The Terrifying Reason We’re Talking About Lizard Squad Again

Today, former Trump legal representative L. Lin Wood shared some supposedly earth-shattering information about a cabal of intelligence officers from “10 of the world’s most well-known & ‘elite’ agencies” [sic] whose alleged mission is to blackmail powerful people by forcing them to have sex with children at gunpoint. In Wood’s telling, they film the activity and they store the tapes—yes, conspiracists think they use tapes—in a secure vault as blackmail material. There’s also an old-school hacking group in the mix.

Once properly blackmailed, the conspiracy goes, the cabal puts the victim into a position of power. This can be anything from placing a victim high up in politics or, in another tall tale, murdering a backup dancer so Britney Spears can become a worldwide phenom.

The cabal then asks victims to do various things. In some cases, they ask victims to put subliminal messages into their art (like some conspiracists claim the Beatles did for MI6 in order to hook Americans on drugs) or force them to invest in someone’s real estate deals (like Jeffrey Epstein’s, naturally). If the victim refuses, they’ll apparently expose their perverse video to the world.

According to the conspiracy theory, most people apparently prefer to kill themselves than go against the group. That none of these tapes have ever surfaced is a testament, perhaps, to the efficacy of the group or to the pure level of bullshit associated with this conspiracy. Wood himself notes that “a group known as Lizard Squad” was able to steal many of these videos who then passed them on to a character actor in Arizona. Yeah. Really.

The cabal is nameless, and the name “Lizard Squad” is trending today because the mess is so outlandish that people think a real hacker group from 2014 is perpetrating these crimes. They aren’t. In fact, they don’t exist anymore.

Wood, for his part, blew the whole thing wide open on Twitter, explaining the process with crystal clarity. The problem is almost anyone who has listened to Alex Jones or visited a gun show in the past twenty years has heard the same tales, embellished with the teller’s own personal bugaboos.

Wood, who is perhaps best known for representing Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, has expressed similarly outlandish things before. His law partners reportedly claimed that he might have some delusions and that he told them, according to Law and Crime:

“I might actually be Christ coming back for a second time in the form of an imperfect man, elevating Christ consciousness. That cause you to have a little bit of a chill? Who would be more eloquent to say what the will of God is, the belief of God in me.”

Law and Crime further reported that Wood claimed in a taped conversation, which was part of litigation between him and his former law partners, “I represent Moses. I represent Ananias the believer. I’m like the power of King David. Now look you all, I told you I was going to pray tonight to my God, not to myself, because to me there’s God and there’s me.”

I’m a collector of tales like those of the Wood cabal, and, like poor Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.” I once spent an afternoon with a seemingly sane journalist who told me about one popular conspiracy story that posits that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself because he took part in a blackmail operation against multiple up-and-coming, unnamed congressmen.

This journalist’s story goes that some besuited men met HST in a strip club in San Francisco and asked if he knew how to run a video camera. HST, being a noted videographer, said he did. The men took him up in a helicopter and asked him to film the rape of two boys who were then thrown out into the desert. They then blessed HST with a career in journalism, allowing him to become a popular political and sports reporter despite an apparent lack of skill or talent.

If this sounds absolutely ridiculous, then I think you’re getting the point.

In Wood’s particular cosmology, Donald Trump is a savior because of his apparent perversions. Because he’s already bent, the cabal deemed him too disgusting to blackmail. But, little did the cabal know, Trump was really helping the authorities get to the bottom of the whole blackmail thing. With the help of a group of people high up in the Department of Energy with Q clearance, Trump was supposed to take down the cabal in his eight years in office. That he was ousted from power so completely is, obviously, orchestrated by the cabal. Everyone from the Nashville bomber to Isaac Kappy, an actor who accused several movie stars of being pedophiles a la the QAnon conspiracy and whom Wood looped into his tale, believe this story completely and that, in the end, is what makes it dangerous.

This particular conspiracy is rooted in stories of blackmail and blood libel. It’s focused on the belief that enemies—usually the Jewish people—are killing and eating Christian children for personal gain. This particular form of blood libel focuses on the scary images of Men In Black and unmarked helicopters popularized by such conspiracists as Alex Jones. After the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which “experts” coerced children to claim that their innocent teachers took them to sex parties, paranoiacs began to turn their gimlet eye to technology. Rather than have this all be a nebulous, witchcraft-inspired weirdness, they decided, you have a database of perverts that the group of powerful people (or lizard people!) controls. The blackmail fodder they have would shut down Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and DC if it ever got out. This more technologically-focused conspiracy was best suited to the early Y2K era and the preppers who, in turn, gave rise to the modern version of the Sovereign Citizen movement—the idea that “old” information (maritime law, Napoleonic codes) is applicable to our “new” world. This obviously leads us to QAnon with its tripcodes, message boards, and breadcrumbs.

The sad thing is that the Lizard Squad conspiracy isn’t just fun and games. It’s a real problem, and it’s causing people to do real damage to themselves and others. The aforementioned Isaac Kappy is a perfect example. Kappy was an actor who showed up in a few minor films—he was a hustler in Beerfest and had a bit part in Thor—and he seemed to be under extreme mental duress. “Beware the man that has nothing to lose, for he has nothing to protect,” he wrote on Instagram the day before he died by suicide. He continued:

“I have not honored the light of God within. Also, it should be noted that I have recently been made to believe that I am the reincarnation of Judas Iscariot, the great betrayer. And while I could have utilized this period of the great awakening to AWAKEN myself, I have used it focused on the darkness OF OTHERS and not the darkness WITHIN. To be clear, I was SO ARROGANT that I did not see the darkness within, or even reflect that I could have darkness within. I actually believed that I have been acting upright.”

What this all means is between Kappy and his personal demons, but what conspiracists take away is that he was a man forced by evil to pay the ultimate price. The real tragedy? That Wood or anyone would use a man’s tragic end to give credence to a fairy tale based on the oldest lies in the world: that there are forces in the world that will make us powerful and, in the end, dash us back to the ground.

This lie is told to the powerless by the powerful to frighten them into submission. That’s it’s so ludicrous and silly—lizard people, HST on a helicopter, the Beatles—is a testament to our gullibility and fear and our need to superimpose a narrative (any narrative) on a world seemingly at war with our own well-being. So yeah, there are no lizard people raping and eating babies out there, but there are a lot of people who would sure love there to be because the alternative—that people are sometimes cruel and confused and dangerous to each other—is far too scary.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255).