WHEN British author David Icke wrote his seminal work, “The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World,” published in 1998, he was not speaking metaphorically. When he detailed the “reptilian genetic streams” of “elite” families — human-reptile hybrids allegedly engineering global events — he meant it literally. To Icke, the world is not run by mere humans but by an interdimensional species operating just outside the visible light spectrum.
While many scoff at this as the ultimate apex of human gullibility, millions have found a dark comfort in Icke’s “wisdom.” According to a landmark 2013 poll by Public Policy Polling, about four per cent of American adults — between 12 million and 13 million people — believe that shape-shifting lizard people control our world.
Conspiracy theories in the US occupy a wide spectrum of beliefs. While the reptilian theory sits at the fringe, others command mainstream traction. According to that same study, 51 per cent of Americans believe a larger conspiracy was behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy, 37 per cent view global warming as a hoax and 29 per cent believe that aliens exist.
Recently, these fringe ideas have drifted toward official discourse. In 2021, former President Barack Obama said: “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” And this month, he stated that aliens are “real.” This was followed by President Donald Trump declaring that he would begin “the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.” This rhetorical tug-of-war has effectively moved the extraterrestrial conversation from the realm of the tabloid to the halls of mainstream politics.
However, the most significant shift in public scepticism did not come from space, but from a private island. The Epstein files — the documentary evidence of a shadow network operated by Jeffrey Epstein — unveiled a web of influential statesmen, corporate titans and intelligence assets. To those who believed in a “New World Order” conspiracy back in 2013 (28 per cent of the US population), the millions of documents released by the Department of Justice provide grim validation. They point to a shadow government operating entirely outside the confines of democratic accountability.
The crimes of Epstein are now a matter of public record, thanks to the tireless efforts of survivors and investigative journalists. But for political science, the Epstein saga represents a Galileo moment. It is the realisation that our institutions are often not the centre of the political universe but are, in fact, satellites orbiting elite private interests.
Historically, we have been taught to view the world through a few primary lenses: realism, which focuses on state-on-state power and national security; liberalism, which champions international institutions and the rule of law; and dependency theory, which highlights the economic exploitation of the “periphery,” the developing nations, by the “core,” the wealthy nations.
Under these frameworks, we analysed the Richard Nixon era through realpolitik, the Bill Clinton years through liberal internationalism and the George W Bush years through neoconservatism. But the Epstein network challenges all of them. This is no longer about core versus periphery or containment versus pre-emptive war.
Traditional theory assumes leaders act on behalf of their citizens. The Epstein files suggest a different reality: a secretive social contract bound by mutual vulnerability and blackmail. In this system, shared secrets are a more stable currency than gold or votes. We are witnessing the rise of the transnational elite theory. This framework suggests the true state is a borderless network of high-net-worth individuals who have more in common with each other than with the citizens of their own countries.
These “sovereign individuals” fly above national laws in private jets, moving assets through jurisdictional gaps that the average citizen cannot see. They do not just influence laws; they exist in the grey zones in between them. For decades, victims spoke out, but mainstream institutions marginalised them. On the chessboard of power, they were too insignificant to matter. The failure of oversight bodies was not a glitch — it was evidence of a system repurposed to function as a support system for the elite.
The implications for our future understanding of power are profound. If the primary driver of high-level policy is no longer the ballot box or national interest but rather the preservation of opaque, transnational networks, then our current democratic models are essentially obsolete. We are forced to admit that the political theatre we witness daily — the debates, the elections and the legislative battles — may merely be a superficial layer designed to distract from the deeper, darker mechanics of the global hierarchy.
Furthermore, this paradigm shift suggests that the marginalised of the world are not just those in impoverished nations but anyone excluded from this high-networked social contract. The divide is no longer strictly between the core and the periphery of nation-states but between the networked elite and the disconnected public.
Now that the public sees the liberal world order as a system that applies rules only to the un-networked, it has lost its moral authority. While the old theories remain useful for understanding the history of politics, they cannot explain its current state. The elites are a powerful network capable of acting against their own governments’ national interests to achieve political power, private leverage and wealth.
Perhaps the literal lizard people have yet to be revealed in the sense that Icke tirelessly promotes. But as the Epstein saga proves, a predatory, cold-blooded and unaccountable elite is no longer a theory — it is documented reality.
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Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
