QAnon Is Freaking Out Over Bill and Melinda Gates’ Divorce

The QAnon movement has been laser-focused on the election audit taking place in Arizona for the past nine days. But that all changed Monday when Bill and Melinda Gates announced they were ending their 27-year marriage. 

Almost instantly, a flurry of baseless and disgusting conspiracies were being shared and promoted on QAnon message boards and Telegram channels, where QAnon followers were eager to decode the news about this central figure in the core conspiracy belief that elites are operating a secret global child sex-trafficking ring.

But it was all too much for one QAnon follower, who posted the following message on the GreatAwakening message board: “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD - STOP POSTING ABOUT THE GATES DIVORCE.”

There were, as the poster pointed out, already dozens of threads started on the message board about the news, so there was no need for any new ones.

Gates became a central focus of anti-vaxxers and QAnon conspiracists over the last 12 months as part of a baseless claim that he engineered the COVID-19 pandemic to create a demand for vaccines into which he had placed a biometric microchip in order to control the world’s population.

As a result, Gates’ impending divorce sparked a number of questions about what it all means for the plan to retake control from the deep state. Thankfully, QAnon supporters were not short of outrageous conspiracies about the divorce.

The dominant theory being shared by QAnon followers is that the divorce is the result of Melinda Gates actually being a man.  

“The current version of ‘Melinda’ Gates is a dude, change my mind,” one comment in the popular “We The Media” channel on Telegram read, above a picture of Melinda Gates. In fact the idea that Melinda Gates had been somehow replaced by a male clone has been widely shared in QAnon circles for some time already.

But that was just one of many theories attempting to explain the divorce. Many posters picked up on a claim that Melinda Gates was leaving her husband for a “real doctor” sharing a meme showing a version of the Pretty Woman poster with Richard Gere and Julia 

Roberts replaced by Anthony Fauci and Melinda Gates. 

On Gab, Telegram and the GreatAwakening, posters shared the theory that the divorce was simply a ruse to protect the couple’s vast fortune—despite the fact that the Gateses have pledged to give away half of their wealth before they die.

But QAnon followers claim that the former, and (in their belief, future) president, Trump will return to seek revenge for the supposed crimes perpetrated by Gates, the Democrats and Hollywood elite. 

“FOLLOW THE MONEY. They divorce to secure some of their money, for when Bill Gates has his money seized by Trump for crimes against humanity, IMO” Susan, a member of the “We The Media” Telegram channel, wrote.

Others shared a video from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has long made deranged claims about Gates. In his most recent video, Jones claims Melinda Gates left her husband because she figures out that he was going to “kill more people than Hitler.”

But ultimately, the timing of the Gates divorce is seen as part of the grand scheme to distract from the audit taking place in Maricopa County, the results of which QAnon followers falsely claim will deliver Trump back to power.