Tons of discretionary cash allows “philanthropists,” who are frequently tunnel-visioned ideologues and aspiring authoritarians, to magnify their mistakes, misconceptions, biases and delusions into widespread catastrophes, all with the arrogance that luck and good fortune so often creates. Melinda Gates, Bill’s ex, has a couple billion dollars to play with thanks to marrying well and divorcing better, and her recent op-ed in the New York Times illustrates this principle.

There are so many ominous tells in Gates’s “The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match” that I don’t have time to flag them all. The headline is one: doctrinaire progressives always equate their agenda items with “progress,” which is a word that implies beneficial change. That rhetorical trick has handicapped conservative thought and policy-making for centuries, though it is demonstrably false. Communism wasn’t “progress,” it was and has been a blight on civilization. The acceptance of promiscuous sex and having children out of wedlock wasn’t “progress;” the acceptance and legalization of recreational drugs isn’t “progress;” letting aliens stream over our borders largely without interference and consequences isn’t “progress;” using abortion as a primary means of birth control wasn’t “progress.” As obvious as these conclusions should be, the “change equals progress” fiction still works, which is why the Left still employs it regularly..

Her declaration to launch her new foundation vibrates with bias as well as bigotry. “We know” she writes, “that women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them.” No, we don’t. That’s hoary anti-male propaganda (and “is associated with” screams “Weasel words!”)

Gates deplores “the Taliban takeover” that “has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls” without having the guts to risk the ire of her progressive audience by pointing out exactly who was responsible for abandoning women to the cruelty of the Taliban. She calls U.S. maternal mortality rates “unconscionable,” which implies wrongdoing. The Times link provided in the column suggests otherwise: the problem of high mortality rates in the U.S. is substantially the result of lifestyle choices available to mothers in a free society, including women in the U.S. delaying child birth past the healthiest time to have children.

Of course Gates doesn’t have the integrity to use plain language when it conveys unpleasant facts that undercut her advocacy: her cover-phrase for being able to kill a nascent human being is “reproductive rights,” neatly skipping the “right to grow and live” component of the issue. She also revels in pseudo-science, writing, “the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.” Sure, Melinda. Because of all the advances in mind-reading, I’m sure. How would one get that “number”?

And what kind of leader does Gates regard as a model for achieving her version of “progress”? “Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit,” Gates reveals. “That group….includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.” Gates’ op-ed keeps referring to lost rights, yet one of her most admired people is the dictatorial former leader of New Zealand during the pandemic, who imposed draconian measures on her nation that crushed individual rights, while she sucked up to China, one of the world’s worst human rights offenders, in pursuit of economic benefits. China, of course, was responsible for the pandemic that Asdern used to expand her power to dictatorial levels.

Someone as arrogant and biased as Gates with two billion dollars to blow is like an ADD teen running amuck in a glass factory. Good luck, everyone!