Episode 27: Hillary Clinton and the Lizard People

Episode
Written By Stephanie Summar

Gender, Power, and Political Conspiracy Theories


Welcome to Season 3 of Paranormal Pajama Party! In the premiere episode, we're poking our noses into a conspiracy-ridden corner of American political discourse and what it reveals about our complicated relationship with power, particularly when wielded by women.

And it all starts with some very confused 19th-century scientists trying to figure out why lemurs live in Madagascar.

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and horror, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as brief mentions of child death, genocide, misogyny, racism and antisemitism, sexual assault, and terrorism. Please listen with care.

    Normally, this is where I’d tell you to follow the podcast or share it with a friend or something. Nah, fuck that. Today’s call to action is just for the Americans 18 and up: Vote. Vote like the ghost of a suffragette who went to prison for your right to do it will haunt you until the end of your days if you don’t. Vote like you’re possessed by the spirit of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Vote because it will make Ted Cruz cry. Just vote.

    If you’re not already registered, it may not be too late – check your state’s deadline. If you’re in Colorado, for example, you can register all the way up until and including Election Day, November 5th, if you’re voting in person. Go, go, go! USA, USA!

    [Pause]

    Senator Jacob Mallory was a rising star in Washington. His sharp rhetoric and unyielding stance on defence charmed voters and fellow politicians alike. But something about him made Connie Aiken’s keen spidey-senses, honed over years of investigative journalism, feel a bit… off. For months, she’d reported on his campaign, watching as he moved through his speeches with robotic precision, his skin a little too flawless, his eyes a shade too bright. She’d chalked it up to political theatre and good stage makeup—until she started digging.

    She started following rumours and whispers – conspiracy theories that had first seemed totally laughable, but the more she uncovered, the more cracks began to appear in Mallory’s public facade: Files that disappeared, records that didn’t add up, and photographs from his college days that seemed… wrong. Beyond some respectable grey hair at his temples these days, he didn’t appear to have aged at all since those photos were taken.

    She’d worried she was losing her mind when she first began considering breaking into his local office after-hours, and now she mentally begged her ethics professors for forgiveness as she jimmied the lock to the front door under the cover of darkness. But there was something here. Something important. And the public needed to know what it was. She needed to know.

    Her hands trembled as she searched through filing cabinets and desks. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, but then she stumbled on a drawer with a false bottom, and inside – a key. It was marked with a strange symbol—a triangle with a slitted eye at its centre. She’d seen Mallory wearing a lapel pin with the same symbol on it. He was even wearing it in his official portrait hanging in the office lobby.

    Following an insane hunch, she slid the portrait to the side, revealing a hidden panel with a lock that matched her key. Connie’s heart raced as the door slid open, revealing a narrow staircase leading downward.

    The air coming from below felt colder and heavier. She hesitated at the top, aware that every instinct was telling her to turn back, but she couldn't stop. Not now. She descended into a dimly lit, cavernous room below. The walls were lined with strange artefacts and alien symbols. At the centre of the room was a massive tank filled with murky green liquid. Inside, something moved.

    Connie stepped closer, squinting to see through the foggy glass. What she saw nearly stopped her heart.

    Senator Mallory floated inside the tank, his human skin peeling off in sheets, revealing scales underneath. His hands, elongated and clawed, were flexed against the glass as if testing its strength. His mouth was slightly open, revealing rows of needle-like teeth. But it was the eyes that terrified her the most. They were no longer bright and charismatic. They were slits—cold, reptilian, and glowing faintly red in the darkness.

    She staggered backward, her breath shallow, her mind racing. This couldn’t be real. 

    Then the water began to drain and the creature inside stirred.

    Mallory – or what had been Mallory – climbed from the tank, fully transformed. His scales were a sickly green that shimmered in the dim light. His tongue flicked out, tasting the air. He smiled, and her gaze fixed on those sharp teeth once again.

    “You were never meant to see this,” he hissed in a low and rasping voice.

    Connie bolted for the door’s control panel, frantically pressing buttons, but nothing worked. She heard Mallory’s long claws click against the floor as he came towards her.

    “I’ve worked too hard to let someone like you ruin it,” Mallory said, his voice growing louder, more menacing. “We’ve waited centuries for this, and soon the others will awaken. This world… it’s already ours.”

    Connie grabbed a metal rod from the floor and brandished it in front of her. “Stay back!”

    Mallory laughed, a scratching sound that sent chills down her spine. “There’s nowhere for you to run. No one will believe you, even if you escape. You’ll just disappear. Just like the others before you.”

    The creature’s reptilian eyes locked onto Connie. She could feel the heat from its breath as it neared, smell the decay of its body.

    Mallory tilted his head. “You humans are so fragile,” he said, almost gently. “So easily led.”

    With a final surge of adrenaline, Connie swung the rod at Mallory, but he was faster. His hand shot out, claws digging into her wrist, forcing her to drop her weapon. His grip was like iron, and his eyes bore into hers, filled with a cold intelligence but completely devoid of humanity.

    Before she could scream, the creature struck, its jaws clamping down on her leg, dragging her to the ground. Pain exploded through her body and her vision blurred, the room spinning around her. The last thing she heard before the darkness claimed her was Mallory’s voice, calm and cold: “Welcome to the new world order.”

    And then, silence.

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off of these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    Welcome back to Season 3 of the podcast, which is shifting to a fortnightly format. For the Americans in the audience, that means every two weeks. Yeah, I’m pretty Australian now.

    Although on that note, you may’ve noticed that tonight’s pyjama party is red, white and blue. I thought we’d have a theme party ahead of the US presidential election. It seemed especially fitting given tonight’s guest of honour, a fourth-dimensional bipedal reptilian alien from the planet Draco who sometimes goes by the name Hillary Clinton. Welcome, Madame Secretary!

    No, I’m totally kidding. If you take one thing away from this podcast episode, let it be this: Hillary Rodham Clinton is 100% human. And reptilians are… well, they’re not real. But they’re not harmless, either. Let’s get into it.

    To explain our extraterrestrial guests and their appearance at this pyjama party, I need to go back to the beginning. In the beginning, there were lemurs. You know, the sproingy little racoon-monkey guys from the movie Madagascar. Lemurs. And the lemurs were spread across both Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent, and the lemurs were good.

    But the lemurs – or their ancestors’ fossils, anyway – were not found in Africa or the Middle East. And if you were a 19th-century zoologist, this was weird as hell. How could lemurs get from the island of Madagascar all the way to India, or vice-versa, but not travel to the much closer land masses of Africa or the Middle East? Tiny lemur boats? Really, really long jumps? A hilarious circus cannon that only shoots out lemurs?

    These days the answer seems pretty obvious because geological evidence overwhelmingly supports the theories of continental drift and tectonic plates. About 88 million years ago, the land that’s now Madagascar and India was all smooshed together, allowing lemurs to hop between the two with ease.

    But continental drift theory only became widely accepted in the 1960s, and before that, scientists had some much zanier theories to explain our world. Not lemur circus cannon zany, but kind of out there. In an attempt to solve the lemur question, someone posited that perhaps, at one time in Earth’s history, there must have been a land bridge connecting Madagascar, India and even Australia. This theoretical land bridge was called Lemuria, in honour of the lemurs, and scientists explained its modern non-existence by guessing that it had sunk into the Indian Ocean.

    This doomed continent sounded pretty good to German scientist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel. High on Charles Darwin’s newly-released “On The Origin of Species”, Haeckel posited that the first humans hadn’t originated in Africa, as Darwin suggested, but had instead crawled out of the primordial soup and established their first home in Lemuria, enabling us to spread across Africa, Asia and Australia with ease. This conveniently solved the questions of how Indigenous Australians arrived on one of the most isolated places on the planet, and why the “missing links” in human evolution were still missing – the fossils that would help illustrate the connection between modern humans and apes were at the bottom of the sea, of course.

    Before I go on and abandon science completely, I should note two things: First, humans probably did reach Australia via a land bridge 50-65,000 years ago, but the bridge connected Australia to Southeast Asia, not India and Madagascar. We can still see the edges of this continental shelf underwater today.

    Second, there is no missing link. Or rather, there are a bunch of missing links, and they’re not really missing anymore. We’ve all seen the Abbey Road-looking lineup of monkey-to-man used to illustrate the stages of human evolution, but evolution doesn’t happen in a nice linear way like that. Instead, it’s a branching process as populations diverge and die out or thrive over time, like a family tree. Exactly like a family tree, actually – it is our family tree. So these days, anthropologists use the more accurate term “last common ancestor” to talk about the fossils we previously called “the missing link.”

    I wanted to spend a moment on that, because we need to wave goodbye to science now, because what happens from here on out in this episode is incredibly imaginary. Bye, science! Thank you for the vaccines and batteries and stuff!

    Ernst Haeckel’s theory shoved Lemuria out of scientific journals and into the public eye, and it was seized upon by Helena Blavatsky, a mystic and spiritualist who will inevitably come up again in the future on a podcast about occult shit. “The Last Podcast on the Left” did a really in-depth series on her a few years back that’s worth a listen if you’re interested in a deep dive. 

    For today’s purposes, you really only need to know that at this time, Blavatsky was busily establishing her own religious and philosophical system, theosophy.

    In creating its mythology, she claimed the theoretical continent of Lemuria – and the continent we now call Australia – was the original homeland of an ancient race called the Lemurians. In fact, she claimed that modern Indigenous Australians are the descendants of Lemurians. Actually, what she claimed was so racist that I will not repeat it. Worse, her claims went on to influence White Australian pop culture and help justify guilt-free genocide and cultural annihilation. COOL.

    Blavatsky said that the first Lemurians were huge, ape-like beings that reproduced by laying eggs and coexisted with dinosaurs. At some point, a branch of the Lemurians evolved into the Atlanteans, another group of people famous for their sinking civilisation.

    I read several sources that claim Blavatsky called them “Dragon-men”, or “Serpent Men” in her 1888 book “The Secret Doctrine”, but they suspiciously all used the exact same sentences to make that point, which felt like a big red “everyone on the internet is just repeating each other” flag, so I decided to check the source. This was a mistake. I couldn’t find any evidence of her using those phrases when I skimmed The Secret Doctrine, and “skimmed” is absolutely the right word because I gave up on attempting to read it almost immediately. It’s a dense wall of bananapants boo-boo bonkers pseudoscience. If I wanted that, I’d just check Instagram.

    Scaly things like snakes, dragons and crocodiles do come up a lot in The Secret Doctrine, and TheosophyTrust.org has a long article about the importance of the serpent as a symbol, especially of wisdom. Theosophy teaches that these “Lemuro-Atlanteans” were highly civilised, and if Blavatsky did indeed call them serpent-men or dragon-men, it seems like she didn’t mean that literally. She meant they were very wise giant ape-people.

    Unfortunately for them, they fell under the sway of a dragon – again, I’m not sure it’s a literal dragon but I honestly can’t tell – who talked them into the unwise use of black magic. This brought a sudden end to everything, and Atlantis, like Lemuria before it, sank beneath the waves.

    Theosophy was surprisingly influential – among people affected by it are names like Kandinsky, Thomas Edison and Mahatma Gandhi. GANDHI. It also influenced a pulp fiction writer named Robert E. Howard, best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian.

    In 1929, the magazine Weird Tales published a Howard story called “The Shadow Kingdom.” Forget everything I just told you about Atlantis and serpent people, because in this story, the hero is a barbarian from Atlantis named Kull who conquers a kingdom called Valusia, founded by magical serpent-men – like, literal serpent-men this time – who still control everything behind the scenes and have superpowers that enable them to take on the appearance of the not-serpent-men.

    I’d never read this story, or heard of Kull, but to be fair, my barbarian background knowledge is poor. It turns out The Shadow Kingdom was extremely influential in its own right – it’s the progenitor of a whole genre of fantasy fiction, and horror heavyweight HP Lovecraft, a contemporary of Howard’s, wrote the Serpent-Men from Valusia into his own stories, officially tying them into the Cthulhu Mythos.

    And we’re still feeling one of The Shadow Kingdom’s more unfortunate effects to this day, because the other person it influenced was a British soccer-player-turned-conspiracy-theorist named David Icke who now spends his time warning the world about an interdimensional race of reptilian overlords.

    After arthritis ended his professional sports career, Icke went looking into alternative medicine and healing, a slippery slope we’ve all become too familiar with since 2020. In 1990, a psychic told him he had a divine purpose here on Earth, and he became convinced that he was the messenger humanity desperately needed — maybe even the son of God — which he announced in a press conference and doubled down on in a TV interview, right before he predicted the world would end in 1997. It didn’t, so. That was probably awkward for him.

    Icke believes that Earth has been hijacked by lizard-like aliens whose ancestors came here from another planet and the fourth dimension. Their reptilian-human hybrid progeny, known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, are hell-bent on keeping the human race in a constant state of fear that they drink like some kind of cosmic energy smoothie. Just like in Howard’s story, these shapeshifting reptilians control everything – from the UN to the CIA, and they’re responsible for basically every bad thing ever.

    You’d recognise the members of the Babylonian Brotherhood because we humans know them as our elite – world leaders, royalty, celebrities, high-profile politicians. If they’re rich or powerful, they’re reptilians.

    This is where Icke has run into trouble, though. Besides Robert E. Howard, his conspiracy theory draws heavily from a couple of other sources. The first is the TV series V, a sci-fi allegory about the dangers of Nazis. That’s ironic because the other source he uses to support his claims is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a known antisemitic forgery created during Russia’s anti-Jewish pogroms, which killed thousands of people at the beginning of the 20th century.

    We’ve known it was propaganda since 1921, but Icke incorrectly claims that the Protocols were actually written by the Knights Templar, making them authentic and much older than they really are. He says it’s not a book designed to make scapegoats out of the Jewish people – it’s a handbook for the Babylonian Brotherhood’s global takeover.

    Icke insists this is not the case. He’s not antisemitic, it's just that the Rothschilds happen to be reptilians who drink blood, a behaviour that has long symbolised monetary greed in literature. Totally and completely unrelated. …You can see why people have a hard time buying that excuse.

    Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Icke’s beliefs have caught on with a larger portion of the global population than you or I would like. In 2008, for example, someone in New Zealand filed an Official Information Act request to ask the then-Prime Minister if he was, in fact, a lizard. He said no. Someone else asked Mark Zuckerberg the same thing, and he also denied it, but honestly… in that case, I could see it.

    Icke’s fans include Russell Brand, which won’t surprise you; Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple, which will surprise you; and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, which honestly just makes me want to hug Stevie Nicks and ask if she needs to talk.

    To the less unhinged among us, this theory sounds very silly. Lizard-shaped aliens disguised as people are the sort of things kids on the playground would make up to raise the stakes in a game of Lava Monster. Unfortunately, it’s had deadly real-world consequences.

    At 6:30am on Christmas Day, 2020, a reptilian conspiracy believer named Anthony Quinn Warner bombed the AT&T headquarters in Nashville, damaging 41 buildings, injuring three people, and resulting in his own death. Warner believed that reptilians were using AT&T’s 5G network as a mass mind control device, another notion promoted by David Icke during the pandemic.

    In 2021, a David Icke fan killed his two children after becoming convinced they’d inherited his wife’s snake DNA. And in 2022, a documentary circulated among COVID-19 conspiracy theorists that the virus was actually a synthetic form of snake venom being spread by the elites via vaccines and drinking water to turn all of us into hybrids of Satan. I wish that was a joke.

    The lizard people theory is also popular with Alex Jones, the controversial host of “Info Wars”, whose other beliefs include the conviction that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, chemicals in the water supply have turned all U.S. frogs gay, and, oh yeah, Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlour that, in reality, had no basement.

    And that’s how we get from lemurs to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    So let’s talk about Hillary for a minute, here, because I thought I knew her – she’s been such a prominent player in US politics and pop culture for literally my entire lifetime – but honestly, I’ve learned a lot.

    Hillary Rodham was born in Chicago in 1947 to politically conservative parents, who, nevertheless, didn’t feel that their daughter should be held back by her gender. They were apparently the only people around her who felt that way.

    As a child, she wrote to NASA at the height of the excitement surrounding the planned moon landing, enquiring how she could become an astronaut. Someone at NASA wrote back to tell her that, regrettably, women couldn’t be astronauts. She ran for senior class president in high school, and after she lost, a boy told her she was stupid if she believed a girl could be president. 

    I like to imagine that Hillary crushed the water glass she was holding in her hand and swore a blood oath to his retreating back that someday she would be president… of everything. Because she certainly tried.

    She went on to attend Wellesley College, where she served as president of the Young Republicans, surprisingly, although she became more left-leaning as the civil rights movement and Vietnam War unfolded. After graduation and before Yale Law School began, she spent the summer working her way across Alaska, including sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery that fired her and closed overnight when she complained about the working conditions.

    She met Bill Clinton at Yale, and in hindsight, I wonder if she wishes she’d stuck with salmon sliming. Their relationship obviously has come to define much of her public life, but she rejected his marriage proposals multiple times after they graduated, keen to carve out her own career.

    Hill was focused on D.C., where she worked as a congressional legal aide, advised the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal, and became a member of the impeachment inquiry staff that led to Nixon’s resignation. She was hot stuff around Washington, and political operatives had their eye on her. But then she passed the Arkansas bar exam and failed the D.C. bar, which led her to make one of the most pivotal decisions of her life—whether to stay in Washington or move to Arkansas with Bill.

    In 1974, she chose to follow her heart and relocated to Arkansas, but her decision to leave her prospects in Washington behind to build a life with Bill in the South didn't mean she was content to simply be a supportive partner. Instead, she immediately set to work building her own impressive law career there, becoming one of only two female faculty members at the University of Arkansas School of Law. She also co-founded Fayetteville's first rape crisis centre.

    She finally accepted Bill’s proposal in 1975, but she made a point to keep her maiden name as a statement of independence. His political career was taking off, and she continued to practise law, becoming the first woman partner at one of Arkansas’ most prestigious law firms. 

    During this time, she worked with the Children’s Defense Fund, was appointed to a national board by President Jimmy Carter, and served on numerous other corporate boards, including as the first woman on Walmart’s board. She was the main breadwinner in the Clinton household all the way up until they moved into the White House.

    When Bill became Governor of Arkansas in 1979, Hillary was incredibly active in his administration, working on education reform and health care initiatives, including leading a program that expanded medical facilities in poor, rural parts of the state without raising doctor’s fees. Even so, her level of ambition and involvement as First Lady didn't sit well with conservative Arkansas voters.

    Unfortunately, the realities of politics led her to make compromises. Bill lost his first bid for re-election, and Hillary keeping her maiden name was identified as one of the factors that alienated traditional voters. Bowing to political pressure, she began using the name “Hillary Clinton”, although she was back in a pretty empowered role when Bill eventually won re-election again in 1982. In fact, while he was deciding to run again, she briefly considered a run for the governor’s office herself, but polling showed it wouldn’t be well-received.

    Hill also played a major role in Bill’s first presidential campaign, and Bill leaned into it. He called their partnership a “twofer,” saying that voters would get two leaders for the price of one—a president with a highly capable, politically savvy wife. This was a pretty groundbreaking approach, and of course, it made some people very uncomfortable.

    Her brains and outspoken nature drew scrutiny on the campaign trail, and Hillary herself has said she’s not a natural politician. She’s always been a little awkward with voters and the press, which we’ll talk about in a moment, and she certainly had a couple of foot-in-mouth moments during that first campaign.

    She faced a particularly intense backlash when allegations surfaced about Bill’s affair with Gennifer Flowers. The Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes in a joint interview that pretty much saved his campaign, but it’s also where Hillary made a now infamous comment about not being “some little woman standing by her man, like Tammy Wynette.”

    Her intent was to portray herself as a modern, independent woman who wasn't going to excuse her husband's infidelities – which feels really squicky in retrospect, but 1992 Hillary had no idea what she was headed towards.

    Even then, the comment rubbed conservative voters the wrong way and offended Tammy Wynette. A lot of people felt like Hillary was an elitist, and out of touch with the traditional gender roles that many people still lived by.

    Later in the campaign, while defending her decision to maintain a career as a lawyer rather than adopt a more traditional homemaker role, Hillary said she could’ve “stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” but had instead chosen to pursue her profession. This too was poorly received by many, particularly women who had chosen homemaking as their full-time occupation. And like, yeah – I’m not a homemaker, either, but this is not good feminist behaviour, Hillary! Both choices are valid, and the point is that women should have the right to pick either path.

    Also, homemaking and all the labour that comes with it is still labour. I was at a friend’s house the other morning as she was trying to get her small kids ready for school. It was like watching someone try to organise a parade of monkeys, but the monkeys are also mocking them, mysteriously greasy, and continually stopping everything to have a dance party just as the organiser is making progress. There was definitely no time for cookies or tea, and I think a few things might have been actively on fire.

    Anyway, despite these missteps, Hillary was indispensable to Bill's campaign. Hillary entered the White House with an unprecedented level of influence compared to previous First Ladies. She was more openly empowered than any First Lady before her and even had her own office in the West Wing—a physical manifestation of her political involvement. Bill even entrusted her with leading his administration's efforts on healthcare reform, a monumental task that was ultimately unsuccessful.

    Throughout her career, Hillary has positioned herself as a champion for women’s and children’s causes. One of her most notable moments as First Lady came in 1995 when she delivered a groundbreaking speech at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Her declaration that “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights” became a rallying cry for feminists around the world and solidified her as an advocate for gender equality.

    I really do think Hillary did a lot of good things for women and children. Some of her work from law school related to children’s rights – an idea that was still pretty new on the scene – is still cited today. She’s been an amazing feminist trailblazer as an individual – it’s like she’s never seen a glass ceiling that she didn’t want to personally smash. But then came 1998, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

    Hillary’s initial dismissal of Lewinsky's allegations of sexual contact with Bill Clinton as part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" where Lewinsky was used as a political pawn hasn’t aged well at all, especially since Lewinsky was only 22 at the time and Bill was, you know, the most powerful man in the world. And even though Monica still says everything was consensual… that’s troubling.

    Hillary’s approval ratings shot up in the face of public humiliation brought on by her husband’s shitty behaviour, but her dismissal of Monica’s personal agency—and failure to fully acknowledge the disturbing dynamic of a president’s sexual involvement with a young subordinate–kinda seems to undercut her advocacy for women’s rights and autonomy.

    It’s probably unreasonable to expect any human to live out their values all the time always in every scenario, and she was in a crazy situation as the First Lady. But the problem as I see it is that because Bill Clinton is a fucking creep, Hillary’s had multiple chances to get this right or reflect publically on what she might have done better.

    In 1992, there was Gennifer Flowers, who says she had a 12-year affair with him and that he helped get her a job in the Arkansas government. Then there was Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, who sued him for sexual harassment in 1994, alleging that he had propositioned her in a hotel room when he was governor of Arkansas. And the most serious allegations came from Juanita Broaddrick in 1999, who accused Bill of raping her back in 1978 when he was still attorney general of Arkansas.

    It sucks that the man Hillary is married to keeps putting her in this position, but it’s also true that her reactions consistently contribute to the patriarchal privilege at the root of the problems she’s positioning herself as addressing.

    In Paula Jones’ case, Hillary was part of the Clinton political machine that tried to discredit and downplay Paula's claims. She was the subject of public ridicule, and Hillary didn’t say anything to support her right to be heard, which is tough to reconcile with her previous advocacy for victims of abuse and harassment.

    And while she has been a vocal supporter of women’s rights, particularly when it comes to issues like workplace harassment and sexual violence, her failure to address Juanita Broaddrick’s allegations—especially in a post-#MeToo world—is really, really disappointing. It’s hard not to feel like her loyalty to her shitty husband and their political survival as a power couple took precedence over her broader commitments to women’s empowerment and justice for victims of sexual violence.

    Even after the White House, Hillary just kept slamming into those glass ceilings like they’d personally offended her, though. Not only was she the first First Lady in US history to hold a postgraduate degree and have a career of her own, but she’s also the only First Lady to date to simultaneously serve as a Senator. She campaigned hard during the final days of Bill’s administration and was elected the first female senator for New York.

    In 2008, she took her first crack at running for president. I hope she called that dumb boy from her high school and just said, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah” before hanging up on him and announcing her run. She was the US’ first serious female contender for president, but she had the unfortunate luck of running in the same election as Barack Obama, and darn it, he’s charming.

    After he won, he appointed her his Secretary of State. During her tenure, Hillary emphasised "smart power," blending military strength with diplomatic engagement, humanitarian aid, and development work. She travelled extensively, visiting more than 100 countries and advocating for democracy, human rights, and economic empowerment, particularly for women and girls.

    She made her second attempt for president in 2016, becoming the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major US political party, and she won the popular vote, although we all know what happened next.

    It still seems bonkers that someone with her CV – maybe one of the most qualified people on Earth to become president – lost to Trump. Like… complicated feminist legacy be damned, her then-opponent is now a convicted rapist with a long and documented track record of objectifying women. “Hillary Clinton has a complex feminist legacy and I feel weird about that” pales in comparison to “Donald Trump believes he can just grab women by the pussy because we’re not human to him.” These two things are not the same, but for the American electoral college, apparently, they were. Holy entrenched sexism, Batman!

    But Hillary came with a lot of baggage from her past, and on top of that, the 2016 campaign was rife with conspiracy theories. Including the one that Hillary Clinton is an evil paedophilic monster with no qualms about selling children into sex slavery. And the one where she’s – you guessed it – secretly a lizard from the fourth dimension. You know. Normal stuff.

    The American presidency attracts conspiracy theorists like second shooters to a grassy knoll, but the Clintons have found themselves at the centre of a huge number. There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the conspiracy theories promoted by Trump, and Hillary looms large in many of them. The Clintons also star on a page called “Clinton body count conspiracy theory” which says believers attribute 50 or more murders or suicides to the Clinton political machine.

    They are, probably correctly, kind of seen as figureheads for establishment politics and powerful elites, which tends to make people project their fears onto anything they do. Regular listeners to this podcast won’t be surprised to learn that as a woman, Hillary has had to deal with a lot of misogynistic bullshit on top of that that Bill hasn’t had to worry about.

    I’ll say this for the reptilian conspiracy: While certainly suspiciously antisemitic, at least seems to embrace gender equality? I looked at Google search trends for “lizard people” over time and the largest spikes aligned with Obama’s 2013 inauguration, Trump’s inauguration, the 2017 midterms, and the 2020 presidential campaign. It seems to be power that makes you a potential lizard. That, and having hazel eyes or an interest in space, apparently.

    But Hillary has been a lightning rod for misogyny, especially given her many prominent positions as a female forerunner in so many traditionally male spaces. Since she entered the public eye, she’s often been portrayed as a monster by our culture – sometimes a lizard, sometimes a cold-hearted robot, sometimes a castrating psychopath.

    During the 2008 Democratic primaries, for example, Obama’s then-foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, called Hillary a "monster" who would "stoop to anything" to win. (If we’re calling out bad feminism in this episode, sorry, Samantha – that sucked.) But this characterisation resonated with a broader cultural narrative because throughout her career, Hills has consistently depicted in the media as cold, calculating and even brutal.

    One of the most persistent portrayals she’s been dogged with is as a cyborg— the Washington Post once called her a "homicidal cyborg from the future... with manic facial expressions, [a] bulldog front, pitiless emotions and a lust to kill”. The New York Times quoted a former aide comparing her to "the Terminator." Satirical outlets have taken this approach, too, calling her an “indestructible robotic intelligence” or joking that she shocked science by exhibiting signs of actual humanity.

    Framing her as a machine or a lizard-hybrid, something both human and non-human, highlights something one of my sources called a “category crisis” often associated with the way we think of women in power. We struggle to neatly categorise them within traditional gender roles, which makes us anxious, which leads us to depict them as unnatural or even monstrous.

    And monstrous portrayals of Clinton aren’t just about her ambition or politics—they’re deeply gendered. There are tonnes of examples of her being portrayed as a castrating figure in political cartoons and merchandise: She’s been depicted as a shark, the Queen of Hearts, just a giant mouth. At one point, people were selling a nutcracker toy version of Hillary with a massive mouth between her legs, which was pretty clearly about fears of her "usurping" Bill’s power.

    All of this reinforces the notion that Clinton, and any other woman in power, is dangerous and threatening. As a Senator and Secretary of State, her assertive stances on issues like national defence, which might have been celebrated in a male candidate, were instead framed as overly aggressive, violent or destructive.

    This is the double bind faced by female politicians: Women who adopt aggressive or hardline stances are often labelled too masculine or domineering, but those who emphasise traditionally feminine traits such as compassion are seen as weak or incompetent.

    Male candidates like Trump succeed for being shockingly informal and transparent because people say they’re being authentic, but if female candidates like Hillary or Kamala Harris are too angry or expressive, people call them shrill or unfeminine. If they cry, they’re too emotional. If they brag, they're too vain.

    Thanks to her relationship with Bill Clinton, Hillary’s in a particularly frustrating double-bind: as First Lady, the public was suspicious that she was too involved and powerful in his administration. As a presidential candidate, the same people were sure she’d just be his puppet, so they gave them the disparaging Billary nickname, which has its own gendered connotations attached.

    She received a lot of flack for not speaking to the press as much as other candidates during her presidential runs, and that makes total sense to me. She’d had a couple of really notorious gaffes in the past that probably freaked her out, and for decades, the media had been calling her a monster and paying more attention to her clothes and body than to her actual policies. In fact, she purposely began dressing more drably to try to get that to stop.

    In Kamala’s case, as a woman of colour, there’s an additional heap of racism on top of the sexist flavour that a lot of the press coverage of her campaign has taken on. We’ll definitely have to get into misogynoir in-depth on a future episode. In the meantime, I absolutely recommend listening to the “Conspiracy She Wrote” podcast episodes about Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion and Michelle Obama to hear Professor Moya Bailey discuss this concept, which describes the unique and awful ways misogyny and racism intertwine to hurt Black women.

    Portraying female politicians as villains makes for compelling copy – and compelling Hollywood blockbusters, too. Back in 2014, there was a run of futuristic movies like Divergent and The Hunger Games featuring smart but cold and calculating older women in pantsuits presiding over dystopian societies that looked a lot like the United States. Unlike many villainous women of the silver screen, they didn’t use sex to obtain power – instead, they used their intellect.

    Was it a coincidence that these were coming out about the same time Hillary was ramping up for her second presidential campaign? It may not have been part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, but Daily Beast writer Andrew Romano doesn’t think the things were unrelated.

    “America is still afraid of women like Clinton,” he wrote. “Women who are tough, brilliant, and plainly ambitious. Women who don't conform to society's sexual expectations. Women who try to run the world rather than seduce it.”

    And while it might not be great that this type of woman is portrayed as an antagonist, in a way, Romano thinks this could be a good sign. “Equality cuts both ways,” he wrote. “It used to be that the only political villains we could conjure up were men. Now it’s just as easy to imagine a woman scheming and spinning her way to the top. In its own funny way, that seems like progress.”

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Thanks for joining me for the premiere of an all-new season of Paranormal Pajama Party. It’s time for lights out for now, but I’ve got a lot of interesting, spooky stuff planned for the rest of the season.

    To learn more about the double bind faced by women in politics and misogynoir, which are real, or lizard people and gay frogs, which are not, check out my sources in the show notes.

    Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

    Heads up: I’m changing the release schedule from weekly to fortnightly to avoid burnout and give me enough time to fall into research rabbit holes.

    So I’ll be back in two weeks with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

The rise of reptilian conspiracies

The idea that our world leaders are actually reptilian aliens might sound like something from a badly-written sci-fi novel, but thanks to former sports commentator turned conspiracy theorist David Icke, millions of people genuinely believe that lizard-like beings from the fourth dimension are secretly running our planet.

According to Icke's theory, these creatures maintain their power by keeping humanity in a constant state of fear, which they apparently drink like some kind of cosmic energy smoothie.

From fiction to fatal consequences

While easy to dismiss as harmless nonsense, these theories have had deadly real-world impacts. The episode explores several tragic incidents, including a Christmas Day bombing targeting AT&T's 5G network and a father who killed his children believing they had inherited “snake DNA” from his wife. These conspiracies don't just live in the darker corners of the internet – they affect real lives.

Hillary Clinton: A case study in monstrous politics

What's particularly fascinating is how these reptilian conspiracy theories intersect with gender politics. Hillary Clinton, one of the most qualified presidential candidates in US history, found herself at the centre of these narratives.

Tonight’s episode explores how the portrayal of powerful women as inhuman – whether as robots, monsters, or yes, lizard people – reflects societal anxieties about female leadership and the double-bind of female power.

The episode also considers how those anxieties manifest in everything from conspiracy theories to Hollywood blockbusters. It's no coincidence that when female politicians start making serious runs at the highest offices, our screens suddenly fill with dystopian tales featuring calculating women in pantsuits controlling sinister futuristic societies.

The politics of power and gender

What's particularly fascinating is how these narratives of monstrousness evolve. The same qualities we might praise in male leaders – ambition, strategic thinking, assertiveness – become evidence of something unnatural or threatening when they appear in women. It's as if we're collectively saying, “Sure, women can be in charge... as long as they don't act too much like they're in charge.”

Hope in the horror

The real horror story here isn't about shape-shifting reptilians or interdimensional aliens. It's about how readily we transform powerful women into monsters rather than grappling with our own discomfort about changing power structures. Whether it's through conspiracy theories, media portrayals, or political cartoons, we keep finding new ways to tell the same old scary story about women and other marginalised community members who dare to seek power.

But maybe there's hope in the horror. After all, you can't have a monster without first having power worth fearing. Perhaps these monstrous portrayals are just the growing pains of a society learning to accept that leadership doesn't have to wear a tie – even if it sometimes wears a pantsuit.

Listen to the Season 3 premiere of Paranormal Pajama Party wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes release fortnightly.

Sources

Stephanie Summar
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