Yes, Peter Thiel is an anagram of The Reptile. No, he isn’t literally a lizard man, any more biolgically related to a literal reptile than any other human. Unfortunately, his behavior is human. Psychopaths are human.
I suspect that at least some of the conspiracy theorists saw a lot of “cold-blooded” looking people in in power. Those without empathy, and the mirror neurons needed to produce normal body language and responses that look like candid and emotion- tinted, socially normal human movements.
It’s a known thing that sociopaths and psychopaths can rise to the top in corporate structures. A lot of our “leaders” in politics etc, seem to lack empathy and this could easily be symbolized in someone mind as being lizard-like. The collective hints would be more obvious and disturbing to more sensitive people, causing their minds to do the pattern recognition and symbolisms needed to create reptilian conspiracies.
So maybe the conspiracy theorists were an early warning for the nonsense we are seeing now in politics.
In as much as (there is some evidence to suggest that) sociopaths lack the capacity for empathy on a neurological level, given that empathy is a recent evolutionary capacity unique to mammals, it could be argued that sociopaths are less mammalian in a crucial sense than typical humans.
Moreover, as I understand it, some of our neurological systems were inherited or developed from pre-mammalian evolutionary ancestors.
So…from a certain point of view…this crazy conspiracy shit can be made to seem slightly more plausible. In a mundane kind of way.
Presumably, people whose brains lack these later distinctively mammalian neurological systems perceive the world, social interactions, and ethics very differently.
They don’t necessarily lack the empathy systems, like reptiles. Some just have additional mammalian systems to use their empathy selectively. For their puppies and dogs, empathy on. For minorities or anyone different from them, empathy off.