Bill Gates 2

bad code true north, FMRLY CALLED BAK

lomborg?! guk 3 26

5/20

see conspiracy

see global eite

see vaxxer

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see also foundation

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ggl 3 26

Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz - DeSmog

*published in partnership with The Guardian.

As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda.

“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.

“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.

“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”

Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.

Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.

Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of President Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects.

Under the leadership of Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change,” “green,” and “sustainability.”

”Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum.

Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic Party representatives have retreated from talking directly about climate change across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63 percent of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.

This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media in January.

Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”

At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the skyrocketing energy demands of their AI businesses.

Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.

Microsoft and Amazon, which have donated large sums to Trump, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players.

In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, slashed at least 14 reporters from the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding.

Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn’t even get push-back from reporters,” Morano said.

During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate,” Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.”

The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. — a hushed silence about climate change has expanded across the globe.

At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.

Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes.

Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.”

Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care — a misperception that has added fuel to a “spiral of science.”

What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.

For environmental sociologist Brulle, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.

“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate,’ but we’re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.”

McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it’s going far faster than they want it to — hence their resort to political gamesmanship.”

---

MMA // COP 30

...Laura Ingraham announced that scientists’ warnings on climate change have been “total scams.”

The network also hosted its usual round-up of climate contrarians and skeptics including Marc Morano, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, and Victor Davis Hanson, and Fox coverage continued to cite the controversial October 28 climate memo from Bill Gates to global leaders ahead of COP30 to suggest that climate change is no longer considered a crisis requiring immediate action.

Video{Citation

From the November 15, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Journal Editorial Report

• In an interview with Lomborg, who frequently appears on Fox to downplay climate change, The Journal Editorial Report host Paul Gigot quipped, “First, let me ask you your reaction to the change of heart by Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire who has long been a climate scold and talked about climate in apocalyptic terms. And now I have to say — his recent conversion, he sounds like you.”

“I think what Bill Gates is really saying is something reasonable,” Lomborg agreed. “Talk about how you think about climate — he’s saying sure, it’s a problem, but it’s not the end of the world.”

In reality, 2025 is set to be the “second or third warmest year on record,” the World Meteorological Organization reports. The warmest year overall remains 2024, which was likely “the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.”

• ## Methodology...

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aha hmmn do they look for cidgel before cop eg UK server -gate?

mma

Ahead of COP30, right-wing media misrepresented Bill Gates' memo to declare climate change is over

Climate scientists question why Gates is pitting poverty reduction against climate action

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Research contributions from Ilana Berger

Published 11/14/25

• Ahead of COP30 — the United Nations climate summit which began November 6 in Brazil — Bill Gates released a memo targeted at the international climate community which argued that “although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise” and called for a “strategic pivot” on climate change to prioritize “human welfare.”

Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, correctly predicted how right-wing media would respond: “This will be used by detractors and denialists to say that the story is shifting.”

On *CNN News Central’*s day one coverage of COP30, Erica Hill laid out some of the impact of Gates’ memo at a time when the United States is already turning its back on the “world’s largest climate summit”:

• > President Trump, of course, has called climate change a, quote, con job. That's despite the overwhelming evidence of its reality and the very real threat it poses. President Trump seemed to get an assist recently from Bill Gates, who argued that resources actually should be shifted away from the battle against climate change. It's a move that experts have said is just flat out wrong.

• In fact, in response to Gates' memo, Trump posted on Truth Social that “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax” because Bill Gates had “finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.” Gates said that Trump and other right-wing media reactions that echo his remarks are a “gigantic misreading of the memo,” while he has also pushed back at “climate scientists who said he was setting up a false dichotomy pitting climate efforts against foreign aid.”

• ## Right-wing media celebrate Bill Gates’ shift on climate, misrepresent his memo to downplay the climate crisis

• The Associated Press reported that Bill Gates remarked: “If you think climate is not important, you won't agree with the memo. If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won't agree with the memo.”

But there it seems Gates was wrong. Right-wing media figures, who regularly downplay the climate crisis are likely among those who “think climate is not important,” and they are not disagreeing with the memo. They have celebrated it and used it to further downplay the climate crisis, attack climate science as “fraudulent,” and advance right-wing narratives and misinformation related to global warming, including denying sea level rise, suggesting that current climate change is unremarkable because the climate has been changing for billions of years, and pushing the “global cooling” myth.

• • The New York Post editorial board concluded, “If Gates wants any credit for belatedly seeing the light, he needs to put maximum effort into getting the left’s climate warriors to wake up, too.” NY Post, [10/28/25]

• • Former Fox News host John Stossel used Bill Gates’ memo to push his climate change denial content on social media, writing, “Welcome to the club, Bill. Here 3 climate scientists debunk several of the doomsday myths.”Stossel shared one of his videos featuring three climate skeptics, Willie Soon, David Legates, and Patrick Michaels, from an event at The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has received funding from fossil fuel interests. Twitter/X, [10/28/25; Media Matters, 1/16/24, 8/14/25; NPR, 9/12/20; Desmog; accessed 11/10/25]

• • Hannity.com: “CLIMATE KOOK FLIPS! Bill Gates Suggests Rethinking Climate Change 'Doomsday Outlook'”Hannity.com, [10/28/25]

• • Fox host Jimmy Failla claimed that Gates’ memo proves climate change is a “grift” and pushed the misleading narrative that the climate is always changing. Failla continued:“What an about face. And it really gives up the whole entire grift we always knew it was. It drives me crazy because, you know this, the movement has not only changed again but changed in name three times before we got here. We were going to freeze to death in the ‘70s. Can you give me some money? We were going to melt in the ‘80s. Can you give me a few bucks? Then they were like, we're not freezing or melting, but the weather changes every day. How about a couple of bucks.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/29/25; climatefactcheck.org,

6/22/22]

• • Glenn Beck, founder of TheBlaze, wrote on his website that Gates did a “strategic pivot” because “the ruling class” finds AI “more useful than fear of the weather.”“Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people,” he later wrote. [Glennbeck.com,

10/29/25]

• • In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt, conspiracy theorist and U.S. Agency for Global Media senior adviser Kari Lake said, “When we get documents declassified on the climate hoax, he’s probably trying to get ahead of what happens then.”Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight,* [10/29/25; Media Matters, 12/12/24]

• • OnAmerica’s Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer used the memo to falsely claim that “rising sea levels just ain’t happening.” “He says it will not lead to the humanities demise. … Maybe an asteroid will, but the rising sea levels just ain’t happening as Al Gore warned us back in 2005.” The World Economic Forum has said that “rising sea levels caused by climate change are impacting 1 billion people worldwide,” while “2024 saw an unexpectedly fast rising of sea levels, which are already unprecedented.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/29/25; World Economic Forum, 3/25/25]

• • OnOutnumbered, Fox News contributor Kaylee McGhee White said “climate change doomerism” was a ploy to “drive young adults … to leftist activism.” “This is the least surprising development ever. I think that the climate change doomerism, it was always a ploy, the real purpose of which was to drive young adults my age into leftist activism, that is all it was a vehicle for. And you know, what’s frustrating about this is Bill Gates is suddenly switching his position, but there is no new science behind." Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [10/29/25]

• • Fox’s Will Cain hosted Alex Epstein, author of the petroleum-promoting bookFossil Future, and suggested that fossil fuel advocacy is the “potential explanations for the change of heart of Bill Gates.” He claimed, “It is really most of the thoughtful scientists and thinkers through the last several hundred years who have understood the power of fossil fuels and economic growth in helping the vast majority of people across the world. Maybe that finally broke through to Bill Gates. Maybe just seeing the writing on the wall in modern America and under President Donald Trump.” Fox News, *The Will Cain Show*, [10/29/25; Media Matters, 11/4/25]

• • OnThe Five, Greg Gutfeld claimed that “people were told to stop having kids” and that Gates' shift is akin to admitting the “climate models … are fraudulent.”Gutfeld said, “It was a lie that impacted the mental health of generations and the physical health of a civilization. People were told to stop having kids. If you had kids you were hurting the planet. But it is hopeful that Gates and others are ceding to reality. We saw it happen already. Nobody is talking about data anymore because the data, the climate models, they are finally admitting are fraudulent, they were retrofitted so that they matched the results they were getting, and now that is out in the open.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/29/25]

• • Fox host Joey Jones claimed that Gates’ memo meant that Trump “won the climate change war.”“I think Trump has won another war. He won the climate change war now. Americans are coming around. You want to talk about petroleum products, think about how much oil is used to make all of those syringes for all of those vaccines during Covid. I mean just the impact and imprint of petroleum on our lives is endless,” Jones claimed. Fox News, *The Five*, [10/29/25]

• • Contributor Katie Pavlich told Fox Business’Kudlowthat she wants “reparations for damage this guy [Bill Gates] did on the climate change front.”She claimed, “There were years of groups that were funded by Bill Gates, foreigners doing fact checks on conservative web sites like TownHall, demonetizing us for talking about climate change and that it’s not going to destroy humanity and in fact a lot of the science has been bought and paid for and has been debunked on this issue. I would get laughed at when I would point out I am from Arizona, and you can find sea shells, fossils at the top of the Grand Canyon because yes, climate change has been happening for billions of years.” Fox Business, *Kudlow*, [10/29/25]

• • Frequent Fox guest and climate denier Marc Morano on Fox Business’The Evening Editsuggested that Bill Gates “knew” all along that climate change was nonsense.“Bill Gates knew in the year 2000 that the climate agenda was complete bleep. He knew in 2010 it was nonsense, he knew in 2020 it was nonsense, but only in 2025 is he willing to tell the truth. And the reason is he needs connections. He needs energy.” [Fox Business, The Evening Edit,

10/30/25; Washington Post, 9/16/16; Media Matters, 12/17/12; 5/22/19]

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty falsely claimed that Gates is “saying that it’s [climate change] not real.Finnerty said, “Now think about what Democrats have done to all of us in reaction to the climate hysteria created by people like Bill Gates over the last five decades: wind farms, electric cars, carbon footprint, bike lanes, electric buses, eating less meat, renewable energy. We could go on all night and all of it was total garbage. … Bill Gates, who's been right there with always-wrong Al Gore warning us of impending doom for years now, saying that it's not real.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/31/25]

Right-wing streamer Zack Hoyt, known online as Asmongold, told his audience that Bill Gates no longer believes in climate change and quotes Trump’s Truth Social Post.“You know who else doesn't believe in climate change recently? Bill Gates. Bill Gates has dramatically changed his position on climate change, acknowledging for the first time that there is no doomsday risk for, of global warming. … We just won the war on the climate change hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely wrong on the issue.” [YouTube, AsmongoldTV,

]}:

• • Fox & Friends Weekendguest and Republican strategist Mehek Cooke claimed Gates shifted on climate change because he realized “we're not going to pay for this green climate change hoax.” She said, “We're not all going to die at the end of the day. So farmers can increase their herd share, I can eat more meat. I mean, all the things that Bill Gates said to the American people, he realized he was losing because we're not going to pay for this green climate change hoax. I also think he's listening to President Trump. It's about innovation and not more regulation.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [11/2/25]

• • Power The Future Founder and frequent right-wing media guest Daniel Turner wrote that Bill Gates’ “climate crusade was always a grift.” Twitter/X, [11/3/25; Media Matters, 5/8/24;

3/25/24]

• ## Climate scientists push back on Gates pitting poverty reduction against efforts to reduce carbon emissions

• During a segment on CNN News Central, Bill Weir highlighted concerns from “the chorus of top climate scientists who spent the week trying to debunk the billionaire's confusing new message that rich cities will be immune from the worst effects and that technology can save us.”

Additionally, The Guardian pointed out that a number of climate scientists have criticized Gates for using “‘straw man’ arguments about the threat to humanity and ‘false dichotomies’ between spending on climate or aid for the poor.”

• • In comments to NBC, Jeffrey Sachs, who leads Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, “called the memo ‘pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing,'" adding that there’s “no reason to pit poverty reduction versus climate transformation.’" NBC, [10/28/25]

• • Climate scientist Michael Mann has been outspoken about Gates’ memo, pointing out that it coincided with the landfall of the climate-driven Hurricane Melissa and that it was defended by former Fox News star Megyn Kelly. Mann also wrote a rebuttal of the memo in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, making the point that “Gates’ latest missive … plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25, 10/29/25; The Bulletin, 10/31/25; The New York Times, 11/6/25]

• • Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, said of the memo: “Despite agreeing with some points therein, I still think its framing is fundamentally flawed and thus also its key conclusions.” Twitter/X, [11/3/25]

• • Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “There are a lot of things I agree with in Bill Gates’ new memo on climate change. … But in other areas I feel that it needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals.” Hausfather said that “we can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger. While there are some tradeoffs it is more a question of policy priority than a zero sum game. Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.” The Climate Brink, [11/5/25]

• • Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also criticized Gates’ memo. She said, “‘I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct … it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it.” The Guardian, [11/6/25]

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his artl long lomborgian ai play energy nuke tmi?

1 in 8 kia air pollute 8 million 2021

holland? fert sri lanka

tim baxter

yt comment

19,247 views Nov 5, 2025 #ClimateChange #billgates

Bill Gates just published a climate think piece that has taken the internet by storm. While conservatives are claiming he's backtracked on climate change, the truth is much more subtle. So what does the Microsoft founder, Gates, get right and wrong about climate change? And why might he be downplaying the risks at a crucial moment for our planet's climate?

CHAPTERS= Intr Misinfo About Piec Against doom Thriving? Adaptation Schmadaptatio Policy or No Policy? Wrong Priorities Fossil fuels ftw Toxic hot ai Secret countr Innovation at all cost Backtracking The whole mes Why, Bill Reactionary Reactio Bottom Lin Where Our Climate is At ==MORE INFO The article https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-...Tim Baxter’s piece showing he knows it’s BS: / even-bill-gates-knows-he-is-full-of-shit Ketan Joshi’s thread:https://bsky.app/profile/ketanjoshi.c... Kate Marvell’s point:https://bsky.app/profile/drkatemarvel... Verge analysis: https://www.theverge.com/report/80864... Further scientist responses here:https://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-climat... Daniel Swain’s responses: • Thoughts from a climate scientist on the B... https://bsky.app/profile/weatherwest.... Gates arguing against renewables and batteries in 2015https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/2... In defence of the anti-doom argument in Gates’ piece https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/op...

...14:20

So look, no one disagrees that we

14:23

need some innovation,

14:25

but we can't

14:25

just innovate our way out of this.

14:28

We need concrete

14:29

actions and policies to actually

14:31

put those innovations

14:33

to use.

14:34

And throughout this piece,

14:35

Gates is arguing against policies

14:38

that would push us to make

14:39

use of the innovation

14:40

that we already have today.

The whole mess

14:42

So to sum up,

14:43

while this piece does acknowledge

14:45

that climate change

14:46

is real and that it matters,

14:48

it simultaneously

14:49

does a lot of work

14:51

to downplay the threat

14:52

and to discourage action.

14:55

It massively minimizes

14:56

the consequences of the warming

14:58

we're in for.

14:59

It talks time

15:00

and time again, as if climate action

15:02

is something separate from action

15:04

to protect against disease

15:06

and poverty,

15:07

even though climate change,

15:08

disease and poverty

15:10

are all interwoven.

15:12

It argues that more fossil fuel power

15:14

would be saving lives today,

15:16

while neglecting to mention that

15:18

millions are dying every year

15:20

due to the toxic air

15:21

produced by fossil fuels today.

15:24

It pretends that the reasons

15:25

we're not acting on disease

15:27

and poverty enough

15:28

are because the world's leaders

15:30

have bought into a

15:31

climate doomsday narrative

15:33

and are acting with

15:34

too much immediacy

15:36

on climate change,

15:37

despite the fact

15:38

that no country's

15:39

climate action is on track.

15:42

It argues that

15:42

climate solutions are too expensive

15:45

while ignoring how much money

15:47

inaction would cost us.

15:49

It argues that

15:50

we can adapt our way

15:51

out of the issue,

15:52

while ignoring

15:54

how much more expensive

15:55

and ineffective that would be.

15:57

And it claims that the only way

15:59

out of the situation we're in

16:01

is innovation.

16:02

Despite the fact that we already have

16:04

the majority of the tech we need,

16:06

and global emissions

16:07

still aren't falling.

16:09

So yeah, there's a reason

16:11

I haven't heard a single

16:12

climate researcher I know

16:13

singing the praises

16:14

of this piece.

16:16

In fact, almost everyone I'm aware of

16:18

is audibly groaning right now.

Why, Bill?

16:21

So why did he write it?

16:23

Well, of course, it's impossible

16:24

to tell what's going on

16:26

in the software inside

16:27

Bill's head,

16:29

but it doesn't seem like a coincidence

16:31

that he's arguing against short

16:33

term climate targets

16:34

while Microsoft

16:35

is massively missing their targets.

16:38

And of course, that fail

16:39

is only going to get more epic

16:42

as the company goes

16:43

all in on energy

16:44

intense artificial

16:46

intelligence.

16:47

Gates conveniently fails to touch on

16:49

this source of growing emissions.

16:51

Instead just arguing that AI will play

16:53

a vital role in all that

16:55

magical innovation

16:56

that's going to solve all our problems.

16:59

And I'm not saying

17:00

AI won't provide

17:01

valuable insights,

17:02

but you've got to at least acknowledge

17:04

that that's coming with

17:05

a massive emissions

17:06

trade off.

17:08

Actually, I guess you don't got

17:09

to acknowledge that because

17:11

Bill didn't.

Reactionary Reaction

17:12

But look, I don't know why

17:14

he wrote it.

17:15

And ultimately it doesn't matter

17:17

what his motivations were.

17:19

The fallout is

17:20

the same.

17:21

It's just so frustrating

17:23

reading it because it's so

17:24

unbelievably tone

17:26

deaf of the moment

17:27

that we're in.

17:28

A moment when the world's

17:30

biggest historic emitter,

17:31

the United States,

17:33

is openly pushing

17:34

back on climate action

17:36

and gutting climate science,

17:38

at a moment when it's becoming

17:39

clear we're

17:40

going to overshoot the 1.5 degree limit.

17:42

A limit in place

17:44

to protect the poorest within

17:45

our nations and the poorest nations.

17:48

And in this situation,

17:50

what does Gates do?

17:51

He argues that we're taking

17:53

climate change too

17:54

seriously.

17:55

And of course, of course,

17:57

we're already seeing people jump

17:59

on this everywhere from conservative

18:01

think pieces to the comments sections,

18:04

those who deny climate science

18:06

are rejoicing at the idea

18:07

that Gates is saying we should shift

18:09

priorities away

18:10

from climate change.

18:12

And they are entirely glossing over

18:15

why Gates is arguing that, namely,

18:17

that he thinks

18:18

we should be giving more

18:19

to protect people

18:20

from poverty and disease.

18:22

And that's my

18:23

deepest concern about this piece,

18:25

that it's going to do absolutely nothing

18:27

to encourage leaders to spend more money

18:30

protecting people from poverty

18:31

and from disease.

18:33

Instead it’s going to give yet

18:34

another BS

18:36

talking point to those

18:37

who want to take money away

18:39

from climate action: Action

18:41

that is trying to keep

18:42

the world as livable as possible

18:45

for the most vulnerable among us.

Bottom Line

18:47

So yeah,

18:48

at the end of the day,

18:49

this article is –

18:50

to use the scientific

18:51

language – a dumpster fire.

18:54

What it's arguing for

18:56

doesn't make sense, and the arguments

18:58

it uses are often

18:59

fundamentally flawed.

19:01

And given the political moment

19:02

we're in,

19:03

it was inevitable that this argument

19:05

was going to be taken out of context

19:07

to add to a rising tide

19:09

of pushback against

19:11

climate action.

Where Our Climate is

19:12

The truth is, though, that climate change

19:14

is hurting us today.

19:16

Acting on it will save lives

19:18

and save money.

19:20

We have the technology to get us on track,

19:22

but we're not implementing

19:24

that tech anywhere

19:25

near fast enough.

19:27

And while there has been progress,

19:29

emissions still aren't falling

19:31

and our current path

19:33

will see us massively overshoot

19:34

the limits that we've set to

19:36

keep ourselves relatively safe.

19:38

I've touched on

19:39

just how

19:40

interconnected health and climate are,

19:42

and my next video is going to be all

19:45

about how the climate crisis

19:46

is a health crisis.

19:49

Subscribe so you don't miss it.

19:50

And in the meantime, here's

19:52

how the things causing

19:53

climate change – burning fossil

19:55

fuels and destroying nature –

19:57

are directly killing

19:58

millions every year

20:00

right now.

20:02

Okay,

20:03

until next time... Bye!

20:06

Protect against...

20:07

blah blah blah!

---}:

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.

• Politics
• Antifa
• Donald Trump
• Peter Schweizer
• Riots
• Seamus Bruner

---

TIKTOK DISS

Weather manipulation

With 25 instances in the data set, weather manipulation conspiracy theories were one of the

most numerous I identified. These are conspiracy theories that ascribe weather and, more

broadly, climate to groups allegedly capable of altering or controlling atmospheric systems.

Like many other popular conspiracy theories, these contain elements of historical fact. Weather

modification is the act of intentionally manipulating weather and it is most commonly used in

the form of cloud seeding in certain drought-prone regions to stimulate precipitation. Similarly,

geoengineering (sometimes called climate engineering) refers to carbon dioxide removal and

solar radiation management when applied at a planetary scale. Weather modification is a

regional and local practice, whereas geoengineering is a global one. I found that both terms

were incorporated into conspiracy discourse on TikTok, frequently used interchangeably and

vaguely.

These videos also frequently incorporated chemtrail conspiracy narratives (the belief that the

condensation trails formed from the jet engines of aircraft consist of biological or chemical

agents). This theory has persisted despite extensive debunking for decades, and it can fit into

climate discourse positioned as either a cause of weather events or as an oppressive and violent

measure used against the public under the guise of geoengineering. Within the data set,

chemtrails functioned both as an explanation for weather, usually as a component of weather

engineering, as well as a supposed response to climate change by malevolent elites. As most

of the discourse was concerned with regional and local weather, I grouped chemtrails and

geoengineering under the umbrella of weather manipulation.

Many videos positioned chemtrails as a component of a larger weather manipulation

conspiracy theory, explaining weather events as man-made or controlled. For instance, in one

video (Figure 11), a woman holds a lighter up to a snowball—an act that leaves a black residue

on the snowball from the gas emitted by the lighter. The user considers this to be evidence of

unnatural weather and speculates about the involvement of chemtrails.

26

The user details their process of testing the snow:

Alright, so I saw a video on TikTok the other day, and it said go outside and get some

snow … it just snowed. It’s still snowing. I’m in southwest Missouri. It feels super fluffy.

But anyways, I saw this video the other day that said go outside and get some snow.

Someone said the snow is fake. Ball it up. It's cold ... it's definitely cold. And then they

said to burn it, and they said it's not real so let’s ... here we go. And it'll turn black and

it'll smell like plastic (holds lighter up to a ball of snow). Look at that! And it smells like

plastic. Really bad. That's not snow, and don't let your kids eat that, that's for sure. A

lot of people been talking about chemtrails. Whether you believe in those or not,

something's going on, but I'm from Minnesota and that is not what snow does.

Something's going on, guys.

The video, which used the hashtags “government,” “man-made,” “chemtrails,” “conspiracy

theory,” “fake,” and “snow,” demonstrates the connection between chemtrail and weather

manipulation conspiracies. It is unclear precisely what fake snow means and what mechanisms

could create it.

Another frequent component of weather manipulation conspiracy theories was solar radiation

management, often described as “blocking out the sun.” Figure 12 illustrates a TikTok

claiming that Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum are using chemtrails to “block the

sun” and manufacture food shortagES..

---

===

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/

no lnx many

facebook posts

stated on May 4, 2020 in a Facebook post:

"Bill Gates worked to end livestock production, and is pushing lab grown meat."

half-true

ENVIRONMENT AGRICULTURE FOOD FACEBOOK FACT-CHECKS CORONAVIRUS  FACEBOOK POSTS

Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates speaks during the Global Fund to Fight AIDS event in central France on Oct. 10, 2019. (Marin/AP)Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates speaks during the Global Fund to Fight AIDS event in central France on Oct. 10, 2019. (Marin/AP)

Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates speaks during the Global Fund to Fight AIDS event in central France on Oct. 10, 2019. (Marin/AP)

By Bill McCarthy

May 18, 2020

What Bill Gates has to do with livestock, lab-grown meat

Gates has invested at different times in several companies making meat replacement products, including Memphis Meats, which grows meat from living cells in a lab.

We found no evidence that Gates has worked specifically to end livestock production.

Gates has said livestock are critical to fighting poverty. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed grants toward helping farmers get more out of their livestock.

Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the target of yet another widespread Facebook post, this time for his support of efforts to create climate-friendly meat replacements.

"Bill Gates worked to end livestock production, and is pushing lab grown meat," said a May 4 Facebook post.

The post 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.)

In this case, the post is accurate in one way and misleading in another.

Gates has invested in numerous companies working to make meat substitutes using plant-based ingredients and, in some cases, laboratory technology.

But we found no evidence that Gates has worked to wipe out livestock production.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

Lab-grown meat

News reports from the last several years indicate that Gates has at different times invested in start-ups focused on developing artificial or plant-based alternatives to meat, such as Nature’s Fynd, Hampton Creek, Memphis Meats, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

Impossible Foods, for example, makes burger patties that use soy and potatoes for protein. The patties get their flavor from heme, an iron-rich molecule found in meat and plants that sparked some controversy but was approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration.

According to the Washington Post, the company’s heme "is made by taking the DNA from the roots of soy plants, inserting it into genetically engineered yeast and then fermenting that yeast."

Other companies are even more lab-oriented. Memphis Meats uses biotechnology to grow meat in what its website describes as a four-to-six-week process that involves "sourcing high-quality cells from animals" and "cultivat(ing) the cells into meat."

"Gates has indeed invested in several non-animal alt-protein companies, including Memphis Meats, which grows real meat from animal cells," said Paul Shapiro, author of "Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World."

In an October interview with Bloomberg News, Gates celebrated Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat for their plant-based meat substitutes. He said he had invested in both and that their products will contribute to a "dramatic reduction in methane emissions, animal cruelty, manure management and the pressure that meat consumption puts on land use."

He’s made similar points on his personal blog, GatesNotes, writing in one post that a rising population requires more food and that farming livestock can take a toll on the environment and require increased deforestation to make room for the animals.

Livestock are responsible for 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

"Raising meat takes a great deal of land and water and has a substantial environmental impact," Gates wrote in a 2013 blog post. "Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for (a future population of) 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians."

"That’s why we need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources," he said.

Ending livestock?

We found no proof that Gates has worked to end livestock production completely.

"He's never said his goal is to end livestock production, and he actually funds some projects to boost livestock-rearing in developing countries," Shapiro said. Shapiro cited the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s agricultural development efforts and a news article detailing $40 million the foundation put toward research and projects to breed cows that produce more milk.

"If you care about the poor, you should care about agriculture, and if you care about agriculture, you care about livestock," Gates said in 2018, according to Reuters. "What that means in this context is helping poor farmers get as much as possible out of their animals."

The foundation has also paid out a number of related grants, according to its website, such as a nearly $8 million grant to the International Livestock Research Institute in November to help "advocate for investment in livestock development globally," among other things.

We searched Google and the Nexis database and found no credible reports showing Gates has worked to end livestock production or said he would like to do so.

On the contrary, Gates wrote in his blog that if he were living in extreme poverty, he would raise chickens. In another post, he said that despite the implications on the climate, "We can’t simply get rid of soil — or stop growing crops, using fertilizer, and raising livestock."

Our ruling

A Facebook post said "Bill Gates worked to end livestock production, and is pushing lab grown meat."

Gates has invested at different times in several companies working to make meat replacements. Some of those companies are using biotechnology to grow their products in labs. But we found no evidence that he has tried to get rid of all livestock production.

Based on the information available, we rate this post Half True.

Our Sources

Facebook posts, May 4, 2020

Various searches on Google and Nexis, accessed May 15, 2020

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "Key facts and findings," accessed May 15, 2020

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "Agricultural development," accessed May 15, 2020

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "Awarded grants," accessed May 15, 2020

Memphis Meats, accessed May 15, 2020

Impossible Foods, "What are the ingredients?" accessed May 15, 2020

The Chicago Tribune, "‘Chicken’ nuggets and cream ‘cheese’ grow in trays in a South Side lab. Are you ready for alternative proteins made from a volcanic microbe?" March 24, 2020

CNN, "Memphis Meats raised $161 million to grow meat from cells," Jan. 22, 2020

U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "FDA Announces Effective Date for Final Rule Adding Soy Leghemoglobin to List of Color Additives Exempt from Certification," Dec. 17, 2019

The Washington Post, "Impossible Burger: Here’s what’s really in it," Oct. 23, 2019

Bloomberg News, "Why Bill Gates Thinks Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat Can Help Fight Climate Change," Oct. 16, 2019

GatesNotes, "We should discuss soil as much as we talk about coal," March 26, 2019

CNBC, "How Impossible Burger’s ‘simple’ vision won hundreds of millions in funding — and backing from Bill Gates," March 7, 2019

MIT Technology Review, "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019," Feb. 27, 2019

GatesNotes, "What the plow and lab-grown meat tell us about innovation," Feb. 27, 2019

CNBC, "How Beyond Meat became a $550 million brand, winning over meat-eaters with a vegan burger that ‘bleeds,'" Jan. 21, 2019

Bloomberg News, "Lab-Grown Meat Backed by Gates, Tyson Foods Faces U.S. Oversight," June 15, 2018

Business Insider, "The magic ingredient in Silicon Valley's favorite 'bleeding' veggie burger is under fire," June 8, 2018

CNBC, "Bill Gates and Richard Branson are betting lab-grown meat might be the food of the future," March 23, 2018

Business Insider, "Bill Gates’ investment in 'super cows' shows that many of the world’s farms are in crisis mode," Feb. 5, 2018

Reuters, "'Super' crops and cows - Bill Gates, UK inject cash into farm science," Jan. 26, 2018

Insider, "Bill Gates and Richard Branson backed a food startup which grows meat in labs," Aug. 23, 2017

Quartz, "Bill Gates headlines an all-star list of investors pumping $75 million into meatless burgers," Aug. 2, 2017

GatesNotes, "Why I would raise chickens," June 7, 2016

CNBC, "Bill Gates bets on growing demand for sustainable foods," May 14, 2015

GatesNotes, "Is there enough meat for everyone?" April 21, 2015

NPR, "Why Bill Gates Is Investing In Chicken-Less Eggs," June 13, 2013

GatesNotes, "Future of Food," March 18, 2013

Email interview with Paul Shapiro, CEO of The Better Meat Co. and author of "Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World," May 15, 2020

===... AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. While a distribution center operated by a Dutch online grocery service was destroyed in a fire in the eastern Netherlands, the facility was not a factory that produced meat alternatives, nor was it owned or operated by Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust invested in the e-grocer in 2021, but the trust is not a controlling shareholder.

THE FACTS: As video spread widely online Monday of flames engulfing the building operated by the e-grocery company Picnic, false claims began to circulate misrepresenting the use of the facility and its connection to billionaire philanthropist Gates.

“Bill Gates factory that produces lab-grown synthetic meat burns down in the Netherlands,” read the caption on one video of the blaze that was posted to Facebook and viewed more than 12,000 times.

A similar false claim was repeated on Twitter, where one user shared a video of another angle of the fire, writing, “Bill Gates factory that makes synthetic lab grown meat goes up in flames.” The post received more than 7,000 shares and nearly 20,000 likes by Tuesday.

But both posts mischaracterize Gates’ relationship to the company and misidentify what the building was used for.

The facility that burned down on Sunday night was a distribution center operated by Picnic, a Dutch online grocery service founded in 2015 that allows users to order groceries using a mobile app and have them delivered.

The building was not a factory that produced meat alternatives and was not used for any kind of production, Martijn Koolhoven, a public relations official representing Picnic, told The Associated Press in an email. The center that caught fire was used to load orders onto electric trucks for delivery, he added, calling the recent claims “false.” He said there was no production of any kind at the site “let alone of meat.”

Picnic in 2021 raised $600 million euros to expand its operations across Europe, according to a news release from the company. A large portion of that funding came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, Koolhoven said, adding that the trust was one investor among “many other existing shareholders” that contributed to the financing.

The trust, which invests and manages money, is separate from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic arm. The trust states on its websitethat its investment decisions are made by an outside team of managers.

“The endowment that funds the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is independently managed by a separate entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust,” according to an email statement from Cascade Investment, which oversees the Foundation Trust. “Foundation staff have no influence on Trust investment decisions, and no visibility into the Trust’s investment strategies.”

And while the trust acquired a minority stake in Picnic through its investment, it “is not a controlling shareholder,” Koolhoven clarified. Neither Gates, nor the trust, own or operate Picnic.

Fire crews in Almelo responded to the “very large” blaze at the distribution center late Sunday, according to a statementin Dutch from the local fire brigade. Officials said the fire completely destroyed the building, but no injuries were reported. The cause of the fire was not yet known and was still being investigated, according to the agency’s statement.

The false claims about the blaze emerged amid ongoing protestsby thousands of farmers in the Netherlands, demonstratingagainst the government’s plansto slash emissions that livestock produce in their waste. During the demonstrations, some protesters blocked supermarket distribution centers, including separate ones operated by Picnic, Koolhoven added.

Old, misrepresentedphotos and video purporting to show such demonstrations have also been shared and debunkedin recent days.

_

This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

https://usrtk.org/bill-gates/radical-menu/

no lnx many

Bill Gates’ radical menu for food systems: ultra-processed foods, patents, monocrops

Posted: May 26, 2021 by Stacy Malkan

If Bill Gates has his way, the food in our future will little resemble what’s on our plates today. Gates and his agribusiness industry partners are proposing to transform our food and how it is produced.

To the techno-food industrialists, hunger and climate change are problems to be solved with data and engineering. The core ingredients of their revolutionary plan: genetic engineering — and patenting — of everything from seeds and food animals, to microbes in the soil, to the processes we use to make food. Local food cultures and traditional diets could fade away as food production moves indoors to labs that cultivate fake meat and ultra-processed foods.

Gates says rich countries should shift entirely to synthetic beef.And he has the intellectual property rights to sell them. As a food that can help fix the climate, Gates touts the Impossible Burger, a plant-based patty made from genetically engineered soy and textured with engineered yeast. Its manufacturer, the Gates-funded Impossible Foods, has two dozen patents and more than 100 patents pending to artificially replicate cheese, beef and chicken and permeate these products with manufactured flavors, scents and textures.

Ginkgo Bioworks, a Gates-backed start-up that makes “custom organisms,” just went public in a $17.5 billion deal. The company uses its “cell programming” technology to genetically engineer flavors and scents into commercial strains of engineered yeast and bacteria to create “natural” ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and flavors for ultra-processed foods. According to its investor presentation, Ginkgo plans to create up to 20,000 engineered “cell programs” (it now has five) for food products and many other uses. Axios reports that the company plans to charge customers to use its “biological platform” like Amazon charges for its data center, and will take royalties like apps in the Apple Store. Ginkgo’s customers, the investor pitch makes clear, are not consumers or farmers, but rather the world’s largest chemical, food and pharmaceutical companies.

If techno-food products are not high on most consumers’ shopping lists, this is a menu investors can get behind. The market for genetically engineered products has the potential to reach $2-4 trillion in the next 20 years. And Bill and Melinda Gates are positioned to reap the rewards. The Gates back “a multitude of agrifood tech startups,” reports AgFunder News, either through private investment vehicles or through the Gates Foundation Trust, which funds the foundation’s charitable activities.

Gates and the tech start-ups pitch their products as solutions for our most challenging environmental and social issues. But are they really?

Doubling down on monocultures

Gates’ “winning strategy for food and farming,” according to a Fortune magazine article by Shawn Tully, “is finding ways for farmers to produce more corn and soybeans on every acre … while substantially lowering carbon emissions.” Gates believes that “genetically modified seeds and chemical herbicides, in the right doses – and not land-intensive organic farming – are crucial to curbing carbon emissions.”

Since 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent over $5 billion on efforts totransform African agriculture; its flagship program, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, works totransition farmers to high-input industrial agriculture and scale up markets for commercial seeds and agrichemicals. Gates says these methods can boost production and lift farmers out of poverty.

Many critics, including African faith leaders and hundreds of civil society groups around the world, say the foundation’s agricultural development strategies are failing to deliver on promises and benefitting multinational corporations over small farmers and communities in Africa. The foundation did not respond to our requests for comment.

“Gates has influenced the direction of agriculture to benefit the corporates,” said Million Belay, coordinator of Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a coalition of 50 Africa-based groups. “His foundation has contributed hugely in weakening our seed, biosafety and agrochemical related regulations … it will take years to undo what they have done.”

Gates also influences how governments and academic institutions think about the future of agriculture in Africa, Belay said. “The narrative now is you need to use agrichemicals, high-yield varieties, GMOs and a host of other farm management techniques to feed yourself,” he said. “It will also take years to convince our elites the future is agroecology. As one of the most rich and powerful people on the planet, the doors of our governments are open (to Gates) while it is ajar for African citizens. He has to be called out and has to change direction.”

Leading experts in food security and nutrition are calling for a paradigm shift away from green revolution-style industrial agriculture and toward agroecology, which promotes biodiversity instead of monocultures, integrates animals to rebuild soils, and advocates for political and economic reforms to address inequities and social divisions. Diversified agroecological systems are more resilient, they say, and have a greater capacity to recover from disturbances including extreme weather events, pests and disease.

Recent science suggests that chemical-intensive industrial agriculture is a key driver of climate change, soil erosion and the worldwide decline of insects.Corn and soy monocultures are especially problematic; they deplete the soil and rely on synthetic fertilizers that emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. These are problems Bill Gates is hoping technology can fix.

A climate solution?

Fortune describes Gates’ plans to intensify corn and soy production as a “pivotal campaign in the war against global warming.” How so? Syngenta, the world’s second largest agrichemical company, is “deploying big data, gene editing, DNA analysis, and other groundbreaking technologies in pursuit of growing bumper harvests while lowering CO2.”Bayer, the leading chemical and seed firm, is making a similar pitch, and claims its new sustainability technologies will “empower 100 million smallholder farmers around the world.”

For 30 years, agrichemical companies promised GMOs could feed the poor and help small farmers, but it hasn’t yet worked out that way.Most GMO crops in the ground today areengineered to survive weed-killing chemicals or kill insects. While these crops provided short-term benefits to farmers, they provided no benefits to consumers, nor did they deliver on promises to boost yields, but they did increase herbicide use. Evidence now indicates the crops are failing as weeds and bugs evolve around the technology.

As a solution to meet the climate crisis, and enable “sustainable intensification” of industrial agriculture, Gates and Bayer point to experimental projects to genetically engineer microbes to fix nitrogen to plants. “If these approaches work,” Gates writes in his climate book, “they’ll dramatically reduce the need for fertilizer and all the emissions it’s responsible for.” In 2017, Ginkgo Bioworks teamed up with Bayer to launch JoynBio, a microbe company that is working to create self-fertilizing plants.

This, too, is a promise Bayer has made before.As far back as 1897, Bayer promoted a product that could reportedly assimilate atmospheric nitrogen, according to Mark Finlay, a history professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University. Bayer said its product could “conceivably make all agricultural lands permanently fertile,” Finlay wrote in a 2015 book about the history of agriculture. “Although early results were disappointing, many popular press writers hailed the potential of this discovery.”

GMO 2.0: genome-editing

Gates is an evangelist for genetically engineered foods. He predicts that “GMOs will end starvation in Africa” and GMOs can “end world hunger by 2030.” If the first generation of GMO crops failed to deliver on these hopes, Gates believes new genetic engineering methods will get us there.

With CRISPR-Cas9 and other “genome-editing” techniques, scientists can nowadd or delete strands of DNA, or turn genes on or off, to produce specific traits in plants or animals — as if writing computer code. Examples include mushrooms that are “edited” to resist browning, “terminator cattle” bred to father only male offspring, or harmless strains of E Coli converted to antioxidant factories.

Gene-editing techniques, and especially CRISPR, are efficient but unpredictable. Studies show the CRISPR process can create unexpected mutations including DNA damage and other off-target effects.In 2019, a plan to release CRISPR-edited “hornless cows” to Brazil was scrapped after a U.S. government researcher discovered the cattle had two antibiotic-resistance genes that weren’t supposed to be there. The Recombinetics, Inc. cows were the “poster animals of the gene-editing revolution,” according to MIT Technology Review, until the “major screw-up in their DNA” came to light.The company’s researchers missed the extra DNA in their own studies; they reported, incorrectly, that the animals were “free of off-target effects.”

Genetic engineering, including genome-editing, “has unpredictable outcomes,” says Michael Antoniou, a molecular geneticist at King’s College in London. “You don’t know in advance what the consequences are of the GM transformation process … and because you don’t know, the only way to evaluate safety is generically,” Antoiniou said. “You basically need to conduct a long term feeding trial in animals and see what happens … and that’s just not going on anywhere in the world for regulatory purposes, at all.”

Nevertheless, experiments continue on important crops and food animals. Gates Foundation has spent over $40 million on projects to genetically engineer dairy cows, with hopes of creating the “perfect” cow. Acceligen (a division of Recombinetics) is working with a Gates Foundation grant to engineer multiple traits into dairy cows to maximize productivity and durability in hot climates.

The foundation is also a leading funder of gene drive experiments that can force an engineered trait through a species. This month in the Florida Keys, the Gates Foundation-backed company Oxitec released 144,000 mosquitos engineered to eliminate females in a disease-carrying species (while not technically a gene drive this is seen as a precursor experiment). Proposed agricultural uses for gene drives include reversing herbicide tolerance in plants, suppressing weeds and eradicating agricultural pests.What could possibly go wrong?

Systemic risk

One of the world’s foremost experts on probability and uncertainty, Nassim Taleb, considered that question — What could go wrong with GMOs? — for a 2014 paper he wrote with colleagues at the New York University School of Engineering. The authors analyzed GMOs in the context of what they called a “non-naive” view of the Precautionary Principle. They concluded: “GMOs represent a public risk of global harm” and should be subject to “severe limits.”

The Precautionary Principle states that if an action has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain, the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. The authors believe it “should be evoked only in extreme situations” when the potential harm is systemic and the consequences widespread and irreversible; they said GMOs “fall squarely” within this criteria.

Among the systemic risks they cited:GMOs have the propensity to spread uncontrollably, with irreversible system-wide effects and unknown downsides. The ecological impacts are not tested empirically — and therefore not understood — before the technologies are released. The researchers noted two factors that contribute to systemic risk: the engineered genetic modifications and the monocultures in which they grow.

“Instead of a long history of evolutionary selection, these modifications rely not just on naive engineering strategies that do not appropriately consider risk in complex environments, but also explicitly reductionist approaches that ignore unintended consequences,” the researchers said.”Labeling the GMO approach “scientific” betrays a verypoor—indeed warped—understanding of probabilisticpayoffs and risk management.”

Taleb summed up their conclusions in a 2015 New York Times op-ed: “The GMO experiment, carried out in real time and with our entire food and ecological system as its laboratory, is perhaps the greatest case of human hubris ever. It creates yet another systemic, ‘too big too fail’ enterprise — but one for which no bailouts will be possible when it fails.”

Ginkgo Bioworks investor pitch

Monopoly Bill

If Gates’ plans for the food system make little sense from an equity or ecological perspective, they are logical from the point of view of an economic monopolist.

“As the former CEO and largest shareholder of Microsoft, you might think that Bill Gates is a capitalist, but that’s not exactly the case,” Megan Tompkins-Stange, a scholar of philanthropy at University of Michigan, told The Ink. “Gates’ version of capitalism would better be called monopolistic. He has consistently sought to distort free markets in order to advance his own corporation’s accumulation of wealth, power, and preeminence.”

These ideologies led to the recent controversy over Covid-19 vaccines, in which Gates’ insistence on patents may have impeded vaccine access for the world’s poor. The incident raised concerns about the powerful influence Gates wields over vital issues involving public health. As Timothy Schwab wrote in The Nation, “It is increasingly urgent to ask if Gates’s multiple roles in the pandemic — as a charity, a business, an investor, and a lobbyist — are about philanthropy and giving away money, or about taking control and exercising power — monopoly power.”

Gates is playing all the same roles in our food system. “Gates has placed his investment bets in many of the key places in this emerging corporate narrative about what the food system needs: gene drives, geoengineering, fake meat, digital agriculture, carbon sequestration,” says Jim Thomas from the ETC Group, which investigates corporate concentration in the food industry. “Clearly he is set to benefit from these changes, plus his Foundation funding supports all this.”

Agribusiness companies are deploying digital apps on farms around the world to gather data on all aspects of farming: soil health, product inputs, weather, cropping patterns and more, including genetic information on the world’s most important seeds and livestock and knowledge indigenous farmers have developed over thousands of years. All this data tobe owned and controlled by corporations, run through AI algorithms, and sold back to farmers with “prescriptions” for how to farm and which corporate products to buy, with little transparency or explanation.

Thehyper-consolidated food and agriculture system has already brought numerous negative consequences to farmers and consumers. A 2019 report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems documents how corporate concentration has squeezed farmer incomes, eroded their choices, narrowed the scope of innovation and escalated public health and environmental risks. The corporate drive to control Big Data, IPES said, “stands to exacerbate existing power imbalances, dependencies, and barriers to entry across the agri-food sector.”

Gates Ag One

Impatient with the creeping progress of the techno-food revolution, the Gates Foundation last year launched a new tax-exempt nonprofit that “seeks to accelerate the development of innovations supported by the foundation’s Agricultural Development team” in two of the fastest-growing regions in the world: sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The new “ag tech startup” will “work with partners from the public and private sector to commercialize resilient, yield-enhancing seeds and traits.” It is located in St. Louis, Missouri, former home of Monsanto and current hub of leading chemical and seed firms, and headed up by Joe Cornelius, the former managing director of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition at Bayer CropSciences.As if to underscore that uniformity and centralized control are core goals of the effort, the new nonprofit is called “Gates Ag One.”

Farm of the future?

In 2019, Cargill (a partner of Ginkgo Bioworks) opened a $50 million factory in Lincoln, Nebraska. The plant manufactures EverSweet, a substance that tastes like the sweetener stevia. To produce it, Cargill combines genetically engineered yeast with sugar molecules to mimic the taste of stevia.

Consumers would not know this by reading the website or looking at the package; the company artfully describes the process as a “centuries-old technique” involving “fermentation.” It markets EverSweet as “non-artificial.”

Cargill also pitches the product as “sustainably produced,” presumably because it moves stevia production off the land, in places like Paraguay where small farmers have been cultivating stevia for generations. But the feedstock for engineered foods made in Cargill’s new plant has to come from somewhere. Cargill would not tell us what it uses for feedstock, but the factory’s’ location in Nebraska offers a clue: it is surrounded by monocrops of GMO corn and soy.

Read more at USRTK:

What’s the controversy over the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit?

The Gates Foundation’s “failing” green revolution in Africa

Is Cargill’s new GMO stevia plant the “farm” of the future?

Why is the Gates Foundation funding propaganda campaign at Cornell?

More info:

The Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045, report by International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and ETC Group (3.30.21)

Tagged Bayer Bill Gates Bill Gates menu climate Gates Foundation gene drives genome editing Ginkgo Bioworks GMO JoynBio monopoly systemic risk

https://www.foxnews.com/media/nyc-mayor-adams-coming-food-waging-war-modern-us-diet-boost-climate-agenda-expert"

... Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams is urging New Yorkers to swap their meat options for plant-based meals to promote his climate initiative

By Yael Halon | Fox News

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‘The Great Reset’ author Marc Morano tells ‘Fox News Tonight’ Democrats are ‘coming for your food.'

Climate warriors are waging war on the modern American diet withcrackdowns on beef and dairy products, author Marc Morano said Monday, firing back at Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams after he announced an effort to push plant-based meals citywide.

"First, they came for your energy. Then they came for your gas-powered cars, your freedom of movement, your cheap flights. Now they're coming for your food," Morano, author of "The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown," said on "Fox News Tonight."

Last week, Adams and other city officials announced that they would begin cracking down on food production and consumption in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and boost their climate agenda. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection released a so-called greenhouse gas inventory as part of the announcement, highlighting the carbon footprint of the city's main sectors including the food industry.

CATTLEMEN ROAST VEGAN NYC MAYOR FOR CRACKING DOWN ON FOOD AS PART OF CLIMATE AGENDA

Eric Adams in January 2023

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced his plan to crack down on food production and consumption in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions andboost his climate agenda. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

"We already know that a plant-powered diet is better for your physical and mental health, and I am living proof of that. But the reality is that thanks to this new inventory, we're finding out it is better for the planet," Adams said.

Adam's push is likely the first step in a more aggressive campaign to target beef products in New York, Morano warned, adding that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates' reported status as the largest individual farmland owner in the United States could help spread the initiative nationwide.

"They will be monitoring what you eat. What’s coming next are the restrictions," Morano said. "We are already seeing it globally with a net-zero commitment. They’re going after high-yield agriculture trying to collapse them. We saw the disaster in Sri Lanka. You also haveBill Gates… America's number one single farmland owner and his goal is to get us to eat his billions of dollars invested in lab-grown synthetic beef made from the stem cells of animals and literally put it in a steel vat and printed on a 3D printer. Not making that up. The fix is in."

NYC MAYOR ADAMS PUSHES TO LIMIT MEAT CONSUMPTION IN LATEST CLIMATE CRAZE

Plate of raw steak]

Mayor Eric Adams is trying to get New Yorkers to give up their steak for plant-based alternatives. (Scott Suchman for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

"This will only happen if we allow it. They’re going after our modern diet. You will eat nothing and be happy according to this plan," he added.

Morano said the fact that some countries are considering having cows wear masks and diapers to contain their methane emissions is indicative of how "crazy" climate activism has become.

"Scientists [not named] out there say methane is completely overblown as a greenhouse gas, number one," Morano argued.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"This is crazy," he continued. "What this is is a revolution of the powers that be. They're always looking for reasons why the rest of us can’t be free. Now they’re going after rice production. There’s a big story in major media about rice causing all this global warming and emissions. But going after the meat is a way to make everything a problem in a climate of urgency. Therefore, they have to be in charge of all this food.They’re not going to try to ban it. They will take over the means of production so the rest of us don’t destroy the Earth. We have to be managed. That’s what we're looking at."

Yael Halon is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to yael.halon@fox.com.

plastic straw nyt op ed---

ny mayor soundbite healtheir [not disputed]

shoplifters go ahead; morano

carbon footprint tracker for nyers --> take away

gates acc to nbc #1 land

cow fart prince chls face mask to capture methane

china will not stop coal or rice

china compete w gates to buy land

gates has agenda too

=== 15 min no one in cda gov't listens to MM; slide from John Kerry pix of him yawning // covid

teen vogue climate

< >Canada’s public health officials have recently added “climate change,” “capitalism,” and “colonization” to an ever-growing list of public health threats, in a report written for Dr. Theresa Tam. Climate Depot’s Marc Morano joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the potential consequences of this move, including the possibility of climate lockdowns and authoritarian restrictions... jamie margolis tesify DC, if shut for virus than we can for covid he means climate& drop 7%/yr boom lockdown --> 7% drop; your cda fauci in 2 perr rev jrnl NJM climate spreads pathogens; follow templayte public health authroitrtian bureaucracy; ppl like clean air in lockdown cynical?; not net zero but absolute zero, gov't wants us to live in stone age but not them [

an 6 22

When the COVID-19 pandemic was at its worst in 2020 and 2021, a combination of far-right conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists and so-called “wellness influencers” added to the death count by pushing bogus, unscientific “cures” and falsely claiming that the lifesaving vaccines being offered by Moderna, Pfizer and others were dangerous. But COVID-19, although still highly infectious, hasn’t been in the headlines as much in recent months — and some fake “wellness influencers” and conspiracy theorists, according to Daily Beast reporter Cécile Simmons, have turned their attention to monkeypox.

“Though little is understood about the mysterious outbreaks of the monkeypox virus in Europe and North America,” Simmons reports in an article published by the Beast on June 15, “scientists agree on one thing: It’s nothing like COVID. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped some influencers in the alternative health and wellness community from repurposing COVID misinformation and using this new public health crisis to further their own agendas.”

Simmons adds, “In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, alt-health and wellness online influencers — from yoga teachers to fitness instructors — became some of the most active propagators of conspiracy theories about COVID-19. With cases now on the decline in much of the West — thanks in no small part to widespread vaccination campaigns — monkeypox has provided new material to rehash the narratives that brought these influencers attention in the early days of COVID, including claims that monkeypox is a plot engineered by global elites to profit from diseases and restrict individual freedoms.”

One of the conspiracy theorists who promoted dangerously false information about COVID-19 during the worst parts of the pandemic was anti-vaxxer Sayer Ji,founder of the alternative medicine website GreenMedInfo.com. In 2022, Simmons reports, Ji has turned his attention to monkeypox.

“Sayer Ji has dedicated his social media channels to making repeated unproven claims about nightmarish vaccine side effects, including death, and that COVID vaccination is a plot masterminded by big pharma and ‘the global government,’” Simmons explains. “And now, with monkeypox on the rise, Sayer Ji has taken to his Telegram channel and Twitter to spread ludicrous claims that monkeypox is the mainstream media’s way of covering up side-effects caused by COVID vaccines to his roughly 50,000 and 11.5k followers, respectively. His Telegram channel includes multiple posts claiming that cases of monkeypox have coincided with the purchase of vaccines by the U.S., among other bizarre theories.”

Another “wellness” influencer/conspiracy theorist pushing wacky claims about monkeypox is Hiighhopess,who, according to Simmons, “recently used her Instagram stories to describe monkeypox as a profiteering ploy manufactured by Bill Gates, and shared claims that the U.S. government is stockpiling vaccines and planning to impose vaccination against monkeypox.”

During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Simmons notes, Hiighhopess, an anti-vaxxer, “used her Instagram channel to share anti-vaccine and anti-mask content, including posts depicting vaccination as a plot by elites to manipulate the public into submission.”

“This repurposing of the COVID playbook by alternative health and wellness gurus should come as no surprise,” Simmons observes. “COVID has provided a blueprint for conspiracy theories, allowing influencers to develop broad-ranging anti-elite and anti-institutional narratives that can be adapted to emerging public health crises.It has also allowed conspiracy-spreaders to use various techniques, including decontextualizing scientific data and cherry-picking facts to give themselves a veneer of credibility.”

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. ...

got no prob w/ musk neurolink

Gates wants to control people with monkeypox & force them to drink 'poop water': MTG

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/majorie-taylor-greene-bill-gates/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/bill-gates-vaccine-india/

globetrotter

While the incompetence of the Indian government is starkly visible in its handling of the second wave of the COVID-19 crisis, its performance has been far worse on the vaccine front. The BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which seems to believe in the ideology of free-market capitalism, thinks that the market will magically produce the number of vaccines the country needs. This would explain why it has starved seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units—according to an April 17 article in Down to Earth—of any support instead of ramping up much-needed vaccine production.

The rights to produce the public sector vaccine, Covaxin, which has been developed bythe Indian Council of Medical Research(ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV), in collaboration with Bharat Biotech, have been given to the private company partner on an exclusive basis. The Indian government also believed that Serum Institute of India, another private sector company and the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, which has tied up with AstraZeneca for producing Covishield, would make vaccines according to the country's requirements without any prior orders or capital support. The government did not even see the necessity to intervene and prevent India's new Quad ally, the U.S., from stopping sending India supplies of the required raw materials needed by India for manufacturing vaccines.

The sheer negligence by the government is further highlighted by the fact that even though India has about 20 licensed manufacturing facilities for vaccines and 30 biologic manufacturers, all of which could have been harnessed for vaccine manufacturing, only two companies are presently producing vaccines. That too is at a pace completely inadequate for India's needs.

India has a long history of vaccine development, which can be traced back to the Haffkine Institute for Training, Research and Testing, in Mumbai, in the 1920s. With the Patents Act, 1970 and the reverse engineering of drugs by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories, the country also broke the monopoly of global multinationals. It is this change, fought for by the Left, that led to India emerging as the largest generic supplier of drugs and vaccines in the world and becoming the global pharmacy of the poor.

Bill Gates recently spoke to **Sky News**in the UK regarding India and South Africa's proposal to the World Trade Organization on the need to lift intellectual property (IP) protection for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines during the pandemic. Gates claimed that IP is not the issue and that "moving a vaccine… into a factory in India… It's only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all." In other words, without the white man coming in to tell India and other middle-income countries how to make vaccines and provide them with his money, these countries would not be able to make vaccines on their own.

This is a rehash of the AIDS debate, where the Western governments and Big Pharma argued that developing generic AIDS drugs would lead to the manufacturing of poor-quality drugs and theft of Western intellectual property. Bill Gates, who built his fortune on Microsoft's IP, is the leading defender of IP in the world. With his newfound halo as a great philanthropist, he is leading Big Pharma's charge against the weakening of patents on the global stage. The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of the World Health Organization, is also to dilute any move by the WHO to share patents and knowledge during the pandemic.

Indian companies are the largest manufacturers of existing vaccines by volume in the world, according to the WHO's Global Vaccine Market Report 2020. When it comes to measuring vaccine manufacturing by value, however, the global share held by multinational corporations or Big Pharma is much bigger than that of India. For example, as per the WHO report, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), with 11 percent of the global market by volume, generates 40 percent of the market by value, while Serum Institute with 28 percent of the market by volume has only 3 percent of the market by value. This shows that the patent-protected vaccines with monopoly pricing get much higher prices. This is the model that Bill Gates and his ilk are selling. Let Big Pharma make the big bucks even if it bankrupts the poorer countries. The Western philanthropic money of Gates and Warren Buffett will 'help' the poor Third World to get some vaccines, albeit slowly. As long as they get to call the shots.

The Modi government's approach to vaccines is based on the central pillar of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideology—which serves as the ideological parent of the ruling BJP—that the task of the state is only to help big capital. Anything else including planning is seen by the right wing as socialism. In the case of vaccines, it means not to make any attempt to get the companies, both in the public and private sectors, to make necessary preparations for a quick vaccination program: to put in the money and provide the necessary supply chain. Instead, the government believed that India's private pharmaceutical industry would do all of this on its own.

It forgot that the Indian pharmaceutical industry was the product of public domain science—the CSIR institutions—the public sector and nationalist companies like Cipla. They all came out of the national movement and built India's pharmaceutical industry. It is institutions like the Haffkine Institute under Sahib Sokhey's leadership and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) built under the leadership of Dr. Pushpa Bhargava that led to India's vaccine and biologics capacity. It is on this base that India's vaccine manufacturing capacity rests.

It is not niji (private) companies that built the vaccine capacity in India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims. The private sector companies rode on the back of public sector science and technology that was built in the country between the 1950s and the 1990s.

The Indian government recently opened up vaccinations for all adults in the country on May 1. To vaccinate all the eligible population—above 18 years of age—India would require about 2 billion doses of the vaccine in order to give the required two shots per person. To plan for the production of an order of this size, apart from technology and capital support, India also needs to plan for the complex supply chain that is required for production. This includes raw materials and intermediate supplies such as filters and special bags. There are at least 37 "critical items" that are currently embargoed by the U.S. from exports under the Defense Production Act, 1950, a relic of the U.S.'s Korean War.

On April 16, Adar Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute of India, had taken to Twitter to ask U.S. President Joe Biden "to lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the U.S. so that vaccine production can ramp up."

If India puts together the production capacity of the Serum Institute, Bharat Biotech, Biological E, and Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, and the five other companies that have signed up to manufacture Sputnik V, developed by the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology, India could have planned for an annual production capacity of more than 3 billion doses. If it also included the public sector units idling under the Modi government, India could have easily boosted its vaccine manufacturing capacity to 4 billion doses and produced the necessary 2 billion doses and more in 2021. It would then have made it possible for India to completely vaccinate its target population and yet have enough left to meet its export commitments including for the WHO's Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT)-Accelerator program and its vaccines pillar of COVAX. What is missing is a planning commission that could plan this exercise and create the political will to carry it forward. Not a vacuous Niti Ayog—the public policy think tank of the Indian government—and an incompetent government.

Instead, the Modi government did not even bother to place an order with the Serum Institute until January 11, and that too for a measly 11 million doses. The next order of 120 million Covishield and Covaxin doses was placed only in the third week of March when the number of cases had reached a daily caseload of nearly 40,000, and India was well into its deadly second wave. The government seemed to bank on its belief in the magic of the capitalist market, which it thought would solve all its problems, without any real effort on the center's part.

India and South Africa have asked the WTO to consider waiving the rules relating to intellectual property during the pandemic, and further sought that knowledge, including patents and know-how, should be shared without restrictions. This proposal has been backed by the WHO and has huge support among most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The holdouts predictably are from the rich countries that want to protect the global vaccine market for their Big Pharma companies. Under pressure from the global community and the bad optics of the U.S. hoarding vaccines, the Biden administration has finally just decided to accept South Africa and India's initiative of a temporary patent waiver, after stonewalling it in the WTO until now. But this waiver is restricted to vaccine patents only and does not extend to other patents or associated intellectual property as South Africa and India's proposal had suggested. This is still a victory for the global public health community, though only a first step.

While India is spearheading the need to share know-how with all companies capable of manufacturing vaccines, it still has explaining to do as to why it has given an exclusive license to Bharat Biotech to manufacture a vaccine developed with public money and in public institutions like ICMR and NIV. Why is it not being shared under a nonexclusive license with both Indian companies and those companies outside India? Instead, ICMR is receiving royalties from Bharat Biotech from sharing its know-how exclusively with Bharat Biotech. Under public pressure, ICMR is now sharing its know-how with the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra's public sector Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, while giving Bharat Biotech six months' lead time with financial support money from the central government.

Modi had dreamed that India would be the vaccine arm of the Quad. He forgot that in order to compete with China, India needs a vaccine production base that not only takes care of its vaccination needs but also fulfills all its external commitments. China can do this because it has developed at least three vaccines already—from Sinopharm, Sinovac, and CanSino—that have been licensed to others. Their production is now being ramped up, and China is the largest supplier of vaccines to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And it has also managed to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, unlike India.

This is where the Modi government has failed and failed badly. An incompetent, vainglorious leadership, combined with the RSS belief in magical capitalism, has led to the disaster that we are now facing.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter. Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rick-wiles-will-be-heading-underground-any-day-now/

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

==

==

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.

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.”

...

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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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“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

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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.

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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

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 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.”

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, 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**

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

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yikes ~ liberal arts?

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

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AN

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.

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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."

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1631 carbon tax

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

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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

• Why Bill Gates is optimistic about climate change ›
• To hit climate goals, Bill Gates and his billionaire friends are betting ... ›
• Paris climate summit opens with Bill Gates, but not Trump | Euronews ›

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

Domhoff

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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...

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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.

....

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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...

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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.

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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

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2x down ~ divest 2015

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

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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

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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 ofThe 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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