Gates, Wm bill MS

SEE TWO BILL

see also foundation

aha he is elite and tech both spooky

SOMETIME // SOROS BOGEYMAN FUNDER

WH billionaire stroke mtg

arabella withdraw

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Arabella Archives - The Automatic Earth

Arabella is the mothership of over 200 NGOs.

Trump Calls For RICO Charges Against Soros; Gates Foundation Severs Ties (ZH)}:

The “dark money” network operated by Arabella Advisors has reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: a leftist billionaire’s foundation. Equally significant in the news cycle this morning, President Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.” A New York Times report indicates that the Gates Foundation has halted funding to nonprofit funds managed by Arabella, choosing instead to work directly with some partners rather than through intermediaries. In its internal announcement, dated June 24 and sent to some Gates employees who oversee grant programs, foundation officials did not mention politics. Instead, they cited a desire to engage more directly with grant recipients and cut back on the use of intermediaries like Arabella entities.

*> Trump: "George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America." pic.twitter.com/KBxuyAaisF

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 27, 2025

“Teams are increasingly working directly with programmatic partners — organizations that are deeply embedded in the communities we serve and closely aligned with our mission,” the note reads. “As we look ahead, this is a chance to build deeper, more durable relationships with those partners — and to reinforce the kind of legacy we want to leave behind.” -NYT” Tracing the Arabella network’s donors is tricky. But according to the NYT, the Gates Foundation has plowed $450 million into the network since 2008, which in turn funneled money into other nonprofit entities, ranging from radical leftist climate groups to abortion initiatives, and even supporting the permanent protest-industrial complex against President Trump.

https://twitter.com/seamusbruner/status/1933626755358863457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1933626755358863457%7Ctwgr%5E1e0fde66960c2c75df873fe2087d2cf266f22afb%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fgates-foundation-cuts-ties-arabella-advisors-linked-funding-radical-leftist-causes}:

With President Trump back in the White House and investigations focusing on corruption across the Democratic Party’s funding and nonprofit infrastructure, as well as ActBlue investigations, the risks for Bill Gates’ progressive NGO empire have never been greater. The move to cut ties could have happened even sooner, according to two people, one close to the foundation and one with knowledge of Arabella’s internal operations. Over the last few years, Arabella has become a target of conservative watchdogs because of its work with groups that funnel money toward progressive causes. With President Trump back in the White House, the political risks have only mounted. -NYT Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute recently revealed a report that detailed how the rogue anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ front group, waging a permanent protest against all things Trump, “bagged $114.8 million from the Arabella dark money network.”*

The Gates Foundation told NYT that the move to sever ties with Arabella was “a business decision that reflects our regular strategic assessments of partnerships and operating models.” NYT’s report on Arabella comes hours after NBC News confirmed Gates met with Trump at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. More details from the report: • Some nonprofits are distancing themselves from Arabella to keep Gates funding. • Several groups have started exiting Arabella’s New Venture Fund (NVF), which serves as a fiscal sponsor for 170+ projects and has funneled billions into progressive causes. • While Gates once accounted for a significant share of NVF funding, in 2023 its contribution was only 2%. Still, losing Gates threatens Arabella’s influence and revenue streams.

:{Read more …

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GAI’s Seamus Bruner Reveals Left-Wing Funders Such as Roy Singham Behind Antifa Riots

PIX PEACE SIGN Elizabeth Weibel9 Oct 2025

Seamus Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) revealed that left-wing funders such as billionaire Neville Roy Singham were behind left-wing Antifa riots and protests.

During a roundtable event on Antifa with President Donald Trump, Bruner explained that he, GAI President Peter Schweizer, and their team “followed” a trail of money and “followed it to the top of what” they called the Protest Industrial Complex, or Riot Inc. Bruner explained that the so-called “Riot Inc.” was made up of many different divisions, and that “dozens of radical organizations” have received millions of dollars from Riot Inc.

“We found a network of NGOs, it’s not just the Soros network, the Open Society Network. It’s other funding networks, the Arabella Funding Network, the Tides Funding Network, Neville Roy Singham and his network, foreign cash,” Bruner explained. “And, it’s also big left-wing funders — some of them are not citizens of this country.”

Bruner continued to note that these left-wing funders were “pouring money into this entire ecosystem.”

Bruner continued to share “three money facts” about Riot Inc., explaining that there were “many divisions” such as “PR divisions, marketing divisions” and even a “well-funded legal division.”

“Number two, we have identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized Antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than one hundred million dollars from the Riot Inc. investors,” Bruner added. “These would be the lawyer groups, these would be the groups that advocate for calling good, honest Americans fascists.”

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“And then, three, I think the most shocking thing is that we have found that more than one hundred million dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding has flowed into these funding networks, including at least four million dollars to these very groups themselves,” Bruner added.

Bruner’s mention of Singham comes after an investigation by the Breitbart News Foundation reported that while “records from the United Kingdom confirm” that Singham resigned from Thoughtworks, Inc., which he founded in 1993, “Chinese government records suggest otherwise.”

After founding Thoughtworks, Inc. in 1993 and building the company into a software consulting powerhouse, Singham helped orchestrate its sale in October 2017, for approximately $785 million to a group of funds managed by London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. Corporate records from the United Kingdom confirm Singham’s resignation from Thoughtworks the same month, and his own LinkedIn profile says he has been retired since 2017. Thoughtworks’ English-language website relegates him to its “alumni” section, reinforcing the image of a clean break.

But Chinese government records suggest otherwise. These records list Singham as a corporate officer of Thoughtworks’ Chinese subsidiary, Thoughtworks Beijing, as recently as June 17, 2025, and for at least as far back as 2022. These records are from the National Enterprise Credit Reporting System (NECIPS), China’s corporate registry. Other documents, including trade show profile and “help-wanted” ads, listed Singham as Thoughtworks Beijing’s official contact in 2021.

The New York Post reported in June that Singham was set to be called to testify before a congressional committee regarding him funding “radical anti-Israel and Marxist groups” behind the Los Angeles riots.

In an article written by Bruner in June, Bruner detailed how the GAI had uncovered how the “official partners” behind the “No Kings” protests “bagged $114.8 million since 2019 from the Arabella Avisors dark money network an how professional protest organizations use tax dollars as a force multiplier.”

Bruner reported:

The expected worldwide mobilization of protests against President Donald Trump this weekend will hardly be a spontaneous eruption. On the contrary, the tumult is a carefully plotted production organized by The Indivisible Project and financed by the progress dark money network managed/advised by Arabella Advisors, which has perfected the mounting of made-to-order protests. Since 2019, the Arabella network has dumped more than $100 million into the coffers of the official “No Kings” protest partners—including the creator of the official protest song book.

This “grassroots” “nationwide days of defiance” targets Trump and his “billionaire allies,” according to organizers. The Arabella network’s biggest benefactors are the left’s own billionaire heroes, including George Soros, Bill Gates, Hansjorg Wyss, Mark Zuckerberg, and Reid Hoffman.

During the roundtable event, Bruner vowed to “keep following the money,” and expressed that he appreciated “everything” Trump was doing.

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an 10 24

This is the time for political courage.

Instead, America’s highest-profile business leaders — Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft; and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway — are displaying political cowardice. They are afraid to publicly support Kamala Harris and speak openly of the dangers posed by Donald Trump.

According to The New York Times, Dimon has privately told associates he backs Harris. But in public he’s praising Donald Trump and leaving the door open to endorsing Trump.

Gates gave $50 million to the main outside fundraising group supporting Harris, but he won’t come out publicly for her.

Buffett, a longtime Democrat, wrote on Berkshire Hathaway’s website that he wouldn’t “endorse and support political candidates.”

Why are these business leaders so reluctant to come out for Harris?

Dimon has never been known for pulling his punches. He has held forth in public on everything from Ukraine to banking regulations. His widely read annual letter in April covers public issues in detail. “I’ve always been an American patriot, and my country is more important to me than my company,” he told analysts on a call this month.

Buffett, too, has in the past been open about his political views; he endorsed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and has publicly criticized Trump in previous election cycles.

Gates relishes his role as a public figure.

So why the timidity now?

It’s not as if we’re approaching a typical election in which it doesn’t much matter which side wins. This isn’t John McCain versus Barack Obama.

It’s fascism versus democracy. Trump has promised to take over the civil service, wreak vengeance on his enemies, and unleash the military on political opponents and on immigrants, even those here legally.

Even John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, says Trump meets the definition of a fascist.

Last time he occupied the Oval Office, Trump brought America closer to a civil war than we’ve been since the actual Civil War. When he lost the 2020 election, he attempted a coup against the United States government. He was stopped only because several people around him were more loyal to America than to him.

But Trump has learned his lesson. If he gets another chance to sit in the Oval Office, he will surround himself with people who will do his bidding.

So why won’t Dimon, Gates, and Buffett speak out now?

Dimon has told associates he’s worried about Trump retaliating against perceived enemies.

That’s a real cause for worry. Trump has increasingly spoken of retribution. He says he’ll punish companies for taking actions he doesn’t like. (He threatened tariffs on John Deere, the farm equipment maker, if it went ahead with plans to move some jobs to Mexico.)

But doesn’t Trump’s thirst for vengeance and his attempt to intimidate critics even before he has the formal power to do so demand that America’s top business leaders summon the courage nowto let their voices be heard against him?

Shouldn’t they use their status to sound the alarm about Trump?

What’s the meaning of leadership if not having the courage to tell the public the truth, even at the cost of possible retribution?

The silence of Dimon, Gates, and Buffett cannot be justified by any notion of fiduciary duty to protect the value of the shares of investors in JPMorgan, Microsoft, or Berkshire Hathaway, respectively.

Quite the opposite. If American democracy is seriously jeopardized because Donald Trump is in the White House — as seems likely — the shareholders of these and every other American corporation will take it on the chin.

Political instability and uncertainty, attacks on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and rejection of the rule of law will impose huge costs on the American economy. As David Firestone, deputy editor of theTimes editorial board, says, Dimon would be doing his shareholders “a better service by doing everything possible to prevent Trump’s election.”

Elon Musk has no qualms about endorsing Trump, creating a pro-Trump superPAC to which he donates hundreds of millions of dollars, turning his X platform into a cesspool of disinformation in favor of Trump and against Harris, and giving away a million dollars a day in raffles in battleground states on Trump’s behalf. So why on earth should Dimon, Gates, and Buffett feel that their hands are tied?

The silence of Dimon, Gates, and Buffett is indefensible. By remaining silent, they relinquish whatever claim they ever had to leadership in America. By saying nothing about the catastrophe that could befall us if Trump is elected, they can no longer pretend to speak for the common good.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at[https://robertreich.substack.com/

good analysis: atomization of ppl

sil vly libtards:

the Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the Experimental Movement

By Adam Fejerskov

https://books.google.com/books?id=v591EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78

Global Lab maps out the political, institutional, and ethical coordinates of a new experimental movement operating across the Global South. It tells the story of how a group of organizations, foundations, and corporations are increasingly using developing countries, local communities, and refugee camps as live laboratories to experiment with untested technologies, biometric humanitarian solutions, new drugs, and radical methodologies for social change. The book asks where and how this movement works, laying bare the human, ethical, philosophical, and political consequences of its practices.

The Global Lab takes the reader through Silicon Valley, Africa, and Asia to understand the tangible and transformative implications of experimentation, following a set of main protagonists, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to experimental economists known as the randomistas, to humanitarian organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Deeply entrenched in contemporary experimental practice, these actors form a movement inspired by core logics emanating out of Silicon Valley about the need for fast-paced radical change and societal disruption, technological innovation as progress, and the privatization and commercialization of the human mind and body. Ultimately, the book examines the inequality of experimentation that is found in the erection of imaginary walls between us and them, and the imagined universal and often unquestioned value of scientific and technological progress in the name of development.

mtg says elect shock if we do not eat his fake cheeseburgers

mojo 6 22

...In part, the breathtaking success of worldwide anti-vaccination campaigns is due to the fact that there is an entire,incredibly lucrative cottage industry devoted to pumping out vaccine disinformation.Many of the most successful anti-vaccine activists rake in advertising money from their popular YouTube channels; some further enrich themselves through sales of supplements, detox regimens, and other wellness products, the Center for Countering Digital Hate has found. Social media makes it cheap and easy to reach international customers—and international versions of popular social media platforms lack even the basic disinformation censors found in American versions. Children’s Health Defense, the prominent and influential anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently launched a European version of its site. Joseph Mercola, the influential anti-vaccine osteopath, offers Spanish and French editions of his site; his videos have been translated into many languages, according to the New York Times. In a 2017 affidavit, Mercola reported his net worth to be in excess of $100 million.

American influencers’ messages often resonate with communities that seem to have little in common with the United States, says Joe Smyser, CEO of Public Good Projects, a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that collaborates with UNICEF on studying vaccine hesitancy. Recently, his team followed the path of an American op-ed criticizing pandemic restrictions from its origin in the United States all the way to East Timor, where it took off on local social media. And when Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul said he opposed government vaccine mandates, “that got a lot of traction in social networks across Vietnam,” Smyser says. “It was used to push back against the Vietnamese government and Vietnamese public health officials.”

But there is another reason that anti-vaccine content finds its way around the world, with consequences even more dangerous and pervasive than those from anti-vaccine activists. In his study, Wilson’s team found that foreign governments—particularly Russia—were amplifying all kinds of messages both in support of and against vaccines. This is a well-established destabilization tactic that leverages social media to polarize an entire population around a particularly contentious issue—Russia used it to undermine the 2016 US presidential election, for example. The point isn’t to promote any single viewpoint; it’s to sow chaos. “A lot of the time, you’ll have bots pushing six completely contradictory, mutually exclusive stories,” Wilson says. “But what unifies all of them is trying to get people to throw up their hands and say, ‘I guess it’s impossible to know what the truth is.’”

Just as Wilson was wrapping up his study, the pandemic began—and suddenly, his research took on new meaning and urgency. Around the world, social media channels were flooded with wild claims about the new disease and the tools to fight it. He watched in horror as powerful people—even heads of state—amplified the “disinformation campaigns online that have managed to blow it vastly out of the original proportion of a few individuals who were hardcore believers.”

Public Good Project/Nimbus Capture]

Which narrative takes off in any given country depends on the culture and history of the place. In May 2020, Kenyan evangelical pastor Fred Akama posted a rant on Facebook, which began“THE GATES OF BILL SHALL NOT PREVAIL.” Bill Gates “predicted that a viral pandemic would hit the world,” the post continued, with the clear implication that the philanthropist was somehow complicit in and profiting from the creation and spread of Covid. Akama also accused Gates of having unethically close ties with the World Health Organization and vaccine producers and called him an enemy of the Christian faith. He has more than 15,000 followers on Facebook.

Akama wasn’t the only social media influencer in Kenya warning about Bill Gates’ motives. “If you look at the kind of stuff that is circulating in East Africa…you find that the content seems to be very similar,” says Eric Mugendi, who works at Meedan, a San Francisco–based technology nonprofit supporting fact-checking and verification of organizations. “The kind of language that was being used and the types of people who were spreading it—a lot of times it was religious leaders,” Mugendi says, arguing that anti-vaxxers often link their arguments to Gates and liberal philanthropist George Soros. They accuse them of wanting to test vaccines’ efficacy on Africans, profit from vaccine sales, control the human population through microchipping, and prevent the growth of the African population.

“The unifying factor is encouraging distrust of elites and experts and Westerners on any level.”

Disinformation campaigns that play up nefarious motives of powerful people are common worldwide. In the United States, a widely shared video called Plandemic popularized the conspiracy theory about Gates early in the pandemic. This strain of disinformation is particularly effective in Africa because of deep-seated anxiety that Western governments want to slow population growth in the developing world, notes Wilson of Brandeis University. “The unifying factor is encouraging distrust of elites and experts and Westerners on any level,” he says.

Ultraconservative groups in Africa have a long history of spinning a variety of Gates conspiracy theories. The anti-abortion movement in Africa has employed this tactic for at least a decade. In a 2017 article in Pacific Standard, Kathryn Joyce reported on a prominent Nigerian anti-abortion activist Obianuju Ekeocha, who in 2012 spoke out against a Gates Foundation contraceptives campaign. American anti-choice groups helped Ekeocha create a new group, Culture of Life Africa. This complemented an ongoing campaign by Human Life International, a hardline US anti-abortion group operating around the world. Its mission? To spread the message that “Western governments and NGOs are using great sums of money and influence to destroy the traditionally life-loving African culture.”

There’s a convergence these days between seemingly unrelated public health issues, as many of the same US-sponsored organizations that oppose abortion have pivoted their messaging to address Covid vaccinations. One such group is CitizenGO, an ultraconservative petition mill with outposts worldwide. CitizenGO Africa, whose anti-abortion work Mother Jones covered here, is led by a Kenyan woman named Ann Kioko, who was trained in workshops by the American Leadership Institute, a conservative organization that counts former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Karl Rove among its distinguished alumni.

In 2020, CitizenGo posted an online petition titled “Bill Gates and WHO: Hands Off Africa” intended to send a “firm message to the Bill Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization that Africa is not a test lab, Africans are people with human dignity and Africans will not be used to try vaccines whose purpose is not known.” The petition accuses Gates of having Covid vaccines “tested on Africa as he stages them [vaccines] as the only solution to the pandemic.” It also accuses Bill and Melinda Gates of attempting to control the African population via contraception and abortion. “Melinda Gates told the Washington Post she is frustrated with the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding for international ‘reproductive-rights projects,’ (READ ABORTION) calling it ‘incredibly disappointing,’” the petition read. ...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/bill-gates/ vaccine for poor?

new 520

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-completely-absurd-conspiracy-theory-about-bill-gates-is-shockingly-popular-on-the-right-wing/

Along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and prominent Democrats such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been a frequent target at far-right anti-shutdown protests. Extremists have accused him not only of using the coronavirus pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump but of designing somevast plot aimed at societal control.

And according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted on May 20 and 21, these preposterous beliefs are surprisingly popular on the right wing.

Yahoo News’ Andrew Romano reports that 44% of Republicans “believe that Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements— a widely debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact….In contrast, just 19% of Democrats believe the same spurious narrative about the Microsoft founder and public health philanthropist.”

The poll also found a connection between the media outlets that respondents were consuming and whether or not they believed that anti-Gates conspiracy theory. Naturally, whether one voted for Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a factor as well.

"Take the Gates example,” Romano explains. “Half of all Americans, 50%, who name Fox News as their primary television news source believe the disproven conspiracy theory, and 44% of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well — even though neither Fox nor Trump has promoted it. At the same time, just 15% of MSNBC viewers and 12% of Clinton voters say the story is true.”

The fact that 2016 Trump voters, Republicans and Fox News viewers were more likely to believe an outrageous conspiracy theory involving Gates, according to Romano, reflects “a growing problem: the dangerous, destabilizing tendency to ignore fundamental facts about the deadly pathogen in favor of misinformation peddled by partisans, including President Trump, and spread on social media.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-targeting-5g-technology-bill-gates-and-a-world-of-fear

covid

aha: youtube to facebook pipeline/escalator to everyone's news feed [2 biggest FANGs, synergy? amplifier?]

plandemic

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/heres-how-plandemic-went-viral/

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/08/fact-checking-plandemic-documentary-full-false-con/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

For Erin Gallagher, the conspiratorial documentary “Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19” came to her attention like it did for myself — a question from her mom about the veracity of the 26-minute video full of coronavirus misinformation.

After hearing about it from more friends and family, Gallagher decided to investigate how the video went viral so quickly.

Gallagher, an independent social media researcher who has been featured in NBC News and Wired, analyzed 37,000 posts containing the word “plandemic” and 24,000 posts with the name “Judy Mikovits,” the former National Cancer Institute scientist whose work has been discredited, yet is the key expert in “Plandemic.”

Using graphs showing the Facebook groups where “Plandemic” was posted, along with the type of link users were sharing, she found a pipeline of how this video went viral: from YouTube to Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members and names like “Chemtrails Global Skywatch,” “OFFICIAL Q / QANON” and “Drain the Swamp.” YouTube links were the most commonly-shared access points for “Plandemic,” regardless of how quickly YouTube removed them.

“Everyone uses multiple platforms to varying degrees now so nothing is ever limited to just one or two,” Gallagher told me this weekend. “But in this case, YouTube hosted the video, and I suspect many mirrors of it once it started getting pulled down, and these large, highly-active Facebook groups were key to spreading it like wildfire and pushing it into all of our families’ Facebook feeds.”

In the “plandemic” keyword data, which was collected between April 8, and May 8, YouTube links posted on Facebook had nearly 200,000 likes and more than 150,000 each of shares and comments.

I reached out to YouTube and Facebook for comment but haven’t heard back. I will send an updated note with tomorrow’s newsletter if either company responds.

“‘Plandemic’ creators encouraged viewers to download the video from the documentary’s website and post it across video platforms,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. “And you could see the impact: dozens of reuploads of the video on YouTube — even after they tried to remove the original — and shares of it on other platforms.”

[video 6 min ]

This isn’t the first YouTube-to-Facebook conspiracy video Kaplan has studied. He found some of the most-viewed YouTube videos touting the debunked claim that Bill Gates is pushing a coronavirus vaccine to microchip the public receiving thousands of engagements on Facebook. And a video calling COVID-19 a “false flag” drew 6 million views on YouTube and more than 1 million engagements on Facebook before it was removed. Both videos went viral over the last two months.

“Be really careful about sharing content coming from places you haven’t heard of before just because it gives you some kind of emotion,” Kaplan said. “Take the time to do some research on the person(s) behind it or the claims made in it, and see if someone, like a fact-checker, has debunked it, before sharing.”

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

There’s no evidence that implanted microchips are being contemplated in a serious way to fight the coronavirus. This notion appears to stem from an incorrect interpretation of comments made by philanthropist Bill Gates.

• Democrats are not “pushing” for mandatory vaccinations, because state government already has the power to compel vaccination. All 50 states use the authority, with some exemptions permitted.

• Some Democrats and some Republicans oppose efforts to limit mandatory-vaccination exemptions based on religious or personal beliefs.

See the sources for this fact-check

Is the coronavirus pandemic going to force Americans to undergo microchip implants? What about mandatory vaccinations? That’s what a Facebook post says.

"The Democrats are pushing for an implanted microchip in humans, and everyone to be vaccinated." says a Facebook post with text on a plain background. "These are words of war to me!"

It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The claim is unsupported.

Microchips

We found no evidence of proposals or legislation, Democratic or otherwise, to promote implanting microchips to counter the coronavirus.

Not that this would even make sense as a solution to coronavirus.

Even the smallest microchips "are rather large, such that none would ever fit into a vaccine needle — these are very small-bore needles," Wilbur Chen, an infectious-disease scientist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, previously told PolitiFact.

Other fact-checkers have traced the assertion in the Facebook post to an inaccurate interpretation of comments made by Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who has focused his efforts on global health.

On March 18, Gates took part in a forum on Reddit in which he was asked, "What changes are we going to have to make to how businesses operate to maintain our economy while providing social distancing?"

Gates responded, "The question of which businesses should keep going is tricky. Certainly, food supply and the health system. We still need water, electricity and the internet. Supply chains for critical things need to be maintained. Countries are still figuring out what to keep running. Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it."

The website Biohackinfo.com soon posted a story on Gates’ comments headlined, "Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus." It included the line that by "‘digital certificates,’ Gates was referring to implantable ‘QUANTUM-DOT TATTOOS.'"

This misinterpretation was amplified on April 13, when Roger Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, told radio host Joe Piscopo, "Whether Bill Gates played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate. I have conservative friends who say it’s ridiculous, and others say absolutely." But, Stone added, Gates "and other globalists are using it for mandatory vaccinations and microchipping people so we know if they’ve been tested. Over my dead body. Mandatory vaccinations? No way, Jose!"

This conversation was spread further by coverage in the New York Post and the Russian news service RT, according to BuzzFeed.

None of this is correct.

"Digital certificates" are electronic information used to securely communicate over the internet, and Gates never mentioned microchips. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told FactCheck.org that Gates was referring to digital certificates as part of an effort to create a system of home-based, self-administered testing for COVID-19 that would involve a secure connection with health officials.

FEATURED FACT-CHECK...[IMAGE]

Meanwhile, unrelated research funded by the Gates Foundation proposed recording vaccination history on a patient’s skin using an invisible dye that could be read by a smartphone and last up to five years.

Kevin McHugh, a Rice University bioengineering professor who worked on the study, told Reuters, "The quantum dot dye technology is not a microchip or human-implantable capsule, and to my knowledge there are no plans to use this for coronavirus."

There are legitimate concerns about privacy in some of the contact-tracing methods being considered to prevent the spread of coronavirus, experts say. However, "the fear of insertion of tracking chips and other things like that into our bodies has been a longstanding bogeyman," said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida who has written extensively about conspiracy theories. "There is a lot of tracking that goes on, but the suggestion that it’s being used in this manner and this way seems absurd."

Mandatory vaccinations

This part of the claim isn’t as far-fetched. Many Democrats and some Republicans do support narrowing exemptions to mandatory vaccinations based on personal beliefs.

States have had the authority to require vaccinations for more than a century, and they use that authority all the time, with certain exceptions allowed.

In the 1905 case Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a mandatory-vaccination law was a legitimate exercise of state power to protect public health and safety.

Since that decision, every state has instituted a variety of vaccine requirements, usually for school-age children. All but five states have exceptions for non-medical reasons. Some are for religious exemptions, some are for "personal beliefs," and some are for both. (The National Conference of State Legislatures has the full list.)

In the past several years, certain states, led in many cases by Democratic lawmakers but often with some bipartisan support, have moved to limit the religious- or personal-belief exemptions to vaccinations. This came amid concerns about outbreaks of measles and other diseases that were believed to stem from growing opposition to vaccination.

Ultimately, several states narrowed exemptions in 2019, including California, Maine, New York and Washington. They did so over the opposition of groups on the right and left who are skeptical of the value of vaccinations, a perspective the medical community strongly opposes. (Read our analysis of complaints about the safety of vaccines.)

The precedent set by Jacobson vs. Massachusetts continues to be cited, three academic experts at Boston University — Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, and Leonard H. Glantz — have written in the American Journal of Public Health.

"A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an epidemic of a lethal disease, with refusal punishable by a monetary penalty, like the one at issue in Jacobson, would undoubtedly be found constitutional under the low constitutional test of ‘rationality review,’" the co-authors wrote, as long as regulators determined the vaccine was safe and effective.

Even without an ongoing epidemic, they added, such a requirement "would probably be upheld" as long as the disease was still spreading to some degree and as long as the vaccine was safe.

The federal government could theoretically impose stronger mandates, but it has not done so, Richard Hughes IV, a vaccine specialist at Avalere Health, wrote in the journal Health Affairs. The federal government could do this through a law pre-empting state policies or by using federal funding as leverage against the states, Hughes wrote. But Mariner said she’s doubtful about this scenario, and there is no evidence of legislation of this type for now.

Our ruling

A Facebook post says, "The Democrats are pushing for an implanted microchip in humans, and everyone to be vaccinated."

On microchips, there’s no evidence that implanted microchips are being contemplated in a serious way to fight the coronavirus. This appears to stem from a warped translation of comments by Gates.

As for mandatory vaccinations, the idea that Democrats are pushing for this power is exaggerated, because the Supreme Court long ago decided that the government has that power. This authority is now used in all 50 states. A minority that includes some Democrats and some Republicans oppose efforts to limit religious or personal exemptions.... Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus," March 19, 2020

New York Post, "Roger Stone: Bill Gates may have created coronavirus to microchip people," April 13, 2020

National Conference of State Legislatures, "States With Religious and Philosophical Exemptions From School Immunization Requirements," Jan. 3, 2020

Politico, "Republicans reject Democratic attempts to tighten vaccine laws," April 16, 2019

American Journal of Public Health, "Jacobson v Massachusetts: It’s Not Your Great-Great-Grandfather’s Public Health Law," April 2005

Health Affairs, "Vaccine Exemptions And The Federal Government’s Role," March 21, 2019

CalMatters, "Five things to know now about California’s new vaccine law," Sept. 15, 2019

BuzzFeed, "Here’s A Timeline Of How A Bill Gates Reddit AMA Turned Into A Coronavirus Vaccine Conspiracy," April 18, 2020

FactCheck.org, "Conspiracy Theory Misinterprets Goals of Gates Foundation," April 14, 2020

Reuters, "False claim: Bill Gates planning to use microchip implants to fight coronavirus," March 31, 2020

PolitiFact, "5 facts about vaccines," Nov. 1, 2019

PolitiFact, "No, the US isn’t developing a vaccine or ‘antivirus’ with a chip to track people," April 3, 2020

Email interview with Wendy K. Mariner, professor of health law, ethics and human rights at Boston University, April 22, 2020

aha: youtube to facebook pipeline/escalator to everyone's news feed [2 biggest FANGs, synergy? amplifier?]

plandemic

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/heres-how-plandemic-went-viral/

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/08/fact-checking-plandemic-documentary-full-false-con/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-administration-orders-halt-to-first-of-its-kind-covid-19-testing-at-home-project-backed-by-bill-gates/

The Trump administration has ordered an “innovative” and “first of its kind” at home coronavirus testing program that has the support of Bill Gates and other public health experts to cease, and it’s unclear why.

The program, as The New York Times and NPR affiliate KUOW report, is based in Seattle, Washington, and allowed residents to easily test for coronavirus. One of the program’s benefits is 43 percent of its more than 12,000 participants so far were asymptomatic. To date the program has identified dozens of previously-undetected COVID-19 cases.

The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN), operated by researchers from the Seattle Flu Study and Public Health – Seattle & King County, and had an “in-person technical adviser” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was authorized by the State of Washington.

“Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained,” the FDA ordered, saying it had “concerns about safety and accuracy."

SCAN’s researchers say they had, The Times reports, “submitted data validating both the safety and reliability of the swabs in home-based collection.”

One researcher not affiliated with the program called halting it “bizarre.”

It’s unclear if Bill Gates’ association with the project has any negative impact. Some far right conspiracy theorists among Trump’s base, including those protesting state stay-at-home policies, falsely claim Gates is developing a vaccine that contains a microchip to track those who get injected.

President Donald Trump has been very concerned with the actual numbers attached to coronavirus cases and has made clear he wanted to keep the numbers low to help his re-election campaign.

He has said, “we don’t want everybody taking this test,” referring to coronavirus testing. “It’s totally unnecessary. This will pass through and we’re going to be even stronger for it.”

On Thursday Trump said testing for coronavirus is “overrated,” and complained that the more tests are conducted, the more cases there are.

“When you test, you have a case,” Trump said in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/coronavirus-bill-gates-fda-scan-seattle

[use = agree priv policy?!; vids play auto]

no lnx

CORONAVIRUS Published 4 hours ago 5/18?

Coronavirus testing program praised by Bill Gates suspended by FDA

The issue is that SCAN shares test results with individuals

By Evie FordhamFOXBusiness

[30M coronavirus tests a week is ‘achievable’: Rockefeller Foundation president

Rockefeller Foundation President Dr. Raj Shah on efforts to increase coronavirus testing to reopen the economy quicker.

Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox.Sign up here.]

A coronavirus testing project praised by billionaire Bill Gates just last week has been halted by the FDA.

The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) uses home-based, self-collected samples and said in a statement that the FDA pressing the pause button had nothing to do with the test's safety or accuracy. Instead, the issue is that SCAN shares test results with individuals.

WHY IS BILL GATES IN THE CORONAVIRUS FIGHT?

"SCAN's test is authorized by the Washington State Department of Health," SCAN said in a statement. "However, the [FDA] recently clarified its guidance for home-based, self-collected samples to test for COVID-19.We have been notified that a separate federal emergency use authorization (EUA) is required to return results for self-collected tests."

"The FDA is supportive of at-home testing for COVID-19, provided there is data and science to support consumer safety and test accuracy. ... We had previously understood that SCAN was being conducted as a surveillance study," an FDA spokesperson told FOX Business. A surveillance study doesn't involve informing patients of results.

[Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, speaks during the Neglected Tropical Diseases Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, April 18, 2017. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy]

SCAN has been in conversation with the FDA since March 1 and hopes to have the EUA "soon," the group said in its statement.

GATES REVEALS WHEN WORLD CAN BE 'TRULY NORMAL' AGAIN

Gates, who has been in the middle of discussions about how the world can fight coronavirus, said he was "excited" about SCAN in a blog post titled "Scanning for answers to a pandemic" last week, before the study was put on hold.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

"I want to be clear that SCAN does not replace the widespread testing that is still needed in communities. But it has the potential to become an important tool for health officials seeking insights about the spread and behavior of the virus.Early results from SCAN found many cases of COVID-19 in Seattle that might otherwise have gone undetected," Gates wrote.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

... Trump administration has ordered an “innovative” and “first of its kind” at home coronavirus testing program that has the support of Bill Gates and other public health experts to cease, and it’s unclear why.

“Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained,” the FDA ordered, saying it had “concerns about safety and accuracy.”

...

One researcher not affiliated with the program called halting it “bizarre.”

President Donald Trump has been very concerned with the actual numbers attached to coronavirus cases and has made clear he wanted to keep the numbers low to help his re-election campaign.

He has said, “we don’t want everybody taking this test,” referring to coronavirus testing. “It’s totally unnecessary. This will pass through and we’re going to be even stronger for it.”

On Thursday Trump said testing for coronavirus is “overrated,” and complained that the more tests are conducted, the more cases there are.

“When you test, you have a case,” Trump said in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

huh?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/arizona-may-jail-right-wing-fraudster-who-accused-democrats-of-sexual-assault/

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news

Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED04/08/20

A conspiracy theory about Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms, getting high engagement numbers, and has since been pushed by both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a Newsmax correspondent.

As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years, has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday and The Daily Show about the need for a vaccine.

Gates on March 18 also participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).

During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort(the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of Gates’ past remarks).

A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction aroundMarch 17, when a YouTube videoabout the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in Facebook groups and showed up as a meme on Instagram....[pix]

...Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” and the conspiracy subreddit on Reddit, where a user called Gates’Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening, white nationalist Faith Goldy wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”[fiath g twt?]

...

The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan, it was picked up by NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as YourNewsWire, which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated on social media and as a meme, along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”

[pix]

On March 21, another YouTube video was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.” The video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements, according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page.[pix w/ pyr eye]

throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” and claiming he is the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The videos included a clip from anti-Semitic conspiracy theory outlet TruNews and a video whose title called the virus a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements combined)....[rw talk?]

Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views (despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy). One video that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” andaccused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.

...[pix]

The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”[pix meme blk kid]

...By April 6, bigger QAnon accounts on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler, who accused Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.”

That afternoon, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted a thread accusing Gates of “control[ling] global health policy” and saying that his “plan” was to use “vaccines to track people.”

On the morning of April 7,Fox host Laura Ingraham, whilequote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's post about Gates’ AMA,said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”

The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have circulated on social media, including others about Gates and the virus.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/plandemic-video-judy-mikovits/

no lnx twt

a video about the coronavirus featuring a well-known vaccine conspiracist is spreading like wildfire on social media this week, even as platforms talk tough about misinformation in the midst of the pandemic.

In the professionally-produced video, a solemn interviewer named Mikki Willis interviews Judy Mikovits, a figure best known for her anti-vaccine activism in recent years. The video touches on a number of topics favored among online conspiracists at the moment, filtering most of them through the lens that vaccines are a money-making enterprise that causes medical harm.

The video took off mid-week after first being posted to Vimeo and YouTube on May 4. From those sites, it traveled to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter where it circulated much more widely, racking up millions of views. Finding the video is currently trivial across social platforms, where it’s been reposted widely, sometimes with its title removed or reworded to make it more difficult to detect by AI moderation.

According to Twitter, tweets by Mikovits apparently don’t violate the platform’s rules around COVID-19 misinformation, but it has marked the video’s URL as “unsafe” and blocked the related hashtags “#PlagueOfCorruption and #Plandemicmovie. The company also hasn’t found evidence that her account is being amplified as part of a coordinated campaign.

Update: On Friday, Twitterclarified to TechCrunch that the company is assessing individual clips from the video when they are shared to Twitter in order to determine if the snippets violate the platform’s rules. The company will also add a warning label to links on Twitter to the full video hosted elsewhere. Twitter is choosing not to remove these links across the board as it says many users include links as context when disputing the video’s claims.

Over on Facebook, the video indeed runs afoul of the platform’s coronavirus and health misinformation rules—but it’s still very easy to find. For this story, I was able to locate a copy of the full video within seconds and at the time of writing Instagram’s #plandemic hashtag was well-populated with long clips from the video and even suggestions for related hashtags like #coronahoax. Facebook is currently working to stem the video’s spread, but it’s already collected millions of views in a short time.

On YouTube, a search for “Plandemic” mostly pulls up content debunking the video’s many false claims, but plenty of clips from the video itself still make the first wave of search results.

The video itself is a hodgepodge of popular false COVID-10 conspiracies already circulating online, scientifically unsound anti-vaccine talking points and claims of persecution.

Mikovits, who in the video states that she’s not opposed to vaccines, later goes on to make the claim that vaccines have killed millions of people. “The game is to prevent the therapies ‘til everyone is infected and push the vaccines, knowing that the flu vaccines increase the odds… of getting COVID-19,” Mikovits says, conspiratorially. At the same time, she suggests that doctors and health facilities are incentivized to overcount COVID-19 cases for the medicare payouts, an assertion that contradicts the expert consensus that coronavirus cases are likely still being meaningfully undercounted.

In the video, Mikovits accuses White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci of suppressing treatments like hydroxychloroquine—falsely touted by President Trump as a likely cure for the virus. While her claims appear to have landed at the perfect opportunistic moment, her beef with Fauci is actually longstanding. As Buzzfeed reported,in a book she wrote six years ago, Mikovits accused Dr. Fauci of banning her from the NIH’s facilities—an event Fauci himself was not familiar with.

Mikovits also touches on a popular web of conspiracy theories fixated on the idea Bill Gates is somehow implicated in causing the pandemic to profit off the eventual vaccine and makes the unfounded claim that “it’s very clear this virus was manipulated and studied in the laboratory.”

In other interviews, Mikovits has suggested that face masks pose a danger because they can “activate” the virus in the wearer. In the “Plandemic” clip, Mikovits also makes the unscientific claim that beaches should not have been closed due to “healing microbes in the saltwater” and “sequences” in the sand that protect against the coronavirus.

To the uninformed viewer, Mikovits might appear to ably address scientific-sounding topics, but her own scientific credentials are extremely dubious. In 2009, Mikovits authored a study on chronic fatigue syndrome that was retracted by the journal Science two years later when an audit found “evidence of poor quality control” in the experiment and the results could not be replicated in subsequent studies. That event and her subsequent firing from a research institute appear to have kicked off her more recent turn as an anti-vaccine crusader, conspiracist and author.

With “Plandemic,” Mikovits seems to have positioned herself successfully for relevance in the pandemic’s information vacuum—her book sales have even soared on Amazon. Toward the end of the clip, her interviewer even cannily sets up a future outrage cycle at the inevitable crackdown from social media platforms, where the video flouts rules ostensibly banning harmful health conspiracies like the ones it contains.

“It’s other people shutting down other citizens and the big tech platforms follow suit and they shut everything down,” Willis says with steely concern. “There is no dissenting voices allowed any more in this free country.”

As we’ve reported previously, the coronavirus crisis is fertile ground for conspiracy theories and potentially lethal misinformation— a fact that the “Plandemic” video’s apparent mainstream crossover success demonstrates. Widespread uncertainty and fear is a powerful thing, capable of breathing new life into debunked ideas that would have otherwise kept collecting dust in conspiracist backwaters, where they belong.

ref

nyt

no lnx

Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target

The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist has been attacked with falsehoods that he created the coronavirus and wants to profit from it.

By Daisuke Wakabayashi, Davey Alba and Marc Tracy

April 17, 2020

In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people.

That speech has resurfaced in recent weeks with 25 million new views on YouTube — but not in the way that Mr. Gates probably intended. Anti-vaccinators, members of the conspiracy group QAnon and right-wing pundits have instead seized on the video as evidence that one of the world’s richest men planned to use a pandemic to wrest control of the global health system.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he is being falsely portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population.

The wild claims have gained traction with conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham and anti-vaccinators such asRobert F. Kennedy Jr. as Mr. Gates has emerged as a vocal counterweight to President Trump on the coronavirus. For weeks, Mr. Gates has appeared on TV, on op-ed pages and in Reddit forums calling for stay-at-home policies, expanded testing and vaccine development. And without naming Mr. Trump, he has criticized the president’s policies, including this week’s move to cut funding to the World Health Organization.

Misinformation about Mr. Gates is now the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods tracked by Zignal Labs, a media analysis company. The misinformation includes more than 16,000 posts on Facebook this year about Mr. Gates and the virus that were liked and commented on nearly 900,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis. On YouTube, the 10 most popular videos spreading lies about Mr. Gates posted in March and April were viewed almost five million times.

Mr. Gates, who is worth more than $100 billion, has effectively assumed the role occupied by George Soros, the billionaire financier and Democratic donor who has been a villain for the right. That makes Mr. Gates the latest individual — along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading U.S. infectious disease expert — to be ensnared in the flow of right-wing punditry that has denigrated those who appear at odds with Mr. Trump on the virus.

“Bill Gates is easily transformed into a health-related meme and figure because he’s so well known,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics. “He’s able to function as kind of an abstract boogeyman.”

Especially since Mr. Gates has sharpened his comments about the White House’s handling of the coronavirus in recent weeks.

“There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus,” he wrote in an opinion column in The Washington Post on March 31. “The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of Covid-19.”

[ImageIn a 2015 talk, Bill Gates said an infectious virus could be the greatest threat to humanity.

In a 2015 talk, Bill Gates said an infectious virus could be the greatest threat to humanity.Credit...Ted]

Mark Suzman, chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Gates’s main philanthropic vehicle, said it was “distressing that there are people spreading misinformation when we should all be looking for ways to collaborate and save lives.”

Through a representative, Mr. Gates declined to be interviewed.

The conspiracy theories about Mr. Gates may particularly damage what people think about a future coronavirus vaccine, said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation. She said the narratives “have the potential to kick off coordinated and sophisticated online campaigns that turn people against taking a virus vaccine.”

[Latest Updates: Economy

Tesla’s plans to reopen its California factory are not in compliance with a local health order.

April’s job losses highlight the depth of the pandemic’s devastation.

...]

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, which also owns Instagram, said they were fighting coronavirus misinformation.

Mr. Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and built it into a software behemoth, has largely devoted his time to philanthropic endeavors since he stepped back from the company in 2008. As of 2018, the Gates Foundation had a $46.8 billion endowment, making it one of the world’s largest private charitable organizations.

Thefoundation has worked to distribute vaccines in developing countries, advocated family planning through greater use of contraceptives andfunded the development of genetically modified crops.Those efforts have prompted unfounded accusations that Mr. Gates was hurting the world’s poor with unnecessary drugs and harmful crops while trying to suppress the global population.

His disdain for Mr. Trump, whom he has met several times, has also become public.In 2018, footage surfaced of Mr. Gates recounting how Mr. Trump needed help distinguishing H.I.V., which refers to the human immunodeficiency virus and causes AIDS, from HPV, which is the human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection.

“Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between H.I.V. and HPV, so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other,” Mr. Gates said to laughter in comments to his foundation.

In January, when the coronavirus began spreading, the Gates Foundation committed $10 million to helping medical workers in China and Africa. In February, Mr. Gates weighed in on the illness, warning in The New England Journal of Medicine that Covid-19 was behaving like a once-a-century pathogen.

In addition to writing the Washington Post op-ed, he called for more and equitable testing in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session last month.This month, Mr. Gates appeared on “The Daily Show” and said his foundation would fund factories for the seven most promising potential vaccines.

On Wednesday, the Gates Foundation said it would commit $250 million — up from an earlier pledge of $100 million — to slow the disease’s spread.

By then, falsehoods about Mr. Gates had taken off. The first mention of a baseless conspiracy connecting him to the outbreak was on Jan. 21, according to the Times analysis. That was when a YouTube personality linked to QAnon suggested on Twitter that Mr. Gates had foreknowledge of the pandemic. The tweet was based on a coronavirus-related patent from the Pirbright Institute, a British group that received funding from the Gates Foundation.

[Image

Mr. Gates at Trump Tower in New York in 2016. He has met President Trump several times.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times]

The patent was not for Covid-19; it was connected to a potential vaccine for a different coronavirus that affects poultry. But two days later, the conspiracy website Infowars inaccurately said the patent was for “the deadly virus.”

The idea spread. From February to April, conspiracy theories involving Mr. Gates and the virus were mentioned 1.2 million times on social media and television broadcasts, according to Zignal Labs. That was 33 percent more often, it said, than the next-largest conspiracy theory: that 5G radio waves cause people to succumb to Covid-19.

Some of the theories tapped into Mr. Gates’s acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was convicted of sex trafficking and committed suicide, saying a global elite had banded together to create the coronavirus.

In other theories, internet trolls twisted comments that Mr. Gates had made. In one, trolls said Mr. Gates, who had raised the idea of “digital certificates” to confirm who had the virus, wanted to surveil the population with microchip vaccination implants.

By April, false Gates conspiracy theories peaked at 18,000 mentions a day, Zignal Labs said.

The theories were amplified by people such as Mr. Kennedy, a son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who campaigns against vaccines as a director of the Children’s Health Defense network. On his Instagram page, Mr. Kennedy has said Mr. Gates pushes vaccines to feed his other business interests.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy posted a cartoon of a smiling Mr. Gates with a syringe and a caption: “Your Body, my choice.”

Mr. Kennedy, whose Instagram followers have doubled to more than 285,000 since March, said in an interview that he was telling the truth about the “terrible damage” that Mr. Gates had inflicted on the world with vaccines.

In an April 7 tweet, Ms. Ingraham, a Fox News host, shared a conspiracy theory about nefarious motives behind Mr. Gates’s call to track and identify who had received a Covid-19 vaccine. “Digitally tracking Americans’ every move has been a dream of the globalists for years,” she wrote.

Ms. Ingraham did not respond to a request for comment.

And Roger J. Stone Jr., the Trump confidant who was sentenced this year to 40 months in prison for felonies related to the 2016 Trump campaign, said in a radio interview this week reported by The New York Post that whether Mr. Gates “played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate.”

On Wednesday, after Mr. Gates said pulling funding to the World Health Organization was ill advised, the online reaction was swift. (The Gates Foundation funds the organization.)

One anti-vaccinator posted a poster of the movie “Kill Bill” on Instagram that read “Kill Bill Gates” and called for people to flood the comments on Mr. Gates’s Instagram account.

That same day, when Mr. Gates posted his thanks to health care workers, it received over 14,000 comments. One read: “This virus is a big, big lie.”

Michael H. Keller contributed reporting. Ben Decker contributed research.

aha note escalator, and recycling mutation/hybridization of older conspir BS [qanon origin, then amplified by jnz]

he's the next soros re covid?

Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host.

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news

mma many link, pix, graf/ twt

Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host

Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 04/08/20 12:13 PM EDT

As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years, has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday and The Daily Show about the need for a vaccine.

Gates on March 18 also participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).

During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort (the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of Gates’ past remarks).

A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction around March 17, when a YouTube video about the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in Facebook groups and showed up as a meme on Instagram.

Infowars Bill Gates

Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” and the conspiracy subreddit on Reddit, where a user called Gates’ Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening, white nationalist Faith Goldy wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”

Faith Goldy Bill Gates

The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan, it was picked up by NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as YourNewsWire, which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated on social media and as a meme, along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”

Bill Gates Instagram3

On March 21, another YouTube video was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.” The video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements, according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page.

Bill Gates Facebook1

Throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” and claiming he is the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The videos included a clip from anti-Semitic conspiracy theory outlet TruNews and a video whose title called the virus a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements combined).

Bill Gates YouTube5

Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views(despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy). One video that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” and accused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.

Video file

CitationFrom a video uploaded to TikTok on April 1, 2020

The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”

Bill Gates Facebook Instagram meme

By April 6, bigger QAnon accounts on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler, who accused Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.”

On the morning of April 7, Fox host Laura Ingraham, while quote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's post about Gates’ AMA, said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”

The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have circulated on social media, including others about Gates and the virus.

**Wiles Says Bill Gates Is ‘Building Lucifer’s Antichrist System’ by Supporting Vaccine Technology**

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bill-gates-warned-about-a-pandemic-years-ago-now-he-says-we-did-not-act-fast-enough/

yikes ~ liberal arts?

https://theconversation.com/gates-launches-lobbying-arm-higher-education-on-agenda-119077

This year's letter from Bill and Melinda Gates focused on nine things that surprised them. For the Microsoft-cofounder, one thing he was surprised to learn was the massive amount of new buildings the planet should expect in the coming decades due to urban population growth.

"The number of buildings in the world is going to double by 2060. It's like we're going to build a new New York City every month for the next 40 years," he.

Construction materials such as steel, cement wood "requires lots of energy from fossil fuels," as Gates noted in the letter, "and the processes involved release carbon as a byproduct."

"We need to find a way to make it all without worsening climate change," he wrote.

The "larger point," the billionaire philanthropist said, is that battling climate change requires much more than just solar panels and wind turbines. It requires "breakthrough inventions" across every polluting sector—buildings, agriculture, electricity, manufacturing and transportation.

Those five industries are the biggest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, or as Gates calls them, the five "grand challenges in climate change."

"Solar panels are great, but we should be hearing about trucks, cement, and cow farts too," he wrote.

For instance, electricity counts for only a quarter of the emissions, Gates said in a promo with Melinda for their annual letter. "Things like cement, steel, meat—there's a lot of other activities that are generating 75 percent of it," he said.

[vid]

Meanwhile, agriculture accounts for another 24 percent of greenhouse gases. Gates quipped: "That includes cattle, which give off methane when they belch and pass gas. (A personal surprise for me: I never thought I'd be writing seriously about bovine flatulence.)"

On that note, Gates was happy to report that the European Commission recently committed to invest in research and development on the five challenge areas, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the $1 billion fund he helped launch, will be using the five areas to as a guide for their future investments in clean-energy companies.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures counts a number of wealthy and influential billionaires as investors and board members, including Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, Virgin Group's Richard Branson, Alibaba founder Jack Ma and more.

"Part of the solution is to invest in innovation in all five sectors so we can do these things without destroying the climate," Gates concluded. "We need breakthrough inventions in each of the grand challenges."

...

1631 carbon tax

Bill Gates Unveils Toilet That Transforms Waste Into Fertilizer, Doesn't Require Water or Sewers 12/18 see Solid Waste.

Bill Gates Co-Launches Group to Jump Start Climate Change Adaptation

As a summer of wildfires, heat waves and flooding made clear, climate change isn't just something to race to prevent in the future. It's also something that's happening right now.

But key players haven't exactly come to terms with that. In 2015 to 2016, $380 billion dollars were spent reducing carbon dioxide emissions and only $20 billion on increasing protections from xtreme weather guard uk

...Now, three very influential people are teaming up to change that. Bill Gates, former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva launched the Global Commission on Adaptation Tuesday in an effort to jump start the development and implementation of effective climate adaptations on the global level.

"We are at a moment of high risk and great promise. We need policies to help vulnerable populations adapt and we need to ensure that governments and other stakeholders are supporting innovation and helping deliver those breakthroughs to the people and places that need them most," Gates said in the press release announcing the launch.

However, the existence of the commission doesn't mean its leaders have given up on preventing additional climate change, but rather that they have accepted that it is already occurring on a wide scale.

"If everyone does their part, we can reduce carbon emissions, increase access to affordable energy and help farmers everywhere grow more productive crops," Gates said.

Georgieva said in a briefing reported by National Geographic that the commission should not be interpreted as a surrender to the dangerous climate change predicted by the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report if world leaders don't rapidly reduce emissions.

"For quite a while there has been that sense that if we adapt, that means we are accepting defeat against climate change," she said. "It is not defeat, it is reality."

The commission has 28 commissioners including its big-name leaders and represents 17 countries, among them big emitters like the UK, Canada, China and India and particularly vulnerable countries like Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands.

During the first year, the commission will prepare a report on the necessity and possibilities of climate adaptations, to be presented at the 2019 UN Secretary General Climate Summit.

National Geographic pointed out some existing climate adaptations of the type the commission might research and promote. Farmers in flood-vulnerable Bangladesh, for example, are switching from raising chickens to raising ducks, which can swim. Scientists in the Philippines are replanting the mangroves, half wiped out by development, that act as a natural flood barrier.

In total the cost of adaptations could be $300 billion by 2030 and $500 billion by 2050, Ban told The Guardian. While that might sound steep, Ban thought it was possible.

"The money can be mobilized," he said. "If there is political will, I think we can handle this matter."

The commission outlined four "roadblocks" to widespread climate adaptation that it would work to resolve:

1. Decision makers and the wider public are not yet aware of all the opportunities to be gained from becoming more resilient and less vulnerable to climate impacts and natural hazards;

2. Governments and businesses fail to incorporate climate change risks into their social and economic development plans and investments;

3. Adaptation efforts fall short of those who need them most, the world's poorest and most vulnerable people; and

4. Although adaptation is a global challenge, global leadership on the issue is scarce. In short, the world is falling short of the transformation required to adapt to a changing climate.

The commission is also an attempt to rebuild the political will around climate action that was damaged by the decision of U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris agreement.

"We were very much united until December 2015 in Paris," Ban told the Guardian. "Now unfortunately the level of solidarity is being loosened, especially by the Trump administration. Even though it is just one country, it has caused big political damage."

While the U.S. federal government is not involved with the commission, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is a member. rELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power_elite/interlocks_and_interactions.html

Domhoff

Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011	Table 2: The network connections of the two richest people in the U.S. in 2011
	William H Gates III	Berkshire Hathaway	Corporation (11)						Microsoft	Corporation (36)		AutoNation	Corporation (212)		Republic Services	Corporation (278)		GAMCO Investors Inc.	Corporation		Pacific Ethanol Inc.	Corporation		Patriot Coal Corporation	Corporation		Western Asset Claymore US Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities Fund	Corporation		Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation	Foundation		Warren E Buffett	Berkshire Hathaway	Corporation (11)		Burlington Northern Santa Fe	Corporation (167)		Ameriprise Financial	Corporation (288)		DaVita	Corporation (355)		Washington Post	Corporation (455)
Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.	Note: The number in parentheses after a corporation indicates its Fortune 500 ranking.

===

accf?!

http://accf.org/2017/12/12/accf-center-for-policy-research-applauds-bill-gates-announcement-on-expansion-of-breakthrough-energy-coalition/

...o advance this mission, BEC is expanding its coalition to include prominent companies, funds, institutional investors, and banks that share a commitment to accelerating the commercialization of new energy technologies. The coalition is proud to welcome the following new members, many of which are quoted at the conclusion of this release: • African Rainbow Capital • African Rainbow Minerals • BNP Paribas • Energy Impact Partners • ENGIE • General Electric • Microsoft • National Grid • OGCI Climate Investments • Prelude Ventures • Reliance Industries Limited • SAP SE • Total • Virgin Group • Wheatsheaf Group In addition to expanding the coalition, BEC is now piloting public-private collaborations with five Mission Inno...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/02/3770561/bill-gates-wrong-carbon-tax-2/

Bill Gates keeps saying confused and confusing things about climate policy and clean energy.

Gates has positioned himself as a major player and spokesman in this arena with his “Breakthrough Energy Coalition,” a $2 billion effort he is spearheading to research and develop breakthrough “energy miracles.” That means his confused — and often simply wrong — pronouncements could have serious consequences in the public debate and are worth exploring in detail.

Gates’ latest bizarre position, as as one media headline explained, is to dismiss a carbon tax — “Bill Gates: Carbon tax not right for the US.”

This is based on an extended interview that Gates did with the magazine Technology Review (TR), which may be his most revealing set of comments to date. When TR naturally asked about Gates whether a price on carbon is needed “to help create a business rationale for investing more in clean technologies?” and “Do you favor a clean, transparent tax?” he replied:

Some countries will do a pure carbon tax, and there’s a certain beauty to doing it that way, but the consensus that I think people will reach here in the U.S. will be to focus more on supply side.

Significantly, Gates explains, “The supply side is about funding basic government research, and then creating startup companies with that research.” For Gates, carbon prices and clean energy tax credits are “demand side” policies because they increase the demand for clean energy, whereas supply side policies in theory increase the supply of clean energy technologies available.

What Gates is saying is that he believes the consensus that Americans will reach is to focus policy more on funding basic research and creating startup companies than on policies to boost demand — what are typically called deployment programs. This is just a restatement of Gates’ view that existing technology is not up to the job and that we need a bunch of energy miracles. That view has no basis in fact (as I’ve explained at length here and here), which is why there is zero chance American policy will focus more on energy miracles than energy deployment.

As I discussed in debunking the recent similarly confused Foreign Affairs piece, we have dawdled for so long on serious climate action that we must rapidly slash CO2 emissions, which requires over 100 times more money be spent on deployment (demand) than R&D into breakthrough technologies (supply). A carbon tax would be a big help in achieving rapid CO2 cuts.

I quoted leading climate expert Ken Caldeira, who explained four years ago, “Globally, deployment costs will be in the trillions of dollars, while R&D costs might be in the tens of billions.” Significantly, Caldeira works with Gates, helping to run the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, which Gates provided half the money for.

Gates, however, appears to be someone who doesn’t really listen to the advice of experts. This affliction — common to billionaires (I’m looking at you Donald Trump) — shines through from the very beginning of this interview:

Gates Reinvents The Wheel, Or, Rather, The Kaya Identity

Gates conceptualizes the CO2 problem through a formula that he claims credit for, but that in fact — as leading climatologist Michael Mann and others have pointed out — was developed by someone else two decades ago who has his own Wikipedia entry.

Technology Review understands what Gates has done but since the billionaire’s climate policy can’t be explained without this formula, they try to split the baby:

Gates is animated by an equation he claims to have come up with (although it resembles another equation, called the Kaya Identity, well known to climate scientists) that considers total carbon dioxide emissions as the product of the factors P (population), S (services consumed per person), E (the energy used to supply those services), and C (the amount of carbon emitted per unit of energy).

One of the dangers of reinventing the wheel, of course, is that you may not realize that one of the features of the original design — like its roundness — is actually central to its value. So you might instead come up with a square wheel. That’s kind of what Gates does here.

Gates explains to Technology Review how to use this formula to figure out the implications of a global effort to take CO2 levels down to zero:

If you take my equation and look at the first three factors, P is going to go up by about 1.2, S is going to go up by about a factor of 2, andE, assuming lots of breakthroughs — well, we’ll be generous and say that’s 0.6. So basically, when you summarize the equation, it suggests that C must be about zero.

The bold-face sentence is incorrect. Gates is saying that to get “Energy Per Service” to 0.6 — a 40 percent drop — would require “lots of breakthroughs.” In fact, it is going to happen without any breakthroughs at all!

That might be clearer to Gates if he used the original Kaya Identity, where the term is a Energy Per GDP, which is easy to quantify and indeed for which there is a vast historical dataset for the world and most countries. Gates never formally defines “Energy Per Service,” which kind of makes it a hand-waving term not so useful in a mathematical equation. Indeed, Gates himself is somewhat confused about the term, as is clear from his Annual Letter, where he writes:

Let’s take a look at (E). That’s the energy needed per service. There’s some good news here. Fuel-efficient cars, LED light bulbs, and other inventions are making it possible to use energy more efficiently…. All of these efforts help cut down on energy use.

Unfortunately, they don’t get us to zero. In fact, most scientists agree that by 2050 we’ll be using 50 percent more energy than we do today.

Uhh, no. Although these paragraphs are supposed to be about E — “energy needed per service” — the final bold-faced line is just about total Energy! Yes, scientists agree that we will be using 50 percent more energy globally by 2050 — but NOT because “energy needed per service” is going up! It’s because Population (P) and Services Per Person (S) are going up.

The whole point of this equation is to disaggregate the effects of overall growth in the population and economy (the P and S terms) from what we can do with technology — namely improve energy efficiency (E) or reduce the carbon intensity of energy sources (C). But Gates then either forgets or ignores or confuses the whole point by leaping to total energy in 2050 to somehow argue that it all doesn’t matter.

The original Kaya Identity simply uses Energy Per GDP (aka energy intensity), and once you do that you have access to reams of data. “Since 1973, energy intensity has declined at a rate closer to 2% per year,” as the US Energy Information Administration explained in a detailed analysis three years ago. “The 2013 Annual Energy Outlook Reference case projects that this average annual decline of 2% will continue through 2040.”

In short, we have every reason to believe that from 2015 to 2050, the energy intensity of the U.S. economy will drop 50 percent, without any miracles or indeed without any major push on energy efficiency — since the EIA doesn’t model any climate or energy policies that don’t exist today. Can you imagine how fast energy intensity or energy per GDP could drop if we actually had a national push on efficiency?

After Gates (incorrectly) asserts that a 40 percent drop in E by 2050 would require “lots of breakthroughs” — basically dismissing/ignoring energy efficiency as a strategy — he puts the entire burden of the climate technology effort on finding zero-carbon energy (generation) miracles: “C must be about zero.”

Immediately after that, TR naturally asks him when must C be zero. The correct answer is — for the entire world in a typical 2C pathway — the end of the century. You can see that in this typical pathway from Climate Interactive, one of the world’s leading organizations with energy and CO2 models that governments and others rely on for making decisions about what can plausibly be achieved through various energy technology options and policies.

....

Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State and the Nuisance of Democracy

Today’s multi-billionaires are a different species of philanthropist; they keep tight control over their foundations while also operating as major political funders.

By Joanne Barkan / Nonprofit Quarterly April 27, 2016

This article was first published in the Nonprofit Quarterly (spring 2016; vol. 23, no. 1).

Once upon a time, the super-wealthy endowed their tax-exempt charitable foundations and then turned them over to boards of trustees to run. The trustees would spend the earnings of the endowment to pursue a typically grand but wide-open mission written into the foundation’s charter—like The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1913 mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Today’s multi-billionaires are a different species of philanthropist; they keep tight control over their foundations while also operating as major political funders—think Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, or Walmart heiress Alice Walton. They aim to do good in the world, but each defines “good” idiosyncratically in terms of specific public policies and political goals. They translate their wealth, the work of their foundations, and their celebrity as doers-of-good into influence in the public sphere—much more influence than most citizens have.

Call it charitable plutocracy—a peculiarly American phenomenon, increasingly problematic and in need of greater scrutiny. Like all forms of plutocracy, this one conflicts with democracy, and exactly how these philanthropists coordinate tax-exempt grantmaking with political funding for maximum effect remains largely obscure. What follows is a case study of the way charitable plutocracy operates on the ground. It’s a textbook example of the tug-of-war between government by the people and uber-philanthropists as social engineers.

The Case of Bill Gates and Washington State

This story begins in 1995, when the Washington State House of Representatives first considered legislation that would enable private individuals and organizations to obtain charters to create their own K–12 schools. These were to be taxpayer-funded schools, but privately run and exempt from many of the regulations governing district (regular) public schools. The funding would come from the resources of regular public schools: each student would “carry” his or her per-child funding out of the district system to a charter school.

The bill died in the state senate, so supporters went directly to voters with a ballot initiative to enable charter schools. The campaign attracted little money on either side, but turnout was high because the vote took place on the same day as the 1996 presidential election. Washingtonians rejected charter schools decisively: 64.4 percent against, 35.6 percent in favor.1

State representatives kept trying. They proposed new bills in 1997, 1998, and 1999, but got the same results: success in the lower chamber, failure in the senate.2

Wariness of charter schools didn’t mean that Washingtonians were completely satisfied with existing schools or feared change. Voters had legitimate concerns. Charter schools, they worried, would divert tax revenue from already underfunded district schools, especially those serving low-income and minority students. In addition, schools under private management might be less transparent and less accountable to the public than Washington’s district schools, which were overseen by locally elected boards.

Charter supporters tried another ballot initiative in 2000, and, for the first time, attracted the backing of a multi-billionaire philanthropist. Paul Allen had cofounded Microsoft in 1975 and The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation in 1988.3 The state places no limits on individual campaign contributions for ballot measures, so Allen was able to give $3.275 million of the total $3.4 million raised by the pro-charter side. Opponents raised only about $11,000. Outspent 309 to 1, they still defeated the initiative, although the millions given in support of charters shrank the margin of victory. The vote was 51.8 percent against charters and 48.2 percent in favor.4

In the next four years, the national context shifted. The debate around public education intensified as a controversial market-based education-reform movement grew stronger. “Ed-reformers” claimed that U.S. public schools were failing; that the culprits were bad teachers, teachers unions, and government bureaucracy; and that the private sector, using public resources, could run better schools. They promoted competition among schools to force out the weakest and measuring educational success via students’ standardized test scores.

The education-reform movement in general, and charter schools in particular, attracted a new wave of philanthropists, many of whom had made fortunes in high-tech industries and finance. Although they had no experience as educators, they aimed to “disrupt” and rebuild public schooling for urban low-income and minority children. They embraced the idea that giving grants to K–12 reform projects corresponded with investing capital in a business. They described their philanthropy in terms of strategic investments to maximize returns and data collection to verify results. Having succeeded in business, they reasoned, they would succeed in education. They came to see funding education-reform candidates and ballot initiatives as part of the same effort.

The Washington legislature finally passed a charter school law in 2004. Opponents responded by petitioning for a ballot measure to repeal the law. Mobilized by the teachers unions, League of Women Voters, state Democratic Party, and the Seattle School Board, they raised $1.3 million for the campaign. The unions contributed the most: the Washington Education Association gave $601,000, and the National Education Association gave $500,000.5

Charter school supporters raised three times as much—$3.9 million. Most of it came from three education-reform political funder-philanthropists, who donated about $1 million each: Bill Gates, who had recently made education reform the main focus of his domestic philanthropy; Walmart heir John T. Walton (from Wyoming), who advocated charters and tax-funded vouchers for parents to use for private-school tuition; and Donald Fisher (from California), founder of Gap and a major donor to the KIPP chain of charter schools...

big sticking point at the climate talks will be money _ how much rich countries should invest help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil and gas producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.

The new initiative is twofold: a public-private project called Mission Innovation, led by governments, and the Gates-led investor group called the Breakthrough Energy Initiative.

The governments pledge to double their spending on low or no-carbon energy over the next five years, according to Brian Deese, senior adviser to Obama on climate and energy issues. They include leading energy producers and consumers, such as the U.S. China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada, France and Norway. They currently invest about $10 billion a year total, about half of which comes from the U.S., Deese told reporters in Washington.

Gates committed $1 billion of his money and was the “intellectual architect” behind the effort to get investors involved, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said. The business leaders are making their pledges conditional on governments also pledging more money, said a former U.S. government official who is familiar with the plan.

The University of California has joined an international coalition led by Bill Gates to invest in clean energy technology, it announced Sunday.

UC will be the sole institutional investor in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, according to the university. The coalition has 28 investors from 10 countries, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The coalition’s goal is to invest in projects and ideas that have the potential to deliver carbon-free power and bring them to the market.

monsanto fdn

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Robert_B._Horsch

http://www.alternet.org/environment/bill-gates-gives-exxon-cover-gates-foundation-deadly-wrong-climate-change-fossil-fuels

2x down ~ divest 2015

http://ecowatch.com/2015/10/23/bill-gates-divest-fossil-fuels

http://www.alternet.org/environment/gates-invest-2-billion-breakthrough-renewable-energy-projects

Gates has announced he will invest $2 billion (£1.3 billion) in renewable technologies initiatives, but rejected calls to divest from the fossil fuel companies that are burning carbonat a rate that ignores international agreements to limit global warming.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Gates said that he would double his current investments in renewables over the next five years in a bid to “bend the curve” on tackling climate change.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, lead by Gates and his wife, is the world’s largest charitable foundation. According to the charity’s most recent tax filings in 2013, it currently has $1.4 billion invested in fossil fuel companies, including BP, responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In March, the Guardian launched a campaign calling on the Gates’ Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to divest from coal, oil and gas companies. More than 223,000 people have since signed up to the campaign. 6/15

dumps alec

http://ecowatch.com/2014/08/29/bill-gates-jigar-shah-carl-pope-renewables/ debate

Published on Monday, March 28, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

All the President's (Coal) Men

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Obama's Wyoming Giveaway

by Jeff Biggers

What really happened in Wyoming last week?

Perhaps we should ask billionaire coal hauler Warren Buffett, the "Oracle of Omaha."

Energy and climate analysts and Big Green organizations are still staggering around for an answer to the Obama administration's blockbuster news in Wyoming's coalfields last week to green-light the mining of an estimated 750 million-2.4 billion tons of coal on public lands. According to environmental analysts, "when burned, the coal threatens to release more than 3.9 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, equal to the annual emissions from 300 coal-fired power plants."

As Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar scrambles to explain his wildly exaggerated claims of the coal lease sales from his announcement, the truth is that this mind-boggling announcement comes on the heels of EPA administrator's proposed new rules to crack down on mercury emissions from coal-fired plants--that will, in effect, continue the move away from coal-fired energy.

It would be easy to point an accusing finger atSalazar, the former cowboy Senator from neighboring coal-rich Colorado who accepted massive amounts of contributions from dirty energy companies, and whose Bureau of Land Management quietly gave the green lightfor another 430 million tons of coal at the Antelope strip mine in Wyoming last year (within hours of the EPA's crackdown on mountaintop removal mining operations in central Appalachia).

But I don't think Salazar is the culprit on this Wyoming spring sale: President Obama needs to be called out for his less than transparent catering to his long-time billionaire and coal-profiteering friends.

Consider this: One month after jointly visitingArch Coal's mammoth Black Thunder strip mine in Wyoming with a fleet of nine private jets, billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett sat in President Obama's Oval Office on December 14th and discussed ways to improve the economy.

As the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffettunderstands the economics of coal better than anyone: He owns the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad that transports most of Wyoming's vast coal supply around the country, along with the utility company, MidAmerican Energy, which operates 11 coal-fired power plants, including four in Wyoming. To be fair, MidAmerican Energy also generates an estimated 2.9 MW of wind energy.

(Little secret: While central Appalachia tends to make the news for its horrific mountaintop removal operations and underground mine disasters, Wyoming is truly King Coal, and provides 40 percent of our nation's coal production.)

Plains Justice, a citizens group on the mining frontlines in Power River Basin, has long calledthe federal land leasing program "the biggest corporate bail-out of all." Clean Energy Action in Colorado has also questioned the growing and largely overlooked costs of coal mining in the Power River Basin.

Everyone in the coal biz also knows that last week's spring sale giveaway in Wyoming has as much to do with a controversial and impending coal export terminal proposed in the state of Washington--and geared toward Asian markets---as much as US markets.

Only days before their December meeting with the President, market analysts were abuzz with Buffett's and Gate's interest in the coal industry. One headline blurted out: Billionaires want coal for Christmas.

Well, looks like the billionaire's coal Christmas came in March.

Let's look at the timeline:

Nov. 10: Gates and Buffett visit Arch Coal's mine in Wyoming, and Buffett hails the trip as "fascinating."

Dec. 10: Wall Street is already certain that Buffett will continue this gamble on coal.

Dec. 14th. Gates and Buffett meet with Obama at the White House to discuss the economy.

Jan 6th: Wall Street analysts now say Buffett is betting BIG on COAL.

Feb. 15th: President Obama awards Buffett the Medal of Freedom at the White House.

Feb. 26th: In Buffet's annual Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter, he reminds all listeners that his coal-transporting railroads (nearly 300 million tons of coal a year) "will increase Berkshire's "normal" earning power by nearly 40% pre-tax and by well over 30% after-tax."

March 23rd: Citing the nuclear tragedy in Japanand world energy needs, Salazaropens 750 million-2.4 billions tons of coal on public lands in Wyoming, only days after EPA administrator Lisa Jackson cracks down on coal-fired plants.

Ah, the great game of capitalism and Big Coal machinations.

And the great dirty coal ship moves on.

Jeff Biggers is the author of The United States of Appalachia, and more recently, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (The Nation/Basic Books). Follow him on twitter:@JeffRBiggers

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