The great Bill Gates conspiracy. A bit of context

In my previous post about the strange case of the Bill Gates conspiracy theory, I talked about those curious aspects of it that are, when all’s said and done, common to all such theories.

They’re impervious to lack of evidence. The fact that there’s nothing at all to prove that Gates is engaging in some sinister plot against the whole of humanity only shows how clever he is at covering his tracks.

Equally, no contrary evidence has any value. Any story showing that it simply isn’t true that Gates is doing any of these things, or even that they’re actually impossible in the present state of technology, are obviously wicked inventions by his acolytes, insidiously fed out to the gullible individuals who believe his protestations of innocence.

Well, as I said, this is the stock in trade of any conspiracy theory. But there is another specific aspect of the Gates story that’s worth looking at. That’s the global context in which it has emerged. Which is almost enough to make me want to launch a conspiracy theory of my own.

Look around the world today.

In China, we have Xi Jinping. He has had the constitution of his country changed so that he can remain in power more or less indefinitely. He’s been in the news recently for the way he has, at a legislative stroke backed by violent police power, wiped out the partial liberties that Hong Kong had enjoyed before.

More sickening still, around a million Uighur people, Muslims from Western China, are being held in what the regime calls re-education camps, and anyone else calls concentration camps. The figure of a million is a bit of a guess and the real figure may be much higher: the regime isn’t particularly forthcoming with the statistics.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have a Donald Trump for whom nothing matters other than his own advancement. He works to divide people, he advances racism, and he incites violence from some of the most despicable individuals in the country. And all the time, he has presided over the worst economic collapse the nation has known at least since 1929, and the deaths by Coronavirus of over twice as many Americans as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam war.

His own incompetence contributed to both those disasters.

Turning to a less significant country (but don’t tell its conservative voters – they like to think otherwise), we have Boris Johnson in Britain. He has in recent weeks defended, and ultimately failed to take any action over, Coronavirus lockdown breaches by his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and one of his Ministers, Robert Jenrick. Again, the mortality due to the virus in the UK is far higher than in might have been, entirely down to the incompetence with which Johnson has addressed it.

Top right: Mark Zuckerberg, the enabler
Then, clockwise: Trump, Putin, Bolosonaro, Xi, Johnson

And the list goes on. Brazil has Jair Bolsonaro, a man presiding over the devastation of his country by Coronavirus, and who, after months of denying there was a problem, and refusing to wear a mask, has now tested positive himself. Or Vladimir Putin in Russia who has gone down the Chinese road, of a constitutional amendment to keep him in power for a lot longer, and who is almost certainly involved in a real conspiracy, to try to influence the US Presidential election through dirty tricks on social media.

Talking about social media takes us, of course, to the dominant figure in that world. Mark Zuckerberg continues to refuse to act against hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook. There are allegations that the massacre of the Rohingya in Burma was promoted through Facebook. And Zuckerberg can play his role, unaccountable to anybody, and free from any kind of control, regulation or sanction. He is one man, elected by no one, and running on his own authority a communications system that feeds information, or disinformation, to 2.6 billion people around the world.

So we we see these characters at work across the globe. Some of them are preparing conspiracies. That’s likely to be true of Putin, and his people will use the means provided by Zuckerberg. But others aren’t even trying to work conspiratorially. We know what Trump’s up to, we have a pretty good idea what Xi Jinping’s doing too.

And in this world, we pick on Bill Gates? Because he correctly predicted that pandemics might be more serious than war? And contributed money to combating the present one?

Why, it’s almost as though someone were trying to deflect attention from some real villains. Distracting us because they’re working to a hidden agenda we know nothing about. Spreading disinformation, perhaps through Facebook, so we don’t look at the people who really deserve our suspicion and distrust.

Curious, isn’t it? Is it just a coincidence that Gates conspiracy theorists are putting this kind of stuff out right now? Or is it something more sinister?

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?