A lizard person’s guide to US election conspiracy theories

As an Oxbridge-educated, left-of-centre, anti-Brexit, yet pro-market capitalism podcaster, who just so happens to live in north London and support Nato, I am a part of that elite, and hence, I am secretly a lizard. However, despite our global elite establishment being all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, and highly self-interested, we are still very very stupid. 

Despite lots of secret conspiratorial planning, we frequently choose decisions that backfire or are of no use to our interests (like the Iraq war, letting China into the WTO, or faking the pandemic to use the vaccine jabs to implant microchips into people seeking to monitor them, which we could have done much more effectively via their smartphones). It is our stupidity at being an all-powerful, all-conspiratorial elite, which is also why over the last two centuries, the composition of the global elite has shifted from being largely European aristocrats to then being American politicians and business tycoons to now comprising East Asian industrialists and Middle Eastern oil potentates. 

Do not be fooled by the details and any seeming inconsistencies. There has always been a conspiratorial elite pulling the strings behind seemingly confusing events like Covid, Brexit, and why the England men’s football team has not won a major final since 1966.

2) Believe! This elite of lizard people has always existed

Conspiracy theories are not only not new, they are a core part of how campaigns of social change are articulated. The more radical the change – the French Revolution, the rise of Hitler, or Trump’s election – the more paramount the need for conspiracy theories to motivate the required action needed to bring it about. As such, conspiracy theories are in fact as old as humanity and they certainly predate both monotheism and writing.

We the lizard people would like to give you an insight into how we work and why we formulate conspiracy theories. We do it because it is these “memeable” theories that allow us to control the Earth.

I’d like to help you Earthlings unpick the multilayered meaning of the most prevalent conspiracy theories that we have injected over the last decade or so to manipulate your Anglo-American politics. You know, our lizardy myths like: the 2020 election was stolen, the immigrants are taking your jobs, the Great Replacement theory, the deep state, George Soros runs the world, and Bill Gates implants people with microchips.

3) Honour tradition by blaming “the Jews”! It usually makes the conspiracy theory more viral!

We the lizard people are most accustomed to our acolytes calling the hidden elite “the Jews”. Over the centuries we have learned that antisemitism seems a good anchor for the spreading of a successful conspiracy theory. It has also proven very flexible and listeners are not worried about potential illogicalities or inconsistencies.

“The Jews use x to control the world” is a time-honoured formulation. So defer to tradition! Use this formula! 

But also: Be creative! X can be capitalism, communism, imperialism, the bubonic plague, Covid, migration flows, Zionism, kompromat from Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilia ring, or even something very silly like chewing gum. It doesn’t need to make sense to work. Do not be fooled by the fact that, despite running the world for centuries according to the most successful conspiracy theories, “the Jews” were seemingly powerless to prevent much of their population from being massacred. 

Use of “the Jews” helps the listener suspend disbelief and logic and accept the conspiracy theory more easily. This appears to work because many people are irrationally terrified, jealous and resentful of Jews.

4) Conspiracy theories don’t have to make sense – just appeal to “out” groups

As Joe Uscinski, author of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer and recent guest on my Disorder podcast has pointed out via extensive surveys, conspiracy theories express a coherent worldview and plan of action for those who perceive themselves without economic or political power. Seen in this light conspiracy theories are calls to action by the powerless to “take back control” from the powerful. 

Whether they rely on pure fantasy (Jewish space lasers) or possible (an elite sex trafficking ring is running American politicians) is not actually that important – it is the implicit call to action by pointing out an injustice or unfairness that we the listeners must seek to be correct. It is for this reason that they appeal to groups who perceive themselves as not able to access traditional levers of economic or political power. 

Hence, to understand how conspiracy theories work, we the lizard people ask you to grasp that beliefs encourage actions. Hence, it is critical that you believe this all-powerful and all-conspiratorial establishment elite exists and that you will risk everything to heroically fight it. 

It does not matter if you call this elite “the WHO”, as Peter Lynch did, or “DAVOS” as Nigel Farage’s Reform campaign manager in Clacton-on-Sea did in late June when I spoke to him, or if you call it “the establishment”, or the time-tested “the Jews”. 

5) Be silly! Conspiracy theories are also entertainment!

Have fun with your conspiracy theories! Think of new things that make people laugh, like Haitian migrants barbecuing people’s cats! 

Conspiracy theories work like jokes or other memes. They are bite-sized bits of information that are easily transmittable on social media and appear to be instantly understood. lizard people run the world, immigrants are eating your pets, public school sex-ed classes turn boys into girls, Jewish space lasers, not climate change, causes forest fires, and there is a sex trafficking ring being run out of an underground pizza parlour – all are perfect examples of how “entertainment value” can lead to the success of conspiracy theories. 

Today’s real political issues about whether AI needs to be regulated or how to curb inflation are too complicated for many people to think about. They find the real issues boring. 

Hence, increasingly people in America and Britain fundamentally choose their political inputs as entertainment – and they find Boris and Trump amusing and goofy. So they vote for whoever is the most amusing and they “believe” and spread whatever theories are the most entertaining.

6) Read beneath the surface! Unpack the true hidden meaning of the conspiracy!

Just as with religion or poetry, the language and storytelling of a conspiracy theory can be used to convey multiple different layers of meanings. Literal veracity is not the only way for certain listeners to assess the claims of a statement and to choose to believe in it or not. 

Conspiracy theories encode critical so-called truths and platforms of political action that cannot be articulated in direct language. This aspect is critical to explain why some of the best-informed and most sophisticated people on Earth – from Elon Musk to JD Vance to Nigel Farage – articulate conspiracy theories that they must know to be literally factually false. They likely believe that the theories are “symbolically” true or articulate true political programmes.

Consider that “the 2020 election was stolen” is true to some listeners – because if you are a white Christian nationalist and you fundamentally don’t believe that blacks, Jews or newly naturalised foreigners should get equal representation with God-fearing, native-born, white Christians, then the election was actually “stolen”. 

What is going on is a form of double truth theorem. We the lizard people would summarise double truth theory – attributed to Averroës (as the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd was known in medieval Europe) – as follows: for moronic simpletons the literal meaning of conspiracy theory is taken to be true but for people who are more philosophical and able to decode it, then a deeper more metaphorical meaning is true. Almost always this meaning is hostile to incumbent powerholders, which is why conspiracy theories are “for losers”.

Generally this meaning is either racist or anti-PC to the extent that it cannot be openly articulated without causing a greater backlash, so the conspiracy theory allows speakers to mask their concerns. 

At present in American politics the concerns of most people on the right have a tinge of the unspeakable (ie they have to do with racial/demographic change in the US and changing patterns of wealth/power among the races/genders/classes). Openly stating that your group should have more power/wealth/status as it had previously is not PC, but most conspiracy theories that we propagate allow listeners to decode that this is the underlying meaning of the conspiratorial trope and to allude to a plan of action to put their group back on top.

7) Donald J Trump is a real upstanding Christian billionaire! He is on our side, fighting Satanic evil!

Contrary to what you might have read in the New European, Trump is not actually a felon; the deep state has conspired to frame him. He did not actually lose the 2020 election; his casinos did not go bankrupt in Atlantic City, he is always a winner at anything he does. And if he apparently loses on November 5 it will only be because the election has been rigged by the secretive satanic and paedophilic liberal elites. 

If this happens, worry not! Trump didn’t actually lose; we the lizard elite just made it seem that way to draw the paedophiles into the open to strike them down and wipe out evil from the Earth. 

Please ignore the inconsistency that Trump is himself a member of the liberal coastal elite, a rapist, has already been president and is likely in debt. All the memes about lizard people and immigrants eating pets also operate as dead cats to distract from Trump’s connections to Russia, to Jan 6, to election rigging, to his rambling. 

We the lizard people promise you, he is genuinely an outsider, a victim, a normal guy, while also being a real billionaire, very Christian, very Bible-loving, very God-fearing and extremely coherent in his statements and visions. He is very fit for office cognitively and physically.

8) Conspiracy theories work because they allow for the politics of “us vs them”, not complex policies and concrete solutions!

The meta-message of all the conspiracy theories that we the lizard people spread is that the memes and conspiracy theories all fundamentally mean the same thing. All recent polling shows that the biggest issue most people worry about is the economy, and most specifically increasing inequality and the unaffordability of contemporary life. 

People don’t know their preferred policy programme to fix it. Should we have tariffs, inheritance taxes, more migrant labour? People don’t know.

Hence, today’s real political issues about how to curb inflation, trade deficits, and labour shortages are too hard for most people to understand and they simply don’t follow the issues sufficiently to evaluate concrete policies. And they hate being made to feel stupid by wonky liberal policy elites. What social media and Netflix has filled them with is a sense that other people own superyachts and have supermodel girlfriends and it simply isn’t fair.

Conspiracy theories are a socially acceptable way of articulating a Politics of Ressentiment – of pitting groups against each other. Just like Brexit, Trump has signalled that he will “take back control” from the minorities, Jews, uppity feminists, transgender activists, immigrants, urban lawyers, and all the other groups you hate and feel have too much power. 

We the lizard people understand that society and culture have changed too rapidly in the past few decades and you want to go back to how things used to be where your group had more power and that everyone that served you at the local diner spoke English. That is the inner meaning of all the conspiracy theories, and that is what the 2024 election is really being fought about. The rest is just detail.

Jason Pack is host of the Disorder podcast