Insider Calls all Criticism of Bill Gates a “Conspiracy Theory” despite facts
- Political dissidents labeled conspiracy theorists to silence legitimate concerns
- Continual vindication of Bill Gates and conspiracies surrounding him keep ignoring the inconvenient facts
- Greenspan chooses the most extreme claims to debunk
- Greenspan fact-checks a Telegram statement that is substantively true, and only the most ridiculous interpretation would make it false
Indicted Outlet: Rachel Greenspan | The Insider | Link | Archive
OUR RATING: 3 = #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
The Insider’s Rachel Greenspan vindicates Bill Gates and his aggressive vaccine advocacy by cherry-picking the claims they debunk, picking only the most extreme ones and not focusing on what the most common complaints about Gates are, and how factually-documented those claims are.
Major Violations:
- Missing Context
- Misrepresentation
- Unbalanced
According to Greenspan there are two claims that have spread on social media: 1] “Gates wanted to force COVID-19 vaccinations on people that would contain a microchip which would allow Gates and Microsoft to track humans, and” 2] “that he is trying to ‘block the sun.’”
The first claim she rightly debunks. Bill Gates has not said publicly that he wants to implant microchips into humans. However, this claim may contain some legitimate fears about Gates that would be considered necessary context. Gates has been clear that he wants to mark those who are vaccinated with an injection of dye that would help governments determine who is and is not vaccinated. [1] Unfortunately, Greenspan’s easy first success is overshadowed by her lying misrepresentation of Tucker Carlson.
Greenspan: “Tucker Carlson dog-whistled to conspiracy theorists, telling Fox News viewers that ‘your body’ is ‘Bill Gates’ body now,’ because the Microsoft founder is helping to fund global COVID-19 vaccination efforts…’Bill Gates has gained extraordinary powers over what you can and cannot do to your own body.’
Greenspan’s bad faith attempt to connect Carlson with the microchip claim is purposefully obtuse. It is obvious, if one watches the entire segment that Carlson is referencing, that Carlson’s point is largely accurate. Gates has a massive financial investment and stake in COVID-19 vaccines, and that choosing to forgo the vaccine has led many to lose their jobs. [2] In a CNN interview, Bill Gates called it a “hurdle” that people had any choice to get the vaccine or not. Given that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed $250 million toward developing treatments, testing, and vaccines for COVID-19, he clearly believes people should be getting the vaccine. Hence the Gates owns your body comment from Carlson is, with context, more reasonable. [3][4]
Greenspan ignores this context to instead assume bad faith that Carlson is adding legitimacy to the Bill Gates “conspiracy.” Just two weeks later, on March 30, Carlson does the exact opposite of dog whistling to conspiracy theorists. Here’s what he said:
“If you’re trying to calm people down about the idea of vaccines, and make them less vaccine-hesitant, and convince them it is not a conspiracy run by Bill Gates, then you won’t consider doing something like this [the idea of vaccine passports].” [5]
The conspiracy he references we can assume, just as Greenspan does, is the microchip conspiracy. If this is true, why is Carlson calling it a conspiracy? It might be that Carlson is not a far right conspiracy theorist, but still has doubts about Bill Gates’ position and power in American society. It is certainly not controversial to say that billionaires have disproportionate economic and political power and influence in America.
This plays into the larger tactic Greenspan employs, which is to put any person who has doubt about Bill Gates’ intentions or motivations into the QAnon conspiracy theorist camp. This is a deliberate misrepresentation of legitimate claims about Gates’ intentions. Greenspan uses blanket terms such as “fringe conspiracy theorists” and “far-right extremists” to describe anyone who has problems with Gates’ massive investments in COVID-vaccinations and his attempts to decrease global warming despite no accountability from any government or health organization.
Greenspan’s “objective reporting” on the second conspiracy theory is negligible at best. She omits context in order to make “far-right conspiracy theorists” sound more extreme and ridiculous than is fair. Greenspan’s example of the theory is a February 18 message on Telegram that says: “What’s happening in Texas was a planned attack. Bill Gates is attempting to block the sun in order to keep the Earth more cool.”
Greenspan doesn’t even link to the source or include any textual evidence that it exists. She then proceeds to debunk the first part of the claim, which is the most exaggerated, but then ignores the factual accuracy of the second part of the claim. This ambiguity helps the reporter because there is legitimate and explicit evidence that Gates is involved in geoengineering, a dangerous and untested method to reduce global warming. [6]
Geoengineering is “a blanket term for technologies that try to alter Earth’s physical qualities on the largest scale possible.” [7] There are many methods, but the most common is to use aerosol particles in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the earth. Gates is financially supporting a Harvard group who seeks to “use a high-altitude balloon to lift an instrument package approximately 20 km into the atmosphere. Once it is in place, a very small amount of material (100 g to 2 kg) will be released to create a perturbed air mass roughly one kilometer long and one hundred meters in diameter…[they] plan to release calcium carbonate, a common mineral dust.” [8] This method of geoengineering is often called “sun-dimming.” [9]
This is not a phrase invented by far-right conspiracy theorists.
Greenspan is right, though, that the power outage was not a coordinated attack by Gates. Even if the lack of solar power was the problem, the Harvard experiment did not take place because of concerns about the consequences of the project. [10]
The technique here is subtle. Greenspan is right in one limited reading of the claim, but not in others. Gates doesn’t plan to block the entire sun and he didn’t plan an attack on Texas, but he is involved in a scientific project that aims to reflect sunlight away from the earth to decelerate global warming.
Instead of acknowledging the doubts and dangers of this kind of experiment, Greenspan focuses on the most hyperbolic and extreme statements to sweep away legitimate concerns about Gates’ ability and power to implement potentially dangerous and globe-altering experiments. [11] [12] [13] But she has enough legitimacy to vindicate Gates because she, like any objective journalist, has “debunked” certain erroneous claims.
To choose a telegram message as the most polished criticism of Gates is both unfair and unbalanced. This is how Greenspan’s “reporting” functions. She debunks half baked tweets and conspiracy theories to prove the legitimacy of the ruling elite, while ignoring the opportunity for real reporting on the facts about powerful men such as Bill Gates. This is not journalism, this is debunking items by misquoting the original source material.
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Bibliography:
1] https://tgpfactcheck.com/usa-today-debunks-vaccine-microchips-ignores-evidence/
2] https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3931956/embed/embed
3] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-final-hurdle-2020-6?op=1
5] https://www.facebook.com/foxandfriends/videos/vb.111938618893743/5435237876518271/?type=3&theater
8] https://www.keutschgroup.com/scopex
9] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07533-4
11] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/518952-bill-gates-mr-burns-block-sun/ From the reporter: “Another problem with meddling with nature is that no one knows how reducing the sun’s energy over one part of the planet will affect the climate in other parts. In a 2019 CNBC special, Professor Kate Ricke, of UC San Diego, said modelling suggested that if the process continued over time, then the weather in China would be hotter and drier, while India would experience wetter, cooler conditions….Rogue states unwilling or unable to curb their greenhouse gas emissions might even take matters into their own hands, according to Andy Parker, project director at the international Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative. He warned CNBC: “There’s the prospect that countries just go ahead and do solar geoengineering and that causes disagreement, conflict, tension even, possibly, war.”
12] https://www.ecowatch.com/solar-geoengineering-risks-climate-change-2623070339.html
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