people

American populism

People’s Party – American populism before Trump

President Trump has been accused of populism but there’s a long tradition of this kind of politics in the United States. Take for example the People’s Party – a prime example of American populism.

I’ve been glued to the TV and social media like the rest of you watching the torture of the 2020 American presidential election. What struck me was how so many rural and rust belt communities voted for Donald Trump. To many outside the United States – this seems inexplicable. Why would poor people vote for a TV reality chat show millionaire?

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But there’s a long history of American populism that has done surprisingly well in rural and poorer areas of the country. Take for example the late 19th century People’s Party – also referred to sneeringly as the Populists – who won four states in the 1892 presidential election.

James Weaver and James Field ran for the presidency and managed to bag the electoral college votes of Colorado, Kansas, Idaho and Nevada. They got additional votes from North Dakota and Oregon. Their political platform, under the People’s Party banner, was left-leaning populism including demands for a graduated income tax, public ownership of key industries and the unlimited supply of silver coinage – sold to the government by miners of silver.

This wave of American populism brought together a number of parties and groups such as the Farmers Alliance, Greenback Party and the Knights of Labor. There was a strong influence of socialist ideas and a call for monopolies to be broken up. The influence of this strand of politics was felt in both Democrat and Republican circles – that felt obliged to acknowledge and respond to the alarming levels of support the People’s Party was achieving.

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This wave of American populism eventually died out. But as we know today, there have been successive waves of populism across the United States ever since. Normally viewed as something malign, it maybe should be seen as exposing the deficiencies and shortcomings of the two-party system. In ‘normal’ times, Democrats and Republicans get to divide up the political spoils only interrupted by the inconvenience of elections every four years.

But every so often, the voices of the dispossessed insist on being heard. And those voices may articulate a rational program of ideas or just be an inchoate howl of rage. The Trump phenomenon seems to be more of the latter. And some dark forces are undoubtedly lurking in the wings. Such is the nature of today’s American populism.

Lizard people – our reptilian overlords

Of all the strange conspiracy theories that bedevil our time – the idea that we’re being ruled by lizard people has to be the oddest.

An article in The Atlantic in 2013 estimated that 12 million people in the United States believe that lizard people run their country. That’s small beer compared to the 66 million who think that aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. But it’s still a very significant number.

Lizard people and David Icke

Conspiracy theorist David Icke has been a leading proponent of the idea that reptiles have gained access to the levers of power. The Icke sympathetic ufochick.com site explains how lizards can take over human bodies with compatible DNA.

They have apparently been doing this for centuries targeting people in positions of power – who then intermarry to preserve the reptilian bloodline.

Apparently, lizards might also go for humans who “live in a state of negativity, fear, anger, violence, aggression and or abuse of drugs or sex”. A form of invisible grooming takes place to lower the individual’s guard.

This allows the lizard to “hop into the human energy field” manipulating the subject’s emotional state to change their “vibrational energy”, which allows the lizard to mount a full takeover.

Lizard people – aliens breeding with humans!

Lizard people theorists seem keen to emphasise that they are not talking about shape shifting. It’s something way more subtle and long established. Icke claims that reptiles came from the constellations of Orion, Sirius and Draco and interbred with humans long ago – though not physically. They did it by altering human DNA.

Basically, to put it crudely, there’s a bit of lizard in all our brains but not all of us have embraced our inner reptile. You can tell those who have by certain traits such as eye colour, scars, mannerisms, etc.

Anyway, that’s the theory in a nutshell.  There are, needless to say, some famous lizards in human guise. Queen Elizabeth II is one. Several US presidents. Global corporate executives. And…of course….the Illuminati and Freemasons.

Lizard people in history

Reptiles as super-powerful people and deities is a recurring theme in many mythologies throughout history.  For example, Kekrops – the founder of the city of Athens – was reputedly half-man and half-snake. He established the cult of the goddess Athena and dedicated her shrine on the Acropolis.

Another half-man, half-snake was Fu Xi, the first mythological emperor of China. He was also the creator of mankind. After a huge flood, Fu Xi and his wife Nu Wa – who were brother and sister – married and repopulated the planet. Both had snake bodies.

The name of Fu Xi’s wife Nu Wa is similar to Noah and some have wondered whether the flood story was shared between China and the Hebrews. Anyway, the bit that should interest us is that this couple, our common ancestors, were 50% reptile. And the idea of reptile gods recurs in many cultures from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs.

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Madame Blavatsky and her theory on lizard people

In the 19th century, the mystic Elena Petrovna Blavatsky – known commonly as “Madame Blavatsky” – claimed knowledge of a long lost land called Lemuria. The Lemurian culture had existed 14,000 years ago and the Lemurian people were a race that could lay eggs, had psychic powers and were bisexual. They were wiped out by a huge catastrophe that also engulfed Atlantis.

In 1983, the notion of reptiles from another galaxy coming to Earth and taking over humans was popularised in the science fiction series V.  The “visitors” claim to come in peace but a small band of plucky humans see through their lies and heroically resist. V was remade in 2009 though failed to make the same impact the original series did in the 1980s.

Social media has heralded a revival in lizard people theory

Today, largely thanks to social media, we are witnessing a surge in the belief that lizard people run our society. A few years ago, I found myself arguing with somebody convinced that a well known celebrity was a lizard because their eyes flickered “unnaturally” in a YouTube video. I tried to explain the concept of pixelation but got nowhere.

I can only conjecture that as people feel less in control of their surroundings and lives, theories that claim alien reptiles are running the show seem increasingly plausible.