John McAfee: Coronavirus is a government plot, grab your guns

The government is deceiving you. The pandemic is a ploy spread by the fake-news media, and if you care about your lives, go out and buy guns now. 

That was the message of John McAfee. Between evil laughs and dark chucklings, the tech guru, tax fugitive, and general wild man shared his suspect views on the “state of the world” during COVID-19 last night at Virtual Blockchain Week.

“We are living in a paradigm the world has never seen before,” the 74-year-old crypto advocate and antivirus-software pioneer said, speaking from God knows where. (He’s kept his whereabouts a secret since fleeing Belize in 2012 after suspicions grew that he killed his neighbor.)

“One-third of the planet is in lockdown,” he said, adding that most of those people are sitting at home, watching TV, and not doing much of anything, while the US government “pulls money out of thin air.” The situation is not sustainable, he argued. 

He was especially disturbed by a recent $2 trillion stimulus package in the US, which appears to be backed by nothing other than the good graces of the US government.

“You can’t pull money out of the air and expect everything to be okay. Money is based on something called industry, production, service. We haven’t increased any of that,” he said with a menacing laugh. He predicted the money-printing will lead to a collapse of the US dollar. 

It’s too late for crypto

Bitcoin and blockchain were meant to “save us from financial slavery, and from the overburdened government that creates the fiat currency that we are forced to use,” McAfee said. But he doesn’t think crypto will save us this time. 

“We are not going to jump into crypto,” he said, because it’s not easy enough to use. “It is not like opening a bank account. You have to spend days understanding what it is and how it works.” 

But as far as the markets go, he predicts Bitcoin will enter a bull run ahead of the halving on May 12. Just before mid-2016, the last halving event, the price of Bitcoin started to rise sharply. It kept rising all the way to late 2017 when the bubble burst. And he believes history will repeat because the same people populate the cryptosphere, and they’re just as greedy as they were four years ago.

More people die of diarrhea

As far as the threat of COVID19, McAfee thinks the number of deaths are skewed because they are presented out of context. It is certainly not worth shutting down entire economies, he believes.  

Repeatedly, he said more people die of diarrhea and of the flu. But both comparisons, common attempts to downplay the severity of the virus, have been widely dismissed as reckless by leading epidemiologists. 

But the way McAfee, who is known for his drug use and paranoia, sees it—just before opening his talk, he jokingly commented he was getting ready to shoot up with heroin—we are being lied to by the government and stirred up by the media. “If you use your head and common sense, you can see you are being deceived,” he said.

Due to the global shut down and the money printing, he believes dark times ahead for our species. The solution? 

"Go buy guns, and guns first,” he said. “Because if you just have the food and you don’t have the guns, your neighbors are going to take it because your neighbors have the guns.”

And then McAfee, who appears to enjoy it when people think he is on edge, pulled out an AK-47 assault rifle and began praising its sturdiness. “This sucker will always fire,” he said. 

Updated May 5 to clarify comments on Bitcoin's price. After the last halving, the price of bitcoin continued to climb.