Some supporters of President Donald Trump have latched onto a new villain to attack during the COVID-19 pandemic: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
As The Daily Beast's Will Sommer reports, Trump-loving social media personalities Diamond & Silk this week uncorked a bizarre conspiratorial rant about Gates working to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus to use unsuspecting Americans as "guinea pigs" in a plan to "rule the world with vaccines."
And Diamond & Silk are far from their alone in their suspicions about Gates -- Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson said he believes that Gates is going to use the vaccine to "track" people, while Trump ally and convicted felon Roger Stone has flat-out said that Gates will use the vaccine to "microchip" people.
Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of fact-checking site Truth or Fiction, tells Sommer that Bill Gates is rapidly becoming the right's biggest bogeyman after financier George Soros.
“These are all just recirculated, warmed-over stories—they’re just switching the names around,” she said. “George Soros was the bogeyman, now it’s Bill Gates.”
Binkowski also fears that these conspiracy theories will make millions of Americans reluctant to take a COVID-19 vaccine when one is eventually developed, which will further put people's lives in danger.