The great Bill Gates conspiracy

We live in a time of conspiracy theories.

Of course, most times have had their conspiracy theories. The power of anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century spread rumours of an international plot of Jewish financiers to take over and run the world. There was even a remarkable document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, explaining how this was going to be carried out.

Unsurprisingly, the document turned out to be a forgery. Equally unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop the conspiracy theory being believed. It is of the essence of a conspiracy theory that once you’ve been bitten by one, nothing will shake your confidence in it. Not even discovering that a key element is false. And if evidence for it is lacking, that only demonstrates how dastardly devious the conspirators are, in hiding all trace of their nefarious activity.

In the same way, any evidence against the theory is obviously fake news, put about by members of the conspiracy to fool the ingenuous and naïve.

You see, it isn’t the people who believe the conspiracy theories who are gullible, for accepting as true allegations with no evidence to back them. The gullible ones are the rest of us, without the acuity to realise that absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence. To say nothing of our being so innocent as to accept the truth of obviously fabricated so-called evidence against the theory.

Well, not a theory. The truth. Or even the Truth, with an initial capital letter.

Melinda and Bill Gates

The target of today’s favoured conspiracy theory is, rather oddly, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has put $300m into fighting Coronavirus. You might think that people threatened with infection by the virus might be grateful for the gesture. I’m sure most are.

He also warned in a 2015 Ted Talk, that the great threat to life in the next decades would be from a virus, not from war. You might think that people would admire him for his prescience. I’m sure most do.

But not the conspiracy theorists.

To them, this is just part of his smokescreen for his real agenda. He wants the pandemic to spread – indeed is responsible for that spread, which is why he knew about it so early – so that a vaccine, developed with his money, can be injected into people – and with it a microchip allowing the Gates foundation to establish control over the people vaccinated.

There are other even wilder accusations around, and if you want to catch up on them, you can do so here.

As Bill and Melinda Gates point out, “we are just giving money away, we write the cheque...” They don’t develop the vaccine. They certainly won’t be administering it to anyone.

Besides, there isn’t a vaccine yet, and there may never be. More to the point, to my knowledge, there is no chip capable of controlling a human being into whom it has been injected.

Why, there isn’t even any evidence that the virus was deliberately developed by anyone, let alone Bill Gates, as the conspiracy theorists keep claiming.

Now, I’m not saying that there are no conspiracies. There are. Indeed, it could be useful to look at a real one, to get a better idea of how it differs from the fake variety.

In March 2018, two characters travelling on Russian passports but in names it seems were not their own, showed up in Salisbury, in Southern England. They were there again the next day. They later claimed that they had been so impressed by the cathedral on their first visit that they decided to return from London at the first opportunity.

Not long after, a former Russian Intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter fell seriously ill, with poisoning by the agent Novichok, of which there are significant stocks in Russia. Skripal had been a double agent, revealing Russian secrets to Britain.

Traces of Novichok were later found in the hotel room in London used by the Russians. And they were later fairly reliably identified as being longstanding members of Russian military intelligence.

The Skripals both recovered from the poisoning, though they were dangerously ill for a time.

Now none of this meets the high standard of a criminal trial, which is proof beyond reasonable doubt (a great criterion, although it hasn’t always stopped innocent defendants being convicted). But Russia’s never going to admit to involvement in the case, or release the agents involved for interrogation and trial in Britain, so we’re not going to get the evidence for that kind of rigorous test.

But on the weaker test of balance of probabilities, it does feel to me as though someone in the Russian state ran a conspiracy to wipe out a man Russia views as a traitor.

Now this story is a wonderful illustration of what a real conspiracy looks like.

First of all, you find out about them. And not just in the form of loose, vague allegations, but with real and convincing, even if only partial, evidence.

But the second characteristic is even more striking. It’s incompetence. The Russian agents failed in their mission. Indeed, when two uninvolved British citizens found and handled the flask that had contained the Novichok, they both fell sick, and one of them died.

In other words, the agents missed their target but hit two people with whom they had no quarrel.

That’s the way most conspiracies go. Inept people within it deliberately or unintentionally let the secret out. And they generally don’t do very well.

That’s one of the things that strikes me most about conspiracy theorists. They massively overstate the intelligence of conspirators. They regard the plots as sinister because they think the plotters ingenious, when in reality they’re like the Skripal agents.

Well, all I can say to conspiracy theorists is, every time you think a brilliant conspiracy is being directed against you, remember the Skripal case. The Russian state’s pretty sophisticated. And look what a pig’s ear it made of that one.

Then think of Watergate. Or the Weapons of Mass Destruction myth for Iraq. Conspirators aren’t as smart as you imagine they are.

The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie once said that the man who dies rich, dies disgraced. And gave away his money.

If Bill Gates is following that example, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just congratulate him, rather than spin a web of unfounded and deeply implausible conspiracy allegations around him?