Disinformation and scapegoating
Along with his cash-in supplies, Jones has managed to slot coronavirus into his overarching conspiracy theories.
Jones – an unwavering Trump supporter – has a neat solution to the problem of taking advantage of the commercial opportunities presented by virus without criticizing Trump’s lackadaisical response.
He claims that Covid-19 is a human-made bioweapon, produced by the Chinese government to bring Trump down.
A similar conspiracy theory has made its way into the brains of more mainstream figures.
This posits the idea that software mogul Bill Gates and financier and philanthropist George Soros were involved in concocting the virus with the Chinese Communist party.
In a now-deleted tweet on 27 February, the Republican California congressional candidate Joanne Wright wrote: “The Corona virus is a man made virus created in a Wuhan laboratory. Ask @BillGates who financed it.”
In another disappeared tweet, she added: “Doesn’t @BillGates finance research at the Wuhan lab where the Corona virus was being created? Isn’t @georgesoros a good friend of Gates?”
As Trump has gradually moved towards an acknowledgment that the virus exists, he has also been leading the charge in scapegoating immigrants and foreigners for spreading the illness.
He has repeatedly tweeted throughout early March that the US epidemic would be worse were it not for his administration’s border policies, and called it a “foreign virus”.
Trump sought to apportion blame, then, in a way that furthered his political agenda and has been amplified by his rightwing allies.
In that spirit, the Liberty University president and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr – a high-profile backer of Trump – last week aired the theory that coronavirus was a North Korean bioweapon.
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