Bonus: Bullying Gates, Bullying Biden: The Conspiracy of Male Violence
Bill Gates is unknowable—except to close and estranged friends, family members, his therapist if he has one. His empire sprawls; his philanthropy is tangled. He’s clearly not any one thing. But what is the one thing conspiritualists fantasize him to be? What archetypal role does he play for those who hate him?In this meditation, Matthew zeroes in on the briefly-mentioned biographical datum that Gates was bullied as a boy to unfold his symbolic power as neuroatypical scapegoat. If we listen carefully, he argues, we’ll hear something very high-school-ish, laced with homophobia and latent violence, in the lazy defamations slung at Gates. Is it a surprise that Trump graduated from the New York Military Academy in 1964—the same year that a horrific hazing incident cost several administrators their jobs? Is it a surprise, given what we saw in that so-called debate, that Trump’s school had written hazing into their cadet manual? No, it’s not. And when Biden pauses and smiles, and shakes his head, and his gaze falls, is he remembering what it was like to have had a stutter in an all-boys school? We spend a lot of time on this podcast unravelling the shoddy thinking at the heart of our conspirituality and political landscapes. These 24 minutes tackles primal cruelty that is up to men to address—if they can remember it, and challenge that sad assumption that it’s simply the way of the world.
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Bullying Gates.
Bullying Biden.
The Conspiracy of Male Violence.
For this week's bonus episode, I want to look at the primal violence we call bullying, especially as it plays out between boys and men.
The first meditation is on the mystery of Bill Gates as the poster boy for conspirituality and QAnon hatred.
The second meditation is on Trump bullying his way through that awful debate.
So I've read a little bit of the available Gates biography out there, and I scrubbed through the Netflix special Inside Bill's Brain, which seems pretty good.
He's obviously a complex character.
There's also a great investigative article from The Nation on the money maze of his philanthropy, and how much of it is a self-serving closed loop whilst also doing considerable work in the world.
It's complex.
But I won't rely on that data too much.
Those who assert that he's evil incarnate aren't really interested in who he is, or in the complexities of his role in the world, so there's no point in trying to get that record straight.
I'm going to focus mainly on what he seems to symbolize.
There is one biographical detail I'll focus on, aside from what's commonly known of his industry accomplishments.
is that he was small as a boy and he was bullied.
Now, this might be continuous with the speculation that he is neuroatypical.
We know that the neuroatypical are targeted for bullying in school.
Also, I've never heard anyone say this, but I believe I hear in the anti-vaxxers' hatred for Bill Gates, an unspoken loathing for the neuroatypical.
They're the ones, after all, who believe autism is a disease.
And I hear in their hatred of Gates' vaccine work this whisper which says, do not make my children like you.
Now as a side note, for us Gen Xers, and I was actually surprised to learn that the Gen X generation is said to begin in Gates' birth year of 1964, we didn't use that language.
We didn't say neuroatypical.
We said nerd, loser, dweeb.
All emasculating words.
And of course we also used homophobic slurs.
We knew the kid who was like Gates as one of the odd boys who would either never recover from high school or who might have the resources and luck to make his differences work.
The bullying of Gates has continued, of course.
I don't think we can fully understand it outside of the larger context of male violence.
And how it both overflows amongst its perpetrators, but also festers or sublimates within its survivors, and how we all respond to it over time.
I'm willing to bet that most men listening to this podcast know what I'm talking about.
We've either committed, suffered, or bystanded the type of dominance hierarchy violence known as bullying.
Some of us have played all three roles, Here's what I know about the archetype of the odd or nerdy boy who got bullied in grade school.
He was quiet, kept to himself.
You knew he read a lot.
He might have had tics.
Gates apparently chewed his pencils.
The nerdy boy rode the bus or the subway alone.
And he was this mixture of hyper-vigilance and being lost in his own world.
He never really shared what he was up to.
You knew he had access to secrets, and that power made him feel and appear out of place.
He daydreamed his way out of conventional activities, which meant he didn't progress at sports or socializing.
Now, Gates's family did put him in sports, and he's proficient at tennis, but you can tell he's got kind of an awkward demeanor on the court.
He was other.
He stood apart.
And this meant he could be scapegoated.
At the all-boys Catholic school I went to, the Bill Gates-type kid would be randomly attacked in the hallway, punched or kicked for fun, bashed into the locker, tripped down the stairs, his sneakers jammed into the toilet.
Now I'd locate myself about halfway into this survivor demographic.
I was quiet, intellectually aloof.
I was a loner.
I wore glasses.
But I was also strong and athletic.
And so I played both sides.
Because that's the nature of a dominance hierarchy.
If you're not at the very bottom, you're trying to keep someone else there.
And no one is ever free.
I was lucky in that I experienced a clear turning point where I recognized my complicity in it all.
I remember it happened during a gym class when the instructor stepped out, and then the other boys in the class heaved about 20 basketballs at the scapegoat boy who was really at the bottom of the ladder.
And all the basketballs flew at him all at once.
And I watched them sail through the air, kind of paralyzed.
And I watched the boy cower and burst into tears as they hit him.
And something inside me was shaken.
And I think that's where I developed this inconsolable rage against bullies.
So, I don't know how bad it was for Gates, but it doesn't really matter.
He came from money, so that might have helped, but, you know, you can't really know.
I do know that those who interact with him symbolically don't care about the details.
What they care about is the symbolic baggage.
They know that Gates was the loathsome boy in school.
They know they hated him.
And if they're making shit up about him now, it's like they're still about 13 years old and they're probably enjoying that feeling.
The reality and memory of violence is crucial because the nerdy boy absorbs it.
He has to do something with it.
It seems that Gates folded it into an incredible discipline and relentless competitiveness that reportedly could veer into the punitive and vengeful in the business space.
But we know that his success is a freak outlier outcome.
On the other hand, the boys who abused Gates also have to do something with that violence.
There's a fork in the road with every moral injury.
If they own it, if they own what they did, maybe they'll look a little more deeply at the way they use power.
If they brush it off, if they disown it, they'll perpetuate it.
I've heard younger men start using this phrase, he has a punchable face, or he's just asking for a slap.
It's important, in my view, to know that we're not just talking about irritation here.
There's a cultural memory of the temporary catharsis that a group of men feels when they offload their rage onto a scapegoat.
I want to be clear that I'm not coming at this from some sort of purist, non-violence point of view.
Neo-Nazis, for example, have punchable faces, but not because punching them scapegoats anyone.
There was an Antifa meme that went around a few years back that said, make punching Nazis great again.
I'm too old for street fighting, but I'm all for protective or defensive violence.
I'm all behind punching up when you can, and when it makes sense.
But punching down is evil, and that's what bullying is.
So where are we now with the Gates archetype?
As with everything in conspirituality to QAnon discourse, extreme black and white thinking cannot conceal the contempt and loathing.
And for a good dose of it, let's listen to what Mickey Willis says about Bill Gates in Plandemic II.
Bill Gates is either the most misunderstood man alive or one of the most convincing conmen to ever live.
You see a benevolent hero or a malevolent opportunist Personally, I would love to believe that one of the richest men in the world has given away his fortune for the betterment of humanity.
I want to believe that endearing smile.
I want to believe that his heart is as soft and warm as his sweaters.
So, what Willis communicates through his, like, supermodel shtick is a well-worn type of homosocial violence.
If you listen closely, and particularly if you're a man like me who has vivid memories of the violence that establishes dominance between boys, you'll hear the contempt tinged with homophobia.
Mickey Willis is calling Bill Gates effeminate.
That's what the sweater remark is about.
The whole thing is very junior high, very predictable.
But here's the twist that gets Willis' goat, and a lot of other people as well.
As the nerd outlier, the odd boy they couldn't quite beat up enough, Gates went on to amass extraordinary influence and control.
And in what?
In precisely the domain that made every nerdy boy the target of suspicion and jealousy.
The domain of the abstract, the intellectual, the difficult to discern, the secret.
Gates became a master of a world virtually no one can see into or understand, and yet everyone winds up living in it.
If there is a revenge of a nerd, How much greater could it be than that the entire world is forced to look through his windows, becomes beholden to his introversion, his ability to create life outside of the body, a universe in a plastic box, to route language and emotions through binary code, to guide missiles, to run surveillance, to create artificial economies that short sell stocks.
Of course, that's not all.
The personal computer, networked, is also the source and driver of an infinite amount of fraud, abuse, state propaganda, disinformation, identity theft, pornography.
And on that note, Bill Gates was photographed with Epstein.
He hasn't commented much on that and has denied business collaborations.
But more important than any rationalization or bystanderism in relation to Epstein is Gates' impact on the most powerful trafficking network tool in history.
And how enraging that his contribution is indirect, superstructural, impersonal.
He's the guy who stands next to Epstein just as easily as beside the captains of industry at Davos.
Gates has been instrumental in creating the space in which the darkest compulsions and addictions could continually tempt the threshold of the real.
And here's a real mind-bender.
Without Bill Gates, could there even be an online conspiracy movement?
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Imagine being a central architect of the technology that allows your own image and name to be broadcast around the world as the villain of some nefarious cause.
Imagine spurring the personal computer revolution so that people wind up using their PCs and your own software to talk to each other about how you're at the head table of the cabal.
Here's a question.
Are conspiritualists acting out against Gates because somewhere they know they are suffering from conspiracy-driven computer addiction?
Also, let's just remember what these machines have done to our capacity for mystery.
The data world is infinitely complex, but we all know that it's ultimately materialistic.
There's nothing metaphysical or untouchable about its hardware or software.
No one controls it, but it has rules and gateways of control.
And what does this Gates world feel like?
What does it feel like to be him?
In the Netflix flick stock, his personal assistant says that his days are scheduled down to the minute, that nothing is left to chance, that he's never late.
And you know that from basic on up, he has written in languages that can symbolize poetry, but not write it.
Bill Gates is a punching bag because he erases all of the mysteries.
But it goes farther than that.
Doesn't he also own our mysteries, at least symbolically?
Hasn't he also contributed to the privatization of the public sphere?
What is it like for us that we know our entire data sphere is governed by socially awkward men?
What does it mean to know that they hold everything in their grey-green clouds?
This guy who seems so bland, so odd, whose own identity is both overexposed and unknown, has majority ownership over the ways in which our most precious data, our memory, flows through the ether, somehow our own, but also somehow out of our reach.
Now if you watched The Social Dilemma, you might have had the same impression that I did.
A lot of awkward, mostly white men talking with some lucidity around these things, but also with an awful lot of thin or even dissociative concern and shoulder shrugging.
Like, we didn't know this was going to happen, oh well.
And I have no doubt many are mortified by what they see and know, but they're also protected from it by the money they made.
And so they can sit there in these beautiful postmodern warehouse spaces emptied out of every human texture and they can say smart things but offer no real answers to what they've done.
And maybe this provokes the rage as well.
That men can be as aloof as they are smart.
This, by the way, is why Andrew Yang was such an interesting candidate for me.
Somehow he integrated his nerdiness, he overcame the racism, and he embodied some kind of normalness and approachability.
And this is an extraordinary feat for any man with a public life.
But turning back to Willis, who seems to want to punch Gates, so does Sayerji whenever he talks about him.
And by the way, all of this is also in the air in how conspiritualists talk about Tony Fauci.
I guarantee you the tone would be different if the good doctor was six foot tall.
It all feels very old, very schoolyard.
Now, last Tuesday, amongst the many other things we witnessed during that so-called debate, we saw the unbridled bullying of a man who grew up with a stutter.
If we experienced anything like this as boys, we know there's no end to it.
The aggressor will continue to dig deeper and deeper as long as he is unopposed.
We know that homosocial violence can simply feel like the air we breathe.
And for me, this manifests by feeling myself get very quiet as I watch.
Partly dissociated, partly paralyzed, but with this overriding feeling of, I recognize this, I know how this goes.
On the last episode on Conspirituality Podcast, I commented on how the whole thing shut me down and made me unavailable to our seven-year-old boy who was watching along and trying to get another half hour before bedtime.
I feel like if there's one thing I want to give him, it's the ability to feel and see bullying as it happens, or maybe even before.
And of course the entire debate was all taking place between three white men who were socially distanced within power and privilege.
We can see it unfold as if under a microscope.
And we can imagine how easy it is for Trump's domination to overflow and to pour down upon those he dehumanizes.
I imagine everyone who isn't white and male can feel that overflow.
Now, I'm not any expert in violence against women, but there's something I feel is underexplored.
Gates, Trump, and I all attended all-boys schools, and this is where we learned dominance.
I believe that in these situations, men practice violence on each other first.
And so of course the instinct outside of that protective sphere is going to be to dominate women, to dominate black people, to dominate the other, to add yet more groups to the hierarchy.
It's an overflow, it's an excess.
Trump graduated from the New York Military Academy in 1964, seven years before I was born.
Hazing there was an accepted ritual practice.
I found an essay by one of Trump's classmates, and I'll just read this excerpt from it.
New York Military Academy had a long tradition of hazing.
Without being specific about just what conduct that word permitted, the official cadet regulation book mentioned that prestigious schools and societies encouraged the practice as a right of entry into their privileged worlds.
In practice, hazing at the military school was conducted by both adolescent cadets and our adult supervisors.
And in their first year, cadets were subjected to ritual new guy rules, which included recitations on demand of silly rhyming formulas for telling time, or listing the supposed functions of a cow, throwing oneself against the wall to make room for an old guy to pass, or even belching on command.
But in the students' later years, it included more serious ritual hazing applied as punishment for disciplinary infractions or poor grades.
One of the most feared tasks required those about to be hazed to appear in the basement shower room where the 10 or 15 showerheads would be blasting hot water, which created a steamy fog that burned the throat.
The unfortunate cadets would have to appear in their heavy padded winter dress uniforms.
They would stand at rigid attention with their arms raised parallel before them, balancing their eight and one half pound M1 rifles across their arms.
After 10 minutes, the M1 seemed to weigh 50 pounds.
Anyone dropping his rifle was taken to the next room to be physically reprimanded.
Hazing at New York Military Academy reached its climax in my time on the 75th anniversary of the school's founding in 1889, so this is 1964 when Trump graduates, with a reporter from the New York Times attending.
On the eve of that celebration, the cadet captain of the feared E. Battery proceeded to punish one of his charges by flogging him repeatedly with a heavy metal chain.
In the middle of the night, the cadet who had received the beating went AWOL.
He escaped the school grounds and found his way to a hospital, which treated him and called his parents, who called the state police.
As a result, the adult staff, including the commandant, the dean, and even the superintendent, were forced to resign effective immediately.
So that's Trump's school, and we're not even talking about the violence in his home.
When I watched the debate, I could feel that same kind of sanctioned violence.
Of course, there were rules to the debate, but the whole setup of it made his behavior permissible.
And I wonder if Biden felt all of this as well.
My hunch is that he did, because like me, he went to a Catholic all-boys school too, Archmere Academy in Delaware.
This stuff isn't something that ever leaves your body.
You can feel the heat, the cortisol, the self-inflation, the puffing up of your chest to menace or to defend, how stiff that feels, the pain you get in your back and your neck, the desperate hope that you will not suffer pain, the chaos, and the shame.
I mean, on one hand, Chris Wallace tried to rein things in, but because he couldn't, the bullying was just normalized.
Afterwards, everyone went on at length about how unprecedented Trump's aggression was.
Give me a break.
And let's pull this out of history and memory and note that male violence is at the very heart of the Proud Boys who he dog-whistled from the stage.
I grew up with broken monsters like Gavin McInnes, who comes from Canada, by the way.
None of this is really history.
Anyhow, going forward, beyond the disinformation, beyond the insane claims, beyond the conspiracism that swirls around us, we can also start naming this primal aggression between men without joking about it.
And we can start to bear witness to how far back it goes and how simple and how brutal it is.
And we can do everything we can to take more time with our boys.
We can give them more space, more eye contact, attunement, and positive regard.
We can give them more silence and sky.
And when the anger comes, when the aggression comes, because it will, and it should, and it's nothing to be ashamed of, we can invoke that kind of holding that might even slide over into playful wrestling.
