OPINION:
Bill Gates, Microsoft founder-turned-vaccine-developer, just came out and predicted that the world, weary as it is from the coronavirus, will see a return to complete normalcy by 2022.
The proper response to that prediction, at least for Americans, is: Who the blank is Bill Gates to say? But sadly, in these fear-driven, emotionally-charged, chaotic times of COVID-19, when the government has successfully seized control of the Constitution, the likelier response, even from Americans, will probably be: Cheers all around, because Gates has seen the finish line.
As if Bill Gates predicts, so Bill Gates must be believed.
As if Bill Gates speaks, so it must be true.
Take a memo, America. This guy is not a god. We should stop treating him as if he’s anything except a dude with an opinion.
It’s interesting that Gates is presented as the person who so presciently predicted and prophesied the pandemic of our current sufferings, way back in 2015. Because — he didn’t.
Not really. In a 2015 Ted Talk, Gates said that the world would not be prepared for a “virus where people feel well enough while they’re infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market.” He also said that “if anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus …” That’s not exactly a narrowed time frame.
He made those claims after reading a book by John Barry called “The Great Influenza” — in which the author predicted another pandemic, akin to the 1918 flu, would indeed one day dawn.
“It’s one of several books that made it clear to me that the world needed to do a better job of preparing for novel pathogens,” Gates wrote about the book on his blog. “Writing roughly 16 years ago, Barry was clear and persuasive that ‘another pandemic not only can happen. … It almost certainly will happen.’”
From that, headlines fawned of Gates’s predictive powers.
“Coronavirus: Bill Gates predicted pandemic in 2015,” the Mercury News wrote, in March of 2020.
“Bill Gates predicted a pandemic in 2018,” The Almanac wrote.
“Bill Gates Warned About Coronavirus in 2015,” India.com wrote.
But that’s sort of like crediting a die-hard faithful Boston fan for predicting the end of the Bambino’s curse in 2004 simply because he had told friends, year after year, that he knew the Series’ win was one day coming. In other words: Predicting “one day” is not really prophetic, now, is it? About as prophetic as “next few decades.”
The media deception with Gates is even worse, though. Not only did Gates not predict the present-day coronavirus — at least, not in the way his water carriers would have believed, by practically naming the time and date of its emergence. But also — and hold onto the hats, drumroll please — Gates specifically said nobody could predict when the next pandemic would strike.
In the very 2018 speech The Almanac referenced as Gates’ prophetic moment, the Microsoft guru actually said this: “There is one area … where the world isn’t making much progress, and that’s pandemic preparedness. This should concern us all, because if history has taught us anything, it’s that there will be another deadly global pandemic. We can’t predict when.”
We can’t predict when.
So why is Gates trumpeted as some sort of god-like prognosticator of truth on the coronavirus? He’s a software guy, for goodness’ sake. And his software isn’t exactly glitch free itself. Why does his opinion matter more than, say, Citizen Jane’s or Citizen Joe’s?
In a word? Money.
Gates has set himself up as an expert in disease control, he’s dedicated millions of his foundation money toward developing vaccines — on which he will then, especially during delivery, profit handsomely — and the media, the leftists, the fear-filled, the globalists who want his money and the elitists who crave his power have gone along with his messaging. He plays a philanthropist well.
But as much as he has a right to live his life as he chooses, so, too, American citizens.
“By the end of 2022,” he said in an interview in Polish media, “we should be basically completely back to normal.”
That should be a shoulder shrug; nothing more.
Really, the better response here is for all Americans to get on with the business of living lives of pre-COVID-19 normalcy now, with or without Gates’s blessing.
And symbolically speaking, no time like the present to recapture individual rights in this country.
Easter’s right around the corner; the same Easter the government, following the wishes of the software dude with the thick wallet, demanded in 2020 that American Christians abandon. And American Christians, to their great shame, did. Churches were closed. Congregations were scattered. Pastors preached from afar — if at all.
So now, with the coronavirus curve flattened, and Easter again upon us, the big question is: Does Gates get to have all the power — or are American citizens going to rise up and take back what is already, rightly possessed from God?
Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus. There’s no better time for Americans to resurrect their God-given rights, and tell the Bill Gates-types of the world, along with the actual Bill Gates, to sit down, sit back and be silent. We don’t need their permission to return to normalcy.
The resurrection of Americans’ rights can be here. Now. If only we are bold enough to demand it.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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