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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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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