May 22, 2020

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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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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