Bill Gates' Wife Has Been Totally Captured By The Social Justice Warrior Crowd

Melinda Gates

The New York Times Magazine this weekend published an interview it conducted with the wife of multi-billionaire Bill Gates, Melinda Gates.

It is now more than 24 hours since I read it but I still feel I haven't come down from an LSD trip that was directly administered by the late Timothy Leary during a Seattle seance session.

Throughout the interview, she talks as if she has been captured by some local rich ladies Seattle social justice warrior cult.

Half the time she says things that don't make any sense. She has no apparent deep thinking skills. There is, for example, where she says she is in favor of progressive taxes and estate taxes. This means she doesn't understand the nature of capital and why it is important to keep it intact.

At other times, she says things that it appears she doesn't mean. She talks at first about moving out of their current mansion to a 1,500 sq ft home but later walks that back to say their second home will be smaller. And it does sound like it will be a second home and they will keep their current 66,000 sq ft home.

Here are snippets:

Bill and I are both on the record saying that we believe in more progressive taxes. We believe in an estate tax. We don’t believe in enormous inherited wealth...

[W]e do need to think about how we right some of these inequities. How do we open our networks of power for women and people of color? We have to think about our privilege. I have to think about my privilege every day...

You have to be in the community with people who don’t look like you. When I read about a shooting, maybe in the south side of Seattle, I’m not living the experience...

And so my youngest daughter and I — she has a lot of friends whom I’m meeting, and they’re of very mixed races, I love that — have this motto that we go by: Every single person who walks through our door should feel comfortable in our house, despite how large it is and that it has nice art. And, believe me, there are people who show up at my front door who are not that comfortable. So sometimes that means sitting down inside the front door with our dog — and I’m in my yoga pants, no makeup on — and petting the dog until they’re comfortable being there. And only if we’ve made them comfortable can we be in real community. I have to do more to break down those barriers. It is very hard for almost anybody to show up at my front door...

We certainly spend money on ourselves. You see it in the house that we built.

 We won’t have that house forever, though. I’m actually really looking forward to the day that Bill and I live in a 1,500-square foot house...

Anyway, just to be clear, the house was being built before I came on the scene. But I take responsibility for it. We’ve already put a certain amount of money in it; we live in a nice place. But we think about expenditures. We think about, O.K., $1,000 we spend on ourselves or our kids is $1,000 we’re not spending on somebody somewhere else in the world. I know we don’t always get it right, but we do think about the world’s resources and our resources...

When do you think you’ll move to a smaller house? I wish I knew! We’ll make some lifestyle changes for sure when our last daughter goes off to college, which is in a few years. With the foundation in Seattle, we will be here for at least six months out of the year. But I assure you, if we decide to spend six months somewhere else it will be in a smaller house.

-RW