Here’s an unfortunate red pill for the conspiracy community:
whole sections of your worldview
have been ripped off from random bits of pop culture trash—
Hollywood blockbusters, daytime TV,
pulp novels, and kids’ comic books.
First step for man on the moon
Reptilian entities are behind this manipulation of human society.
Where conspiracy theories and pop culture meet.
[Truth Hurts]
Let’s start right at the top with conspiracy superstar David Icke.
Icke was briefly a professional footballer.
Then in 1991 he appeared on a British talk show
wearing a turquoise tracksuit,
and declared he was the Son of God.
You claim to be the Son of God. Is that true?
Yes. You see, the thing is that it’s quite funny, really.
He’s now spent 30 years developing various theories,
all underpinned by the essential belief that
a race of shapeshifting pan-dimensional lizard men
have been secretly controlling the destiny of the human race.
He’s sold millions of books,
can fill concert halls with thousands of paying fans on speaking tours.
A recent interview in which he declared coronavirus was a hoax
had over eight million views by the time YouTube removed it.
But there's a problem here.
I mean, there's many problems here,
but a major one is that his whole fundamental theory
is pretty much stolen straight from the plot of a 1980s TV show.
The show
It’s pretty good.
Basically, aliens arrive on Earth.
They look just like us.
Initially, they offer technological improvements,
gaining the trust of the humans.
But the heroes then discover that they’re actually giant lizards
disguising themselves in humanoid costumes,
planning to enslave our planet,
replace our leaders, and harvest us for food,
which basically is the gist of David Icke’s entire philosophy.
People can deny their existence if they like.
I do not give a ****, they exist.
So, when Icke goes on about reptile conspiracies,
is he receiving divine revelations
to save the human species as he claims
or are these the half-remembered dregs of a TV show
he saw shortly before he announced himself the Son of God?
It’s impossible to say for sure, but we do know Icke is a
He’s said before that he thinks that the show got a lot of things right.
Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.
After the JFK assassination,
the Apollo moon landing became the second great hit
of the 1960s conspiracy theory.
You can see why.
That’s one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
Imagine a world before walking on the moon.
Such a thing would have seemed unreal, magical, unbelievable.
Perhaps even faked as a bit of Cold War propaganda.
Neil Armstrong did not land on the moon.
A government lie landed on the moon.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, man.
It’s, like, so stupid.
The very year Buzz and Neil landed on the moon, 1969,
the idea of fakery was already being played out by Hollywood
in the filming of a fake moon landing
clumsily featured in the worst Sean Connery Bond film,
Diamonds Are Forever.
Then, in 1979,
a hit thriller about a faked Mars mission, came out.
There’s only one small catch,
it never happened.
The filmmakers were then sued for plagiarism
by a prominent moon landing truther named Bill Casing.
Going to the moon was a real risky thing.
And the ensuing controversy elevated all sorts of moon landing nonsense
into the conspiracy theory mainstream.
The footage that we have shows them faking being halfway to the moon.
That proves they couldn’t go halfway
because they’re faking being halfway.
Impressively, despite a supposedly vast government cover-up,
the conspiracy fantasists apparently even figured out
which director had shot the fake footage.
Stanley Kubrick’s psychedelic epic,
had come out the year before the moon landing,
so obviously it must have been him.
NASA hired Stanley to fake the moon landing
because they couldn’t do it themselves.
And then they threatened to kill his **** family,
so he shut the ****up and put out subliminal messaging in
to let you all know it was him that did that ****.
They were, they were fake.
We did them at Roswell.
Smoke, mirrors.
No, they were pretty real, as far as I know.
I mean, I only know Apollo 8.
[The Illuminati Conspiracy]
And what about the Illuminati,
hip-hop’s favorite conspiracy theory
about a new world order who secretly run the world?
I’m afraid this is stolen from 20th century pop culture as well.
The original Illuminati were
a small group founded in Bavaria in 1776.
Ironically, their mission was specifically to promote enlightenment
and combat superstition.
They never had more than a few hundred members
and were basically done by the early 1800s.
Boy, Illuminati real, you know what I’m saying,
once you hit your peak at a certain level.
The crazy part about it is where’s Lil Durk at?
And he did a video.
People not paying attention.
Grandma, I’m going to get you something to eat right now, OK?
But they did have kind of a cool name
or so thought Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst,
who, to be fair, knew a thing or two about cool names.
He was a hippie satirist born Kerry Thornley,
who in the 1960s teamed up with
to troll the world.
These two thought it would be a super funny prank
to start writing letters to media outlets across America,
blaming every problem, tragedy and failure
on the secret behavior of the shadowy group called the Illuminati.
They called this Operation Mind****,
and the inside joke became pretty influential,
spinning into a series of novels called
inspiring satires from Umberto Eco and Alan Moore,
and some music by the KLF.
Unfortunately, Operation Mind****’s prank
also inspired a generation of very online people
to believe that the Illuminati actually run the world.
Now every time you see a YouTube comment
claiming Katy Perry is part of the Illuminati,
this is basically where it comes from.
Let’s get back to Stanley Kubrick.
When he died while finishing the edit for
his scary sex movie,
the conspiracy world lost its collective mind.
By 1999, when
the idea of the Illuminati created by satirists
and taken seriously by
had taken hold.
But it had now become mixed online
with anti-Semitic tropes of
to create a new mixture of old hatreds and lies.
In this world, the Illuminati were the Jews,
and specifically the squillionaire Rothschild family.
The new conspiracy ran that
the secret sex and murder games of the New World Order elite,
led by the Rothschilds.
And obviously, since Kubrick died
shortly before the film actually came out,
he must have been whacked by the perverted Illuminati ****
he was trying to expose through the medium of a Tom Cruise movie.
He filmed a ritual with Tom Cruise in it
in, which I only know more recently, was a Rothschild mansion.
[*No It Wasn’t]
Part of the reason for this impressive leap
is that the film features a masked ball.
People connected this to a party held in 1972
Guy de Rothschild called the “Surrealist Ball.”
Salvador Dali designed special masks worn by A-lister guests,
who were served food on fur plates by butlers dressed as cats.
Basically, it was the most amazing sesh in history
and I would have loved to be there.
To really understand the model
which modern conspiracy theories largely follow,
we actually have to look at another bit of 90s pop culture.
In
are two FBI agents assigned to investigate unsolved cases
involving paranormal activity.
Week after week, episode after episode,
Mulder and Scully find themselves going deeper and deeper into...
guess what?
A massive government conspiracy, which... guess what?
Involves an alien race infiltrating positions of power
on Earth using... guess what?
A virus to infect and control their human host.
The story has to escalate.
It can never resolve
because no resolution could ever be satisfactory
for the scale of the questions being asked.
The X-Files
in American TV history.
Its slogans, “The Truth is Out There”
and “Trust No One”
coming to define the paranoid fantasist style
of the online conspiracy hunter.
The truth is out there.
It probably just doesn’t involve anti-Semitic space lizard fantasies,
fake moon landings, or billionaire sex cults.
It's likely based on something a lot more boring,
like interest rates or filibusters or something.