Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century - On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters. - link

• Biden and the Blame Game at the Border - The issues involved are nearly impossible to settle as long as policymakers regard decency as a political weakness rather than as a moral strength. - link

• The Politics of Stopping Pandemics - Even before the COVID-19 crisis, global instability had caused a worrying rise in epidemics. Medical science alone won’t be able to turn the tide. - link

• Mario González Still Wants to Know Why the Police Held Him After the Atlanta Shooting - González was on a date with his wife, Delaina Ashley Yaun, when she was killed. But, for hours, no one told him what had happened to her. - link

• The Movement to Exclude Trans Girls from Sports - The opposition is cast as one between cis-girl athletes on the one hand and a vast liberal conspiracy on the other. - link

From Vox

• What Americans really think about billionaires during the pandemic -

  

  A new poll from Vox and Data for Progress pulls back the curtain.

  The debate over the power of billionaires in America is driven by critics who see them as rapacious tax-cheats and by defenders who see them as embodiments of the American Dream.

  But what do regular people think?

  A new, exclusive poll from Vox and Data for Progress pulls back the curtain on how Americans feel about the exploding net worth of billionaires during the pandemic; their record-setting philanthropy as a way to address inequality; and whether they have too much political power in American elections. The poll was fielded In February and surveyed likely voters.

  The data suggest that gone are the days when the ultra-wealthy could count on widespread admiration as job-creators, titans of industry, and “thought leaders.” They now confront a skeptical public, shaped in part by a year of the coronavirus pandemic that has entrenched their power.

  At the same time, Americans reject many of the furthest-left critiques of billionaires and their influence in American life. You can read the full results here, and here are some of the highlights.

  How Americans feel about billionaires during the pandemic

  The pandemic has exacerbated wealth inequality, and many Americans are resentful of the fact that while they struggled, the wealthy made significant gains.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  By a wide gap — 72 percent to 19 percent — voters polled say it was unfair that billionaires got wealthier during the pandemic. That conclusion is shared across all racial, partisan, socioeconomic, and other demographic groups.

  This unease is reflected in questions that speak to Americans’ more generalized opinions about the one-percent, which were generally shared across the political spectrum. Only 23 percent of those polled said they consider billionaires to be good role models for the country, and 65 percent said they don’t.

  Similarly, only 36 percent said they had, in general, positive feelings about billionaires, as opposed to 49 percent who said they did not. Black Americans said they had much more positive feelings about billionaires than did members of other racial subgroups: 45 percent said they felt positively, with only 39 percent saying they felt negatively. Democrats were also more likely to be anti-billionaire than were Republicans.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  And yet Americans are broadly dismissive of some progressive rhetoric about something being fundamentally wrong with a society that features billionaires. Some 82 percent they agree with the statement that people should be allowed to become billionaires — and similarly, 68 percent say they disagree that it’s immoral for a society to allow people to become billionaires.

  How Americans feel about billionaire philanthropy

  Voters give billionaires positive marks when it comes to their philanthropy. Asked whether billionaires do a good job at giving away their money through philanthropy. 47 percent say they agree. Only 33 percent say they don’t.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  And yet, they do not think philanthropy is a sufficient solution to solving Americans’ inequality problems. When asked about which is a better solution to solve the country’s problems during the pandemic — to raise taxes or to seek more charity from the wealthy —52 percent choose the former and 38 percent say the latter.

  How Americans feel about Bill Gatses, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg

  Four tech billionaires have become some of the world’s most influential people during the pandemic, at center stage in America like never before. Vox asked voters how they felt about these increasingly unavoidable figures.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  Elon Musk is the most popular of the tech billionaires polled, with 50 percent saying they had a favorable opinion of the Tesla founder and currently the world’s second richest person. Musk is a bipartisan figure: 52 percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion (versus 22 percent unfavorable) and 48 percent of Republicans (versus 25 percent unfavorable.) Musk is especially popular with men: A staggering 66 percent of men view him favorably (versus 21 percent unfavorably).

  Bill Gates, who has played a quasi-governmental role during the pandemic from his perch and his eponymous foundation, also is viewed very favorably in the throes of the crisis with 55 percent of respondents saying they felt that way, versus 35 percent who felt differently. Gates is especially popular with Democrats, who are fans of his by a 55-percentage point margin.

  Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, who are both lightning rods in their own ways, are less popular figures. Just about as many people view Bezos unfavorably as view him favorably. And Zuckerberg himself is under water by a significant margin; 54 percent say they have an unfavorable opinion, including 64 percent of Republicans.

  How Americans feel about billionaires’ political power

  What unites Americans is a belief that billionaires have too much influence in the political system. Of those polled, 61 percent say they feel that these ultra-wealthy people had too much influence in the 2020 election (62 percent of Republicans agreed with this statement, as did 55 percent of Democrats).

  Whether Joe Biden himself was too close to this billionaire class, predictably, depends on your partisanship. Only 20 percent of Democats say that’s the case. But 72 percent of Republicans say so.

  Nevertheless, despite being concerned about these billionaires’ power, American voters do not think they pose any sort of existential risk. Asked if billionaires are a threat to democracy, only 28 percent said they agreed, while 54 percent said they disagreed.

• Why we can’t stop talking about billionaires -

  

  Tech billionaires emerged from a year of hardship as more than leaders of iconic companies. They are central — almost too central — characters in American life.

  When MacKenzie Scott unveiled last year that she had donated $6 billion to support 500 nonprofits across the country, overwhelming applause rushed in for a billionaire who probably donated more money directly to charities in a single year than any living person ever had before.

  But then something weird happened. She ended the year much, much richer.

  It happened to Jeff Bezos, Scott’s ex-husband and Amazon’s CEO, too. Ditto for Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. And the same went for Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, whose net worth more than doubled over the last year. All of these billionaire philanthropists ended the first 12 months of the Covid-19 pandemic wealthier than when it started, even though some of them are determined to relinquish their money and power to the masses — or to “keep at it until the safe is empty,” as Scott once put it.

  Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  Instead, they became more moneyed and more powerful. It’s a paradox that neatly encapsulates just how much billionaires won at a time when many Americans lost something.

  “This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” wrote Scott last year, before tartly acknowledging the winners that philanthropists can resist acknowledging. “Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”

  At the outset of the pandemic a year ago, I wrote about how Silicon Valley’s richest people were stepping up to help in the face of an unprecedented crisis — and how relying on them was likely to expand and entrench their power and influence. A year later, that largely happened.

  The current crisis has cemented tech billionaires’ status as masters of the universe. They have grown their economic power — both their companies’ market caps and their own personal bank accounts. Many of them now exert greater gravitational pull in civic life through their philanthropic empires and political operations. And we are all more dependent on them and on the private sector more generally, in no small part because of a slow response from a public sector that created a leadership vacuum in the first place.

  They have emerged from a year of hardship as more than leaders of iconic companies. They are central — almost too central— characters in American life, according to interviews with philanthropy professionals, critics, advisers to the mega-rich, and, yes, some billionaires.

  “If you asked someone, ‘Do you think Jeff Bezos is more powerful than the collective Congress?’ you’d probably have people debating that,” said Ro Khanna, a liberal member of Congress who represents much of Silicon Valley.

  That assessment is backed up in new exclusive polling from Vox and Data for Progress that reveals an American public that is uneasy about its billionaire class. The survey finds that Americans have heated feelings about the ultra-rich, saying by a more than 40 percentage-point margin that billionaires aren’t good role models. Many Americans also say billionaires unfairly got richer during the crisis and should have to pay more in taxes, rather than leaving the country depending on their philanthropy. At the same time, though, many dismiss further-left critiques and say they believe billionaires generally do a good job at giving away their money; by a 50 percentage-point margin, Americans strongly reject the idea that a society that allows billionaires is inherently immoral.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  That’s because, as the survey results suggest, billionaires are also appreciated — and their power is not always nefarious. Yes, the wealthy got wealthier since the pandemic started, but in many ways because they provided services and products Americans desperately needed. Plus, the influence that billionaires gained through their philanthropic and political operations can easily be overstated and oversimplified, in part because Americans are now more attuned to their power in the first place.

  But when someone gives away more money in a single year than any living person ever has before and somehow ends the year richer, it raises questions for everyone involved about the system that produces these winners.

  How tech billionaires won the pandemic

  If there was already a huge gap between the rich and the poor, this pandemic turned it into a chasm.

  The wealthy were able to hop on private jets, decamp to spacious vacation homes, and consult high-end concierge doctors. The poor lost 80 percent of the jobs that disappeared, disproportionately labored on the front lines, and were more likely to die from the virus than wealthier Americans — and racial minorities were hit even harder. The disconnect between the stock market and the economy could not be more stark: The stock market had one of its best years since World War II as America’s economy shed 10 million jobs and dragged millions more into poverty.

  Billionaires and their already-big companies were winners of this yawning inequality. Scott and Bezos and Zuckerberg and Dorsey were not anomalies among the billionaire class. The 500 wealthiest people in the world saw their net worth increase by almost one-third in 2020, the greatest increase in the eight-year history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

  Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  That spike was driven disproportionately by the tech titans, the richest people in the world: The pandemic created a new class of billionaire-dom, turning tech’s mega-billionaires into mega-mega-billionaires at a time when the rest of the economy was cratering. At the outset of the pandemic, only one billionaire, Bezos, had more than $100 billion. Today, five do.

  “The scale of the upside that the wealthiest like the tech billionaires have experienced — in the face of what has happened to the rest of country — should force a fundamental rethink about the society we live in,” said Jenny Stefanotti, who has advised some of Silicon Valley’s ultra-wealthy on philanthropic work. “We can talk all day about why that is the case — because of what happened with the markets and blah blah blah — but I find something fundamentally problematic about that outcome.”

  Many Americans agree. Seventy-two percent of those polled said they found that the fact that the rich had gotten wealthier during the pandemic to be unfair, compared to only 19 percent who found it fair.

  How did that happen? Tech founders got richer because their companies became more powerful and essential — and they were already dominant before the pandemic. While many non-tech companies surged over the last year, too, the tech giants now account for almost one-quarter of the value of the S&P 500, a sign of just how big they have become relative to the rest of corporate America. Shutdowns around the world forced the economy to pivot to digital, and tech companies were positioned to reap the windfall.

  Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

  Defenders of billionaires’ wealth gains have a fairly straightforward argument: Their innovations made Americans’ lives more convenient, cheaper, and safer. They created jobs or vaccines. And public market investors bid up their increasingly successful companies. To fault billionaires for maximizing shareholder value and for getting richer as a result, these defenders say, is to question the capitalist impulses that undergird America’s entire economy.

  “There are few things as dangerous to the average, everyday person trying to get by as misplaced rage about this issue,” said one person close with several tech billionaires. The anger should be at the government for not taxing them more, not the Jeff Bezoses of the world. “If Jeff Bezos was stealing money, he’d be arrested. The fact that he’s not stealing money means that probably government officials should be arrested.”

  Critics, though, paint a different portrait of American success stories: Their companies made only some Americans’ lives more convenient, cheaper, and safer. They say companies like Amazon put workers at risk and took advantage of third-party sellers, and made it even harder for mom-and-pop retail stores to survive. To hear them tell it, these tech titans are throwbacks to the pillaging robber barons, and a sign that the economic system doesn’t work.

  “There’s being in the right place at the right time and you get a certain premium for that. You and I open up a lemonade stand on a hot day in a park and we’re being entrepreneurial,” said Chuck Collins, a progressive critic of billionaires at the Institute for Policy Studies. But that’s not what he thinks the tech giants did. “If it’s a water shortage and you and I set up our table to sell water bottles at twice the price or whatever, then we’re benefiting from adverse conditions for others. And that’s kind of a profiteering scenario.”

  So the debate about billionaire tech CEOs in America in some ways boils down to a debate about trillion-dollar tech companies in America. What is a legitimate, hard-earned profit, and what is craven rent-seeking? How much scheming to box out a foe is to-be-expected corporate warfare, and how much is monopolization meriting an antitrust breakup? And amid a pandemic, do companies have any special obligations to society that they don’t have ordinarily, or is their primary calling still to maximize their bottom line?

  Those are big questions that people naturally disagree on. What you can’t really debate is the reality that these companies are more powerful today than they were before Covid-19. We’ve all been forced to embrace and depend on Big Tech: Your mall may be closed, leaving you dependent on Amazon Prime. Your school may be closed, leaving you dependent on Google Classroom. Your borders may be closed, leaving you dependent on Facebook Messenger to communicate with family.

  Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

  Is that good? Americans are evenly split in Vox’s poll on whether these tech companies have done more good than bad for them and their families over the course of the pandemic. But they should get used to it — the long-term power expansion of the industry seems unlikely to reverse any time soon.

  One of the few things that could halt that is antitrust action, which has accelerated alongside the tech giants’ pandemic gains. These tech giants have become less optional than ever, but if antitrust advocates have their way, the pandemic would be a high-water mark for their power, rather than an upward inflection point on their path to dominance.

  And for the billionaires themselves? One of the few things that could halt their fortunes are proposals for higher taxes, which have multiplied during the pandemic, too.

  More net worth doesn’t always translate to more power. There are plenty of no-name billionaires who grew their bank accounts during the pandemic but are just as marginal to public life as they were before. And what often gets overlooked by critics of billionaire power is that tech founder-CEOs are not swimming in actual cash, but in stock that they can be reluctant to sell as long as they are in company leadership.

  And so tech billionaires’ power primarily comes from their hand on the wheel of America’s most powerful companies.

  “My students get all in a huff about how much money people have made during this time of the pandemic. It’s kind of irrelevant in some ways,” said Akhtar Badshah, who ran philanthropy efforts at Microsoft for 15 years and now teaches at the University of Washington. “To me, it’s pointless. However, what is not pointless is that the gap within certain sectors of the [economy] have increased because of this. And what is the sector as a whole doing to reduce the inequity?”

  A testing moment for billionaire philanthropy

  One of the ways that tech billionaires can convert their companies’ economic power into personal power is through philanthropy. And billionaire philanthropy faced its biggest testing moment to date at the outset of the pandemic. Would the billionaires save us?

  It’s hard to tally exactly how much the ultra-wealthy did. The nonprofit industry is opaque by design. Tech philanthropists in particular are drawn to vehicles that do not require disclosures of gifts, or they see for-profit vehicles — as opposed to nonprofit grants — as their most effective civic-minded work. Some early estimates of philanthropic donations during the pandemic are almost certainly a massive undercount because they rely solely on public disclosures. Better data on 2020 will likely come in the middle of the year.

  In this vacuum, proponents and critics of big-money philanthropy gravitate toward their prior beliefs. Proponents point to the dedicated time and eye-popping sums some billionaires spent on responding to the crisis. The other side can’t get over how small even record-setting donations are in comparison to donors’ exploding net worths. And the responses of everyday Americans polled for Vox seem to acknowledge both sides have a point.

  By a spread of 14 percentage points, Americans say they think billionaires have done a good job at giving away their money during the pandemic. But at the same time, when asked if the better solution to inequality is more philanthropy or higher taxes, 52 percent chose taxes and only 38 percent favored charity.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  “There was a modest increase in giving, but the increase was not equal to the need that existed. And certainly in retrospect, I think the philanthropic sector could have been much more generous,” predicted John Arnold, a billionaire donor who is pushing Congress to impose new regulations requiring philanthropies to give their assets away more quickly.

  Ironically, billionaires’ perceived thriftiness in the past year means that the ultra-rich didn’t amass as much power as they might have had they brandished their generosity more visibly.

  Charitable gifts from billionaires sometimes allow them to influence policies as if they were political leaders — even though these donors haven’t been elected. For instance, when Zuckerberg donated $100 million to try to fix Newark schools a decade ago, the Silicon Valley billionaire suddenly gained huge influence over education policy in New Jersey’s largest city.

  Billionaires and their aides often bristle at the notion that their altruism can give them undue influence, especially when their gifts are addressing basic needs. What power did Craig Newmark gain when he donated $25 million last year to the nation’s food banks to feed the hungry? We asked him.

  Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

  “How did I do that and what’s the secret there? I can show my ignorance and naivete there,” said Newmark. The Craigslist founder said he had not noticed any broader power grab by billionaires during the last year. “I haven’t seen it. Maybe I haven’t been looking.”

  It may be unsurprising that a billionaire philanthropist would say that. But the same dynamic has struck some billionaire critics, too. Megan Tompkins-Stange entered the coronavirus pandemic concerned that the rich would make major philanthropic gifts that “would be leveraged into reputation, capital, and more power in the political sphere.” A year later, she says, “I don’t think that happened.”

  That’s in part, she said, because philanthropists disclosed smaller donations than she thought they might. But that’s also because many donors tended to focus on basic problems — like the $100 million that Bezos donated to a food bank, Feeding America — rather than trying to place a stamp on US policy.

  To her, that’s a nod to the moment (and the polling).

  “Billionaires don’t have the same reverence in the eyes of the public that they had five years ago and so I think that some of their purchase in the policy process is not necessarily as palpable as it was even four or five years ago,” said Tompkins-Stange, who studies the policy influence of the rich. “I think the critique about foundations being too involved in policy and the democratic process perhaps maybe counterintuitively has led to a reticence on their part to step in in the case of government failure.”

  A year into the pandemic, the polling shows that the general public is not gushing with praise for billionaires or their philanthropic accomplishments. Some billionaire philanthropists, like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are popular (55 percent approve; 35 percent disapprove); others, like Zuckerberg, are not (31 percent approve; 54 percent disapprove).

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  Even when philanthropists made gifts that were sorely needed during the pandemic — such as when Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated a needed $450 million to support American election administration — they couldn’t earn easy PR wins and even found themselves dogged by right-wing backlash. And so while billionaire critics also entered the pandemic with concerns that the wealthy would manage to burnish their public profiles with unwarranted praise, the power grab wasn’t as severe as some feared.

  The massive exception is, of course, Gates. Since the earliest days of the pandemic, he has been one of the most omnipresent spokespeople for taking the health crisis seriously. The Microsoft founder-turned-public-health expert played an almost governmental role throughout the pandemic.

  Gates has corralled drug makers to develop drugs for poor countries; convinced monarchs and presidents around the world to fund the World Health Organization; and served as an informal adviser for Washington policymakers. Whether he is playing diplomat, fundraiser, or doctor, no private citizen has had more reach in the realm of public health over the last year than the world’s third-richest person.

  Gates in some ways made the best argument possible for billionaire philanthropy, playing a leadership role when the federal government wouldn’t.

  Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images

  Private philanthropists like Gates say they aren’t trying to grab power, and many of them share a concern that critics are sloppily stereotyping the rich.

  Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the data company Palantir, said private philanthropists like him are merely motivated by trying to do anything they can to help amid all-hands-on-deck crises. For him, that included starting a for-profit biopharmaceutical company, Resilience Bio, that manufactures gene therapies and mRNA.

  “Yes, us starting that does ‘increase wealth inequality,’ but it’s not clear it would have been better for us all to go to the beach,” said Lonsdale. “Positive sum wealth creation is not something anybody should be ashamed about, although our culture works better when everybody takes their success and finds ways to contribute.”

  Why tech billionaires may have less political power than we think

  To hear some people tell it, all of this focus on charity misses the bigger picture of how billionaires truly shaped American society over the past year. Billionaires’ single most significant power flex, they say, has been funneling their millions into politics, specifically to help oust Trump.

  Even if you believe that America’s billionaires should have been maniacally focused on combating the coronavirus, you might be inclined to agree that the best return on that mission was achieved not through feel-good philanthropy but by beating Trump, who bungled the federal response.

  But at the dawn of the Biden administration, these tech titans may actually have less power than they typically might given their massive donations.

  On the surface, Democratic mega-donors played an enormous role in the presidential campaign, financing hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs that helped back Joe Biden’s campaign. Titans like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt executed sweeping, often secretive plans to push new political technologies and raise big money for outside groups backing Biden.

  But you could make a good argument that billionaires now have less political influence than they have in years past, despite the large checks. That’s because there’s so much other money in politics.

  This trend dates back to at least 2016, when GOP presidential contenders competed for the affection of billionaires who could donate to their super PACs. But then Donald Trump ran roughshod over his Republican opponents while being massively outspent — a formula he repeated in the general election against Hillary Clinton, who had her own stable of super PAC-donating Democratic billionaires.

  Four years later, the small-donor revolution that Trump and Bernie Sanders popularized was in full swing. Big donors spent more money on the 2020 election than ever before, but the amount of money that other Americans on the whole spent on the 2020 election skyrocketed to $14 billion, twice as much as was spent in 2016. And so while the top 100 donors of the 2020 cycle contributed $700 million more than did the biggest donors in 2016, the proportion of total money raised that came from them actually dropped compared to 2016, according to an analysis done for Vox by the Center for Responsive Politics. And the billionaires who ran for president themselves got clobbered.

  For all the exhortations about money in politics, it can seem like the heyday of billionaire influence in politics was five years ago, or even 10 years ago — not today.

  And yet, Americans still feel that billionaires had too much influence in the 2020 election: 61 percent of those polled said they thought so, including majorities of both Republicans and Democrats.

  “Both of these things can be true at the same time — that billionaires are arguably less important and less powerful because of the ridiculous amounts of money flowing through the system,” said Anthony Nownes, the co-author of a new book about the rise of Silicon Valley political donors. “But it can also be true that they’re still incredibly powerful and important players.”

  What further weakens billionaires’ political power is that it’s not clear that their donations will translate to significant influence in the Biden administration — at least publicly.

  Biden has sung sanguine notes in the past about billionaires not being “bad guys,” but he does have to watch his left flank, which is led by voices who often cast billionaires as villains. He has promised to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. And so while a few tech billionaires like Hoffman and Schmidt certainly have access to the administration, Biden has to be ultra-mindful of how much he acknowledges those ties in public.

  Whether you think Biden is too close with billionaires is a question in polling shaped strongly by your partisanship, according to Vox’s poll. But if you’re one of the majority of Americans who thinks that billionaires, in general, have too much influence in politics, there is ample reason to think it is waning.

  So where does this leave America?

  At the onset of the pandemic, you could squint and envision two possible readings of the country’s thermometer on its billionaires. You could see the mood getting hotter and antipathy toward the mega-rich growing as the pandemic revealed and exacerbated inequities in the economy. But you could also imagine the pandemic serving as a coolant, with billionaire philanthropists’ generosity front and center in America like never before.

  Logically, it feels like the answer should be colder — that in a moment of solidarity we came to appreciate the rich. But the impression I gleaned from interviews was that our country is as riven by so-called class warfare as it’s ever been. Billionaires, perhaps because of a skittishness to act publicly, today don’t get as much “credit” for their philanthropy or political wins as they might have in the past. While they should be in a better place reputationally, the bipartisan public conversation is increasingly driven by a desire to tax them at higher rates, break up their companies, and more closely scrutinize their philanthropy.

  You need look no further than the guillotines that activists rolled out in front of Bezos’s mansion in August. Or look at our polling: By a margin of 13 percentage points, Americans say they have generally negative feelings about billionaires; and by a spread of 42 percentage points, they say that America’s billionaires do not serve as good role models.

  Ethan Winter, Data for Progress

  Lonsdale said critics are using the wealthy as scapegoats rather than tackling the root drivers of inequality by fixing America’s education and criminal justice systems, for instance.

  “It’s much easier for populists instead to demonize easy general targets, and to play on fear and envy versus doing the hard work of allowing innovation and building to make it easier for everyone to have the opportunity to thrive,” he said.

  It feels Pollyannaish to think that these populists will accept that argument when the pandemic is retired to history. Years from now, it may be tough to recall what any billionaire or their company did to mitigate the pandemic’s destruction on the margins. And there’s little evidence that this will somehow lead to a come-to-Jesus moment for billionaires that unleashes billions more in philanthropic capital over the next few decades.

  David Ryder/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  Meanwhile, Americans’ dependence on these billionaires’ tech companies seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon. It’s not totally clear what America’s economy will resemble in the long aftermath of the pandemic, but is there any doubt that some of the digital-first trends that advantage tech giants like Amazon and Google will continue?

  A more and more powerful tech industry, led by wealthier and wealthier founders. A group of philanthropists somehow giving away more than ever, but still not enough to appease critics. A political ecosystem that Americans of all ideologies still feel is controlled by the rich.

  If this all seems to you like a system waiting to combust, you’re not alone.

  David Risher, a top lieutenant to Bezos during the early days of Amazon, worries about that too. He said he was quite bothered that the wealthy — including him and his wife — got even richer over the last year. And he’s simultaneously concerned about the demonization of the wealthy that has made America more tense.

  “Wealth can do incredible things,” said Risher. But “it’s hard not to get very, very frustrated — or even angry — with this accumulation of wealth that’s happened so fast, and a tax policy that hasn’t kept up with it.”

• Lil Nas X’s evil gay Satanic agenda, explained -

  

  Lil Nas X put human blood into 666 Nikes because being queer means embracing your villainy.

  Not content to merely spur controversy and debate within the country music industry, Lil Nas X has jump-started the 21st century’s first foray into Satanic Panic by selling blood-infused Nikes.

  Welcome!

  It all started with the March 26 release of his latest music video, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” in which he cavorts erotically with various iterations of Satan, is stoned by a crowd throwing buttplugs, transforms a spear that’s been homoerotically aimed at him (a la St. Sebastian) into a stripper pole, and then slides all the way down the pole into Hell before giving Satan a lap dance as an excuse to seduce him, murder him, and steal the crown of Hell for himself in a win for bottoms everywhere.

  Oh, and he does all of this while singing with a mix of joy and wryness about gay sex, the frustration of living a closeted life, the pain of loving someone who’s still in the closet — Lil Nas himself is openly gay — and the jealousy he feels toward straight people who get to live their lives without facing bigotry and oppression due to their sexuality. “You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend,” he sings. “I’m not fazed, only here to sin.” The song’s subtitle, “Call Me By Your Name,” also doubles as a refrain, in which he sings, “Call me by your name / tell me you love me in private” — another reference to the closet, as well as a reference to the acclaimed 2017 film about an illicit gay affair.

  So you can see how the music video might be a little bit shocking — especially from the portion of the public that loves a good moral panic and believes queerness is a sin.

  But Lil Nas X apparently wanted to ratchet up the potential for outrage just a bit further. So he partnered with a creative agency named MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based promoter with serious Zardulu energy that’s become known for a string of viral stunt promotions. In 2019, MSCHF released a viral pair of sneakers called “Jesus Shoes,” which claimed to contain a drop of holy water in every pair.

  Together, Lil Nas X and MSCHF designed “Satan Shoes”: a limited edition of 666 pairs of custom Nike Airs in which the air bubble in the sole has been filled with a mixture of red ink and “one drop of human blood.” The shoes, which cost $1,018 per pair and went on sale at 11 am Monday, reportedly sold out in under a minute (or should we say … soul’d out?) — although Nike has reportedly moved to sue MSCHF and block sales of the shoes, citing infringement.

  Outside of sneaker culture, you wouldn’t typically expect a limited number of shoes being sold at a very high price to set the world on fire. After all, how much trouble could a few hundred pairs of shoes possibly cause? Yet in the three days since they were announced, all Hell has broken loose. According to many outraged conservatives, in fact, these boots were made for Pied Pipering children directly into the fiery pit of eternal damnation.

  The “Montero” music video, with its decadent queer eroticism, spurred an initial homophobic backlash as conservative viewers chided Lil Nas X for corrupting children. But if the video drew a wave of backlash, the video together with the Satan shoes drew a veritable tsunami.

  The resultant controversy has spawned a series of endlessly entertaining moments — cascading dominos of devilish diversion, starting with the enjoyably campy video that began all of this hysteria:

  And beyond the initial hilarity, the shoes have also prompted a broader discussion about bigotry, homophobia, the historical roots of Satanic Panic in the US, and whether all that much has really changed since Satanic Panic began in the 1980s.

  A fight for the soles of the nation

  The world found out about the Satan shoes from this tweet on March 26, which immediately went viral:

  MSCHF x Lil Nas X “Satan Shoes”
  
  Nike Air Max ’97
  Contains 60cc ink and 1 drop of human blood
  ️666 Pairs, individually numbered
  $1,018
  ️March 29th, 2021 pic.twitter.com/XUMA9TKGSX

  — SAINT (@saint) March 26, 2021

The satan.shoes website that promoter MSCHF built features a photo of one of the blood-infused shoes rotating against a backdrop of orgiastic demons styled as ’90s collage-style website wallpaper, along with quotes from Paradise Lost and the Bible:

MSCHF

The launch of the website led to this official description of the process by which the shoes — purchased by MSCHF and altered after the fact — were injected with the ink-and-blood mix, which MSCHF co-founder Daniel Greenberg provided to the New York Times, and which the New York Times, paper of record, subsequently quoted: “Uhhhhhh yeah hahah not medical professionals we did it ourselves lol.”

Nike, for its part, was quick to issue a statement to the Times emphasizing that the shoes were not sanctioned by Nike:

“We do not have a relationship with Little Nas X or MSCHF. Nike did not design or release these shoes, and we do not endorse them.”

In context, the terse dismissal carries the terrified tone of a jock shouting, “no homo” — an impression bolstered by Nike’s subsequent reported lawsuit against MSCHF.

For what it’s worth, the Church of Satan also distanced itself from the stunt — but not before the shoes prompted intense alarm among prominent Christians. Most visible was this tweet from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who took time out from presiding over the worst Covid-19 response in the US to cry that Christians are in “a fight for the soul of the nation,” implying literally that Lil Nas X’s shoes are a Satanic influence.

“Our kids are being told that this kind of product is, not only okay, it’s ‘exclusive.’” Noem wrote. “But do you know what’s more exclusive? Their God-given eternal soul.”

Noem’s response garnered a wide range of reactions, most notably from Lil Nas himself, who subsequently boggled that she was “a whole governor” who was “tweeting about some damn shoes” instead of doing her job.

But other conservatives also spoke out against the shoes, including popular Tennessee pastor Greg Locke, who called Lil Nas a “thug” and railed against the shoes as “a bunch of demonism, devilism, and psychotic wickedness.” Black right-wing activist Candace Owens called out Lil Nas and his Black fans for “promoting Satan shoes to wear on our feet.” Rapper Joyner Lucas complained that Lil Nas was corrupting his legions of young fans — to which Lil Nas quickly clapped back, as he did for most of the louder grievances:

(My personal favorite response born of all this social media chaos is this incredible “hole for Satan” tweet, made by a Christian comedian who seemed to think “hole for Satan” was a legitimately funny burn, which consequently makes it the funniest thing anyone has ever said.)

But concern over the shoes has predominantly been met with ridicule on social media, and trends like Satanic Panic and #SatanShoes have made the rounds as a result. Lil Nas X seems to be exulting in the controversy. He was quick to double down by posting a faux apology on YouTube that essentially functioned as a Rickroll for the music video’s aforementioned bump-and-grind moment with Satan:

He also continued courting attention and scorn in equal measure by promising to release a Christian-friendly version of the shoe, with a nod to the famously homophobic, if kinda reformed, Christian-founded fast-food chain Chick-fil-A:

The artist also made it clear how fully he anticipated all of the outrage — and how happy he is to ride the waves of it to even greater success:

But while he’s clearly been having fun with the responses, he’s also been consistent about bluntly explaining the importance of the song and how it fits into his role as one of the few out gay entertainers in the music industry.

In fact, the whole topic has spawned ongoing conversations about everything from queer subtext in art to religious moral hypocrisy to (my personal favorite) the storied folkloric tradition of associating queerness with demon-fucking.

Be gay, do crimes, enjoy hell

Lil Nas X, as much a performance artist as any other Hollywood star, has made it clear that he intended for “Montero” to spawn exactly this level of outrage in precisely the way that said outrage has unfolded. In essence, it’s the entire package of “Montero” — the video, the shoes, and the social media backlash — that he’s presenting as art. All of it taken together creates a commentary about modern-day witch hunts, modern-day Christianity in general, and modern-day queer identity.

The video for “Montero” uses mostly classical imagery from a traditional version of Christianity to showcase how intertwined the languages of religiosity and homoeroticism have always been. In case it’s not clear from the sequence where Lil Nas X throws buttplugs at himself in the shape of stones, all of the titillating erotic elements in the video are intended as metaphors. He also plays all the characters in the video, and so essentially winds up self-flagellating — another bit of erotic play, this time on the theme of eroticized guilt and self-hate that also runs through Christian iconography.

The classical religious imagery in the video functions precisely the way religious imagery always has for many queer people — as a way of inserting queer subtext and overlaying figurative storytelling onto more socially acceptable Biblical narratives. Remember, queer people have historically been denied access to salvation through legitimized readings of the Bible and stories like the fall of Adam and Eve — not to mention the constant reminders from most Christian churches that being gay is a sin. In response, they’ve inserted subtextual interpretations into Biblical stories and readings of characters, and passed those subtextual readings down through the centuries.

The “Montero” video is in keeping with this tradition: It teems with traditionally homoerotic religious imagery, like the phallic spearing of St. Sebastian, the erotically charged Miltonian depiction of Satan as a ripped hot guy, and of course the bondage implications of tangling with a giant snake in the Garden of Eden. Lil Nas X showcases, calls out, and celebrates all of this long-established subtext, making it overtly sexual. In doing this, he not only creates an explicitly queer religious commentary, but he challenges Christianity to reckon with the hidden queer identities in its midst. And he does it all while he’s singing about loving a man who’s still trapped in the closet — a societal closet that Christianity helped create and still reinforces.

Lil Nas X is deeply aware, as most queer people are, that the queer experience has always been defined by deviance, primarily because mainstream society has historically refused to legitimize any other kind of queer experience. Queerness has always been associated with the monstrous and diabolical, with queer influences being framed as corrupt and perverse and queer people experiencing higher rates of imprisonment than straight people, all while being disallowed to marry, start families, and enjoy “normal” lives. Thus, queer people have learned to embrace and own their own social ostracism, turning deviance into something to celebrate.

The essence of being queer, in other words, is to “be gay, do crimes,” and to celebrate monstrosity.

Lil Nas anticipated the backlash to his stunt — and weaponized it to make a point about religious intolerance

These themes aren’t particularly deep — they’re a well-established part of queer theory, religious history, and media criticism. Most people probably wouldn’t even need to know much about them to understand the metaphors in “Montero.”

But there’s just one problem: Modern Christianity isn’t exactly keen on figurative interpretations, especially when it comes to demons and gay people.

Modern evangelical Christianity is largely influenced by the kind of epic Christian fantasy that emerged during the 1980s when writers like Frank Peretti turned the concept of “spiritual warfare” into, ironically, a kind of Dungeons-and-Dragons-like role play that saw good Christians quite literally fighting and defeating actual demons through prayer and spiritual badassery. Fueled by Satanic Panic, that version of Christianity spread like wildfire across the country during the rapid growth of evangelicalism throughout the 1980s and ’90s. And it never really went away — as Lil Nas X’s strategic baiting has made clear.

Simultaneously, Christians’ justification of the persecution of queer people has historically been based upon very literal interpretations (and frequent misinterpretations) of Biblical passages. These include verses in which sodomy is discussed and other same-sex subjects are hinted at broadly; this is also the approach that’s been used over the centuries to justify slavery and burning women alive for alleged witchcraft.

So a queer Black entertainer, singing about gay sex and flirting with the occult all in one fell swoop? That’s basically a bingo card of challenges to Christian literalism — and many Christians, at least on social media, seem to be failing the test.

You might be asking: What’s the point of all this? Why would Lil Nas X bother to get people riled up and angry for no real reason?

But there’s actually an excellent reason. It’s virtually unheard of to see an openly gay entertainer sing about being in love and having positive gay sexual experiences, let alone one as famous as Lil Nas X — who didn’t come out until after he was already famous. He is clearly determined to make his own outing into a positive, inspiring act, and making music about his queer identity is part of that.

But the flip side of that positivity is the joyous subversion that’s such a huge part of queer creation: acknowledging and celebrating your deviance. Lil Nas X has cut straight to the core of the queer experience with “Montero” and its accompanying diabolical shoes, framing queer people as fabulously demonic. In presenting that side of queer identity, he’s owning his queer Black heritage and anticipating the response to his daring performativity.

He’s also arguably inviting Christians to kick back and not start a new moral crisis over something so relatively trivial. But the nature of the stunt is that he’s already anticipated this predictable moral panic and framed it in advance as the kind of response that proves his point about the need for queer people to reject hate and choose to love themselves.

“i spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of the shit y’all preached would happen to me because i was gay,” Lil Nas X tweeted. “so i hope u are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves.”

It’s possible there will be more controversies yet to come around “Montero,” Christianity-adjacent or otherwise; many people have pointed out the video’s alleged plagiarism of the FKA Twigs video “Cellophane” (which also features a stripper pole to Hell), including the director of the latter. But the backlash to the music video — and to those 666 pairs of shoes with their 666 drops of human blood — reveals how skilled Lil Nas X is at owning a conversation and asserting his identity in an innovative way, all while making music that justifies the hype.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Skipper Manpreet Singh returns to lead India in Argentina - India will also play two practice matches against the home team on April 6 and 7, followed by two more on April 13 and 14 as part of their preparations for the Tokyo Olympics this July

• Indian Premier League | Puma becomes official kit partner of RCB - Puma will now have exclusive retailing rights to RCB’s take down and replica jerseys, adding pan-India merchandise reach for the franchise across retail and e-commerce channels

• England garnered valuable experience in India, will stand them in good stead: head coach Silverwood - Silverwood also spoke about England’s much-debated rotation policy that has drawn a lot of criticism recently, reiterating that he wouldn’t change the approach

• Interested in captaining Australia again: Steve Smith - The 31-year-old served a one-year ban from playing and was disqualified from leading Australia for two years because of his role in the 2018 ball-tampering scandal.

• Lakers hang on for narrow win over Magic - Second win for defending champion sans James and Davis

From The Hindu: National News

• President Ram Nath Kovind undergoes successful bypass surgery at AIIMS - Ram Nath Kovind visited the Army’s Research and Referral (R&R) Hospital following chest discomfort.

• ‘Pesaha’ appam is a must on Maundy Thursday in many Christian households in Kerala - ‘Pesaha’ appam, an unleavened bread made of rice flour, is cooked in many Christian households

• Six children burnt to death in Bihar’s Araria - At least six children were burnt to death when fire broke out in the house they were playing on Tuesday in Araria district of north-east Bihar. The d

• When PR agencies run election campaigns - Political parties and candidates have outsourced their promotion to professional outfits

• NIA seizes high-end car ‘registered’ in Sachin Vaze’s name - The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday seized a high-end car apparently registered in the name of arrested Mumbai Police officer Sachin V

From BBC: Europe

• Covid: Italy introduces quarantine for EU travellers - People arriving in Italy from other European countries must now also quarantine for five days.

• Abortion in Italy: ‘I found a grave with my name on it’ - Women in Italy who had an abortion or miscarriage discovered the fetus had been given a religious burial, in a grave marked with the mother’s name, without their consent.

• Irish pubs could become work hubs in post-pandemic plan - Remote workers will be enticed to live in the countryside through a new “quality of life” policy.

• Covid-19: World leaders call for international pandemic treaty - Boris Johnson and more than 20 other leaders say another health crisis is a matter of “not if, but when”.

• Mafia fugitive caught after posting cooking show on YouTube - The Italian gangster had tried to hide his face but was identified by his distinctive tattoos.

From Ars Technica

• VW changing to Voltswagen—early April fool or corporate rebranding? [Updated] - VW posted then deleted a press release announcing the name change, according to CNBC. - link

• SpaceX working toward early Tuesday morning Starship launch [Updated] - This rocket rolled to the launch pad less than three weeks ago. - link

• Apple-funded Stanford study concludes Apple Watch can be used to measure frailty - Study contributes to Apple’s messaging about the Watch’s impact on health care. - link

• Smartphones are finally matching 2012’s Nokia 808 in camera sensor size - It’s got a rear screen, ceramic body, and a really big camera bump. - link

• Parler: We warned the FBI more than 50 times before the Capitol riot - Company claims it warned FBI about violent posts before everything hit the fan. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Doctor: sorry sir but your body has run out of magnesium -

  Me: 0mg

  submitted by /u/itsaveryshittyname
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• A woman was at her hairdresser’s getting her hair styled for a trip to Rome with her husband. She mentioned the trip to the hairdresser, who responded: -

  “Rome? Why would anyone want to go there? It’s crowded and dirty. You’re crazy to go to Rome. So, how are you getting there?”
  “We’re taking Continental,” was the reply. “We got a great rate!” “Continental?” exclaimed the hairdresser. “That’s a terrible airline. Their planes are old, their flight attendants are ugly, and they’re always late. So, where are you staying in Rome?”

  “We’ll be at this exclusive little place over on Rome’s Tiber River called Teste.” “Don’t go any further. I know that place. Everybody thinks it’s going to be something special and exclusive, but it’s really a dump.” “We’re going to go to see the Vatican and maybe get to see the Pope.” “That’s rich,” laughed the hairdresser. “You and a million other people trying to see him. He’ll look the size of an ant. Boy, good luck on this lousy trip of yours. You’re going to need it.”
  A month later, the woman came in for a hairdo. The hairdresser asked her about her trip to Rome.
  “It was wonderful,” explained the woman, “not only were we on time in one of Continental’s brand new planes, but it was overbooked, and they bumped us up to first class. The food and wine were wonderful, and I had a handsome 28-year-old steward who waited on us hand and foot. And the hotel was great! They’d just finished a $5 million remodeling job, and now it’s a jewel, the finest hotel in the city. They, too, were overbooked, so they apologized and gave us the owner’s suite at no extra charge!”.

  “Well,” muttered the hairdresser, “that’s all well and good, but I know you didn’t get to see the Pope.” “Actually, we were quite lucky, because as we toured the Vatican, a Swiss Guard tapped me on the shoulder, and explained that the Pope likes to meet some of the visitors, and if we’d be so kind as to step into his private room and wait, the Pope would personally greet us. Sure enough, five minutes later, the Pope walked through the door and shook my hand! I knelt down and he spoke a few words to me.”

  “Oh, really! What’d he say?”

  He said: “Who fucked up your hair?”

  submitted by /u/RubyBlye
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• Whats the difference between a Computer and an American ? -

  An American does not have troubleshooting.

  submitted by /u/manaspachauri
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• There are two trees in the forest, a beech and a birch and one day, they notice a small tree has sprouted up in between them. The birch says, “Man, that really looks like a son of a beech!” The beech retorts, “No way! That’s gotta be a son of a birch!” -

  So, they start arguing back and forth. “Son of a beech!” “Son of a birch!”

  Eventually, a woodpecker flies by and hears the two trees fighting and he asks the two trees what’s wrong and what are they are fighting about.

  The trees explain to the woodpecker that they can’t tell if the small tree that sprouted between them is a son of a beech or if it’s a son of a birch.

  The woodpecker decides he will settle their argument, once and for all, tells the tree he will be right back, then flies down to the small tree to check it out.

  Meanwhile, the beech and birch continue to argue.

  After a while, the wood pecker returns to the two tree and says, “Guys, I’ve got some news for you. It’s not a son of a beech.”

  The beech tree sighs in relief.

  The woodpecker continues, “And it’s not a son of birch, either!”

  To which the birch replied, “Thank goodness! What is it, then?”

  The woodpecker blushes and answers, “Well, it’s the finest piece of ash that I’ve ever stuck my pecker into.”

  submitted by /u/honolulu_oahu_mod
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• Alright guys, the Suez Canal jokes are getting a bit old now. -

  That ship has sailed.

  submitted by /u/reeram
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