While Americans are split on how to feel about Bill Gates, even those who oppose him might agree on this point.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on philanthropic efforts toward healthcare and eradicating disease, and has donated billions to various causes around the globe plans to run for just another 25 years. While the foundation intends to remain focused on those efforts, Bill Gates has been mulling over another issue.
What Happened: At the 2022 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit, Gates said, “People seek simple solutions [and] the truth is kind of boring sometimes. Anybody who’s got good innovations on reducing polarization, getting the truth to be as interesting as the crazy stuff, that would be well worth investing in.”
The Microsoft founder was talking about the polarization in U.S politics, which the Pew Research Center defined as the vast and growing gap between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.
“I admit that political polarization may bring it all to an end, we’re going to have a hung election and a civil war,” the billionaire said at the summit.
In the U.S., the political divide has been escalating for years. The differences between Republicans and Democrats in Congress have only widened, and the majority of Americans get their news and information from sources that support their political views, which magnifies conflicts over the essential details of numerous political issues.
“The polarization and lack of trust is a problem,” Gates said. “One of the best-selling books last year was a book by Robert Kennedy, saying that I like to make money and kill millions of people with vaccines. It’s wild that sells well.”
Why It Matters: Polarization and misinformation go hand in hand, and the American News Pathways project by the Pew Research Center found consistent differences in what separate segments of the population — including political partisans and readers of particular news sources — heard and believed about the developments surrounding COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
For example, news consumers who often only viewed outlets with right-leaning audiences were more likely to come across and accept certain untrue or unsupported claims.
The study also revealed that, in certain instances, terms such as “fake news” and “misinformation” have come to refer to news and information that does not support people’s preferred worldviews or narratives, regardless of whether the information was in fact false.
“I’m generally optimistic about the future, but one thing that dampens my outlook a bit is the increasing polarization in America, especially when it comes to politics,” Gates wrote in a blog post, promoting “Why We’re Polarized,” by Ezra Klein.
There are no easy solutions and the wackos and extremists from each side are not going to change or disappear. But they do not have to affect the rest of us.
I suggest we change our primary system to open primaries and rank voting. Changing that will force candidates to have to appeal to the wider public , including independents instead of catering to the extremes of the 2 parties.
If a location wants to decide between 2 democrats or 2 Republicans or 2 independents , that would be up to them.
Seems to me we are constantly forced to pick between 2 bad candidates all the time.
Ranked voting doesn’t work because the party with the fewest candidates in the first round ends up with the two highest ranked candidates for second round…
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This article is disinformation because the ‘real divide’ is GOOD PEOPLE vs refuse to work, junkies, weirdos, perverts, mentally ill, criminals, and murderers(aka Democrats)!
People like Gates ARE the problem. They talk out of both sides of their mouth. Gates talks about killing oil and gas and then he flies around the world in a private jet. He touts getting rid of meat to help save the planet, and he just happens to own a large share of a Vegie Meat company. He came up with this idea of putting some kind of chemical up in the atmosphere to block the suns rays from heating the planet, but he didn’t bother to explain just how this works and what happens once the planet cools, just how do we get this stuff out of the atmosphere so that the earth doesn’t continue to cool and cause another Ice Age.
Yeah, just because Gate’s patent attorney Dad patented stolen FreeWare for him and made him rich doesn’t mean Gates knows anything about anything else…
He is right. Civil war is coming. The cause being people elected to represent their peers suddenly having a power complex and deciding that they know what is “best” for everybody, plus getting rich by being paid off. The second is nonelected RICH people who also have the power complex because what they say or do brings them more wealth. Third is the controlling of the sharing of ideas, opinions and information by declaring this or that misinformation. Like it or not, people are intelligent and can deduce what is true and what is not and whether it pertains to anyone, everyone or no one.