This story was reported in partnership with Type Investigations .

Three months into the global coronavirus pandemic, Bill Gates has displaced George Soros as the chief bogeyman of the right.

In April, dozens of Texans crowded around Infowars host Alex Jones at an anti-shutdown demonstration in Austin, Texas, chanting arrest Bill Gates. A New York-based tech nonprofit falsely rumored to be working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to implant vaccine microchips in people received so many death threats that it contacted the FBI. And a White House petition demanding the billionaires foundation be investigated for medical malpractice and crimes against humanity amassed half-a-million signatures in three weeks.

Gates, who has announced that his $40 billion-foundation will shift its total attention to fighting COVID-19 , has been accused of a range of misdeeds, from scheming to profit off a vaccine to creating the virus itself. On April 8, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Attorney General Bill Barr speculated about whether Gates would use digital certificates to monitor anyone who got vaccinated.

A Christian Right broadcaster, Brannon Howse of Worldview Watch, warned that Gates and the medical globalist deep state were using the crisis to regulate peoples fertility depending on their worldview, through procreation tickets and microchips. On Instagram, anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., posted a video featuring a 1984-style audience listening to Gates, with text declaring that the Microsoft Corp. co-founder is conducting global social and medical experimentation, via the World Health Organization. The New York Times noted that misinformation about Gates has become the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods trending online.

But while these themes have fed the imagination of QAnon , Pizzagate and anti-vaccination proponents since January, conspiracy theories involving Gates actually have a much longer history. Accusations that he has sinister plans to control or experiment on the public under the guise of medical charity date back at least a decade, including to an obscure and different political fight in Ghana.