Donald Trump shakes hands with Michael S Dell while Susan Dell watches Alamy Stock Photo
SeriesInternet Diaries
Our FactCheck editor details the internet trends seen by a thirtysomething-year-old man.
Stephen McDermott
THEY WALK AMONG us.
To the untrained eye, they can be hard to spot in the flesh, but those who know can tell.
These otherworldly beings have an unmistakable intensity, communicate in frantic bursts and appear to have studied human punctuation without fully understanding it.
I’m talking, of course, about the ‘lizard people’ people.
These people believe a conspiracy theory that the world’s elites are actually shape-shifting, reptilian extraterrestrials who secretly control the world by hiding in human form.
Their natural habitat is in the replies and comments sections of social media posts.
I’ve never knowingly seen one of these people in the wild, but the internet has recently shown me a huge amount of evidence that they exist in the form of bizarre theories about women linked to the Trump administration.
It started when I was shown videos of the businesswoman and philanthropist Susan Dell in the Oval Office with Donald Trump last week.
Before I knew why she was visiting the White House, I was being bombarded with posts that claimed she was part of this reptilian conspiracy.
Dell, whose husband Michael founded the technology company that bears their surname, was in Washington to promote a $6.25 billion pledge they’d made to help fund investment accounts for 25 million American children.
That massive act of charity was entirely submerged beneath the deluge of commentary about what they perceived as her strange movements and other remarks about her appearance.
Takes from the lizard people people included things like “I’m telling you now she’s either reptilian, or she’s a robot”, “It looks like Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and “aliens are already working inside Trump’s world … tell me you don’t see it”.
Other posts soon targeted Kelly Loeffler, the administrator of the US Small Business Administration, and Barbara Thornhill, the new ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat human trafficking.
Loeffler’s looks in a viral TikTok video and Thornhill’s appearance in an image used to announce her appointment were taken as further evidence that the Trump administration “isn’t even trying to hide the aliens anymore bro”.
It was difficult to tell which of the conspiracy theories was in earnest, and which were just leaning into the meme for mean-spirited lulz.
The distinction mattered less the more of these posts I saw: both types of commentary simply invited me to pick over the details of these women’s appearances before I knew anything about who they were.
What do we learn about powerful people by debating whether they’re human?
These women, however well-meaning, have access to Trump and the higher reaches of the US government, and present carefully manicured images of authority and glamour.
After several clips, I could recognise Susan Dell immediately but could explain almost nothing about why she was in the Oval Office.
My feed had made her familiar without making me informed.
It’s easy to get stuck down that rabbit hole if you want to because posts about the three women are alluring: they are a kind of engagement bait where users are invited to intensely inspect the women’s gestures and physiognomy, or to go looking for more ‘evidence’.
When you’re primed to see something and get drawn into the hunt for clues, it’s little wonder that you end up believing a bizarre theory or goading others into doing the same.
Those who genuinely think there are aliens in the White House possibly feel that this can be explained because people with extraordinary wealth and access are fundamentally different from everyone else.
The theory therefore turns a complicated question – how power operates – into a mystery with an identifiable answer and clues that anyone can supposedly spot if they look hard enough.
You don’t have to believe any of it to keep the game going either; it may just be absurd entertainment, a game being played by bored people on the internet that others keep adding to.
But whether you’re playing along or uncovering an intergalactic conspiracy, the conversation ends up in much the same place.
The question of what Susan Dell was doing in the Oval Office has devolved into speculation about whether she is a lizard, a robot or an alien.
When you’re asking bigger, more difficult questions about power and access, recognising someone as human is a fairly modest concession, and might yield a better critique of the genuinely weird state of US politics right now.
The truth is out there.