TRUE BELIEVERS:

A new public opinion poll from the Economist/YouGov offers additional proof of the mass derangement that is afflicting TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse. Roughly 30 percent of Republicans say they believe it is "definitely" or "probably" true that the government has put microchips in the COVID-19 vaccines.

But today's conspiracy theories and related bad behavior in response to the pandemic and the new vaccines are part of a much older and deeper history. Jason Colavito is a professional skeptic, researcher and author whose essays have been featured at Slate and the New Republic. He has also offered expert commentary on the History Channel. His new book is "The Legends of the Pyramids: Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt." [...]

Millions of Americans apparently believe that COVID vaccines are part of some great conspiracy which involves being tracked by microchips. They believe the vaccines were not properly tested and are dangerous to use, that the vaccines will rewrite their DNA or that the vaccines and COVID itself are part of some "New World Order" plot. How much of this paranoia is new and how much of it has been around for much longer?

The specifics of this conspiracy theory are unique to the COVID vaccine, but the underlying ideas are old ones. It goes all the way back to the Book of Revelation and the mark of the beast. Many evangelical and conservative groups have applied that label to basically any technology or medicine that they do not like. This includes everything from barcodes to vaccines. Through that lens almost anything can be interpreted as the mark of the beast because it is something Satanic or in the case of the vaccine, some type of evil government conspiracy.

One of the attributes of these particular types of conspiracies is that old elements keep getting recycled in new ways. For example, there is the classic scene in the movie "Dr. Strangelove," where the military general played by Sterling Hayden has locked himself in his office after starting what he hopes is going to be a nuclear war. He's sitting there telling this British officer, played by Peter Sellers, that the Communists are trying to pollute Americans' "precious bodily fluids." That is the same type of thinking we are now seeing with the COVID vaccines and the conspiracies surrounding them.

These claims go back to the 1950s and 1960s with the John Birchers and their pseudo-science conspiracies about bodily purity and how the Communists are trying to infiltrate not just American culture and society, but also our very bodies to corrupt us from the inside out. Conspiracies about fluoride in the water are part of that imaginary as well. Ultimately, with these types of conspiracies it comes down to keeping out all of the hostile, foreign, unwanted theologies and beliefs that are somehow manifesting at a physical level. [...]

When people in the conspiracy community and elsewhere talk about the vaccines as part of a "globalist plot" or as evidence for the "New World Order," what are they really saying? What are the underlying beliefs?

In many cases, what they are doing is adapting old conspiracy theories -- many of them antisemitic in origin -- to fit a modern worldview. These conspiracy theories are helping the true believers to navigate, however imperfectly, a world where they are no longer the center of the narrative. A lot of what we're seeing is deep distrust of a changing world. And so to make sense of it, they're trying to hold onto the sort of mid-century sitcom fantasy of America that never really existed, but is the imagined America that they grew up with and that they had hoped to live in all their lives.

When members of these communities propose conspiracy theories about "the elites" or aliens or "the Jews" or some other secret group that is trying to destroy America and take over the world, it is really an attempt to cling to the way things were before the country experienced demographic and cultural change.

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