Draft:Verum Est! Totoo Ba Ito?



Verum Est! Totoo Ba Ito? (lit. Verum Est! Is This True?) was a Filipino paranormal schlockumentary series aired by from 2001 to 2003 and hosted by veteran broadcaster Tony Velasquez. As is typical with many paranormal "investigative" shows, Verum Est discusses phenomena such as ghost sightings and paranormal incidents in the Philippines as well as recurring subjects like occultism and alleged Satanic infiltration of popular media, from backmasking to lurid end times prophecies and allegations of public figures being aligned with the antichrist such as John Paul II and even Bill Gates of all people.

Bill Gates, the Pope and the Antichrist
I feel dumber for having searched for this. One segment in an episode called "Kampon ng Kadiliman" (English: "Forces of Evil") talks about a rather lurid endtimes prophecy with public figures shoehorned in for good measure. The show parroted a then-popular email shitpost about Gates having been somehow branded the Antichrist and is supposedly in control of critical infrastructure through a hidden feature in Microsoft Excel of all things.

"According to interpretations by some, the Antichrist is said to be Bill Gates, the inventor of computer software. It is said that Windows 95 contained secret number codes, which if calculated would show the title 'Hall of Tortured Souls'. And since computers are used to control nuclear arsenals, security systems, Internet, and stores throughout the world, it is said that Gates wields immense power, and he can lead the destruction of the world.

- Tony Velasquez, Verum Est"

Most viewers unsurprisingly drank ABS-CBN's Kool-Aid and took to the anti-Gates crap as gospel, apparently unable to pick up a litany of factual errors and outright lies the show peddled. Gates was far from the "inventor of computer software"–not by a long shot, though to be fair his prominence in the computer industry made him a poster child and therefore easily misattributed by the uninformed; he did programming work since his teens for one, but one of the few pieces of commercial software credited to him was, a rudimentary driving game written in as a demo that came with the original IBM PC, on top of him co-developing. The "Hall of Tortured Souls" title refers to the Excel minigame, and is not part of the antichrist calculation. And even without any reverse engineering involved, it is clear that Excel or any other Microsoft software would NOT contain any code that somehow taps into computer systems and takes control of them unless modified or explicitly found to do so, e.g. the controversial data collection scheme in Windows 10 and later (which can be neutered if not completely disabled anyway).

Of course, if you really are anti-Catholic, you'd do everything and come up with a way to make it appear that the Pope is 666. In this system they used the Latin phrase "Vicarius Filii Dei". There are only five letters with a numerical equivalent; what about the letter "A", letter "R", letter "F"? What are you going to do with it then? So you'd make stuff up and come up with certain assumptions. The episode also covered the gematria controversy surrounding the Latin phrase "" as first used in the forgery Donation of Constantine and popularly ascribed to the Pope. Archive footage from the late John Paul II was used where they took to discussing his supposed alignment with the devil through a chronogram invented by Protestant writer Andreas Helwig supposedly equating the Latin phrase to 666 not unlike the shitpost equating the faux-Latin spelling of "cute purple dinosaur" as "cvte pvrple dinosavr" to the number of the beast. To be fair however, they did interview Hernando "Ding" Coronel, media director of the (CBCP) and rector of Quiapo Church in Manila, who dismissed the 666 calculation as nothing more than anti-Catholic nonsense with a healthy dose of made up pseudo-Roman numeral malarkey as Coronel pointed out. Besides flying in the face of devout Catholics who'd raise their eyebrows at such a spurious accusation, there is something of a double-standard for ABS-CBN to seek the opinion of the accused group, in this case, the Roman Catholic Church, but not with computer experts regarding the Bill Gates calculation hoax, let alone Microsoft themselves. ABS-CBN later ran ads for Microsoft some years after they aired the Bill Gates segment which arguably served more to boost their ratings through sheer gossip than anything factual.