The State Cannot Reach the Lizard People

The idea has a certain elegance on paper: build a fake conspiracy theory channel with all the production hallmarks of the real thing—breathless narration, suggestive stock footage, the right fonts—and gradually make it obvious you’re taking the piss. Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education did exactly this with Wahre Welle TV, a mock outlet covering lizard people in positions of power, flat earth, moon Nazis, and Angela Merkel as a puppet of various simultaneously incompatible shadow governments.

The problem, which the people behind it surely understood and chose to ignore, is that irony requires the target to recognize they’re being satirized. Someone who genuinely believes the earth is flat and that chemtrails are population control does not watch a channel confirming those beliefs and think: wait, is this a joke? They think: finally, someone telling the truth. The project was creative and probably more fun to make than a standard media literacy pamphlet, but its audience was never going to be the people it was designed to reach.

Conspiracy thinking is less about specific content—moon Nazis, 5G towers, globalist puppet masters—and more about an epistemological stance: the conviction that official sources are always lying, that the real explanation is always suppressed, and that your ability to identify the suppression is a form of superior intelligence rather than its opposite. Satire doesn’t touch that. If anything, it reinforces it. Look how they’re laughing at us, the believers say, correctly identifying that someone is laughing at them, and drawing entirely the wrong conclusion about why.

Maybe the Nazis really were on the moon. I can’t prove they weren’t.