Bill Gates: Let them eat bugs!

OPINION:

The attorney general of North Dakota just cleared the way for Bill Gates to buy a couple thousand acres of farmland — adding to his already impressive level of property holdings across America.

The question, of course, is why would a former Microsoft executive who has spent the last two years chiding Americans to be more like China when it comes to coronavirus protections and forced COVID-19 shots want to own prime farmland at all?

Good question.

Let’s explore.

Gates is also a guy who’s sparked headlines like this, from The Post, in February — “Bill Gates wants you to eat artificial meat” — and this, from SurvivingTomorrow.org, in March: “Billionaire Elites Want You to East Bugs — And You Will.” Think that’s silly blogosphere clickbait?

Think again.

This, from the World Economic Forum, in September of 2019: “Burgers, bugs and the shift to a new way of eating.” Contained beneath that rather gross headline was this even grosser bit of news: “All Things Bugs, another US start-up, raised $100,000 in initial seed funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop an eco-friendly, ready-to-use therapeutic food product made from insects for children in famine-stricken countries.”

Bill Gates really does want us to eat bugs.

Back to his farmland deal.

“Gates,” The Associated Press wrote in June, “is considered the largest private owner of farmland in [this] country with some 269,000 acres across dozens of states, according to last year’s edition of the Land Report 100, an annual survey of the nation’s largest landowners.”

That’s less than 1 percent of all of America’s total farmland. 

But still.

But still: Land plus desire to develop bug-based food equals — eventual manufacturing? Again with the gross.

Red River Trust, a firm linked to Gates, spent $13.5 million on acreage owned by potato farmers in North Dakota. Concerned farmers raised questions about the purchase, citing a decades-old state law that protects individual farming operations by barring corporations, trusts and limited liability companies from farming. Attorney General Peter Headley investigated but gave the OK to the purchase after it was revealed the trust was going to lease the land back to farmers — therefore, keeping intact the laws of the state.

But that still leaves the question of why Gates wants the property.

“Bill Gates: Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef,” MIT Technology Review reported in February 2021, about topics Gates covered in his then-new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”

And from his own GatesNotes post a few months earlier, in December 2020, he wrote this: “There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent: climate change … We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean electricity, grow food …”

At least he stopped shy of calling for the eating of babies.

Remember this — from an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gathering in Queens, New York? “‘Get rid of the babies!’: Distraught woman at AOC town hall urges ‘eating babies’ to fight climate change,” a Fox News headline rang in October of 2019.

Obviously — off her rocker. But one has to wonder: At what point do elites and control freaks like Gates consider such hysterics sound solutions for climate matters?

“Where do greenhouse gas emissions come from?” Gates asked in his 2018 GatesNotes post. “Agriculture — 24%. Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases!”

Get rid of the cattle — get rid of 24% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Get rid of the cattle grazing lands — get rid of the cattle.

“In addition, deforestation — clearing land for crops, for instance — removes trees that pull CO2 out of the air, and when the trees are burned, they release all their carbon back into the atmosphere,” Gates also wrote in this same GatesNote.

Message received.

Farming bad; cattle badder. Gates, on a long-running crash course to zero emissions, thinks he’s the man with the plan to solve all. Let them eat bugs! It’s good for the environment.

Gates’ land purchases make perfect sense.

• 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 and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE  or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.