismissing this all as "hypersensitivity" is seriously missing the point.

Dressing up in ways that mock POC cultures isn't harmless -- it perpetuates stereotypes that result in actual harm. To you, it's only a Halloween costume that you get to take off at the end of the night -- for them, it's their LIVES. To me, protecting POC and dismantling dangerous stereotypes is more important than your desire to dress up for Halloween without thinking about the impact of your costume.

There are stereotypes and stereotypes. Surely we can all agree that a Halloween party isn't an appropriate place to don blackface and pretend to be a negro minstrel. And there are tasteless jokes that offend us no matter how friendly the person telling them or the lack of intent to offend. I understand the desire to promote a sense of decency at a time and place where good judgment often goes out the window. But at the same time, if we lose all perspective and the ability to laugh at our own stupidity, then what we embrace is a culture of outrage. Those of us with unique and interesting backgrounds ought not to be so precious.

Some schools advise that borrowing from any culture is demeaning and insulting unless the wearer is a part of that culture. In other words, do not put on a karate outfit with a black belt, the University of Washington advised in the video it sent to students, unless you actually earned that belt.

Are you serious? Halloween costumes aside, what many universities are doing is shielding students from divergent points of view.

I'm not sure if donning a sombrero, a false mustache, and clothes suitable to a mariachi band is offensive. But I don't think that dressing as a geisha or a judoka is offensive in the same way that dressing as "a suicide bomber" is. But is dressing as Osama Bin Laden offensive, because it means wearing typical Arabic clothing? Would the clothing itself be offensive without racial stereotypes? Are Viking costumes offensive to people of Scandinavian descent? Are leprechaun costumes offensive to the Irish? Are Tyrolean costumes offensive to Austrians, Germans, and Swiss?

Yet the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, citing judicial restraint, stated that it was its business to examine not the wisdom of the bill, but only its constitutionality: The judges would strike down the law only if the Haryana legislature had exceeded its authority in passing it, or if the law violated the fundamental right to equality of those it targeted by discriminating against them in ways that were arbitrary or irrational.

Populist in idiom rather than intent, the B.J.P. appears to be using these two states as laboratories in which to test the chances of a broader conservative move to limit the political participation of the poor.

This vision of solid citizens leading the shiftless poor toward civic virtue is un-republican: It constrains liberty, corrodes equality and mocks fraternity

Using only hot chili sauce as a local anesthetic, the people who performed this fateful operation typically did so in one swoop, using a small, curved knife. In exchange for a lifetime of humiliation marked by incontinence and sexual frustration, a few eunuchs were able to achieve tremendous influence and wealth.

Traditionally, a eunuch preserved his genitals in a jar, to insure that they would eventually be buried with him, in the belief that this would guarantee his reincarnation as a ''full'' man.

coincidentally the year that the former Emperor Pu Yi died -- Mr. Sun's family destroyed his jar. They were afraid of being punished by marauding Red Guards if such a symbol of China's feudal past were discovered.

The practice of using castrated men as guardians of the emperor's inner court began more than 2,000 years ago.

the eunuchs became crucial intermediaries between the outer bureaucratic world and the inner imperial one.

'Any senior official with business that demanded the emperor's attention had to persuade a eunuch to carry the message for him; the eunuchs, naturally enough, asked for fees in return for such service, and soon the more powerful ones were flattered and bribed by ambitious officials.

A ruling principle of Chinese history emerged: whenever the authority of an emperor receded, so the influence of eunuchs grew as a court yielded to a web of corruption, a hallmark of a declining dynasty ripe to be overthrown

his eventual success or promotion depended on the favor in which his master was held. On his master's death, a young eunuch might be forgotten in the sluices until the day he himself died, but if he was apprenticed to the chief eunuch he might rapidly acquire influence.''

Though eunuchs were generally illiterate, some, like Li Lianying, could read enough of the stylized court language to wield influence over officials bearing documents.

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, a black woman, knew the fallen soldier and his widow and was in the car when the president called to offer condolences. Wilson seems to have correctly reported what Trump said.

This set Trump off and he issued a stream of lies to defame Wilson. The White House even sent its chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, out to defend the president. He, too, lied about Wilson.

When asked about Kelly’s lies, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was “highly inappropriate” to question a four-star general.

Aside from this not being a third-world military junta where a person in a high-profile political job can’t be questioned, this illustrates how Trump’s fetish for military generals also acts as an expression of his racial exclusion and preference for patriarchy.

Military generals are a fraternity comprised almost exclusively of white men, according to a government report from 2011. How dare their word be questioned?

“According to Trump’s sordid he-said-she-said turn of events, however, Wilson isn’t an elected official supporting a constituent and friend, she’s a ‘wacky’ woman. Just like Clinton and San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz were ‘nasty’; Brzezinski had a ‘low IQ’; Megyn Kelly has ‘blood coming out of her wherever”; and Jessica Leeds, who accused Trump of assault, ‘would not be [his] first choice.’”

Gordon Matthews, a professor of anthropology living in Hong Kong, says some of his colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who have devoted their lives to China are exploring pursuing new lines of academic inquiry to avoid visiting the mainland.

'What are the things I have been doing that may have contributed to my getting detained?' It's also a question of, 'What is my nationality? What have the politicians from my country have been saying?'" says Nee.

"China has always protected the safety and legitimate rights and interests of foreigners in China in accordance with the law,"

In June, a business advisory council to the US State Department issued a report titled "Hostage Diplomacy in China," seen by CNN, which cited the two Canadians' cases as a primary reason why firms should be more careful when sending employees to China.

O'Halloran's exit ban was finally lifted in January. But to complete what Member of the European Parliament for Dublin, Barry Andrews, has called his "Kafkaesque nightmare," when O'Halloran went to the airport, hoping to get home for his son's 14th birthday, he was stopped again. He remains in China.

n 2020, China became the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment, with flows into the country rising 4% to $163 billion.

he wasn't concerned about getting into the country from a political standpoint. In fact, she said her community is itching to go for research and investing purposes, once the pandemic permits travel there again. "Fund flow is still positive and strong into China," she said. "So if you're investing, it's typical to take quarterly trips."

"When I'm in China, I don't go out. I don't fraternize, I don't go out to bars," he says. "You know, there's too much to lose. So my life in China is very small and I want to keep it that way. Because, you know, I've heard horror stories.

criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign powers.

He recalls one Buddhist colleague who had started contributing to a school in Tibet, a restive region of China with an exiled government agitating for its autonomy. He says his company took the colleague aside to ask her to refrain from donating, and to keep a low profile on Tibetan matters, to avoid causing the firm problems when she represented them in the mainland.

"A lot of the new advice we are getting, as graduate students, is to do a project that does not require you to necessarily do fieldwork in China,

With fewer academics willing to travel to China, and those who do make it after the coronavirus pandemic encountering a more closed nation, the result could be fewer Western minds reporting on and studying China firsthand at a time when, arguably, the world has never had a greater need to understand the country.

Surveillance footage released by the district attorney shows Rodriguez stepping out of the window and pulling a gun out of his waistband as officers were yelling for him to show them his hands and drop the gun.

He appears to be putting his hand down on his left side, and officers opened fire on him seconds later.

Attorneys have not been listed for the officers as of Wednesday. Currently, there are no dates set for the case.

The incident report states that Rodriguez "did not follow officers' commands and was subsequently shot."

Police records show that all five officers fired at Rodriguez.

"A loss of life is always a tragedy, and we know these officers did not take firing their weapons lightly," John George, president of the Oklahoma City Fraternal Order of Police, said in a statement. "The OKC FOP stands by these officers and maintains they acted within the law."

In an email sent to CNN, Dan Stewart of the Oklahoma City Police Department said that the department was informed on Tuesday that the officers would be charged.

Five Oklahoma City Police officers were charged with first-degree manslaughter in last year's fatal shooting of a 15-year-old armed robbery suspect who had already dropped his weapon, according to court documents filed Wednesday in Oklahoma County.

A sixth officer, who fired a less-lethal round, was not charged, the affidavit states.

The affidavit of probable cause filed by District Attorney David W. Prater alleges the officers "jointly, willfully, unlawfully and unnecessarily" killed the teenager "while resisting an attempt by the deceased to commit a crime or after such an attempt had failed."

At that point, the officer who was not charged fired a 40 mm "less lethal" round that struck Rodriguez, the affidavit says. Officers Sears, Barton, Adams, Skuta and Pemberton all then "unnecessarily" fired lethal rounds at him, striking him 13 times, the document says

Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.

The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.

then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.

Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say

as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”

After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.

Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.

there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result

If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.

Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism

Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans

Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.

But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”

“They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did

A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed

When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.

Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.

He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”

indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies

I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine

I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal

do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?

reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”

A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.

Many Flint residents are Black, and they have long memories of racist treatment by doctors who dismissed or neglected their medical needs.

Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive of the state Department of Health and Human Services, said the state's plan to vaccinate 70 percent of residents as quickly as possible includes efforts to enlist people like block club captains, fraternity and sorority presidents and religious leaders to promote the vaccine — an effort Khaldun said is especially important in the Black community, where what she called "vaccine hesitancy" is high.

"When you tell us that the water is safe but it really wasn't, that relationship between leadership and the community is still damaged," said Todd Womack, the pastor of community connections at Central Church of the Nazarene in Flint. "That just layers the historical trauma that has presented itself in our community."

"In this country, we know that African Americans have always been targeted as test dummies," he said, referring to unethical medical experiments including the infamous Tuskegee study, which left hundreds of Black men with untreated syphilis for decades.

"There is still systemic racism that exists. There is still, quite frankly, sometimes explicit bias that exists in the health care system, and so I think we need to name it and not shame these groups of people where they may have some hesitancy."

The process of spreading the information is just beginning, but it's going to need to come from more than one place, said Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist who has been leading community discussions about the virus as director of the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions

But at the same time, "relationships are built on trust, and trust takes time," she said. "They developed a vaccine at warp speed, and they're trying to skip a bunch of processes in the trust and relationship-building process."

"You don't allow your pulpit to become a platform," he said, adding that he understands "what you are risking when you open these platforms to a community that's already been taken advantage of, misused, abused."

"There's a reason, a quite valid reason, for there to be concerns about how the health care system in general, and often health care systems and the government together, have treated the African American community historically in the United States,"

"There was this push for everybody to use the water from the city," both during the crisis and after the city switched to a cleaner water source and started distributing filters and replacing corroded pipes, Womack said.

The President later released a stronger video denouncing the incident, but sources told CNN that Trump later appeared to regret making the video.

Although Trump has enjoyed widespread support from police unions in the run up to the 2020 election, even law enforcement organizations that endorsed him for reelection -- such as the powerful Fraternal Order of Police -- were appalled at the Trump-fueled January 6 attack on the Capitol.

In a strongly worded statement imploring the President to speak out against the Capitol violence, the group said, "the images coming in from the United State Capitol Building today are heartbreaking to every American. We call on President Trump to forcefully urge these demonstrators to stop their unlawful activity, to stand down, and to disperse."

With less than a week remaining as president, Trump's ceaseless false claims of mass voter fraud continue to threaten and make life more difficult for law enforcement in America.

"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You see them thrown in rough," Trump said, adding, "Please don't be too nice."

The Gainesville, Florida, police department said Trump had "no business endorsing or condoning cops being rough with arrestees and suggesting that we should slam their heads onto the car while putting them in." The department added that Trump's remarks "set modern policing back and erased a lot of the strides we have made to build trust in our community."

Trump's caustic comments about the investigators working to uncover Russian influence stood at odds with his attempted "pro-law enforcement" image, as did comments made by the President's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, when he compared career FBI agents to murderous Nazis.

While addressing a group of police officers early in his presidency, Trump encouraged those in attendance to be "rough" with suspects.

As the nation prepares to inaugurate Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, federal law enforcement agencies have transformed the nation's capital into a veritable fortress -- fearful that pro-Trump supporters could stage an attack along the lines of the Trump-inspired violent insurgence at the US Capitol on January 6.

Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.

The average doctor does not need to know where a donor’s DNA will present itself within a patient. That’s because this type of chimerism is not likely to be harmful. Nor should it change a person. “Their brain and their personality should remain the same,”

for a forensic scientist, it’s a different story. The assumption among criminal investigators as they gather DNA evidence from a crime scene is that each victim and each perpetrator leaves behind a single identifying code — not two

In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But there was a problem: The man had been in prison at the time of the assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant. The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted.

she heard about another disconcerting scenario since then. It involved police investigators who were skeptical of a sexual assault victim’s account because she said there had been one attacker, though DNA analysis showed two. Eventually the police determined that the second profile had come from her bone marrow donor.

In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was confirmed by DNA in a kidney, but not in the spleen or the lung, which contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.

Fraternal twins sometimes acquire each other’s DNA in the womb; in at least one case that led to unfounded fears of infidelity when a man’s child did not seem to be his. In another case, a mother nearly lost custody of her children after a DNA test.

one frequently offered explanation is having a desire to serve in the military, but being excluded from doing so.

part of the Oath Keepers’ attraction to disabled veterans like himself is that it offers a way to serve beyond their time in the military, in the absence of other “boots on the ground fraternal organizations” that might provide outlets to carry out a drive to be “guardians and warriors.”

On April 1, 1814 Talleyrand convinced the French Senate to create a provisional government in Paris, with him as president. The next day, he led the French Senate in official deposing Napoleon as Emperor and forcing him into exile the island of Elba. On April 11, 1814, the French Senate, in approving the Treaty of Fontainebleau adopted a new constitution that returned power to the Bourbon monarchy.

Representing the aggressor nation, Talleyrand faced a daunting task in negotiating the Treaty of Paris. However, his diplomatic skills were credited for securing terms that were extremely lenient to France. When the peace talks began, only Austria, the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Russia were to be allowed to have decision-making power. France and the smaller European countries were to be allowed only to attend the meetings. However, Talleyrand succeeded in convincing the four powers to allow France and Spain to attend the backroom decision-making meetings. Now a hero to the smaller countries, Talleyrand proceeded to secure agreements under which France was allowed to maintain its pre-war 1792 boundaries without paying further reparations. Not only did he succeed in ensuring that France would not be partitioned by the victorious countries, he greatly enhanced his own image and standing in the French monarchy.

Though Napoleon was ultimately defeated in the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, Talleyrand’s diplomatic reputation had suffered in the process. Bowing to the wishes of his quickly expanding group of political enemies, he resigned in September 1815. For the next 15 years, Talleyrand publicly portrayed himself as an “elder statesman,” while continuing to criticize and scheme against King Charles X from the shadows.

Upon learning of Napoleon’s death in 1821, Talleyrand cynically commented, “It is not an event, it is a piece of news.”

Talleyrand may be the epitome of a walking contradiction. Clearly morally corrupt, he commonly used deceit as a tactic, demanded bribes from persons with whom he was negotiating, and openly lived with mistresses and courtesans for decades. Politically, many regard him as a traitor because of his support for multiple regimes and leaders, some of which were hostile toward each other. On the other hand, as philosopher Simone Weil contends, some criticism of Talleyrand’s loyalty may be overstated, as while he not only served every regime that ruled France, he also served the “France behind every regime.”

“I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.”

And perhaps most self-revealing: “Man was given speech to disguise his thoughts.”