Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The shameless revisionism of the Capitol attack cannot be allowed to take root It is important to keep fresh in our memories the true sights and sounds of that day — a day when Congress was supposed to be performing its duty to certify the electoral college tally of the 2020 election. A day when democracy itself came under attack by faux patriots. The whole country witnessed an insurrectionist mob, which Trump later referred to as “very special” people, breaching the building and going on a rampage. More than 350 individuals have since been charged in violence that left five people dead and about 140 police officers injured. (Washington Post)
• The World Needs the Not-for-Profit AstraZeneca Vaccine, Minus the AstraZeneca Drama A series of unforced errors by the British pharma company has turned hope into hesitancy. (Businessweek)
• Despite A Ban, Facebook Continued To Label People As Interested In Militias For Advertisers Months after banning militias from its platform, Facebook continued to categorize people as being interested in them. (Buzzfeed)
• Millions Are Tumbling Out of the Global Middle Class in Historic Setback Setback (Businessweek) see also Government has always picked winners and losers A welfare state doesn’t distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer (Washington Post)
• A Look Inside the Anti-Vaxx Playbook How the anti-vaccine establishment is waging war against Covid-19 vaccines. The roughly 150 leading anti-vaxx social media accounts gained more than 10 million followers, mostly on Instagram and YouTube, between 2019 and December 2020. (Bloomberg)
• The Disintegration of the ACLU A new documentary about former Executive Director Ira Glasser explains how the once-storied civil liberties organization came to embrace the ideology it was built to fight (Tablet)
• A QAnon revelation suggests the truth of Q’s identity was right there all along The extremist movement’s leader had purported to be a top-secret government operative. But a possible slip-up in a new documentary about QAnon suggests that Q was actually Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of the 8kun message board. (Washington Post )see also Does HBO’s QAnon Documentary Reveal Who Q Is? Assessing the latest evidence in a Trump-era mystery. (Slate)
• Should health-care workers be required to get coronavirus shots? Companies grapple with mandates. The question of whether employers should compel their workforces to be immunized against the coronavirus is rippling through the health-care industry and beyond. It is a question of uncommon intricacy, involving public health, ethics, law, labor relations and ingrained American values. (Washington Post)
Two babies were switched at birth. Now a town asks: How many more? Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. They didn’t know each other, and never would. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery. (Atavist)
• Tucker Carlson’s Bizarre Defense of Capitol Rioters Tucker Carlson defended the Capitol rioters in a lengthy monologue on Tuesday night, presenting a bizarre, revisionist account of the Jan. 6 attack, one that will sound odd to anyone who was awake and mildly aware of what happened on that day. (Mediaite) see also Fox News’ New Prime-Time Host Tucker Carlson Is Beloved By Neo-Nazis And Misogynists Since landing his 7 p.m. Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight in November, Carlson has built a strong following among the worst racists, misogynists, and anti-Semites on the Internet. (Media Matters)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with John Schlifske, CEO of Northwestern Mutual. The firm underwrites over $2 trillion in life insurance, with $200 billion in client assets. Schlifske joined Northwestern Mutual in 1987 as an investment specialist, and climbed through the ranks, becoming CEO 11 years ago. The firm announced a record $6.2 billion dividend in 2021.
How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations
Source: New York Times
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