Month: August 2020

Michelle Obama only once mentioned the white elephant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by name. But she succeeded in throwing more shade than any elephant could.

She followed a video earlier in the night from Kristin Urquiza who lost her father, Mark, to the coronavirus. His “only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump,” she explained. On his deathbed, he felt betrayed.

“Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country…. He is clearly in over his head,” Obama said. “It is what it is.”

Obama threw back at him his own words about the 170,000 dead Americans — dead on his watch from his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and from the division and chaos of the presidency that followed Barack Obama’s.

Heart. Soul. Conscience. Empathy. Michelle Obama is everything the acting president is not, and showed it Monday night. But that was not the contrast she was there to help paint.

Watch Amtrak employees and riders look back at Joe Biden’s 30 years of riding the rails #DemConvention pic.twitter.com/les5iGtKN9

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) August 18, 2020

“The average guy is important to him,” said Gregg Weaver, a former Amtrak conductor, in a video tribute to former Vice President Joe Biden. The portrait of Biden’s daily rail commute and Obama’s speech portrayed a man both empathetic and authentic. “A profoundly decent man, guided by faith,” Obama said, “who will “govern as someone who’s lived a life that the rest of us can recognize.” More shade.

But there was unsettling darkness to go with it moments before when Obama warned:

So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.

And in the face of racism and voter purges, intimidation and lies about ballot security, we have to vote in numbers that cannot be ignored, Obama said, adding:

We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.

We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.

Obama was as deadly serious as the virus killing off our neighbors. It felt like a call to battle. Really.

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) earlier thanked his supporters for helping advance issues on which he campaigned. He urged their support for Joe Biden, warning, “The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake.”

Obama’s underlying message is that if Biden does not replace the autocrat in the White House in January the republic might not survive to see it.

What worries me is voting in November may already be too late. Will Bunch describes what is happening right now as a coup-by-mail. Democrats talk of holding hearings and undoing the damage to the Post Office the president’s lackeys have done to threaten an election that will be conducted largely by mail. But those mail sorting machines have not simply been removed. By some reports, they’ve already been destroyed. “This is a nine-alarm fire for American democracy,” Bunch writes.

Eric Boehlert notes what’s missing in reporting on vandalism of the USPS: “Trump threatens Postal Service funding to sabotage vote count.”

Don’t just watch the convention. Get busy. Now.

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Michelle Obama: “Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can: Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country … He is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is." pic.twitter.com/9nUJDOBaij

— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 18, 2020

This is some op-ed, totally believable yet still shocking. It was obviously inevitable that something horrible was going to happen and the pandemic response is the greatest presidential failure in the history of the country, no doubt about it. But it’s a miracle that we have, so far, avoided a major, catastrophic national security failure as well:

Miles Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff.

After serving for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership during the Trump administration, I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.

Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.

I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand.

The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted several times.

Trump’s indiscipline was also a constant source of frustration. One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.

The decision-making process was itself broken: Trump would abruptly endorse policy proposals with little or no consideration, by him or his advisers, of possible knock-on effects. That was the case in 2018 when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced, at the White House’s urging, a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute anyone who crossed the border illegally. The agencies involved were unprepared to implement the policy, causing a disastrous backlog of detentions that ultimately left migrant parents and their children separated.

Incredibly, after this ill-conceived operation was rightfully halted, in the following months the president repeatedly exhorted DHS officials to restart it and to implement a more deliberate policy of pulling migrant families apart en masse, so that adults would be deterred from coming to the border for fear of losing their children. The president was visibly furious on multiple occasions when my boss, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, refused.

Top DHS officials were regularly diverted from dealing with genuine security threats by the chore of responding to these inappropriate and often absurd executive requests, at all hours of the day and night. One morning it might be a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh (“How much would that cost us?”). Meanwhile, Trump showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.

How can you run a huge organization under those conditions? You can’t. At DHS, daily management of its 250,000 employees suffered because of these frequent follies, putting the safety of Americans at risk.

The president has similarly undermined U.S. security abroad. His own former national security adviser John Bolton made the case so convincingly with his recent book and public accounts that there is little to add, other than to say that Bolton got it right. Because the commander in chief has diminished America’s influence overseas, today the nation has fewer friends and stronger enemies than when Trump took office.

Trump has also damaged the country in countless ways that don’t directly involve national security but, by stoking hatred and division, make Americans profoundly less safe.

The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 Americans have died.

It is more than a little ironic that Trump is campaigning for a second term as a law-and-order president. His first term has been dangerously chaotic.

Four more years of this are unthinkable.

I thought that in 2016 and look where that got me. It was always obvious the man was ignorant and unfit and belonged nowhere near power of any kind so I have to wonder about the judgment of any national security expert who voted for him in the first place. But now we’ve had it demonstrated in living color and we’ve seen the Republican establishment and its voters back him to the hilt. No one can say that he’s going to “grow into the job.” Clearly he’s incapable of it.

Still, I’m grateful for people like this coming forward. It’s important that the record be clear and unequivocal. Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our national security.

Here is Miles Taylor:

NEW: Testimonial ad from Trump's Former DHS Chief of Staff @MilesTaylorUSA, declaring his support for Joe Biden and describing Trump's presidency as "terrifying" and "actively doing damage to our security."

WATCH & go to https://t.co/Nz2NiSCquN for more. pic.twitter.com/iChqOdIIew

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) August 17, 2020

Oh God. I know a lot of people believe that the polls were all wrong in 2016 and therefore are not worth paying attention to, but that’s really a myth. The polls showed a tight race with Clinton winning by about 2 points, which she did — with the popular vote. The individual state polls were very tight and within the margin of error. There was always a chance he’d win and I think we just didn’t want to believe it could be possible.

As of today, Biden is ahead by 8.2 points in the polls of polls. That includes the outlier CNN poll from the weekend which showed the race tightening substantially with Biden only ahead by 4 points. None of the other weekend polls had that result. CBS/YouGov shows a 10 point lead. T he Washington Post/ABC poll has Biden ahead by 12 points. The NBC/WSJ poll has him ahead by 9. Last week’s Marist poll has Biden up by 11.

Having said that, polling is only part of the story. We have a pandemic going on and the GOP has completely gone over the edge, everything is in terrible shape and Trump is openly trying to sabotage the results. So, we can’t assume anything. But if you want to check the temperature of the public as we start the final descent, this is the best method we have.

One of Epstein’s youngest known victims says she was introduced to Donald Trump in 1994 with a very odd comment:

Last January, a California woman identified as Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Epstein’s estate and British heiress Ghislaine Maxwell, who is facing federal charges for allegedly recruiting girls into the financier’s trafficking ring.

The complaint accuses Epstein and Maxwell of grooming and sexually abusing Doe for years, starting when she was 13 years old. The former couple met Doe in 1994 at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan. (The Daily Beast previously revealed Epstein was a donor to the prestigious school and stayed at a cabin he funded on the property.)

Doe also claims Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago when she was only 14 years old.

“This is a good one, right?” Epstein asked the future president, who allegedly smiled and nodded before sharing a chuckle with the depraved hedge funder.

That’s a weird thing to say. It’s almost like he was getting Trump’s approval, which he apparently got.

This woman doesn’t accuse Trump of any misconduct. But it seems that he didn’t find anything wrong with Epstein showing off very young teenagers and asking for his approval.

Trump’s inappropriate well-wishes for Epstein’s procurer and participant Ghislaine Maxwell the other day are another reminder of just how involved he was with this whole scene.

Recall this:

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York Magazine that year for a story headlined “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery.” “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

He knew. He didn’t have a problem with it. But why would he? Clearly, inappropriate behavior with young girls is right in his wheelhouse:

A picture of Donald Trump, with his daughter Ivanka, perched atop two concrete parrots having sex. pic.twitter.com/TFse8gM1An

— Tim Ireland 💙⚜️🔥🎤 (@bloggerheads) January 31, 2016

And this:

Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Donald Trump walked into the dressing room while contestants — some as young as 15 — were changing.

“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,’ ” said Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA.

Trump, she recalled, said something like, “Don’t worry, ladies, I’ve seen it all before.”

Three other women, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of getting engulfed in a media firestorm, also remembered Trump entering the dressing room while girls were changing. Two of them said the girls rushed to cover their bodies, with one calling it “shocking” and “creepy.” The third said she was clothed and introduced herself to Trump.

The story also reported:

Of the 11 (contestants) who said they don’t remember Trump coming into the changing room, some said it was possible that it happened while they weren’t in the room or that they didn’t notice. But most were dubious or dismissed the possibility out of hand.

But there was also this:

Billado said she told Ivanka Trump (Trump’s daughter), about Donald Trump entering the room while the girls were changing their clothes. Billado remembers Ivanka answering, “Yeah, he does that.”

Trump has admitted to walking in on his beauty pageant contestants. This was to Howard Stern:

Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting, I want to make sure that everything is good.

You know, the dresses. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that. But no, I’ve been very good.

This is a man who sexualized girls and young women, including his daughter. It’s unknown if he ever had sex with underage girls but he clearly knew for many years that Epstein was obsessed with them and he thought it was funny. But then he thinks it’s prfectly normal to talk about wanting to sleep with his own daughter on telvision so…

This would just make my year:

The Cook Political Report on Monday moved its forecast of South Carolina’s Senate race, which features Lindsey Graham (R) seeking re-election, from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”

The race has tightened asJaime Harrison, Graham’s Democratic challenger, has proven himself to be a fundraising contender amid a favorable electoral climate for Democrats, driven by the coronavirus pandemic and a renewed focus on racial justice, per an analysis by Cook’s Senate editor Jessica Taylor.

A Harrison victory would mark the first time that two Black senators occupied both of a state’s seats simultaneously. Sen. Tim Scott (R) is South Carolina’s other senator.

Black voters in South Carolina were a key driver of Joe Biden’s primary victory in the state, which ultimately propelled him to convincingly win the Democratic nomination. Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris as his vice presidential nominee could further energize Black voters in the general election.

That outcome could help drive additional turnout and enthusiasm down the ballot for Harrison.

 Graham is still definitively the favorite. South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in over 20 years.

 “[I]t’s clear this race is becoming more competitive, and Graham faces an incredibly strong challenge,” Taylor writes.

I know it’s a long shot but if Graham loses, it would send an even stronger a message to the Republican Party than Trump losing. Graham embodies the cynical, self-serving, nihilism of the modern GOP in a way that nobody else does.

One of the more tedious tasks in writing about politics is that every single election year it’s necessary to discuss the latest cheating schemes cooked up by the Republican Party to suppress the votes of minorities, challenge the legality of perfectly legal votes and otherwise make all elections they do not win look suspect in the eyes of American voters. Needless to say, this year is worse than usual because Donald Trump makes everything worse than usual.

But it’s important not to ascribe the latest attempts to manipulate the election results solely to Trump and his minions. Even though he is more crude and obvious about what he’s doing, he is actually following in a longstanding tradition of the modern GOP, traceable all the way back to the 1960s.

Obviously there has been cheating in elections since the founding of the republic. Once upon a time, it was institutionalized by the big-city bosses, who were almost entirely Democrats. For a century, African Americans were denied the vote by Democrats in the white supremacist Jim Crow South with the deployment of a whole arsenal of restrictions, including onerous poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements.

As everyone is aware, Southern party identification began to switch to the GOP in the 1960s with the civil rights movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, at which point the newly converted Republicans eagerly stepped up to the task of disenfranchising Black people and other ethnic minorities. They’ve been very creative about it ever since.

For instance, they’ve done “vote caging” ever since the ’60s, as described in this voluminous report about the practice by Project Vote:

Voter caging is a practice of sending non-forwardable direct mail to registered voters and using the returned mail to compile lists of voters, called “caging lists,” for the purpose of challenging their eligibility to vote. In recent years, other techniques, such as database matching, have been used to compile challenger lists.

They have used more direct forms of voter intimidation such as “Operation Eagle Eye” and the modern knockoff “True the Vote” and have created large, well-funded legal organizations, most notably the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Voting Integrity Project, devoted to challenging laws throughout the country that make voting accessible. This was the institutional legal apparatus that immediately launched into overdrive during the disputed presidential election in Florida in 2000.

For more than 50 years the Republican Party has been working feverishly to ensure that Democratic voters are denied the right to vote, especially African Americans and other minorities. It hasn’t just been Southern white supremacists in deep-red states doing this. Such campaigns have been sanctioned and endorsed by the highest reaches of the Republican establishment. The corruption that lies at the heart of this project has been demonstrated by Republican Departments of Justice and the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, with essentially no repercussions.

So, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that because Donald Trump is crude and ignorant his current attempt to sabotage the November election by defunding the post office and delegitimizing the vote-by-mail system is an anomaly. It may not have the subtlety of vote caging or the elegant sophistry of insisting that counting all the votes will disenfranchise voters, but it’s very much in line with the Republicans’ ongoing program of vote suppression.

Trump is taking it to a new level, however, by attempting to suppress Republican votes right along with Democrats. For years the GOP has been pushing voting by mail to help their senior and rural constituencies who have tended to prefer it. R Roughly one-fourth of Trump’s votes in 2016 were delivered by mail.

The attacks on the U.S. Postal Service are also going to hurt his own voters just as much as Democrats. Republicans like to get their mail on time too. And many of them are just as nervous about standing in line for hours on Election Day in the middle of a deadly pandemic as Democrats are — although there’s some evidence that they will do it because their president wants them to.

Officials in Trump’s claimed home state of Florida apparently convinced him that he could lose the state this way because he amended his blanket condemnation of voting by mail by claiming that Florida alone knows how to do it correctly. He and the first lady have already requested their mail-in ballots, which raises the question of why he can’t go to the voting booth on Election Day as he expects everyone else to do.) But Trump still insists the rest of the country is incapable of running elections as efficiently as Florida (!) and cannot be trusted to handle a large number of mail-in ballots.

His obsession with the Postal Service originally stemmed from his erroneous belief that the main function of government is to make a profit (except for the military, of course, which is to be smothered in cash beyond any possible necessity). Trump is also jealous of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and thinks he can destroy him by destroying the post office. Now he’s attacking the agency in order to suppress the vote by making people believe their ballots won’t make it in time and won’t be counted for months, if ever.

All of this is downright self-defeating if he wants to get out his vote, but that’s clearly not what he’s trying to achieve. Recall that in 2016 he also claimed the election was “rigged” and during one presidential debates refused to say whether he would accept the results. He amended that shortly thereafter:

You may also recall that even when after he won his fluke Electoral College victor, Trump convened a “voter fraud” commission in an effort to prove that he had actually won the popular vote as well. It was quietly disbanded a few months later, without issuing any kind of report.

It appears that all this nonsense is in service of a plan to contest his defeat if the vote count is delayed or if there’s any significant confusion, regardless of the vote margin. And he won’t have to go it alone. The New York Times reported last May that the Republican Party was gearing up to help him:

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Mr. Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

This isn’t a Trump thing. It’s a GOP thing. And it’s been going on for a very long time. At some point, this country is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party is fundamentally hostile to democracy and do something about it.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

Update

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

From acting incredulous that I suggested he'll challenge election results to confirming he will challenge election results in about a minute. https://t.co/p8nwose1H7

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 17, 2020

This explains everything:

Trump has a “management philosophy” that has guided him from the Trump Organization to the 2016 campaign to the White House and now to the campaign for reelection. “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump. When you look at Trumpworld, it’s all these people who weren’t involved in presidential races, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to be; it was because nobody would hire them. It’s not like Steve Bannon woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’d like to get involved in campaigns!’ Or Corey Lewandowski, all of these people. It’s how you end up with Brad Parscale. Top professionals won’t work for you.”

That’s former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens’s observation and I think it does explain Trump’s White House.

All Trump cares about is loyalty. So he seeks out people who owe everything to him , which means they are, at best, mediocre. No person of quality would ever tie their reputations and their futures to such a man unless no one else would have them.

Take a look at a couple of the closest members of his inner circle:

I could go on …

Netroots Nation At Home finished up Saturday evening. It was a herculean effort to replicate the annual conference experience by Zoom. Highlights are here. You will see a lot of familiar, progressive faces. But without seeing, networking, and drinking with my political family and making new friends, it felt a bit hollow. It was not like being in Denver (where it was scheduled until the plague hit) and coming home exhausted and energized to fight another year.

Our local Democratic committee held a 2-hr Zoom briefing Saturday morning on preparations for the fall election. Everything we normally do must be reconfigured to cope with the coronavirus. The thoroughness and scope of the preparations was impressive, representing a helluva lot of time and planning done largely face-to-face in normal times.

The local Board of Elections is working furiously on its preparations as well.

Don’t take it personally, I told an activist who had set up a voter registration table in her apartment building but found few takers. Normal people pay little attention to elections before Labor Day. We are not normal people.

With the billions raised and spent every four years on presidential campaigns, normal people think that kind of cash is always floating around “the party.” It’s not. Normal people are stunned to learn that the county team on that Zoom call and the 40-or-so people on it are all volunteers. When are they going to pay you? my mother asks regularly. Who they? Most local committees have very limited resources. “The party” isn’t a sugar daddy with the deep pockets, as people believe. And the national party has nothing to do with county committees anyway.

There was another national organizer call over the weekend. There have been a lot of those Zoom meetings and coordination calls this summer. None of it is on TV. Hundreds of activists are on calls like these: union organizers, health care activists, party activists, elected officials. Some paid. Many not. Some you’ve heard of. Many you’ll never hear of. Clicktivists who jump on Facebook or Twitter once or twice a day to badmouth “The Democrats” for their slackness and lack of progressive chops see none of it because they don’t see it on TV or online.

With few exceptions — the women, typically — national-level Democrats never seem aggressive enough. Yeah, some officials’ positions are less progressive than progressives’ aspirations. And some perpetually cringeworthy leaders seem from another era:

If Postmaster General DeJoy doesn’t testify before Congress next week as Speaker Pelosi and I have requested, he should be stamped, returned to sender, and removed from his position.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 16, 2020

But that leads critics to believe there is nothing happening. Progressive Twitter lit up at the end of last week demanding to know why Democrats were not doing more to push back against the sabotage of the USPS. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Sunday night she plans to call the House back into session. Be assured, that planning was happening behind the scenes before it popped up on TV and the Internet.

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Fewgawdsakes:

[Trump ex-wife Marla] Maples, who dabbles in wellness influencing, has periodically mentioned the global pandemic to her Instagram following of 114,000—recommending Vitamin C IV drips, morning prayer, and an idiosyncratic hand-washing method in which she pours a mug of water on her hands without soap. But Tiffany Trump’s mother has stayed largely quiet on the political dimensions of the virus, including how her ex-husband has handled it. Her Thursday post, spotted by CNN’s Betsy Klein, fed into the unfounded, but widely-held belief that Bill Gates has hatched a plot to implement tracking devices on billions of people under the guise of a COVID-19 vaccine. (Maples did not respond to requests for comment). 

The conspiracy has taken off particularly among right-wing COVID truthers (despite the fact that Trump personally asked Gates to be his science adviser). Kennedy shared the post with the exhortation to “Follow the Corbett Report !”—a far right-leaning website ranked “Tin Foil Hat” on Media Bias Fact Check’s conspiracy scale. The Corbett Report claims to cover topics from “9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more.” Lewis Hamilton, the Formula One racing driver with 18.3 million Instagram followers, shared several stories in late July pushing the Gates theory.

A YouGov poll of Republicans from late July found that 44 percent believe the conspiracy, while just 26 percent identified it as false. 

Conspiracies about Bill Gates’ involvement in the global pandemic have swirled in online circles since early March. Gates has been sounding alarms about viral outbreaks for years, once warning in a 2015 TED Talk that the next global catastrophe was “more likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than a war.” In the early weeks of closures in the United States, the video spurred baseless theories that Gates had orchestrated the virus himself. 

Those theories were disseminated in part by high-profile figures, who shared the claims on social media. A March report from NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny identified one such viral video on the Instagram accounts of Cedric the Entertainer, Gary Owen, D.L. Hughley, and Derrick Lewis. The video overlooked the fact that public health officials, including an Ebola researcher in the Obama administration, have made similar claims for years. By March 19, the claim had shifted away from the mad scheme to infect the world with respiratory illness, to the notion that Gates planned to insert microchips in would-be vaccine patients to monitor and control their behavior…

But the conspiracies quickly mutated over time. By March 19, the claim had shifted away from the mad scheme to infect the world with respiratory illness, to the notion that Gates planned to insert microchips in would-be vaccine patients to monitor and control their behavior, like that Wallace and Gromit short where an evil penguin controls Wallace’s trousers. A Reuters fact-check of the conspiracy theory found that, by March 31, the claim had been shared at least 1,000 times on Facebook and 3,600 times on Twitter. 

Most of the posts linked to a blog from biohackinfo.com, a website run by two “do-it-yourself biohackers” who write under the aliases CyphR and Glyph. The article claimed Gates planned to “launch human-implantable capsules that have ‘digital certificates’ which can show who has been tested for the coronavirus and who has been vaccinated against it.” Their sole evidence came from a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ Gates participated in on March 18, in which he discussed digital contact tracing. 

Gates addressed the conspiracy theories about him in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, saying, “It’s strange. They take the fact that I’m involved with vaccines and they just reverse it, so instead of giving money to save lives, I’m making money to get rid of lives. If that stops people from taking a vaccine or looking at the latest data about wearing a mask, then it’s a big problem.”

For privacy advocates, digital contact tracing—technology that tracks and monitors COVID-19-positive patients to mitigate outbreaks—has inspired legitimate concerns over how the digital surveillance works, how much data will be collected, and where it may go. Earlier this week, the crime blotter app Citizen launched its contact tracing function, SafeTrace, to immediate ire from data security professionals. But data companies don’t need to insert microchips into users’ skin to follow people around—if they have location services enabled on their phone, those companies already do.

It’s not just the wingnuts diving into conspiracy bullshit. (And the irony of these nuts using the phrase “education is key” is almost too much to bear.)

Why would we be surprised by this though? Any country that elected Donald Trump to lead it is by definition filled with a lot of people who are unable to competently reason.