By BEN R. WILLIAMS
The world does not deserve Bill and Melinda Gates.
The Microsoft co-founder and his philanthropist wife are the trustees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the single largest private foundation in the world (Warren Buffett is also a trustee, and as a former employee of his dumpster fire media conglomerate, I’m not exactly a fan, but I’ll give him a pass here).
The goals of the foundation are to fight poverty and improve the quality of healthcare worldwide. If I listed even a tenth of the positive things this foundation has done, I wouldn’t have any room left to get to the point of this column, but suffice it to say, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has verifiably made the world a better, safer place. It has given more than $50 billion in grants to combat disease, to fight malnutrition, and to make food more easily available for those who need it. It’s estimated that this foundation has saved about 122 million lives worldwide (so far).
Bill Gates could have used the billions of dollars he made by co-founding Microsoft on anything. He could have had his name laser-etched on the moon’s surface. He could have cloned The Beatles and forced them to perform for him every night. He could have built a golden mansion at the bottom of the sea. You know, rich people stuff.
Instead, he and his wife decided to make the world a better place.
And how have we, as a society, repaid Bill and Melinda Gates? How have we thanked them for being the two most generous and beneficent human beings that have perhaps ever lived?
Why, by forming elaborate conspiracy theories that paint them as murderous villains, of course!
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just take a gander at Facebook (if you have the stomach for it these days).
There are multiple conspiracy theories about the Gates Foundation, but the one I’ve seen most often basically boils down to this: Bill Gates intentionally released the coronavirus so that he could then release a vaccine which would secretly contain a tiny microchip, thus allowing him to monitor every human being on Earth and establish a New World Order or something. Also, George Soros is involved, because George Soros is wealthy and Jewish and no conspiracy theory is complete without a heaping helping of anti-Semitism.
I’m not going to mince words here: this conspiracy theory may well be the single dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Please understand: if you have heard this conspiracy theory and thought it sounded plausible, I am not calling you dumb. One of the smartest people I know once told me that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to “KFC” because they were breeding mutant six-legged chickens to maximize their profit margins and the FDA wouldn’t allow them to classify the beasts as “chickens.” Even very smart people can fall for conspiracy theories. (On a side note, they changed the name to KFC because the word “fried” was developing a bad reputation, and KFC is also a lot shorter.)
But getting back on track, allow me to explain why this microchip theory is the stupidest thing ever. I’m not even going to bother with the part about intentionally releasing the virus and the New World Order and all that; it’s so patently absurd that I don’t want to lend it credence by refuting it. Instead, let’s focus on the microchip itself.
First off, Bill Gates has never invested any money into nor even mentioned the idea of injecting a microchip into people through the use of a vaccine. He HAS spoken about the need for better contact tracing of people who have tested positive for Coronavirus. And he’s absolutely right.
Two, Bill Gates isn’t able to mandate that anyone have a microchip injected into them when they receive a vaccine. Bill Gates is a private citizen. Admittedly, the last few years have proven that private citizens can get away with virtually anything if they’re wealthy enough, but the point is that Bill Gates does not have the political power to mandate anything. All he does is fund research.
Third, if someone were to design a chip that could track people with GPS and send their biometric data to some shadowy organization, that chip would have to be injected using a needle about as big around as a pool cue. You would definitely notice it. The technology just doesn’t exist at this point.
And lastly — and this is the most important point — there is absolutely no need to insert a data-tracking microchip into anyone in America. This is because we’re already carrying the microchips around in our pockets, and we paid for them ourselves.
Everything this magical microchip is supposed to do, your smartphone already does. It can track your movements using GPS satellites. It can store and share your financial information. If you have a smart watch, it can even record your biometric data. In fact, your phone probably knows more about you than your friends do.
Fortunately, this data is not being used to create a New World Order. It’s being used to sell you stuff.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you get on the internet and look up “Who played Vinton on ‘Mama’s Family?’” (It was Ken Berry.) What you will probably notice for the next month is that when you’re on Facebook, or reading articles on your phone, or doing pretty much anything, you’re going to see ads about Mama’s Family. You’re going to learn where to buy the complete series on Blu-Ray. You’re going to get an ad for a replica of the Aloha Hula Girl lamp from that two-parter where everyone went to Hawaii. This is because Facebook, Google, and many, many other websites track what you look up and show you targeted ads.
Designing and distributing a secret microchip that does all the stuff a smart phone already does would be an enormous and pointless waste of time and money. Even if Bill Gates WERE evil, he would definitely be smarter than that.
If anyone out there wants to hate on Bill Gates, consider the fact that he still had his hand on the tiller when Microsoft replaced Windows XP with Windows Vista. XP was the best operating system Microsoft ever made and Vista was straight-up terrible, but I guess I’ll cut Gates some slack, what with the whole “saving more than a hundred million lives” thing.