Daniel Greenfield May 11, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
In
1993, Bill proposed to Melinda: an executive at his company. In 1994,
they were married. In 1995, Melinda debuted Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob
treated computer users like idiots who were too stupid to be allowed to
use their computers without a lot of handholding.
Condescending
handholding was also what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offered
the world as one of the industry’s most notoriously miserable human
beings decided to become a philanthropist and save the world from all
the people who weren’t running it properly.
In 2000, Gates
stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, left his day-to-day role in 2008, and
departed as chairman of the board in 2014. He also jettisoned 8 million
shares of the company.
Forget CEO of Microsoft, Bill would use his vast wealth to become the CEO of the world.
Each
of Bill’s resignations followed another ‘Microsoft Bob’, another failed
Microsoft project, from Windows 2000, to Windows Vista in 2006, and
most infamously, Windows 8 in 2014.
Every time Microsoft screwed
up badly, Bill Gates seemed to decide that he should spend less time
trying to make the company that had temporarily made him the richest man
in the world succeed, and more time trying to run the world. Running
the world hasn’t gone well for Gates.
Ever since Bill and Melinda
got away from making bad software and began building a bad non-profit,
the country and the world have been treated to the thoughts and wishes
of the godmother of Microsoft Bob. The only thing more infuriating than
having to endure the hectoring of a soulless nerd who thinks he can
solve the world’s problems is taking it from his trophy wife.
In
2019, Melinda released the obligatory feminist tract that female dot com
tycoons were putting out at the time, titled, “The Moment of Lift: How
Empowering Women Changes the World.”
There was no sense of irony
in a woman who was only rich, famous, and powerful because she had
caught the eye of an obnoxious tech tycoon writing about empowering
women.
The release of Melinda’s book came at an awkward time when
female employees at Microsoft, who weren’t married to Bill, were
complaining about sexual harassment. In one of those complaints, a woman
who worked at Microsoft claimed that a contractor "threatened to kill
her if she did not perform implied sexual acts" and her manager told her
it was just flirting.
Empowering.
The happy couple, Bill
and Melinda (not the Microsoft employee and her potential rapist and
killer), spent some $53 billion from Bill’s wealth obtained by chaining
companies and users to a bad operating system and its bad satellite
software on their ‘philanthropy’. When people think of philanthropy,
they imagine money going to people, but a lot of the Gates fortune went
into policy. Instead of funding people, they funded assorted political
agendas up their alley.
A ton of money from the college dropout
tycoon and his trophy wife went into education where the duo managed to
trash everything from K-12 schooling to the SATs. Meanwhile politicians,
the experts they funded, and the media hailed them as visionaries even
though they had no idea what they were doing. And what they did do was
make American education even worse.
After years of giving talks
and speeches to their own organizations about the amazing progress being
made, Bill and Melinda made a different sort of statement last year
with their letter.
“Why We Swing for the Fences”, issued in 2020,
had one of those ubiquitous mantra titles that Big Tech companies use
to spin their momentous failures as aspirational victories.
Featuring
a photo of Bill and Melinda, maskless, leering down at a skeptical
black woman in a mask, the letter admitted to its "share of
disappointments, setbacks, and surprises".
“When it comes to U.S.
education, though, we’re not yet seeing the kind of bottom-line impact
we expected. The status quo is still failing American students,” Melinda
argued.
But the status quo is the common core and equity nightmare they helped create.
There’s plenty of bottom-line impact from the Gates money. It’s just bad.
After
two decades of doing this, Melinda admitted that, "one thing that makes
improving education tricky is that even among people who work on the
issue, there isn’t much agreement on what works and what doesn’t."
Maybe
they should have considered that admission of ignorance before they
used their vast fortune to force their ideas on millions of parents and
children around the country?
“Are charter schools good or bad?
Should the school day be shorter or longer? Is this lesson plan for
fractions better than that one?” they wrote. “It’s also hard to isolate
any single intervention and say it made all the difference.”
That
momentary admission that they had no idea what they’ve been talking
about for two decades after upending the country’s education system
didn’t stop them from continuing to push their preferred policies
anyway.
Only a massive divorce might be able to do that.
The
shattering of the great corporation of Bill and Mel will mean
potentially dividing up a quarter-million-acres of farmland, an estate
known as Xanadu 2.0 near Seattle, a 229-acre horse farm near San Diego,
another horse farm in Florida, a ranch in Wyoming, and a ski club in
Montana. But it will also mean splitting up their vast philanthropic
enterprise.
Bill will have to take India, while Melinda will have to take Africa.
The
divorcing billionaires will have to decide which of them gets to run
which parts of the world, country by country, and state by state.
Melinda
will set educational policy in Colorado, while Bill will call the shots
in Arizona schools. One will take South Dakota and the other will take
North Dakota. Bill will get everything in California north of Los
Angeles, while Melinda will control the schools below the divorce line.
In
their fence-swinging letter, Bill and Melinda claimed that they were
already focusing on separate monogrammed issues: “climate change” for
him and “gender equity” for her.
Considering Bill’s massive
estates, including a $43 million oceanfront beach house in San Diego
County, and Melinda’s fortune by way of marriage and then divorce,
global warming and gender equity seem like the perfect causes for them
to virtue signal their hypocrisy.
A cockeyed optimist might hope
for a wake-up call in which Bill and Melinda finally realize that they
can’t run their own lives, or Microsoft, and so they probably shouldn’t
be running the world.
There’s also a lesson in humility there for
their younger peers like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the
industry in which college dropouts make a fortune from a product, and
decide that hitting a niche at the right time makes them superior beings
qualified to run the world.
The Gates divorce may be bad news
for the couple, but it’s good news for local communities, parents, and
reformers who actually want to be able to run their own school systems.
And everyone in any field, from health care to education to energy, who
was tired of being dictated to by a power couple and their vast
organization and fantastic wealth, is breathing a sigh of relief.
The
divorce is likely to weaken the Gates machine. It won’t destroy its
hold over our daily lives, but as the two sets of lawyers circle each
other, it may give us some breathing room.
And that’s a good thing.
Microsoft
Bob went away, but it spawned the Comic Sans font. Like Bob, the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation is likely to be history, but it will
continue to haunt us anyway.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
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