We examine the second richest man in the world and his eponymous Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the world's wealthiest private charitable organization. Philanthropy in America apparently involves owning direct and indirect stakes in all its most noxious industries. Before Julian chews on that, Travis brings us the story of an apparently non-partisan woman moved to action within a month of seeing her first QAnon-related video. He follows this by exploring a few conspiracy theories that plague the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including the idea that it is attempting to microchip the world's population with the Mark of the Beast. The episode ends with a Jake story — and it happens to feature Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. A treat.
↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓
www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Follow Robert Evans: http://twitter.com/iwriteok
Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com
Music by MAPPED (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A014r3xa9Vg)
SOURCES:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundation-philanthropy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/media-center/speeches/2008/01/bill-gates-2008-world-economic-forum
Welcome, listener, to the 90th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we are tackling billionaire Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, creator of Clippy, and according to QAnon, the COVID-19 virus.
We'll be jumping into some fun conspiracy theory delusions at the top of the episode before allowing our honeymoon to be interrupted.
by the very real question of whether modern philanthropy in America is also a big fucking scam.
And finally, Jake has prepared a story for you, fine listeners, one starring Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards podcast.
Let's hope Bill Mitchell does not show up this time.
But before all that...
I have just one story this week and it's a QAnon follower live streams her own arrest in New York after posting that she wants to take out Joe Biden.
So this is a really interesting story of how a woman got radicalized in the QAnon.
What happened was that an Illinois woman, inspired by QAnon videos, traveled to New York City on Wednesday with more than a dozen illegal knives and threatened to kill Joe Biden, according to police and her own social media posts.
New York police officers arrested dancer Jessica Prim, who is 37 years old, On Wednesday, after she began to act strangely on a city pier, in a live video that Prim posted on Facebook of her arrest, she ranted about saving children and claimed that she had come to New York because of a QAnon video that she saw on YouTube.
So one interesting thing about Jessica Prim is that she left behind years of social media activity, and that might give us some insight into how she was radicalized.
I want to give a special shout out to Marc-Andre Argentino, and he is a PhD candidate at Concordia University who's studying this stuff.
Mark did a really great job of archiving all of the social media information about Jessica Prim and breaking down what that information revealed in this great Twitter thread.
Through most of Jessica Prim's eight-year social media history, she promotes her work, or she posts jokes about smoking weed, and she shares horoscopes, and it's a pretty normal, innocuous social media feed.
But also, interestingly, she has this interest in the arrest of child predators.
And that seems to be due to the fact that her own child was the victim of sexual violence.
In fact, she doesn't even seem particularly political or like a big Trump supporter.
In 2016, she didn't post anything about the election.
But all that changed for Jessica Prim in a big way sometime like in the last two months.
This was a very recent sort of conversion in the QAnon.
Yeah.
And it happened when a client of hers sent a popular QAnon documentary called Fall of the Cabal to her.
And in her own words, like, that's what red pilled her.
And I was freaking out inside and he kind of at first, you know, he's the one who kind of calmed me down a little bit because actually he's the one who sent me that Paula Cabal.
Have you seen this?
He sent it to me and I watched it but I only got to part four and I was kind of like, you know, I got distracted.
And then, I found it again.
And I had already seen the part 1, 2, 3, and 4, so I skipped it to 5.
And, oh my gosh.
I'll never be the same again.
Ever.
Ever, ever, ever.
There's no, no way that you can watch that.
And go and eat, and actually, like, go into a group.
A Facebook group.
Like, Pizzagate.
Um, QAnons, okay?
And just start, like, digging into that.
Start digging into that.
You can tell she's new because she says QAnons plural, which is not the usual way you would say it if you had heard influencers say it over and over, right?
So she's clearly new to it, which is wow.
This video, I actually have to say that it humanizes her a bit.
I have not watched video of her before.
I had just seen that kind of image that accompanied some of the articles, and the image is terrifying to me.
It represents, to me, my own mental illness, and I can see someone who really desperately needs help.
If you see her in the video, she could be your friend in California who smokes a lot of weed or whatever, just like into horoscopes.
She really is an innocuous person, and I don't know, it communicated something to me when I saw that image, and I've not been able to get it out of my head.
So, on April 9th of 2020, she makes her very first post about QAnon on Facebook, and that post is a link to the QAnon documentary Out of Shadows, which we recently covered in a premium episode.
So eventually she gets the Qdrop app on her phone and she starts posting screenshots of new Qdrops on Facebook and then she becomes a true believer.
She buys into 5G conspiracy theories and vaccine tracking and Frazzledrip and even Trump-Tesla time travel stuff.
She just bought it all.
She also apparently bought into conspiracy theories about the hospital ships.
In fact, the reason that she went to the pier was because she was convinced that it was near the hospital ship Comfort.
Like we discussed in the Mole Children episode, there's this faction of QAnon who believes that the hospital ships are being used to rescue children who are in deep underground bases.
But in reality, she had mistakenly believed that the USS Intrepid was the hospital ship Comfort.
So she just saw a big boat.
So, like, the closest she's gonna come to, like, doing anything is essentially standing out on a pier, potentially in front of the right boat.
But then, like, the stuff that she's kind of being arrested for is, like, threatening to kill, like, Joe Biden, who she knows is not on the USS Comfort.
Like, there's an issue here, you know?
I do kind of think that, like, ideologically diagnosing this person is, like, not very useful.
Absolutely.
Because nothing fits together.
No, yeah.
But it is a perfect example of how, when at their most vulnerable, people can kind of be I guess just kind of intercepted by conspiracy theories and they can like change your life to the point where within months you're ready to take action.
You're ready to drive across the country or you know take knives and store them in the back your car or whatever you know.
that that can happen within months is terrifying to me.
And I know a lot of people say, hey, don't always connect how mental illness
is related to these things. There's lots of mentally ill people who don't do any
of these things. Of course. We wouldn't be pilled if someone said, hey, have you checked out
Out of Shadows? But we can't ignore how these communities prey on people who
already have these vulnerabilities and exploit their existing fears that are valid.
Like her child was sexually assaulted.
And so there's a reason why she kind of tracks predators and pays attention to that and and and twists those desires into something useless that has no more that no longer kind of like links in with reality.
And what it does effectively is destroy their lives and sideline them permanently.
It is shocking how quickly she was not just radicalized in believing, but radicalized to action.
Which is stunning.
I just want to emphasize that I think Jessica Prym is a victim.
She was picked up by the cops on a pier with nothing in her hands.
She was not attacking anybody.
She was ranting and lost her way and she needs help.
Shortly before her arrest, Prym wrote this on Facebook.
Hillary Clinton and her assistant Joe Biden and Tony Podesta need to be taken out in the name of Babylon.
I can't be set free without them gone.
Wake me up.
This is such a powerful own of Joe Biden.
That is so funny.
I never even noticed it until now because I was focused on other aspects of the story, but Hillary Clinton and her assistant Joe Biden is how she opened this message.
Yeah, just to emphasize how quickly this happened.
So her first QAnon post was on April 9th, and then she was arrested on April 29th.
So like, less than a month basically.
It sucks.
The livestream video of Jessica Prim's arrest is not easy to watch.
She actually calls out to a police officer from her car for help, because she's terrified.
She's like trembling and she's weeping and confused and the whole thing sucks.
As Jessica tries to tell the officer what the issue is in that video, she again mentions that QAnon documentary, Fall of the Cabal, and also her belief that Donald Trump speaks directly to her through press conferences.
Somebody sent me the YouTube video, Fall of Cabal, and I watched part five.
I don't know if you've seen it.
Part five?
Part five.
It talks about The Elite Eating Children?
Maybe I could share it all to you, okay?
It's up over my Facebook.
Okay, so this is not someone getting arrested.
They're getting arrested because they're mentally ill and loitering, essentially.
And we're having a panic attack and decided to talk to the cop.
Oh, yeah.
The idea of trying to get a cop to tune in to part five of a QAnon video actually rules.
I think we should do this more often, but this woman needs actual help, and it's not the police arresting her that's gonna fucking help at all.
No, absolutely not.
How is it that in America we arrest people like this?
Like, what the fuck is wrong with us?
I agree.
And look at this.
Look what she got fucking charged for.
I know it's bullshit.
She got charged for like any violent crime.
It was it was like marijuana possession bullshit.
And then it was 18 counts of criminal possession of a weapon for this because she had a bunch of knives in her car.
Um, I hope- I hope- Dude, I bet that shit was just, like, some shit she had stored in, like, an old backpack.
Like, I fucking swear, she doesn't seem at any point like she set out to do anything except just- No.
Yeah.
Nothing about this woman is threatening.
Nothing.
The fact that she's in jail right now instead of getting help?
Go fuck yourself.
I saw some, like, examples of, like, saying, like, oh, a QAnon supporter threatens to kill Joe Biden.
That's why she was arrested.
It's, like, untrue.
There's, like, this woman is a threat to no one but herself.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, I feel like, you know, she became a bigger threat to her own self, you know, because she fell into QAnon instead of a healthier way to deal with whatever issues she is struggling with.
Yeah, she could be doing hashtags, don't believe Tara Reade.
Instead, she has a choice of belief systems.
Yeah, yeah.
She could be blue MAGA or red MAGA, man.
Calling Tara Reade a Russian operative.
Yeah, weird that she's posting at the Russian hours.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess it's sort of like a, um, kind of a trite comparisons makes it made a lot of time.
But what really strikes me is like here, here's a woman who is behaving erratically in part, in part, because she was radicalized by some very specific YouTube content that she names, right?
Yes.
If instead she was like radicalized by say pro-ISIS content or something by some other sort of extremist belief, there'd be an outcry.
And then there would be like efforts to like, you know, talk about how, how to de-radicalize this community.
But for some reason, like someone can say, I am here on a pier with a bunch of knives and I'm having a panic attack because I saw this video on YouTube and nothing's going to happen.
That video is probably not even be taken down.
We live in a country where when McCain died, people on CNN were saying, like, angels are crying.
Like, we live in the most religious, extremist, insane country that believes in, like, demons battling fucking angels, like, right before our eyes if we would just pay attention.
We live in an extremist country.
That's why we don't give a shit about her radicalization.
It's absolutely in line with the entire ideology of, like, you know, kind of radical Christian extremism.
Yeah.
That about sums it up.
But also I do want to say, to take one moment to just tell everybody in the liberal class who thinks this is the enemy and that it's very funny to laugh at people like this, go fuck yourself.
You all disgust me just as much.
Hell yeah, Pimp.
Get it King.
Bill Gates conspiracy theories.
Today, yes, we're going to be talking about Bill Gates, second wealthiest man in the world
and his also incredibly wealthy foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And this foundation has spent $53.8 billion on various programs over the past 20 years.
Now, the large majority of that spending was about $39.8 billion, which went to global development and global health programs.
So, just to cite just one example of the kind of stuff that the Gates Foundation is interested in, they donated $1.5 billion to this public-private health partnership called GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
So, over the past 20 years, that alliance has helped reduce the cost of vaccines and helped immunize 760 million children in some of the world's poorest countries.
And that effort almost certainly helped save millions of lives in the process.
With that and other specific projects, I think that the Gates Foundation has done some undeniably noble work, but I nonetheless remain a strong believer in applying skepticism and scrutiny to powerful people.
So I tasked Julian with trying to see if there's anything about the Gates Foundation that might give someone some pause.
So, Julian, I assume you didn't come up with like anything, you know, substantial that you could like throw out the Gates Foundation.
So let me know if we need to pad out this episode.
Everybody, we found the good billionaire.
Oh, perfect.
It's this guy, and it's him and Warren Buffett, the only two good ones.
And you'll see how they work together to make sure that you believe that.
Oh, beautiful, beautiful.
But before we let Julian loose on the billionaires, I wanted to see if there's any truth to a lot of the conspiracy theories that are swirling around.
So, conspiracy theories about Bill Gates' health agenda have been kicking around since the early 2010s, but they seem to have really reached a fever pitch as the pandemic spread across the globe.
Alex Jones recently was in Austin at a rally and he was chanting, arrest Bill Gates, arrest Bill Gates.
The conspiracy theories around Gates, they tend to portray him as like this Lex Luthor style supervillain who wants to destroy and control humanity.
For example, here's a clip of conspiracy theorists Mark Taylor and Christopher McDonald talking about their views of Bill Gates' evil agenda.
You better believe it.
of hell right now. You better believe it. And he's trying to institute a vaccination program
with nanotechnology in it. We all know that. That's that.
It's just got a conglomerate of things in it. This guy's being used for the depopulization
agenda period. Bill Gates is.
So this guy is not good right now. What I'm saying right now is this guy is being used
to commit genocide. Literal genocide is what this guy's being, uh, is being used for right now.
God, they really every single time that you put the right on and I'm like right before the cliff,
I'm like, I bet I'm going to like, kind of agree with them.
Like he does do bad stuff. And like, he does try to control the world in certain ways and stuff.
And then by the end, I'm like, oh, you morons, I fucking hate you. Well, I mean, there's
Absolutely astroturfing the issue, you motherfuckers!
Well, I mean, their show is called The McFiles, which sounds like something you'd order at McDonald's.
Oh yeah, no, they rule.
The guy on the left looks like he's, uh... His permanent expression is, they just lifted the Klan robe off me, and I'm in surprise.
He is an absolute human cigarette of the of the white supremacist variety.
The other one is the guy who's always yelling about hyper-christian stuff and he has a big nice mustache.
Him I would like to kiss on the mouth.
What I love most about this clip is that the fact that when these people talk about like George Soros, for example, they always talk about him in terms of like a Puppet master who's sort of like behind the scenes and he's making decisions.
But when they talk about Bill Gates, who was like several times wealthier than even the billionaire George Soros, they're like, he's being used, right?
He's being used.
He's the one being controlled.
Would you like me to translate this?
Why do you think that the Jews... He's basically not Jewish.
That's why he's... That's all that matters.
That's all that matters.
Not Jewish.
Imagine if Bill Gates also happened to be Jewish.
Oh, forget about it.
Now forget George Soros.
Soros would literally never be on the tongue of anybody.
So today I want to focus on three conspiracy theories around Gates.
One, that he's implementing an agenda Of like genocide and eugenics.
Number two, that he's trying to microchip everyone.
This is a popular one.
And number three, that he's going to give everyone the mark of the beast through the nonprofit ID2020.
By the way, like the evangelicals, they fucking love Bill Gates conspiracy theories when I was searching through YouTube.
Lots and lots of talk about revelations and the mark of the beast.
And people talk about if Bill Gates is the Antichrist, possibly.
He's inspired their imagination.
So a lot of conspiracy theories around Gates seem to stem from the fact that he has been a very strong advocate for improving vaccine accessibility.
For example, here's what Gates said about the importance of vaccines in a 2011 interview with CNN.
Well, over this decade, we believe unbelievable progress can be made, both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them.
We could cut the number of children who die every year from about 9 million to half of that if we have success on it.
And the benefits there in terms of reducing sickness, reducing the population growth, it really allows a society a chance to take care of itself once you've made that intervention.
Wait, how is the vaccine going to stop the growth of these people?
And why are we trying to stop growth in another country instead of America?
Now, that's a very good point, Julie.
And in fact, a lot of conspiracy theorists actually did seize on that line, his sort of tossaway lines, like, oh, reducing population growth.
Now, I mean, I'll be honest, like you hear a guy worth $100 billion talking about reducing
population, then yeah, okay, I can understand why that would make you wary.
But there are two important things to consider.
Number one, he's not talking about reducing population, which is what a lot of people
accuse him of.
He wants to reduce the number of people on Earth.
So according to a 2011 article in Forbes, in the early days of Bill Gates' efforts on world health,
he focused heavily on providing women with birth control options.
The reason was that if you give women more control over their reproductive choices, then it would lead to smaller families that are easier to care for with the resources available.
And thus, people would be healthier and more people would be lifted out of poverty.
But after pouring through the data, Gates believed that actually expanding the availability of vaccines led to smaller, more manageable families, and it had a lot of other benefits too.
Now, that sounds counterintuitive.
But here's how Gates came to that conclusion, according to that Forbes article.
In society after society, he saw when the mortality rate falls, specifically below 10 deaths per 1000 people,
the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes.
It goes against common sense, Gates says.
Most parents don't choose to have 8 children because they want to have big families, it turns out,
but because they know many of their children will die.
If a mother and a father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size.
In terms of giving, Gates did a 180 degree turn.
Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born.
We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that, says Gates.
So the idea is that, yeah, it's just sort of like a, I don't know, a byproduct of his vaccine program.
He's not actually interested in, you know, controlling the world's population for its own sake.
It's sort of tied into his other goals for world health.
The other big conspiracy theory kicking around, Gates, is that he's using the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to push a vaccine with a microchip capable of tracking everybody.
Now, there isn't really anything to the whole microchip idea.
This idea apparently stems from the fact that the Bill Gates Foundation, they funded a study that was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine in December of 2019.
And it examined one theoretical way to improve immunization tracking in areas where records
aren't very good. So the issue is like, what do you do if you are a healthcare worker who
is treating patients somewhere and you don't have good medical records? You won't be able to know
what vaccines your patients have received and which ones they haven't. So you don't have the
information that you would need to make the best possible health outcomes.
So the proposed solution, which again, I have to emphasize, like theoretical proposed, there's no plans to implement this, is to store... Yeah, because it sounds a bit like catch and release, like what you would do on animals if you were studying them to make sure they're all healthy, but just as a kind of herd, not really as an individual.
Yeah, I know.
But so here's the idea.
The idea is like it would store like the data about the vaccines in a pattern of dye, which is invisible to the naked eye and is delivered in the skin as the same time as the vaccine.
So to accomplish this, the study describes the use of something called the quantum dots.
There are these molecule sized particles that react to near infrared light in the way that could theoretically be identified by a device such as a smartphone.
Man, this can definitely not go wrong.
All we're doing is giving individuals IMEI numbers and just starting to treat them like a good that's circulating and not at all tracking them.
We're just marking them.
I will say this.
There's nothing about this that involves a microchip or anything electronic or any device or anything like that.
It's a micro-branding, basically.
It really is.
It's a micro-branding.
It's a micro-tag.
It can't be seen.
You'd need a device in order to see it.
Who gives a shit if it's a chip or not?
He's encoding data into the skin by printing it.
Who cares if there's a metal piece involved?
It's bad.
I wouldn't do it.
I don't think it's a good idea.
I want to tag and release Travis and his family.
But I think it's important that people object to what the concept is in reality, and not what it is in their conspiratorial fantasies.
Right.
It doesn't literally say 666 Mark of the Beast, is what you're saying.
It says this person's been vaccinated on this date, blah blah blah.
If people have freedom and they can choose to do this or not, do you think they would choose to?
Do you think you could convince any?
Even a fragment of America to getting printed on?
No, of course not.
Of course not.
It was just these think tank dweebs who were presented with a problem.
And they just brainstormed, like, no bad ideas, no bad ideas.
How about we just do a micro invisible die that encodes their information?
Sure, let's try that.
Let's think about it.
Let's bat it around.
It's conceptual.
All the conspiracy theorists think that if the idea was proposed, then it was followed
through to completion, was successful, and is in mainstream trials secretly.
The point is, he's paying a bunch of dweebs to sit in a room and figure out how to get
Africa to grow slower.
There's just something—that is a form of control.
You think you can control other populations in the world that are not of your own country?
You have the right to go and interfere with their growth?
With anything at all is so insane to me.
But I understand that when you get past that stage, then we can talk about this kind of relativity.
But I can't even get past that stage.
For me, it's just flat-out wrong for somebody to be actively fucking studying another country like this if you can't even get your own supposedly free countrymen to go along with it.
You're doing it because you know there's less regulation and less individual freedom in those countries, and so, I don't know.
Just... Yeah, you got a point, Julian.
Yeah.
The real description of what Gates is doing skews you out fine, but focus on that instead.
Yeah, I know.
I don't tend to push the Mark of the Beast conspiracy theory, not yet.
All right.
This podcast is going to take a weird religious turn this next year.
So yet another conspiracy theory surrounding Bill Gates concerns a nonprofit organization called ID2020.
And so here's how one conspiracy theorist on YouTube describes ID2020.
This initiative that Bill Gates is pushing, the ID2020, that has the goal to take a system like maybe even the vaccination system we just said, to have an ID for a billion people, if not maybe seven billion.
Right now they're starting with the poorest people in the world, but they want everyone to have a digital identity, one that can be tracked, one that can be watched, one that can be controlled.
So ID2020, this is like, it's basically this small non-profit think tank.
It was founded in 2016.
And it was designed to address the problems that arise from people who have no identification at all.
So here's how ID2020, their website, describes this problem.
Over 1 billion people worldwide are unable to prove their identity through any recognized means.
As such, they are without the protection of law and are unable to access basic services, participate as a citizen or voter, or transact in the modern economy.
Ah, I love that last one on the list.
They have no ability to do that and they are sad about it.
Most of those affected are children and adolescents and many are refugees, forcibly displaced,
or stateless persons.
So yeah, so ID2020, it basically, it brainstorms and promotes initiatives to expand access
to like digital identification in order to solve that problem.
For example, ID2020 partnered with the city of Austin, Texas to help the city's homeless population through a pilot project called MyPass.
So the problem that they are trying to address is that about half of Austin's homeless have no identification and therefore they don't have the means to access Government services or like housing or employment or even health care often.
So to hopefully solve that, MyPass provides people with the option to store their vital documents digitally using blockchain technology.
Now, I think that, I mean, yeah, there are lots of concerns, I think, around the idea of like a digital sort of like paperwork or digital sort of documents, like especially around like privacy and security.
You want to give like governments like another way to sort of like track your information.
But nothing about that project or any project associated with ID2020 involves implanting a device in your skin.
Even then, all they've done is a handful of papers and pilot projects across the globe.
Take that fucking money and give it to the fucking homeless in Austin, you asshole.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Since you all know my fondness for billionaires, I'm gonna
go soft on Bill Gates up front by stating that he started a business relationship with
Jeffrey Epstein three years after the prolific pedophile and sex traffickers first conviction.
The New York Times covered it because Bill got defensive about his ties to Jeff, stating in August of 2019, quote, I didn't have any business relationship or friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
After Billy made the statement, the New York Times did some investigating and found out, of course, that he was lying.
This is what they concluded.
In fact, beginning in 2011, Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions, including at least three times at Mr. Epstein's palatial Manhattan townhouse, and at least once staying late into the night according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the relationship, as well as documents reviewed by the New York Times.
Employees of Mr. Gates's foundation also paid multiple visits to Mr. Epstein's mansion, and Mr. Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multi-billion dollar charitable fund, an arrangement that had the potential to generate enormous fees for Mr. Epstein.
His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me.
Mr. Gates emailed colleagues in 2011 after his first get together with Mr. Epstein.
Bridget Arnold, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, said he, quote, was referring only to the unique decor of the Epstein residence and Epstein's habit of spontaneously bringing acquaintances to meet Mr. Gates.
What?
What?
Doesn't sound better.
Oh, my fucking God.
Just just Epstein's acquaintances.
Jesus Christ.
Sorry, you had to finish the quote of the spokeswoman.
Yes, Bridget Arnold went on to say, quote, it was in no way meant to convey a sense of interest or approval.
So that's from an article by Emily Flitter and James B. Stewart published in October of 2019.
So pretty recent.
It's accompanied by a photo of Jeffrey Epstein standing with four other men, one of which is Bill Gates and the other of which is the science advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Fantastic.
So I think right here is a good place to kick off our examination of what freelance journalist Bill Schwab called Bill Gates' Charity Paradox in his extensive article for The Nation.
Now, when I say this article is extensive, I mean it was funded by like a reputable journalism fellowship and it reads like a short book.
Like I'm pretty sure he spent like almost all of 2019 working on this.
It's insane.
Wow.
It's truly impressive stuff.
He went through the entire 20 years of records and came up with some great, I think, some great critiques and some insights into how this is all put together by Bill.
But before all that criticism, I'm supposed to give the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation a fair shake.
Now, I'm not gonna lie, that ended up falling on Travis.
He had to review my document, realized it was a lunatic extremist's coverage.
The problem is that I decided to explore the criticism first, and by the end of my research I was so fucking pissed off.
So, I'm gonna let every other fucking outlet give him a fair shake, And I'm just going to report on the avaricious, sickly side
of his sprawling empire that, let's not forget, attempts to control humanity in a variety of ways,
but ultimately serves capital and not the scientific community, or even the idea of an objective truth.
So that's what I'm going to do. If you'd like something else, please refer to the millions of articles online that
seem hell-bent on sucking his dick, particularly ones by, you know, giant media outlets that
still have the name of his company built into their fucking acronym.
Hell yes.
In 2008, Bill Gates announced he would step away from Microsoft and focus on philanthropy.
He used words like creative capitalism and catalytic philanthropy, which is the kind of thing you expect to hear at Davos.
And that's because that's exactly where Bill was when he announced to stall his rich buddies.
He was at Davos.
And at the time, his net worth was over $40 billion.
Now to be fair, Bill Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife in 2000, so one could argue that I'm showing bias by focusing on Bill 8 years later in 2008.
And you know what, you might be right.
His motivations may have been purer in 2000 when his net worth was Uh, 60 billion dollars.
Again, perhaps it's unfair of me to use the past against Bill like this.
What are the results of this great man's philanthropy?
Well, I'm happy to report that this year marks two decades of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and 12 years since Bill stepped away from Microsoft to focus on philanthropy.
And that's why today, Bill is only worth $106 billion, which is a number different to $60 billion by approximately 46 positive billions.
So I just want to take a look at what this means, how much money he has, and how the word charitable even comes to describe a person.
Bill Gates is currently worth $106,000 times a million dollars.
So let's say your net worth is $100k, Jake, right?
Okay, no, not close, not even.
That's right, because that's more than double the median net worth in America for your age, so of course you're scared by that number.
So imagine it.
You've accumulated $100,000 of goods and riches.
Incredible stuff, right?
Now imagine giving a homeless person a single dollar bill.
Congratulations, you've just given away a million dollars if we scaled you up to be as rich as Bill Gates.
The reason I point this out is simple.
If Bill donates a million, you'd read about it.
If imaginary well-off Jake gave somebody $1, not only would you not read about it, but quite frankly, I'd wonder why he didn't scrounge up a fiver.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the world's richest private foundation with $46.8 billion in asset at the end of 2018.
By then, Bill and Melinda had donated $36 billion of their own money, which is a lot, but we must keep in mind that this remains smaller than the increase in net worth that Bill experienced between 2000 and 2020.
So let's take a look at what they got in return for that money.
Here is noted anti-capitalist outlet Forbes explaining in 2017.
Bill Gates is the richest person in the world.
He achieved that station by co-founding and then leading Microsoft to incredible success.
Most of his wealth came not from his salary, but from Microsoft stock that he owns, equal to about 10% of the company's outstanding shares.
Wealth gained from stock price appreciation is not taxable until you sell the shares.
By holding most of his shares since the company's founding, Mr. Gates delayed paying tax on those capital gains.
By donating the shares to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that wealth will never be taxed.
Thus, the fact that capital gains are not taxed as long as the asset is held and, in real estate, not even when sold if the proceeds are reinvested in a like asset, And the existence of the charitable donation, tax deduction, have provided Bill Gates with what might be called the biggest tax break in history.
The federal government likely lost out on 15 to 20 billion dollars.
Even for the federal government, that is real money.
Enough to, for example, run the State Department for about a year.
Holy shit!
Department from that one tax break.
Holy shit.
Now, this is Forbes, so they're proud of this.
They think it's awesome.
And actually, they go on to say that if you consider all the good the foundation does,
quote, a strong case can be made that the ability of Bill and Melinda Gates to keep
their money and use it for charitable purposes was the biggest and best tax break in American
history.
So the first thing to understand about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that
its primary activity is actually investment, in that it owns stocks and bonds in various
private companies.
These include massive pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Sanofi, and Pfizer, but also, even more confusingly, in companies like Berkshire Hathaway.
So what is Berkshire Hathaway?
The foundation's primary investment, in fact, the Billy and Melinda Gates Foundation, is $11 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock, which a lot of it was given to them by Warren Buffett, who got his own tax breaks, of course.
So this is a multinational owned by billionaire Warren Buffett, and in turn it owns Geico, Duracell, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, BNSF, Lubrizol, Halsberg, Diamonds, etc.
It's just insane.
It's a huge, huge company.
And it also has its own investments in companies like MasterCard and Coca-Cola, both of which
the foundation has helped over the years.
So before we even get into some of the investment stuff, let's talk about those tax breaks
first, because I want to be completely fair to them.
You know, this is not just a way to completely pay no taxes, although we have seen some corporate
entities manage that with the loopholes.
But I'm sure that Bill would do it if he could.
But he's trying his best, you know.
So here's the nation.
By Bill Melinda Gates's estimations, they have seen an 11 percent tax savings on their
36 billion dollar in charitable donations through 2018, resulting in around four billion
dollars in avoided taxes.
The foundation would not provide any documentation related to this number, and independent estimates
from tax scholars like Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College, indicate that multi-billionaire
see tax savings of at least 40 percent, which for Bill Gates would amount to 14 billion
dollars.
When you factor in the tax benefits that charity offers to the super-rich, avoidance of capital gains taxes, normally 15%, and the state taxes, 40% on everything over $11.58 million, which in Gates' case is a lot.
The funny thing is like Gates's dad was a lawyer and he actually did like lobby Congress a lot to try to keep the state tax in because he thought that it was like creating dynasties.
But then if you look at what Gates did actually like he was actually simultaneously kind of going against that grain with a lot of his companies and decisions he was making.
It seems like we have this case of a dad who's a pretty wealthy, well-off, lib kind of guy.
I mean, he is trying to change legislation, and he does have his beliefs about what it means to be very wealthy, obviously, and to pay an estate tax and all that.
But Bill is brought up in this environment of wealth, and he then starts a company and tells a story about himself as just a regular schmuck who started in his garage, of course, even though his family was wealthy before that.
Yeah, his garage had fucking carpet, probably.
There was carpet in his garage, yeah.
And a good smell.
I'll bet he had a good-smelling basement.
But what's kind of infuriating about all this is that, through these tax write-offs, the average American is effectively subsidizing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which it really does not need, as we will see in a moment, because it's really, really good at making fucking tons of money by investing.
So, when I found out that the foundation held stocks and bonds, I looked it up and I found myself incredibly confused.
And this is by design.
He tries to obfuscate everything he personally invests in.
So, he just leaves a lot of the portfolio that is built through the foundation open.
In fact, the confusion seems shared by the financial media.
Or maybe they're not confused.
Maybe they actually just don't see the foundation as separate from Bill himself.
In fact, Investopedia has an updated article entitled, This is What Bill Gates' Portfolio Looks Like.
And then it goes on to repeat, quote, what Bill Gates' portfolio looks like.
But this is immediately followed by the line, quote, the following are some of the foundation's most prominent holdings, which is weird.
So what's the first item in Bill's portfolio as listed by Investopedia?
Well, it's the aforementioned $11 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock held by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
So one last thing before we move on.
Bill Gates serves on the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway.
Here is The Nation.
And again, this is Schwab from his article.
The nation found close to $250 million in charitable grants from the Gates Foundation
to companies in which the foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds.
Merck, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Vodafone, Sanofi, Ericsson LG, Medtronic, Teva, and
numerous startups.
With the grants directed at projects like developing new drugs and health monitoring
systems and creating mobile banking services.
A foundation giving a charitable grant to a company that it partly owns and stands to benefit from financially, would seem like an obvious conflict of interest.
But judging from the sparse rules that Congress has written governing private foundations
and the IRS's light enforcement of them, many in the federal government do not appear to see it that
way.
Again, this may seem alarming if you think of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation primarily as a foundation,
but not if you think of it as an investment arm and tax evasion tool that also happens to do charitable work.
The numbers on this are pretty damning.
Like, in the last five years, the foundation spent $23.5 billion on charitable grants, but it made $28.5 billion in investment income in all these private companies that are...
Maintaining the status quo that they claim to be trying to change.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on.
My small pea-sized brain is having trouble wrapping my head around this.
So the foundation made more dollars Than it spent?
It actually made $5 billion more than it spent.
Yes.
Because it is primarily an investment company.
It's not actually a charitable foundation.
It's mainly an investment company with a charitable foundation attached to it.
And do we know what happens to that extra just $5 billion?
Well, it keeps it the world's most rich foundation.
So just halving the capital.
So it's actually just an extension of his wealth.
Right.
It's just another bank account essentially for him to hold an extra $65 billion in or whatever.
It's the kind of bank account where you get a lot back on your dollar, if you know what I mean.
You're getting some really good savings on that credit card.
This is just incredible.
This is the best version of your bank account, where every time you spend money, the taxpayer has to subsidize you.
And good PR.
The foundation also seems to have an interest in regulation and law surrounding philanthropy itself.
You're kidding me.
This is from the article again.
Naturally, big philanthropy has special interest groups pushing back on the creation of such rules.
The Philanthropy Roundtable defends the wealthiest Americans' quote, freedom to give, end quote, describing itself as fighting the quote, increasing pressures from some public officials and advocacy groups The Gates Foundation donated $2.5 million to this group between 2005 and 2016.
That foundation was joined in this by right-wing billionaires including Charles Koch.
$2.5 million to this group between 2005 and 2016. That foundation was joined in this by
right-wing billionaires including Charles Koch. Schwab explains,
While there is no credible argument that Bill and Melinda Gates used charity primarily as
a vehicle to enrich themselves or their foundation, it is difficult to ignore the occasions where
their charitable activities seem to serve mainly private interests, including theirs,
including the schools their children attend, the companies their foundation partly owns,
and the special interest groups that defend wealthy Americans, while generating billions
of dollars in tax savings.
When the Gates Foundation has faced criticism in regard to its endowment, including investments in prisons, fast food, the arms industry, pharmaceutical companies, and fossil fuels, conflicting with its charitable mission to improve health and well-being, Gates has pushed back in black and white terms, calling divestment a, quote, false solution that will have zero impact.
Ah, now that reminds me of the old Bill Gates, the one we all hated for making a shitty operating system and destroying Netscape to make us all use his less good browser, Internet Explorer.
So how the fuck did this guy change everybody's minds on what he's up to in life and in the world?
Well, here's from The Nation again.
But he was also an embattled billionaire, still licking his wounds from a series of legal battles around the monopolistic business practices that made him so extravagantly wealthy.
And that compelled Microsoft to pay billions of dollars in fines and settlements.
In a recent Q&A with the Wall Street Journal, he revisited his legal face-off with antitrust regulators, saying, quote, I can still explain to you why the government was completely wrong, but that's really old news at this point.
For me personally, it did accelerate my move into that next phase 2-5 years sooner of shifting my focus over to the Foundation.
Gates's view of Microsoft as the victim of overzealous antitrust regulations may help explain the laissez-faire ethos driving his charitable giving.
His foundation has given money to groups that push for industry-friendly government policies and regulation, including the Drug Information Association, directed by Big Pharma, and the International Life Science Institute, Funded by Big Ag.
He has also funded nonprofit think tanks and advocacy groups that want to limit the role of government or direct its resources towards helping business interests like the American Enterprise Institute, the American Farm Bureau Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and organizations associated with the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce.
So he clearly doesn't think he's done anything wrong.
And in fact, he's a lot of what the foundation does as well is just kind of invest in ways to never have that happen again, to never have a large company that wants to take a monopoly get punished like that again, which is just really worrying that he would want that.
I mean, if you respect capitalism, like Netscape was the better browser.
Yeah, I mean, I remember that.
We suffered through many years of shitty Internet Explorer before Chrome and Firefox came around and had some better options.
Yeah, they destroyed Netscape, then Mozilla rose in the wake, and Firefox now still exists as an open source project.
He tried his best to basically destroy the open market on ideas there.
And I mean, it kind of fits in with his operating system, which he ripped off Mac as well and just said, what if it had no regulation and we just let the software people do whatever they want with it?
We could sell it to more people.
I mean, he's a very intelligent capitalist.
And I think that that's one thing that I've noticed with Gates is that what he uses his
intelligence for is to craft this incredibly intelligently woven private public charitable
non charitable structure that reinforces itself constantly.
So you'll see the connection of like you'd have to follow the layers to understand how
it actually works.
So when you see the Gates Foundation working with Coca-Cola you wouldn't immediately go
oh that's because Berkshire Hathaway owns like most of Coca-Cola and then in it and
then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation owns 11 billion of stock in Berkshire Hathaway.
It's like a whole pyramid.
But I just want to show you how this kind of interwoven thing works in different industries.
So let's start with education.
Here's from the article again.
Between 2011 and 2014 the Gates Foundation gave roughly 100 million dollars to In Bloom
an educational technology initiative that dissolved in controversy around privacy issues
and its collection of personal data and information about students.
To Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University, In Bloom illustrates the way Gates is, quote, working to push technologies in classroom to replace teachers with computers.
That affects Microsoft's bottom line, Ravitch observes.
However, I've never made that argument.
The foundation is not looking to make money from this business.
They have an ideological interest in free markets.
Here's how the same kind of interwoven system works in the pharmaceutical industry.
Microsoft's bottom line is heavily dependent on patent protections for its software, and the Gates Foundation has been a strong and consistent supporter of intellectual property rights, including for the pharmaceutical companies with which it works closely.
The patent protections are widely criticized for making life-saving drugs prohibitively expensive, particularly in the developing world.
Quote, he uses his philanthropy to advance a pro-patent agenda on pharmaceutical drugs, even in countries that are really poor, says longtime Gates critic James Love, the director of the non-profit Knowledge Ecology International.
Quote, Gates is sort of the right wing of the public health movement.
He's always trying to push things in a pro-corporate direction.
He's a big defender of the big drug companies.
He's undermining a lot of things that are really necessary to make drugs affordable to people that are really poor.
It's weird because he gives so much money to fight poverty and yet he's the biggest obstacle on a lot of the reforms.
So, you see how you can be your own controlled opposition within a capitalist market by using charity, and it's actually really effective, especially if you have a couple of media arms who will just toe the line for you every time you donate 5, 10 billion, or whatever, even though we've explored not that much of your bottom line.
And also, it's actually going to help you make more money, because people will think, hey, he's a good guy, so I'm down to spend money on the companies that he owns, actually.
If the PR works, it's actually profitable for him as well.
But the whole point of these examples is just to show you how intelligently Bill Gates has built this empire.
Everything is interconnected, but you can never really say that he did the bad thing, because it's always like three steps between each thing.
And you're like, well, yes, that does make sense that if he overall is pushing the whole world to digitize the classroom, Microsoft will be making billions of dollars selling those to the third world.
Right?
Like, there's always something with him.
There's never a single, like, just simple, straightforward, I care about this.
There's always a bottom line, and what he keeps in place is the corporates.
Because he owns, he literally owns stock in them.
In fact, not only does he own stock in them, but the foundation itself owns stock in them.
So if the problems were ever solved, how the fuck is Merck gonna make a buck?
Like, you know, it's...
It just doesn't make financial sense for the foundation to actually be working to permanently change the world only to patch up the issues with the system that as run by corporations, which is of course heartless as we know and puts a kind of a price on a human life.
And so I can only kind of extrapolate from that that perhaps Bill doesn't care as much about human life as he pretends to sometimes when he's making big speeches.
Sometimes he even tells you that he's kind of making this interwoven and interconnected thing.
In some places, the Gates Foundation explicitly marries its investing in charitable activities.
Gates' quote, strategic investment fund, which the foundation says is designed to advance its philanthropic goals, not to generate investment income, includes a $7 million equity stake in the startup company Agbiome.
whose other investors include the agrochemical companies Monsanto and Syngenta.
The foundation also gave the company $20 million in charitable grants to develop pesticides for African farmers.
Similarly, the foundation has a $50 million stake in Intarsia and an $8 million investment in Just Biotherapeutics, to which it gave $25 million and $32 million in charitable grants, respectively, for work related to HIV and malaria.
At one point, the foundation held a 48% stake in an HIV diagnostic company called ZioMix, to which it previously awarded millions of dollars in charitable grants.
So, if you think of Bill Gates as a charitable man, a philanthropist, a humanist even, with some sort of interest in the well-being of mankind at large, then please attempt to maintain this image as we continue reading from the same article.
And this is going into some research that was done by the Los Angeles Times.
In 2007, In one of the few investigative journalism series ever published about the Foundation, the Los Angeles Times profiled the Foundation's investments in mortgage lenders involved in subprime loans and for-profit hospitals accused of performing unneeded surgeries.
The Times also noted the Foundation's investments in chocolate companies that depend on cocoa production using child labor.
The Gates Foundation spokesperson says it, quote, does not comment on specific investment decisions or holdings, but did note that the, quote, sole purpose of its endowment is, quote, to provide income to support the Foundation's mission and be capable to do so over the long term.
The Gates Foundation's endowment currently has an $11.5 billion stake in Berkshire Hathaway, which in turn has $32 million invested in the chocolate company, Mondelez, which has been criticized in relation to the use of child labor.
The foundation made $32.5 million in charitable donations to the World Cocoa Foundation, an industry group whose members include Mondelez, for a project to improve farmer livelihoods.
The project doesn't appear to address Child labor.
So this one, it's just incredible to me.
He literally owns money in a child labor cocoa project, basically through the foundation.
And then he's giving money to the industry of cocoa that is doing the child labor.
And there's nothing about child labor in any of the papers, even though they were already defending against multiple accusations.
So it's just this kind of thing that just makes me think that the guy doesn't fucking care.
And it makes me also think, why is this not being investigated?
Like a single one of these should be putting a person to jail.
That's why I, you know, I don't believe it's horseshoe theory to agree with Alex Jones that Bill Gates should be in jail.
I think he should be in jail for white collar fraud.
For fucking tax evasion and white collar fraud.
So is this shit getting investigated by some sort of regulatory committee of some kind?
Fuck no.
And I mean specifically fuck no for Bill Gates from 2000 to 2014.
Here's from the article again.
State Attorneys General can exercise oversight of private foundations, as the New York Attorney General's Office did in 2018 when it investigated Donald Trump's private foundation, which shut down amid allegations that he used it for his personal benefit.
The Gates Foundation's location in Seattle gives the state of Washington purview over its charitable work, but the State Attorney General's Office says it did not have full-time staff dedicated to
investigating charitable activities until 2014 a decade after the foundation became the largest
philanthropy in the world The Washington AG's office would not comment on whether it
has ever investigated the Gates Foundation Justin furiating
They didn't have- oh, we couldn't staff it, I guess.
We was gonna, but we didn't have the people.
Johnny called in sick, so we couldn't look into the rich crime.
The article ends, I think, in quite a bit of panache, reminding us how far the Overton window has shifted on this kind of stuff.
100 years ago.
When oil baron John D. Rockefeller asked Congress to provide him with a charter to start a private foundation, his ambitions were soundly rejected as an anti-democratic power grab.
As Theodore Roosevelt said at the time, No amount of charities and spending such fortunes can
compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.
Damn, Teddy Roosevelt.
Damn, T-Rose.
Teddy Trustbuster.
Punched him in the dick twice.
He would have hated Bill Gates.
He would have absolutely punched Bill Gates in the dick.
Bill Gates is a monster.
Featuring Robert Evans.
The crowd waited anxiously in the hot sun, maybe a dozen of them, sitting underneath the shade of the decaying Millennium Falcon.
The sky was a clean, brilliant blue.
No trace of smog.
The sun glared off of the cement of the abandoned theme park.
Here he comes!
shouted one of the followers.
Lord Gates!
shrieked another.
God damn it, thought Robert Evans.
What had started as a laid-back Saturday with some of his friends had turned into an all-out apocalypse as the third wave of the virus hit, this time coupled with the power of 5G technology.
99.9 repeating percent of the world's population had been wiped out, save for a handful of Silicon Valley elites who allowed themselves to be microchipped, courtesy of Microsoft, in exchange for the vaccine.
Evans didn't have a microchip.
He just happened to be incredibly unlucky.
A fuzzy Tauntaun he had drank in that fateful day at the cantina had somehow given him branch immunity.
His friends perished.
Only he and a handful of dads had survived.
And then Gates showed up with his platoon of imbeciles.
It had been a shitty month.
Trapped at Disneyland, completely dependent on their ecosystem, Evans had considered jumping from the peak of Space Mountain.
But the journalist in him couldn't miss an opportunity to document Bill Gates' strange Silicon Disney cult.
He knew this would end badly.
He just didn't particularly care.
Power!
Unlimited power!
I'm joking, of course.
approaching his 70s, took to the stage adjacent to the massive replica starship. A small stuffed
animal creature was perched on his shoulder.
Power! Unlimited power! I'm joking, of course. How is everyone?
There was a light smattering of applause.
About a hundred feet away, buzzards picked at the eyes of a large Donald Duck costume, the park actor decaying inside.
Gates straightened up and cleared his throat.
If you had told me a couple years ago that one day I'd be living inside of Disneyland with the last twelve people on Earth, I would have said, you're probably right.
Crowd chuckled, sucking neon blue milk out of big plastic glow-in-the-dark jugs.
What the fuck did I write?
He thinks, it's like so far we have Star Wars and a rave going on at once
Like, you were what, blackout drunk at this point?
I think you started writing this one drunk Like this one has signs of you not being okay right off the
bat This is gonna be, hmm
Well, I guess the show must go on You see, Melinda and I spent years crafting the perfect virus to depopulate the world.
While COVID-19 was only intended to relieve about 70% of all human beings, it seems that in true Microsoft fashion, we've outdone ourselves once again.
And well, ever since a little kid, it's always been a dream of mine to live here at Disneyland.
Specifically, inside of the Peter Pan ride.
That's it.
Evans would rather face the wasteland alone than be holed up with these assholes.
He lit a cigarette and began to dust himself off before standing and walking towards the galaxy's edge exit tunnel.
Hey, what are you doing, man?
A guy with his shaggy hair and a Weezer t-shirt grabbed Evans by the shoulder.
Don't you want to see gameplay from the next Xbox?
Evans found himself surrounded.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for some piece of technology promised to them by Gates.
Ugh, it's the end of the fucking world, man.
What games are you even going to play?
Aw, man!
New Assassin's Creed!
Didn't you see the trailer announcement?
One of the dads started to list features off the new Surface Pro.
Evans' heart began to race.
He had been surrounded by assholes waving guns for the last decade.
And yet, this excited dad was giving him the fear.
Evans zeroed in on the $200 lightsaber strapped to the guy's back.
No doubt purchased for a son whose skeleton was rotting somewhere in the park.
With a quick fluid motion, Evans grabbed the saber out of the cylindrical black bat.
The saber looked incredibly realistic, with a full sound package that hummed and purred as Evan waved it around.
It was cool, he thought.
But $200 cool?
Hard to say.
Stay the fuck back.
The group of Gates' followers closed in.
Evans knew the sword couldn't actually melt their flesh, but by golly if he wasn't going to break it over one of these idiots' heads.
That's quite enough!
Gates said calmly, William, grab him.
Evans did a double take.
From behind the small stage emerged an unmistakable man with silver hair and a sharp gray suit.
He held a plastic... I just hurt my jaw.
I'm just imagining him come out.
Fuck.
I love Bill Mitchell.
He had a plastic prop Star Wars blaster in his hand as he approached Evans.
By the power entrusted to me as sheriff, I hereby order you to accompany me immediately to Tom Sawyer's Island.
Evan stared at the man.
Do I know you?
The man stared back, curious.
I don't know.
You ever do cocaine with Jimmy?
Evan shook his head.
What?
No.
The man laughed.
You look like a guy who might do cocaine with Jimmy.
That's why I asked.
Guess you must have met in another life then.
He has a reverse AA?
Like instead of Friends of Bill, because he's in recovery, but it's like open, he just says cocaine in the name.
Cocaine with Jimmy!
Incredible.
This is actually where you're at your finest.
Oh no.
The man pulled the trigger of the prop gun, which made some piddly laser sounds.
It was clear the toy was running out of batteries!
To Sawyer's Island with you, traitor!
I can't wait to test out the jail I made!
Out of leaves!
That won't be necessary.
Bill Gates' voice cut through the din.
I'm sure Robert and the rest of you Adam and Eves would love to see the roadmap for Earth Windows 10 Professional Edition.
Evans couldn't believe how dumb it sounded.
The rest of the zombies turned around and cheered.
Gates continued.
Melinda will be passing around full jugs of Tauntaun milk.
Sure enough, Melinda appeared with giant jugs of frothy, neon-colored milk and passed one to her husband.
She then waltzed out into the small crowd and began handing them out to the rest.
Bill raised his glass.
Before we unveil what myself and Melinda have worked so hard on these past 18 months, I'd like to propose a toast.
I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions, they will be moved to act.
Here's to all the believers that bought the ticket and took the ride. He tipped his head back and took a large
gulp of the disgusting looking liquid.
Everyone else did the same, except for Robert Evans of course. He knew better than to drink
the milk. Behind them, a large screen was being projected.
On it, crude hieroglyphics.
There were pictures of hundreds of children riding a log flume into a fiery mountain.
Uh-oh.
Thud Evans, this couldn't be good.
It was never good when it came to billionaires who had their hands in both video game consoles and coronaviruses.
Since we are all that remains of the human race, it is our task to repopulate the world intelligently.
Phase one, everyone will pair up with a member of the opposite sex.
Once the children are born, we will store them inside the caverns of Splash Mountain.
Some of the followers began to look uneasy.
A murmur of dissent rippled through the crowd.
Wait, I thought we were gonna get access to the Xbox Series X and 8K monitors.
The kid yelled, Yeah, where's my Surface Pro?
shouted one of the dads.
The man with the silver hair and the gray suit piped up.
I am anxiously awaiting my mating assignment, my lord.
I shall name my first 100 sons Kahikali.
Gates began to cackle.
There's no use trying to revolt.
The milk we have all drank is contaminated with a new, even more potent strain of the coronavirus, and only I have the vaccine.
Gates brandished a small syringe with an amber-colored serum inside.
He calmly placed the needle into his heart and injected himself without so much as a grimace that something was wrong.
Gates doubled over, crying out in pain.
Evans and Gates' followers watched in horror as Bill's muscles began to ripple, stretching his sweater until it disintegrated into shreds along his hulking back.
He seemed to almost double in size, all the while howling a ferocious cry.
People took off in various directions into the theme park.
The man with the silver hair and grey suit ran over next to the hulking monster's side, doing his best to match its ferociousness.
That's right!
Run, you cowards!
Final Form Bill Gates will rule the world, and I, his trusted advisor!
The monster reached down and popped the man's head in between his fingertips with a small poof, and his body crumpled to the ground.
It set its sights directly on Evans.
I'll say it again.
God damn it.
Evans sighed.
He took off running with the monster in tow.
Evans sprinted towards a couple of small metal railings.
He hopped them and ducked behind a wall sporting a large Peter Pan mural.
He crept through rows of heavy black curtains looking over his shoulder.
Evans could hear the monster grunting behind him.
All of a sudden, Evans found himself in a large room.
Tiny stars twinkled above him on the ceiling.
Below him, a miniature village with hundreds of small windows giving off peaceful glow.
Evans just managed to duck out of the way as a floating pirate ship whisked above his head.
He watched as it flew around the city and then disappeared into the darkness.
It was so mesmerizing, he didn't manage to see the hulking monster lumber into the chamber behind him.
Robert spun around, face to face with the beast.
When standing in the middle of the tiny village, it looked like some sort of Godzilla behemoth, ready to tear down skyscrapers with a swipe of its hand.
But the monster's expression was one of sadness.
It looked around at the amusement park ride forlornly.
Desperately searching for whatever piece of humanity was left inside, if any.
For a brief second, Robert Evans thought the monster might change its mind.
That it would go back to being a regular human monster instead of a mutated, hacker-looking one.
But alas, whatever was left of Bill Gates died right then and there in the soft glow of the artificial stars.
You cannot escape me, Robert.
I have been rich for so long, reality bends to my will.
Stars give way and explode at my desire.
The monster reached up, crushing one of the small light bulbs in his massive hands.
Buildings tremble in my wake.
The monster stamped his feet a little bit, causing the cardboard buildings to rock and
sway back and forth.
Bow to me, and together we will shape a new world.
A world far more successful than the one we're leaving behind.
Evans heard something.
A familiar sound, quickly approaching.
Bow to me!
The creature roared, flecks of saliva spraying from its sharpened rows of teeth.
Evans smiled.
Fine.
Whoosh!
He quickly dropped to his knees as a flying pirate ship flew overhead and past him, decapitating the creature in a single swoop!
Its head and body tumbled into the village below.
Evans got to his feet and dusted himself off.
He pulled out a crumpled cigarette from his front pocket and lit it.
Success is a lousy teacher.
It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
He flicked a cigarette into the city and walked away as it went up in flames behind him.
Evan seized awake.
He glanced around his bedroom.
Sunlight was beginning to creep through under the blinds.
Fuck.
Still drunk.
He sat up in his chair rubbing his eyes.
As the room came into focus, Evans noticed an email open on his laptop in front of him.
Sent around 2.30 AM.
The sender?
Jake Rokitansky.
The subject line?
Robert Evans.
Bill Gates.
Apocalypse Story.
Sorry for sending so late.
The End.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You should go follow Robert Evans, who was the guest for the story.
I write okay on Twitter, and you can also listen to his podcast, Behind the Bastards.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
There's actually over like 70 of them right now.
When you subscribe, you help us stay advertising-free and editorially independent.
You can join us on Twitch.
That's twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous.
And for anything else, we have the website.
You can go there for stuff like access to the Discord community, infamous Lost episodes, music from the soundtrack.
All of that is free.
And you can also find merch there.
Plenty of it.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
To all the people of Wuhan, you made a great sacrifice to be in this very strict quarantine.
I'm very glad that it succeeded, but I'm sure that the difficulties were very great.
And so we're thankful that you made these sacrifices.
Being at ground zero of an infectious disease is an incredible challenge.
You know, you made changes, you know, work was stopped, your living was very different, and now the goal that all of that had, which is getting the cases down to very small numbers, and still being super open about, okay, where are those cases?
That critical thing is something that people should feel good about, and I hope that we can get things even more back to normal in the months ahead.
We use testing data to see where do we still need to restrict things and where can we go partially back to normal.
