It’s 2019 and people are talking about the lizardmen because of George Soros. This is slightly more sensible than 2018, when everyone was talking about David Icke because of Alice Walker.

Remember 2018? Of course that sentence was true.

Yes, Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple. Yes, David Icke, the ex soccer announcer who believes that shapeshifting aliens secretly rule the Earth. That David Icke, who once held a press conference announcing that he was Son of the Godhead and the world would end in 1997.

For the most part, the world did not end, so the conversation about Icke centers around his anti-semitism.

A clear reading of his website and the links he provides should be evidence enough that the man is anti-semetic, but if you don’t want to read his rather deranged website, someone else has already gone through and provided ample proof.

That someone is Marlon Solomon, and he offers this lengthy blog post. Marlon has done his homework. David Icke is an anti-semite. I am not here to go over each instance of what Marlon found. If you’re here to defend David Icke, please do not.

What I want to talk about is the shapeshifting lizardman conspiracy. Is it anti-semitic? Why do so many conspiracy theories end in that dreadful territory?

The idea of shapeshifting reptillian aliens ruling the earth is oddly compelling. Many of our worst acts are not done by humans, but the culprits do not possess vertical pupils or reptile DNA.

Earth is home to artificial intelligences of a sort. They are made by man, but they are not human.

A corporation is a “person.” A corporate charter is code on paper. The “person” behaves when numbers run through people and accounts, rather than drives and memory.

Government is codes of law, executed in parallel processors made of citizen meat. Religion and academica are sets of instructions that brains to follow.

These machines do great things for us, as any machine can. They take us to the moon. They build our bridges and our homes. They clean our water. They keep the lights on and our houses warm.

But sometimes our tithes and taxes destroy lives and inflict pain. Governments allow our bridges to fall down. Banks take our houses. Corporations poison our water. Priests and preachers torment the young. Our military blows up hospitals. Companies warm our globe.

The Lizardman Conspiracy sees the inhuman behind those acts. This is a function of conspiracy theories, they are a kind of folk journalism, amaeatur investigations of urban legends.

Journalists and skeptics often fail to understand this, and their exposés can therefore spread paranoia, because the facts are not the point. The facts can be debunked.

Debunk the facts, the theory returns, the facts are not the point.

The facts are not the point. The story is the point. People build their identities around the story.

Do immortal aristocrats drink our blood to live forever? No. At least, not yet.

Does an inhuman entity profit from our death and suffering? Yes.

By investigating - and therefore accepting - the identity of the culprit, Icke analysis falters. If you look at the “facts” of what he is saying, there is nothing anti-semitic, for there is nothing real. The lizardmen are the culprits, not Jews.

The lizardmen are not real, so you can’t be racist against them.

And yet I maintain that the lizardman conspiracy IS anti-semitic. Why?

There is a specific reason and a more general one.

Specifically, Icke’s lizardmen are a repackaging of the oldest anti-semitic tropes in the modern world. They are straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Icke’s lizardmen are vampiric. They drink blood. They eat babies. Foreskins are somehow involved. They “psychically drain vitality.” The lizardmen have magic powers. They are hidden in places we cannot go, either underground or inside the moon. They are genetically different than you and I, yet can “interbreed” with us “regular” humans to produce subservient hybrid offspring.

Then we come to their plan! Their “revealed” plan for world domination is plagiarized from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols are plagiarized from Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquie, which is itself plagiarized from Les Mystères du Peuple.

None of these sources reveal anything that a good campaign operative didn’t know in 1819 or 2019.

Do people manipulate our culture and media to create a desired outcome Yes, these influencers exist, and they are in demand. They are easy to track down if you know where to look. They are not secret, if you have enough money.

This brings us to the more general failing of conspiracy theories.

After enraging us with tales of evil aliens and endless depravity, Icke and his ilk claim that the lizardmen (or Illuminati, or Freemasons, or Catholics) work in SECRET. Shapeshifting. Mind control. Hidden from “the masses.”

Anonymous targets are convenient, if you are trying to avoid falsification, or a lawsuit. Revealing “secret” knowledge is a good way to build your cult, initiate by initiate.

But unlike the conspiracy theorists, the racists name names. Certainly, they are the wrong names, but once you’ve heard that a transdimensional demon is harvesting souls, you want names. You want a course of action. The conspiracy theorist himself may not reveal it to you, but when the audience self-selects for gullibility, someone will.

It is this failure that gives racists and white supremacists room to operate, allowing anti-authoritarian fringe outlets to be overrun with them.

Our tormentors and rulers-once-removed are not secret. They put their names on buildings. They charge exorbitant prices. They are protean, but they think we are reptilian.

David Icke lets these real human beings off the hook by claiming they are aliens. Alex Jones lets these real human beings go unnoticed when he seeks out demonic influences. Donald Trump distracts us with tales of Secret Muslim Obama while real mainstream Christians commit atrocities.

As I have argued before, conspiracy theories are important. Paranoia needs to be real, and influential.

It just needs to find targets that exist.

-FPJEROME