My dear readers might think that what you are about to read is a product of my imagination, but I assure you that in the interest of journalism, I have decided to reproduce a conversation I had last week in New Hampshire with a 63-year-old Uber driver. The ride didn’t last more than ten minutes, yet the pearls of his conspiracy-driven thoughts were spectacular. I got in, we exchanged names. I had just said goodbye to a friend in Spanish, so of course, I spoke to him in English.
"You speak two languages; God is great. I’ll never manage to learn another language," he said, taking a long sip from his Dunkin coffee. I tried to explain why, but he didn’t listen. He started talking as if picking up a conversation we hadn’t had:
"You know, Joe Biden is dead."
"Since when?" I asked.
"Since the inauguration. Didn’t you notice? They only used three cannons, not four. The military code is strict. Three cannons are only used for a funeral. Twenty-one shots. The first one didn’t even work right."
"Oh, so who is the guy on TV?"
"An actor. He’s a bit taller than the late Biden."
"And surely you didn’t notice, but the inauguration was in a cemetery. Not at the National Mall."
He started getting lost in his thoughts, so I let him continue without refuting him.
"In fact, the United States of America doesn’t exist anymore. It ended after the inauguration. Now there’s a corporation that runs this country. It’s called the Republic of the United States, and Trump is in charge. They’ve brought back all the gold we had abroad, even from China. Biden doesn’t have the gold; the corporation does."
I thought I might contradict him:
"But I thought Biden was dead."
"Biden the actor, don’t you get it? With that gold, paper money doesn’t matter anymore. The dollar is worthless. The only thing that matters is cryptocurrencies. The corporation controls them: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, Tether. None of them have real value."
"So why do you work?"
"To keep from getting bored. I don’t have a mortgage. Right now, my house is worth $380,000. I could ask for fifty thousand on my phone, buy a new car, and pay a nickel for eternity."
"When you sell the house, you’ll have to pay off the debt. Then it’ll be worth less than $330,000, especially with interest."
"You really don’t get it. They don’t want my house; they want me to use their cryptocurrencies. When I sell my house, I’ll have already recovered the value."
I looked at his rather run-down car and wondered why he didn’t make that transaction and switch to a more comfortable, newer one.
After all, according to him, it was a matter of seconds without even going to the bank.
"All the banks are bankrupt. They don’t have money. Or they do, but it’s bills that are worthless."
From the economic topic, in which he was an expert, he went on to talk about the world’s wars, about Ukraine, about Israel. All those wars are there to destroy the "deep state" and bring down those governments. The deep state, he told me, is the world’s biggest problem. That’s why it ended in the United States when the Republic of the Corporation began.
"Look, maybe you and I won’t see it. But one day, the corporation will run the whole world, and there won’t be local governments or countries."
Just to check, or out of curiosity, I asked him:
"So what do you think, is the Earth round or flat?"
"I’d like to believe it’s round. It would be easier to talk with some of my friends who still think that way. But I’m convinced it’s flat. The round Earth thing is another invention by the Rothschilds."
I wanted to change the subject because I was getting lost.
"What a nice day it is today."
"Yes, you can see some of the blue sky. Few clouds. And at least those are real."
"Yes, real. Not like the others, the fake ones."
"Which fake ones?"
"The other ones. They put them up, take them down. That’s why we’re all sick with lung disease. Do you smoke?"
"No, I don’t smoke."
"Doesn’t matter a damn. You’ll get sick too, soon. I smoked for 44 years and was healthy, had nothing. I quit smoking and got sick because of the fake clouds."
He started coughing. Took another sip from his Dunkin.
BY PEDRO ÁNGEL PALOU
CONTRIBUTOR
@PEDROPALOU