Right Wing Watch reported last week that FlashPoint, a prominent Christian dominionist and MAGA-minded television show, had featured “prophet” Joseph Z claiming that “the antichrist spirit” had chosen Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz to fit in with the “wicked overlord lizard mafia” and its “goblin masters.” Right Wing Watch readers commented that such rhetoric is grounded in antisemitic conspiracy theories, which encouraged us to follow up on that post.
The FlashPoint program was not the first time Z has used such rhetoric. An episode of his podcast posted last September is entitled “EVIL LIZARDS ATTEMPTING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.” In a portion of the podcast focused on the World Economic Forum and its founder Klaus Schwab, Z referred to “wicked lizard goblin pervert mafia scumbags” and “lizard wicked scumbags trying to take over the world.” Z also used the phrases “global domination plan,” “dominion spirit,” and “right out of the antichrist playbook.”
Z’s previous episode is notable because FlashPoint host Gene Bailey, a prominent Trump backer who was invited to Mar-a-Lago last year to interview the former president, vouched for Z on last week’s show, saying he had been watching the “prophet” closely for a year.
The World Economic Forum and its call for an economic “great reset” after the COVID-19 pandemic have spawned an array of conspiracy theories promoted by right-wing media and grounded in the idea that “a group of world leaders orchestrated the pandemic to take control of the global economy.” These claims are variations on an older “New World Order” conspiracy theory, which has antisemitic origins, and taps into the same strain of conspiracist thinking promoted by the infamous forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which has been used to promote antisemitic violence. Among those promoting “great reset” and COVID conspiracy theories has been the vehemently antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters.
In Z’s earlier “lizard” video, the “prophet” also referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Castro’s kid” – a reference to another false conspiracy theory that Donald Trump promoted recently during his interview with far-right online personality Adin Ross, who has a history of promoting racism and antisemitism.
In a 2021 NBC story about a conspiracy theory about reptilian aliens hiding among humans to achieve world domination, cultural historian Lynn Stuart Parramore explored its roots in both science fiction and antisemitic conspiracy theories:
The notion of shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptilian humanoids invading Earth to control the human race sounds like a cheesy sci-fi plot. But it's actually a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century.
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The world-ruled-by-lizard-people fantasy shot to prominence in recent years in part through the ramblings of David Icke, a popular British sports reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist known for his eccentric ideas. [note: Icke’s son is among the promoters of Great Reset conspiracy theories.]
Icke would have you believe that a race of reptilian beings not only invaded Earth, but that it also created a genetically modified lizard-human hybrid race called the "Babylonian Brotherhood," which, he maintains, is busy plotting a worldwide fascist state. This sinister cabal of global reptilian elites boasts a membership list including former President Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Mick Jagger.
This nonsense is espoused by a variety of internet conspiracy-mongers, including far-right, Trump-loving QAnon adherents, one of whom was accused in 2019 of murdering his own brother because he thought he was a lizard. As many as 12 million Americans believed in this lizard people conspiracy in a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey. It's safe to assume the number is higher today.
The outlandish trope has roots in the second half of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution, Darwin's theory of evolution and rapid scientific advances upended time-honored traditional ways of life, leaving people unsettled and unsure what to believe. It emerged more strongly toward the end of the century, when anxieties about perceived outsiders, especially Jewish ones, were fueled by waves of immigrants flooding urban centers in Great Britain and the United States in search of economic prosperity and religious freedom. The tide of immigrants ignited cultural conflicts, as well as health and sanitation crises, in cities that lacked adequate infrastructure for the millions of arrivals.
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Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because today's internet postings by conspiracy theorists often carry traces of just the sort of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic tensions that show up in history whenever segments of the population feel betrayed by elites and fear loss of their own social and economic status.
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Billionaire George Soros is a frequent bête noire among this crowd, and he is often depicted as a world-dominating reptile.
Parramore also noted that Anthony Quinn Warner made statements about a conspiracy of lizard people taking over the planet before setting off an explosion in downtown Nashville, Tennessee on Christmas Day 2020. A 2021 Business Insider story on that bombing noted, “Like the lizard-people theory, QAnon draws on centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes.” The Daily Beast reported that a man who stabbed his brother to death—claiming that God told him his brother was a lizard—was also a QAnon adherent and had tried to join the Proud Boys.
Literary Hub cited another example of the lizard conspiracy theory turning deadly:
In August 2021, the owner of a Christian surf school in Santa Barbara, California, drove his two young children to the Mexican resort town of Rosarito, where he killed both children (ages two years and ten months) and left their bodies by the side of the road. He would later claim that his wife “possessed serpent DNA” and he had killed his children out of fear of “interbreeding” between humans and reptilians—a theory he seems to have adopted through the work of ex-athlete and Green Party politician David Icke.
Z’s references to goblins may have been influenced by controversy about whether or not the portrayal of goblins in the Harry Potter books and movies—particularly an evil banker—was promoting age-old antisemitic tropes. Comedian and commentator Jon Stewart was among those who raised the issue, though he later said people were taking his “light-hearted” comments too seriously. When the goblin controversy reemerged last year with the release of the video game “Hogwarts Legacy,” the Times of Israel noted that following Stewart’s comments, the UK’s Campaign Against Antisemitism released a statement saying that “the portrayal of the goblins in the Harry Potter series is of a piece with their portrayal in Western literature as a whole” and “is a testament more to centuries of Christendom’s antisemitism than it is to malice by contemporary artists.”
