Joe Rogan ripped into billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates on Wednesday and accused him and others who profited during the COVID-19 pandemic of causing widespread harm.
In an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan took issue with Gates’ promotion of vaccines and his public health messaging during the pandemic. Rogan criticized Gates for his early endorsements of COVID-19 vaccines, which he said were promoted before their effects were fully understood.
“Bill Gates, who’s on television telling everybody, get the vaccine. You won’t get Covid. And then afterward, that didn’t work after he had unloaded all of his stock,” Rogan said.
The podcast host doubled down on the consequences of decisions made by the tech mogul and other influential figures during the pandemic.
“It turns out Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought it was. Well, you guys are really responsible for a bunch of people taking a medication that was unproven,” Rogan said.
He further lambasted Gates and others for their roles in what he described as a cascade of societal disruptions.
“You’re responsible for all the side effects. You’re responsible for all these, and you’re responsible for fearmongering, lying, closing down businesses, [out] there ruining economies, changing the political structure of the country,” Rogan said --->READ MORE HERE
We do know, don’t we?, that money can, in fact, solve a lot of problems—maybe not all of them, and it can create or exacerbate some, but it can certainly be of help in trying to meet challenges, on either personal or societal levels. Most of us would take it.
Very-moneyed Bill Gates himself is also a problem, as is his philanthropy—institutionally, in the form of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and as practiced by it and its many related entities—according to Tim Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. Gates personally and the Gates Foundation, which in January announced a 2024 spending budget of $8.6 billion, are representative icons of that which could and should be considered “Big Philanthropy.” It’s a problem—perhaps a challenge and/or opportunity, as well, but a problem. It’s ours, defined in more than one way. And we don’t need to take it.
Schwab is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. His worldview is left of center, and his problem with Gates and the Gates Foundation is, at core, borne of his discomfort with their anti-democratic attitudes, tendencies, and behavior—in their arrogance and their giving—all of which is in tension with, if not outright contrary to, an actual or purely charitable impulse. The philanthropic problem described by Schwab in The Bill Gates Problem is first and foremost all of ours, in his view, as American citizens who may want at least something of a plain old democratic say in things.
“We must recognize at all times that billionaire philanthropists are not neutral charity workers or unimpeachable humanitarians, but, in fact, powerful political actors who seek to use their wealth to advance their own interests and reputations, often in ways that harm society and democracy,” according to Schwab, specifically citing Gates, Charles Koch, and Michael Bloomberg as examples.
For conservatives who plausibly see big, establishment philanthropy as financially creating, sustaining, and enhancing a centralized system of elite, well-credentialed and -connected experts that overbearingly and coercively applies top-down, scientifically “proven,” data-driven, progressive solutions to social problems—one to which we never consented—Schwab’s Gates problem and the larger, Big Philanthropy one it exemplifies are ours in particular, too.
None of us needs to take it.
Made to understand
The Bill Gates Problem convincingly and comprehensively makes a case that Gates is neither who you think he is, nor is he who he wants you to think he is, nor is he who he says to others and thinks he is to himself. “Bill Gates is not simply donating money to fight disease and improve education and agriculture. He’s using his vast wealth to acquire political influence, to remake the world according to his own narrow worldview,” Schwab writes. “[W]e’ve been made to understand that Bill Gates is a philanthropist when he is, in fact, a power broker. And we’ve been made to see the Gates Foundation as a charity when it is, in fact, a political organization—a tool Bill Gates uses to put his hands on the levers of public policy.”
Saying to others something about yourself that’s not true just means hypocrisy, of course; thinking to yourself something that’s not true is worse: it’s a self-lie—maybe the worst kind, giving rise to societally detrimental artifices in this case, but harmful to its individual or institutional propagator in almost all cases.
In Schwab’s journalistically damning indictment of a book, for instance, he describes the Gates Foundation as—again, contrary to that which you might think and what it says about and tells itself—in large part, really more of a Microsoft-like, monopolistic pharmaceutical company than anything else, including being the tax-exempt, charitable grantmaker that it’s supposed to be. This may be the indictment’s “Count One.” It is an eye-opening education.
“One reason Bill Gates has made health and medicine the central focus of his philanthropy is that this body of work allows him to draw so heavily on his experience at Microsoft,” as Schwab tells it. “As he explained in a 2019 interview, 40 percent of the foundation’s annual budget goes to research and development to bring new pharmaceuticals to market.” In this market, the foundation is essentially (and again) overbearingly, and sometimes underhandedly, competing with others that do not enjoy is tax advantages as a charity, moreover. A problem.
The foundation has put $500 million into its own nonprofit pharmaceutical enterprise, the Gates Medical Research Institute, according to Schwab, and it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable gifts directly to for-profit pharmaceutical companies “in which the foundation’s endowment reported holding stocks and bonds, like Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis. This means the foundation is sometimes positioned to benefit financially from its charitable partnerships.” --->LOTS MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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