Politics

Fringe Factor: Lizard People Rule the World

Say What?

If you believe Senator Lindsey Graham is actually a lizard, you're among friends—12 million of them.

12 Million Americans: Lizard People Rule the World

In 1991, a once well-respected BBC sportscaster named David Icke revealed that, according to a psychic, he was a healer who’d been sent to Earth with a purpose, and warned that tidal waves and earthquakes would soon destroy the world. Icke continued to develop his conspiracy theories, publishing a number of books with the central idea that the world is controlled by a secret group of shape-shifting “reptilian humanoids” also known as lizard people. According to the results of a Public Policy Polling survey published this week, 12 million Americans believe this is true. Thanks to the handy blog Lizardpersonornot.com, those 12 million people no longer have to wonder which world leaders are secretly reptilian. “Lindsay [sic] Graham is clearly a lizard person,” this blog asserts. “Barack Obama? I don’t think so.” While 12 million sounds like an awful lot, it is actually the least believed of the conspiracies mentioned in the PPP survey. The most popular—with a whopping 160 million-plus believers—is that John F. Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy. In second and third place are the notions that George W. Bush intentionally lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and that global warming is a hoax.

Wisconsin Dem: ET’s Are Are Real, 9/11 Was a False Flag

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Speaking of conspiracy theories, the Democrat who intends to challenge Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan for his House seat in 2014 is a bit of an alarmist himself. Amardeep Kaleka, whose father was killed in the 2012 Oak Creek Sikh Temple shooting, and is a staunch gun control advocate, produced and directed a documentary claiming that the government orchestrated 9/11 as a maneuver to distract the American public from evidence of alien life on Earth. In an interview with Madison’s Capital Times, Kaleka said, “I don’t think that any knowledgeable human would say that extraterrestrials don’t exist,” arguing, instead, that the real question is whether aliens are living on earth and, if so, how they got here.

Tennessee: Where Sharia Law Rules

John Guandolo, an FBI agent who resigned in disgrace in 2009 after he was caught keeping a list of fellow agents—and one confidential source—he’d had sex with, has made a second career speaking as an authority on Islamic terrorism. This week, Guandolo called Tennessee “one of the most dangerous states in the union,” because, despite the fact that only one percent of the state’s entire population is Muslim, it’s under severe threat of Sharia law and terrorism. “You have some very courageous state legislators who are addressing the threat but you also have some folks there in leadership who are not addressing it,” Guandolo said on the Christian radio show Crosstalk, Friday, claiming that members of the Muslim Brotherhood he’s arrested have verified this. Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories have been running wild in Tennessee lately. Republican lawmakers recently freaked out over a mop sink in the Capitol building that they thought was a Muslim foot-washing station—proof of Sharia law’s persistence in state politics. Last summer, GOP and Tea Party activists accused Tennessee’s Republican of supporting Sharia law for refusing to fire a state employee for being Muslim.

Megachurch Minister: Obama’s No Christian

Pastor Mark Driscoll, founder of the Seattle megachurch Resurgence, has a new book out that perpetuates another one of America’s favorite conspiracy theories—that Barack Obama is not a Christian. According to the Christian Post, the first chapter of A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future? addresses the president’s religion. “On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama placed his hand on a Bible he may not entirely believe to take an oath to a God he may not entirely know,” Driscoll writes. “Jesus alone will judge his soul one day, but in the meantime we are free to be confused by a man who says he’s a Christian while ending his speech to America’s largest abortion provider with, ‘Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.’” In the same chapter, Driscoll writes that, despite reports that Pastor Louie Giglio pulled out of giving the inaugural prayer at President Obama’s 2013 swearing in ceremony after a controversial anti-gay sermon on, the true story is, “He was dumped like a prom date with tuberculosis... While the nation celebrated tolerance, liberation and homosexuality, the evangelical Christian was forced into the closet.” Obama’s second inauguration, he argues, “was also a funeral” for Christianity in American society.

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