The month before 9/11, I was in Seattle interviewing the new digital titans for the Sunday Telegraph. My editor, to namedrop, was Emma Soames, Churchill’s granddaughter, who was curious about those unwashed, youthful colonials with “all that lovely money”. Question: once the flash but cool house and flash but arty dames were enjoyed, what were they going to do? Answer: good of course, lots and lots of it. Every one of them had a passion, whether art, fair trade coffee companies or the environment – all of which would be on the grand scale.
And then of course, I’d ended up at the Gates Foundation, and met their new gal, an achingly polite, somewhat scared but also beautiful brainiac who had been with the Clinton administration. I shook hands with Gates Sr., who seemed a benign older gentleman looking for something worthy to do in retirement, much like my great uncles. The place was empty to the point of echoing.
Since then, all the others went on to predictable projects, many of them – well most – in the old form of philanthropy: a massive sculpture park, a new symphony hall, the endless standing up of idiot environmental organizations, run by upper-middle-class narcissists that shut down economic activity from Alaska to the Baha.
None of them ended up being besties with Jeffrey Epstein.
A new book, The Gates of Hell,Why Bill Gates Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World by Daniel Jupp, manages to dissect all of Gates’s activities since September 2011 and has he ever been a busy psychopath. Jupp is one of the several gifted polemicists called forth by the gnarly times we live in. He soared to recognition with witty, but somehow soothing Facebook blasts that combined PJ O’Rourke with Jonathan Swift with Steve Bannon. Everyone passed around his posts exulting. Jupp, if that is his real name, hails from working class England, Essex to be precise-ish, and edits or writes for Country Squire Magazine. Whatever, he is of the time and do we ever need him.
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