Is the Mainstream Press Beginning to Turn on Bill Gates?

The Bill Gates Problem is Hitting the Mainstream

Is one of our favourite billionaire philanthropists losing the support of the MSM? Bill Gates, who once could do no wrong, has had numerous disparaging articles written about him in recent weeks.

These all stem from a new book written by author Tim Schwab (no, nothing to do with the other Schwab - I think!). In the words of the publisher, ‘The Bill Gates Problem’ is “a powerful investigation of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, showing how he uses philanthropy to exercise enormous political power without accountability”.

Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions, and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is not a selfless philanthropist but a power broker, a clever engineer who has innovated a way to turn extreme wealth into immense political influence—and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it.

Piercing the blinding halo that has for too long shielded the world’s most powerful (and most secretive) charitable organization from public scrutiny, The Bill Gates Problem shows how Gates’s billions have purchased a stunning level of control over public policy, private markets, scientific research, and the news media. Whether he is pushing new educational standards in America, health reforms in India, global vaccine policy during the pandemic, or Western industrialized agriculture throughout Africa, Gates’s heady social experimentation has shown itself to be not only undemocratic, but also ineffective. In many places, Bill Gates is hurting the very people he intends to help.

No less than dark-money campaign contributions or big-business political lobbying, Bill Gates’s philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a problem of money in politics. It is a dangerous model of unconstrained power that threatens democracy and demands our attention.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charity, often makes the papers with editors swooning over the founder of Microsoft. Whether it is the Foundation’s work to end poverty or vaccinate the whole world, rarely is a negative word said about Gates, probably because the very same Foundation has tentacles (and funding) in all the major media outlets. This raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest and the objectivity of media coverage regarding his philanthropic activities.

However, things have been going downhill for Gates since his ties to Jeffrey Epstein became public. In fact, it is likely that his ex-wife Melinda, divorced him in 2021 due to the revelations.

In an interview with the Daily Beast, Schwab said that it’s a paradox for most people but the Foundation actually donates money to private companies. Most people who are sceptical of Gates will undoubtedly know about how much money his Foundation gives the media but may not know that it also gives a very large sum to companies in which the Foundation is itself a shareholder.

Schwab also discovered that 90 percent of the Gates Foundation money goes to wealthy nations. It claims to help the poor by funding the rich which Schwab says is sort of a quintessential colonial model. Funding mainly goes to universities, think tanks, NGOs, news, media and governments, primarily in the US, UK and Switzerland. Hmmm Switzerland…why would so much money be funnelled in to that country!?

The Times reviewed Schwab’s book and asks whether Gates is a tyrant-nerd or good guy? It hints to its readers that perhaps Gates’ philanthropy was a devious way to repair his reputation which took a downturn in the ‘90s. He was mocked by Steve Jobs and even the Simpsons took a pop at him. Was money the way to make people like him again?

Gates won’t be happy to read that The Times gives Schwab’s verdict on Gates - “Gates is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing and an emperor who has no clothes”... Gates himself is still a tyrant.”

When it comes to vaccines, the paper says that Schwab attacks the claim about the number of lives they have saved. “Gates himself never appears completely sure how many lives he’s saved - the number fluctuates from year to year. Sometimes the number of children’s lives the foundation has claimed to save is as high as 122 million…They have no problem marking their own homework. Many of their claimed successes — such as the foundation’s work on rotavirus, which causes diarrhoea and dehydration that kills many children around the world — are taken apart under Schwab’s examination.”

There are those who claim Gates kills people through vaccination but according to Schwab the vaccination programme itself indirectly kills people. Gates is part of the system that drives profits for pharmaceutical companies via intellectual property claims. His signature project, Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization) resembles a “drug dealer who hooks new customers with freebies”, then expects them to cough up for more expensive highs in the future. Another vaccine expert Schwab interviewed believes that Gates is effectively creating “the world’s largest pharmaceutical company”.

The New Statesmen says that “Bill Gates is bad for humanity” and that “by ‘maximising’ lives, the billionaire philanthropist is making ours worse”. It says that with more the $63bn, the Foundation is a state within a state, worth more than the GDP of half the world’s nations.

“The metric is clear. Success is measured in profits, stock price and market share. As fellow tech titan Peter Thiel has been helpfully honest about in his own writings, businesspeople do not fear monopoly, they seek it. “Competition is for losers,” he put it neatly. What happens when the businessperson directs the quantifying and tabulating impulse towards the goals of humanity at large? The most vulgar answer is the correct one. You measure success in terms of human lives.

What should we make, then, of the paradox that Schwab overlooks: that Gates’s other major undertaking works to reduce the number of lives in the world through the extension of birth control and family planning? Do we want more lives or fewer? There is a long history of people solving this paradox under the rightly maligned term of eugenics. The eugenicist wants to reduce the number of lives at the less-endowed left end of the bell curve and maximise the number of lives on its right.”

The Nation also thinks Gates’ Philanthropy is a Problem. They say that if you look past his PR halo, you see his greed, hubris and superiority complex.

“A sober analysis of Gates shows he is just as worthy of the titles of hoarder and miser as he is philanthropist and mensch. Relative to his vast wealth, Gates is giving away a tiny amount of money—that he doesn’t need and that he could never possibly spend on himself. So the question is: Instead of celebrating the million-dollar gifts his foundation donates, why aren’t we interrogating the $184 billion that Gates isn’t giving away? Why aren’t we asking: How is it that the world’s most generous philanthropist is becoming richer and richer, year over year?

There are few words that better describe this model of power—where the richest guy gets the loudest voice—than “oligarchy.” And no one has done more to normalize and institutionalize oligarchy than Gates. By masking his money-in-politics efforts under the banner of charity—instead of, say, lobbying or campaign contributions—Gates commands tax benefits, endless accolades, and public applause. Philanthropy has been very, very good to our “good billionaire.””

And the Daily Mail says that Bill Gates actually does more harm than good. They reveal that Gates is now worth $117 billion, twice as much as when the foundation was set up in 2000. Clearly philanthropy is good for business.

There is growing criticism that Gates’ philanthropic model is oligarchic. His wealth and influence allow him to shape global policies in a way that doesn’t align with democratic ideals nor the real needs of the underprivileged. His immense influence over global health, agriculture and education is dangerous. It lacks transparency and accountability, resembling more the operations of a private corporation than a public charity. Gates’ top down, prescriptive philanthropy is out of touch with the communities he claims to serve with many of his initiatives being ineffective or even harmful.

Is the MSM beginning to turn against Gates? Let’s hope so. Well, at least let’s hope they stop sycophantically fawning over his every word. A sceptic may conclude that Gates’ philanthropy is nothing more than a tax swindle, combined with his God complex and a lust to make more money. However, with so much of his money still controlling the media, this could just be another Gates scheme, a pressure release valve after all the negativity focussed on him during the pandemic.

Let’s not forget that Gates was (and still probably is) part of (and funded) the ‘Good Club’, a secret organisation set up to resolve the over-populated world. Is his Foundation just a front for this club, following a similar agenda? Probably. And with his obsession with IQ, is his philanthropy a way to increase the number of intelligent people on this planet whilst vastly reducing the amount of useless eaters that can’t further his empire?