A Lot of People Believe Bill Gates Wants to Microchip Them

This is . . . oh hell. I don’t know:

Be sure to read the question carefully. It literally asks people if they think Bill Gates wants to implant microchips in everyone.

But before we get too smug, I wonder what this poll would look like if instead of Bill Gates, the villain were Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or . . . Donald Trump. Maybe progressives wouldn’t look so good. After all, even with the saintly Bill Gates in the question, only half of Democrats are sure he has no plans to microchip people.

This whole thing is nuts. Anti-vaxxers make up only a few percent of the population, but somehow a huge number of people seem to have become deeply suspicious that the search for a COVID-19 vaccine is just a front for the Trilateral Commission or something. What makes it all especially bizarre is that Donald Trump doesn’t support this notion. In fact, he’s a big vaccine fan. Somehow, though, that’s not enough. In the same way that the Republican Party paved the way for Trump and now can’t control him, maybe Trump has paved the way for conspiracy theories even more bizarre than the ones he himself retails. Soon, perhaps, his supporters will abandon him in favor of Alex Jones or someone similar. If Trump can’t deliver the conspiracy goods, they’ll just find someone who can.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, if Bill Gates did want to track you, do you really think he’d use something as primitive as microchips? Please. Microchips are for pet cats. He’d use nanobots in the vaccine, which would allow him to control your mind as well as to track your every move. Come on, sheeple.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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