Regular Episode
#097 – SHAME ON THE LIZARD PEOPLE
April 15, 2015

#097 – SHAME ON THE LIZARD PEOPLE

🎙️ Blake Smith flies solo on this episode — Karen is out with a cold and a pregnancy (emphatically unrelated) — to welcome back journalist and author Jon Ronson. The occasion is the release of Ronson’s then-new book 📚 So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed 💵, but the conversation ranges broadly: from Ronson’s years spent documenting David Icke and his reptilian-elite theories, to the mechanics of online mob justice, to the surprisingly awkward overlap between the two.

It’s a rare MonsterTalk episode where the “monster” is mostly metaphorical — though the lizard people do get their full hearing.

🦎 Who Is David Icke, and What Does He Actually Believe?

Ronson sketches Icke’s unlikely trajectory: professional goalkeeper for Leicester City, then a familiar face presenting sports on the BBC (including the venerable Grandstand), then a spokesman for the Green Party — and then, in 1991, a now-legendary appearance on Wogan in which Icke announced he was the Son of God, prophesied earthquakes and hurricanes, and declared a strict turquoise wardrobe policy. Terry Wogan‘s dry observation — “they’re not laughing with you, they’re laughing at you” — was met with a wave of hysterical audience laughter that effectively ended Icke’s mainstream career.

After a period of ridicule and relative obscurity, Icke re-emerged first as a fairly standard New World Order / Bilderberg Group conspiracy theorist, and then — the move that made him a global phenomenon — with the claim that the ruling elite are blood-drinking, child-sacrificing, paedophilic reptilian shapeshifters of ancient bloodline. Blake notes that fictional lizard-rulers had already appeared in Robert E. Howard‘s pulp fiction and the TV series V, but Icke gave the idea its modern conspiratorial architecture.

🐊 Lizards, or a Code Word? The Anti-Semitism Question

Ronson’s interest in Icke crystallised when he read a Jewish Chronicle article arguing that “lizards” was simply coded language for Jews — a reading shared at the time by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and various anti-racist organisations. Ronson followed Icke to Vancouver, where activist groups including the Canadian Jewish Congress were attempting to have his books seized and his appearances cancelled.

Ronson’s considered view, offered here, is that Icke himself genuinely means lizards — but that some of his followers are antisemites who read the theory as they wish to. He acknowledges a brief period when Icke’s website linked to Henry Ford‘s The International Jew, which Icke later attributed to a rogue webmaster. Ronson declines to simply label Icke an antisemite, calling him “much more complicated than that.”

The Vancouver campaign against Icke famously backfired. A custard-pie attack at a bookstore missed its target entirely, splattering the children’s section, while Icke sold out a large theatre — boosted, Ronson suspects, by Vancouver audiences rallying around free-speech principles against the perceived heavy-handedness of those trying to silence him. The resulting documentary, David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews — part of Ronson’s The Secret Rulers of the World series — has rarely been screened since; a grainy copy circulates on YouTube, and Ronson mentions showing a better print at a Brooklyn museum screening. The written account appears in 📚 Them: Adventures with Extremists 💵, in a chapter called “There Are Lizards and There Are Lizards.”

🔍 The Paedophile Ring Claims: A Broken Clock Moment?

The most genuinely unsettling part of the conversation concerns Icke’s long-running claim — mocked as loudly as the lizard theory when he first made it — that senior figures in the British establishment were involved in organised child sexual abuse. Ronson observes that in the years since, a substantial number of those claims have been substantiated: politicians and celebrities from the 1970s and 80s close to the Thatcher government have been exposed as abusers in a series of ongoing UK inquiries.

Ronson’s explanation is not that Icke has special insight, but that his marginalised status made him receptive to sources nobody else would take seriously — including genuine abuse survivors who had been disbelieved. Blake floats the darkly conspiratorial counter-reading: that bad actors may have deliberately fed the information to Icke knowing his association would discredit it. Both possibilities are left unresolved. Blake also draws a parallel to the contemporaneous US phenomenon of Satanic panic prosecutions, noting that he covered the American dimension in a concurrent Skeptoid episode on Satanic ritual abuse.

😳 Public Shaming: From Custard Pies to Twitter Mobs

The conversation pivots to 📚 So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed 💵, and both Blake and Ronson note the through-line: the entire Icke saga is a shaming story, from Wogan’s studio audience to the Vancouver pie-throwers. What changed, Ronson argues, is scale and permanence. Pre-social-media shaming was “primitive” — you couldn’t get the same traction.

Ronson describes his book as a “70,000-word examination” of the dynamic — familiar from Louis C.K.’s stand-up — by which online shaming delivers the thrill of social punishment without the moderating feedback of seeing your target’s face. He deliberately avoided a redemption narrative, he says, because offering one would let “us shamers off the hook.” His practical advice for surviving a pile-on: go completely silent for a year or two, and trust that human memory is mercifully short. The internet makes permanent tainting possible, but only if people bother to look things up — which, Ronson notes with some relief, they rarely do.

The two also digress warmly about the film adaptation of 🎬 The Men Who Stare at Goats 💵 — Ronson is fond of it despite its divergence from his book’s darker material — and the way source books are inevitably refracted through their adapters’ agendas.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed 💵 by Jon Ronson
– 📚 Them: Adventures with Extremists 💵 by Jon Ronson
– 📚 The Men Who Stare at Goats 💵 by Jon Ronson
– 📚 The Psychopath Test 💵 by Jon Ronson
– 🎬 The Men Who Stare at Goats 💵 (film)

🔗 Related Links

– David Icke — Wikipedia
– Reptilian conspiracy theory — Wikipedia
– David Icke — The Skeptic’s Dictionary
– The Secret Rulers of the World (documentary series) — Wikipedia
– Wogan (BBC chat show) — Wikipedia
– Satanic panic — Wikipedia
– New World Order conspiracy theory — Wikipedia
– Zecharia Sitchin Is Wrong (context on ancient-astronaut claims underlying some lizard-people lore)

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

THERE IS A WELL KNOWN CONSPIRACY THEORY that says there is a secret elite group of people who rule the world. There is a lesser known theory that this elite group is comprised of Satanic pedophilic lizard people. One man has made it his mission to tell the world about this threat to world freedom and his name is David Icke. On this episode of MonsterTalk we talk with Jon Ronson about his experiences with David Icke, about lizard people, about child sex-abuse amongst the elites, and about being publicly shamed.

Related Links
Jon Ronson: Selected Works

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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