David Icke

Family and education

The middle child of three boys born seven years apart, Icke was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke and Barbara J. Icke, née Cooke, who were married in Leicester in 1951. Beric had wanted to be a doctor, but the family had no money, so he joined the Royal Air Force as a medical orderly. He was awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry in 1943 after an aircraft crashed into the Chipping Warden air base in Northamptonshire. Along with a squadron leader, Beric ran into the burning aircraft, without protective clothing, and saved the life of a crew member who was trapped inside.

After the war Beric became a clerk in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a terraced house on Lead Street in the centre of Leicester, an area that was demolished in the mid-1950s as part of the city's slum clearance. When Icke was three, in around 1955, they moved to the Goodwood estate, one of the council estates the post-war Labour government built. "To say we were skint," he wrote in 1993, "is like saying it is a little chilly at the North Pole." He recalls having to hide under a window or chair when the council man came for the rent; after knocking, the rent man would walk around the house peering through windows. His mother never explained that it was about the rent; she just told Icke to hide. He wrote in 2003 that he still gets a fright when someone knocks on the door.

Always a loner, he spent hours playing with toy trains, preferring to cross the street rather than speak to anyone. He attended Whitehall Infant School, then Whitehall Junior School, feeling nervous and shy to the point of feeling faint during morning assembly and having to leave before he passed out. The family doctor suggested a referral to a child psychologist, but his father would have none of it.

Football

Icke made no effort at school, but when he was nine, he was chosen for the junior school's third-year football team. It was the first time he had succeeded at anything, and he came to see football as his way out of poverty. He played in goal, which he wrote suited the loner in him and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.

After failing his 11-plus exam in 1963, he was sent to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern (rather than the local grammar school), where he was given a trial for the Leicester Boys Under-Fourteen team. He left school at 15 after being talent-spotted by Coventry City, who signed him up in 1967 as their youth team's Goalkeeper. He also played for Oxford United's reserve team and Northampton Town, on loan from Coventry.

Rheumatoid arthritis in his left knee, which spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists and hands, stopped him from making a career out of football. Despite often being in agony during training, he managed to play part-time for Hereford United, including in the first team when they were in the fourth, and later in the third, division of the English Football League. He was earning up to £33 a week. But in 1973, at the age of 21, the pain in his joints became so severe that he was forced to retire.

First marriage

Icke met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa; she was working as a van driver for a garage. Shortly after they met, Icke had another of the huge rows he had started having with his father—always a domineering man, his father was upset that Icke's arthritis was interfering with his football career—so he packed his bags and left home. He moved into a bedsit and worked in a travel agency, travelling to Hereford twice a week in the evenings to play football.

He and Atherton were married on 30 September that year, four months after they met. Their daughter was born in March 1975, followed by one son in December 1981 and another in November 1992. The couple divorced in 2001 but remained good friends, and Atherton continued to work as Icke's business manager.

Journalism, sports broadcasting

The loss of Icke's position with Hereford meant that he and his wife had to sell their home, and for several weeks they lived apart, each moving in with their parents. In 1973 Icke found a job as a reporter with the weekly Leicester Advertiser, through a contact who was a sports editor at the Daily Mail. He moved on to the Leicester News Agency, and through them did some work for BBC Radio Leicester as their football reporter, then worked his way up through the Loughborough Monitor, the Leicester Mercury, and BRMB Radio in Birmingham.

He worked for two months in Saudi Arabia in 1976, helping with their national football team. It was supposed to be a longer-term position, but he missed his wife and new daughter and decided not to return after his first holiday back to the UK. BRMB gave him his job back, after which he successfully applied to Midlands Today at the BBC's Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, a job that included on-air appearances. One of the earliest stories he covered for them was the murder of Carl Bridgewater, the paperboy who was shot during a robbery in 1978.

In 1981 Icke became a sports presenter for the BBC's national programme, Newsnight, which had begun the previous year. Two years later, on 17 January 1983, he appeared on the first edition of the BBC's Breakfast Time, British television's first national breakfast show, and presented the sports news for them until 1985, which meant getting up at two o'clock in the morning five days a week. In the summer of 1983 he achieved his ambition when he co-hosted Grandstand, at the time the BBC's flagship national sports programme. He also published his first book that year, It's a Tough Game, Son!, about how to break into football.

Icke and his family moved in 1982 to Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His relationship with Grandstand was shortlived–he wrote that a new editor arrived in 1983 who appeared not to like him–but he continued working for BBC Sport until 1990, often on bowls and snooker programmes, and at the 1988 Summer Olympics. He was by then a household name, but a career in television began to lose its appeal; he wrote that he found television workers insecure, shallow and sometimes vicious. In August 1990, his contract with the BBC was terminated when he initially refused to pay the Community Charge (also known as the "poll tax"), a local tax introduced that year by Margaret Thatcher's government. He ultimately paid it, but his announcement that he was willing to go to prison rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.

Green Party, Betty Shine

Icke had begun to flirt with alternative medicine and New Age philosophies in the 1980s, in an effort to relieve his arthritis, and this encouraged his interest in Green politics. Within six months of joining the Green Party, he was given a position as one of its four principal speakers, positions created in lieu of a single leader.

His second book, It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment, was published in 1989, and he was regularly invited to high-profile events. That year he discussed animal rights during a televised debate at the Royal Institution, alongside Tom Regan, Mary Warnock and Germaine Greer, and in 1990 his name appeared on advertisements for a children's charity, along with Audrey Hepburn, Woody Allen and other celebrities.

Despite his successful media career, Icke wrote that 1989 was a time of considerable personal despair, and it was during this period that he said he began to feel a presence around him. He often describes how he felt it while alone in a hotel room in March 1990, and finally asked: "If there is anybody here, will you please contact me because you are driving me up the wall!" Days later, in a newsagent's in Ryde, he felt a force pull his feet to the ground, he wrote, and heard a voice guide him toward some books. One of them was Mind to Mind (1989) by Betty Shine, a psychic healer in Brighton. He read the book, then wrote to her requesting a consultation about his arthritis.

Icke visited Shine four times. During the third meeting, on 29 March 1990, Icke felt something like a spider's web on his face, and Shine told him she had a message from Wang Ye Lee of the spirit world. Icke had been sent to heal the Earth, she said, and would become famous but would face opposition. The spirit world was going to pass ideas to him, which he would speak about to others. He would write five books in three years; in 20 years a new flying machine would allow us to go wherever we wanted and time would have no meaning; and there would be earthquakes in unusual places, because the inner earth was being destabilized by having oil taken from the seabed.

In February 1991, Icke visited a pre-Inca Sillustani burial ground near Puno, Peru, where he felt drawn to a particular circle of waist-high stones. As he stood in the circle, he had two thoughts: that people would be talking about this in 100 years, and that it would be over when it rained. His body shook as though plugged into an electrical socket, he wrote, and new ideas poured into him. Then it started raining and the experience ended. He described it as the kundalini (a term from Indian yoga) activating his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.

Turquoise period

There followed what Icke called his "turquoise period". He had been channelling for some time, he wrote, and had received a message through automatic writing that he was a "Son of the Godhead", interpreting "Godhead" as the "Infinite Mind". He began to wear only turquoise, often a turquoise shell suit, a colour he saw as a conduit for positive energy. He also started working on his third book, and the first of his New-Age period, The Truth Vibrations.

In August 1990, before his visit to Peru, Icke had met Deborah Shaw, an English psychic living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. When he returned from Peru they began a relationship, with the apparent blessing of Icke's wife. In March 1991 Shaw began living with the couple, a short-lived arrangement that the press called the "turquoise triangle". Shaw changed her name to Mari Shawsun, while Icke's wife became Michaela, which she said was an aspect of the Archangel Michael.

The relationship with Shaw led to the birth of a daughter in December 1991, although she and Icke had stopped seeing each other by then. Icke wrote in 1993 that he decided not to visit his daughter and had seen her only once, at the request of Shaw. Icke's wife gave birth to the couple's second son in November 1992.

Press conference

In March 1991, Icke resigned from the Green Party during a party conference, telling them he was about to be at the centre of "tremendous and increasing controversy", and winning a standing ovation from them after the announcement. A week later, shortly after his father died, Icke and his wife, Linda Atherton, along with their daughter and Deborah Shaw, held a press conference to announce that Icke was a son of the Godhead. He told reporters the world was going to end in 1997. It would be preceded by a hurricane around the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, eruptions in Cuba, disruption in China, a hurricane in Derry, and an earthquake on the Isle of Arran. The information was being given to them by voices and automatic writing, he said. Los Angeles would become an island, New Zealand would disappear, and the cliffs of Kent would be under water by Christmas.

Wogan interview

The headlines attracted requests for interviews from Nicky Campbell's BBC Radio One programme, for Terry Wogan's prime-time Wogan show, and Fern Britton's ITV chat show. The Wogan interview, on 29 April 1991, was the most damaging. Wogan interviewed Icke again in 2006, acknowledging that his comments had been "a bit sharp".

Wogan introduced the 1991 segment with "The world as we know it is about to end". Amid laughter from the audience, Icke prevaricated when asked if he was the son of God, replying that Jesus would have been laughed at too, and repeating that Britain would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. Without these, "the Earth will cease to exist". When Icke said laughter was the best way to remove negativity, Wogan replied of the audience: "But they're laughing at you. They're not laughing with you."

The interview proved devastating for Icke. The BBC was criticized for allowing it to go ahead; Des Christy of The Guardian called it a "media crucifixion". Icke disappeared from public life for a time. In May 1991, police were called to the couple's home after a crowd of over 100 youths gathered outside, chanting "We want the Messiah" and "Give us a sign, David". Icke told Jon Ronson in 2001:

One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into "Icke's a nutter." I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.

Publishing

The Wogan interview separated Icke from his own previous life, he wrote in 2003, although he considered it the making of him in the end, giving him the courage to develop his ideas without caring what anyone thought. His book The Truth Vibrations, inspired by his experience in Peru, was published in May 1991, and he continued to write, turning himself into a popular author and speaker.

Between 1992 and 1994, he wrote five books, all published by mainstream publishers, four in 1993. Love Changes Everything (1992), influenced by the "channelling" work of Deborah Shaw, is a theosophical work about the origin of the planet, in which Icke writes with admiration about Jesus. Days of Decision (1993) is an 86-page summary of his interviews after the 1991 press conference; it questions the historicity of Jesus but accepts the existence of the Christ spirit. Icke's autobiography, In the Light of Experience, was published the same year, followed by Heal the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation (1993).

The Robots' Rebellion

Icke's fifth book of that period, The Robots' Rebellion (1994), published by Gateway, attracted allegations that his work was antisemitic. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the book contains "all the familiar beliefs and paranoid clichés" of the US conspiracists and militia. It claims that a plan for world domination by a shadowy cabal, perhaps extraterrestrial, was laid out in a notorious antisemitic literary forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (c. 1897). Barkun states that Icke's reliance on the Protocols in The Robots' Rebellion is "the first of a number of instances in which Icke moves into the dangerous terrain of anti-Semitism".

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a notorious antisemitic literary forgery, probably written under the direction of the Russian secret police in Paris, that purported to reveal a conspiracy by the Jewish people to achieve global domination. It was exposed as a work of fiction in 1920 by Lucien Wolf and the following year by Philip Graves in The Times. Once exposed, it disappeared from mainstream discourse, Barkun writes, until interest in it was renewed by the American far right in the 1950s. Its use was spread further by conspiracy groups on the internet.

Icke took both the extraterrestrial angle and the focus on the Protocols from Behold a Pale Horse (1991) by Milton William Cooper, who was associated with the American militia movement; chapter 15 of Cooper's book reproduces the Protocols in full. The Robots' Rebellion refers repeatedly to the Protocols, calling them the Illuminati protocols, and defining Illuminati as the "Brotherhood elite at the top of the pyramid of secret societies world-wide". Icke adds that the Protocols were not the work of the Jewish people, but of Zionists.

The Robots' Rebellion was greeted with dismay by the Green Party's executive. Despite the controversy over the press conference and the Wogan interview, they had allowed Icke to address the party's annual conference in 1992—a decision that led one of its principal speakers, Sara Parkin, to resign—but after the publication of The Robot's Rebellion they moved to ban him. Icke wrote to The Guardian in September 1994 denying that The Robots' Rebellion was antisemitic, and rejecting racism, sexism and prejudice of any kind, while insisting that whoever had written the Protocols "knew the game plan" for the 20th century.

Books

Why do we play a part in suppressing alternative information to the official line of the Second World War? How is it right that while this fierce suppression goes on, free copies of the Spielberg film, Schindler's List, are given to schools to indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events. And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.

Icke's next manuscript, And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), contained a chapter questioning aspects of the Holocaust, which caused a rift with his publisher, Gateway. In addition to Holocaust denial, Icke claims in the book that Jews "dominated the Versailles Peace Conference and created the circumstances which made the Second World War inevitable. They financed Hitler to power in 1933 and made the funds available for his rearmament." After borrowing £15,000 from a friend, Icke set up Bridge of Love Publications, later called David Icke Books, and self-published that book and all his work thereafter. He wrote in 2004 that And the Truth was one of his proudest achievements.

According to Lewis and Kahn, Icke set about consolidating all conspiracy theories into one project with unlimited explanatory power. His books sold 140,000 copies between 1998 and 2011, at a value of over £2 million. Thirty thousand copies of The Biggest Secret (1999) were in print months after publication, according to Icke, and it was reprinted six times between 1999 and 2006. His 2002 book, Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster, became a long-standing top-five bestseller in South Africa. By 2006, his website was getting 600,000 hits a week, and by 2011 his books had been translated into 11 languages.

Icke became known, in particular, for his lengthy lectures. By 2006, he had lectured in at least 25 countries, attracting audiences of several thousand each time. He lectured for seven hours to 2,500 people at the Brixton Academy, London, in 2008, and the same year addressed the University of Oxford's debating society, the Oxford Union. His book tour for Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More (2010) included a sell-out talk to 2,100 in New York and £83,000 worth of ticket sales in Melbourne, Australia. In October 2012, he delivered a 10-hour lecture to 6,000 people at London's Wembley Arena.

Second marriage, politics, television

In 1997, Icke met his second wife, Pamela Leigh Richards, in Jamaica. He and Linda Atherton divorced in 2001, and he and Richards were married the same year. However, the couple separated in 2008 and divorced in 2011.

Icke stood for parliament in the 2008 by-election for Haltemprice and Howden (an East Yorkshire constituency), on the issue of "Big Brother—The Big Picture". He came 12th out of 26 candidates, with 110 votes (0.46%), resulting in a lost deposit. He explained that he was standing because "if we don't face this now we are going to have some serious explaining to do when we are asked by our children and grandchildren what we were doing when the global fascist state was installed. 'I was watching EastEnders, dear' will not be good enough."

In November 2013, Icke launched an internet television station, The People's Voice, broadcast from London. He founded the station after crowdsourcing over £300,000 and worked for it as a volunteer until March 2014. As of that year, the station appeared to have stopped broadcasting.

Overview

Icke combines New Age philosophical discussion about the universe and consciousness with conspiracy theories about public figures being reptilian humanoids and paedophiles. He argues in favour of reincarnation; a collective consciousness that has intentionality; modal realism (that other possible worlds exist alongside ours); and the law of attraction (that good and bad thoughts can attract experiences).

In The Biggest Secret (1999), he introduced the idea that many prominent figures derive from the Anunnaki, a reptilian race from the Draco constellation. In Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More (2012), he identified the Moon (and later Saturn) as the source of holographic experiences, broadcast by the reptiles, that humanity interprets as reality.

Reptoid hypothesis

In his ancient-astronaut narrative, Icke argues that humanity has been genetically manipulated by the Babylonian Brotherhood, a hybrid race of human–extraterrestrial reptilians, also known as the Illuminati. He briefly introduced the extraterrestrial hypothesis in The Robot's Rebellion (1994), citing Bill Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse (1991), and expanded it in And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), citing Barbara Marciniak's Bringers of the Dawn (1992).

In The Biggest Secret (1999), Icke identified the Brotherhood as descendants of reptilians from the constellation Draco, who live in caverns inside the earth. They are the deities known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš, and the fallen angels, the Watchers, who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha. He said in an interview:

When you get back into the ancient world, you find this recurring theme of a union between a non-human race and humans—creating a hybrid race.

Robertson writes that Icke's reptilian idea is adapted from Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976), combined with material from Credo Mutwa, a Zulu healer. Sitchin suggested that the Anunnaki came to Earth for its precious metals. Icke maintains that they came for monatomic gold, a non-existent mineral (only gases can exist in a monatomic state) that, he writes, increases the capacity of the nervous system ten thousandfold. After ingesting it, the reptilians can process vast amounts of information, speed up trans-dimensional travel, and shapeshift from reptilian to human.

The first reptilian-human breeding programmes took place 200,000–300,000 years ago (perhaps creating Adam), and the third (and latest) 7,000 years ago. The hybrids of the third programme, more Anunnaki than human, today control the world: "The Brotherhood which controls the world today is the modern expression of the Babylonian Brotherhood of reptile-Aryan priests and 'royalty' which came together there after the flood." By "Aryan" he explains that he means "white"; this includes most Jews, whom he regards as having originated in the Caucasus.

Brotherhood aims and institutions

At the apex of the Babylonian Brotherhood stands the Global Elite, and at the top of the Global Elite are the Prison Wardens. The goal of the Brotherhood, their "Great Work of Ages", is a microchipped population and fascist world government.

The Brotherhood created and controls the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, Round Table, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, Club of Rome, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group, as well as the media, military, CIA, Mossad, science, religion and the Internet, with witting or unwitting support from the London School of Economics.

As of 2003, the reptilian bloodline encompassed 43 American presidents, three British and two Canadian prime ministers, several Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs, and a smattering of celebrities. Key bloodlines are the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, various European aristocratic families, the establishment families of the Eastern United States, and the British House of Windsor. Icke confirmed to Andrew Neil in May 2016 that he believes the British royal family are shapeshifting lizards. He identified the Queen Mother in 2001 as "seriously reptilian", and said he had seen Ted Heath's eyes turn black while the two waited for a Sky News interview in 1989. Lewis and Kahn argue that Icke is using allegory to depict the alien, and alienating, nature of global capitalism. Icke has said he is not using allegory.

Dimensions

It is alleged that the reptilians not only come from another planet, but are also from another dimension, the lower level of the fourth dimension (the "lower astral dimension"), the one nearest the physical world. Barkun argues that the introduction of different dimensions allows Icke to skip awkward questions about how the reptilians got here. Icke writes that the universe consists of an infinite number of dimensions that share the same space, just like television and radio frequencies. Some people can tune their consciousness to other wavelengths, and it is from one of these other dimensions that the Anunnaki control the planet, although just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they in turn are controlled by a fifth dimension.

Problem–reaction–solution

Icke writes that the Brotherhood uses human anxiety as energy. "Thus we have the encouragement of wars," he wrote in 1999, "human genocide, the mass slaughter of animals, sexual perversions which create highly charged negative energy, and black magic ritual and sacrifice which takes place on a scale that will stagger those who have not studied the subject."

In Tales From The Time Loop (2003), Icke argues that the reptilians create religious, racial, ethnic and sexual division to divide and conquer humanity. Incidents and issues he attributes to the Global Elite include the Oklahoma City bombing, Dunblane, Columbine, 9/11, 7/7, global warming, chemtrails, water fluoridation, and Agenda 21. The incidents allow the reptilians to respond in whatever way they intended to act in the first place, a concept Icke calls "order out of chaos" or "problem–reaction–solution". One of their methods is to create fake opposites, or "opposames", such as the Axis and Allied powers of World War II. The movement of societies toward totalitarianism because of these conflicts he calls "totalitarian tiptoe".

Red Dresses

In Infinite Love is the Only Truth (2005), Icke introduces his three categories of people. The Brotherhood are "interactive software programs", or "Red Dresses". They lack consciousness and free will, and their human bodies are holographic veils. A second group, the "sheeple" (the vast majority of humanity), are conscious, but do as they are told and are the Brotherhood's main energy source. They include the "repeaters", people in positions of influence who repeat what other people tell them; he cites doctors, teachers and journalists as examples.

The third and smallest group are those who see through the illusion; they are usually dubbed dangerous or mad. The Red Dress genetic lines interbreed obsessively to make sure their bloodlines are not weakened by the second or third levels of consciousness, because consciousness can rewrite the software.

Saturn–Moon Matrix

The Moon Matrix is introduced in Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More (2010), in which Icke suggests that the Earth and collective human mind are manipulated from the Moon, a spacecraft and inter-dimensional portal controlled by the reptilians. The Moon Matrix is a broadcast from that spacecraft to the human body–computer, specifically to the left hemisphere of the brain, which gives us our sense of reality: "We are living in a dreamworld within a dreamworld—a Matrix within the virtual-reality universe—and it is being broadcast from the Moon." Unless people force themselves to become fully conscious, their minds are the Moon's mind.

This idea is further explored in Icke's Remember Who You Are: Remember 'Where' You Are and Where You 'Come' From (2012), where he introduces the concept of the "Saturn–Moon Matrix". In this more recent conceptualization, the rings of Saturn (which Icke believes were artificially created by reptilian spacecraft) are the ultimate source of the signal, while the Moon functions as an amplifier.

Reception

Icke has emerged as a professional conspiracy theorist within a global counter-cultural movement that combines New World Order conspiracism, the truther movement and anti-globalization, with an extraterrestrial conspiracist subculture (Roswell, alien abduction, crop circles, men in black, The X-Files). Thanks to Icke's prominence, public figures are regularly asked whether they are lizards. An Official Information Act request was filed in New Zealand in 2008 to ask this of John Key, the prime minister, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was asked the same during a Q&A in 2016. (Both men said they were not lizards. Key added that he had taken the unusual step of consulting not only a doctor but a vet.) In a 2013 survey in the United States by Public Policy Polling, 4% believed that "'lizard people' control our societies."

Icke's audiences consist of all ages and political persuasions, from the far-right Christian patriots to New Agers. Barkun categorizes Icke as a New Age conspiracist, describing his work as "improvisational millennialism", with an end-of-history scenario involving a final battle between good and evil. Barkun defines improvisional millennialism as an "act of bricolage": because everything is connected in the conspiracist world view, every source can be mined for links.

Barkun argues that Icke has actively tried to cultivate the radical right: "There is no fuller explication of [their] beliefs about ruling elites than Icke's." In 1996, Icke spoke to a conference in Reno, Nevada, alongside opponents of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, including Kirk Lyons, a lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan. Icke was dogged for years by allegations of antisemitic; his claim that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery is genuine was taken to mean that Icke's reptilians were really Jews, which Icke called "friggin' nonsense". After complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress in 2000, he was briefly detained by immigration officials in Canada where he was booked for a speaking tour, and his books were removed from Indigo Books, a Canadian chain. Several stops on the tour were cancelled by the venues, as was a lecture in London.

Despite his relationships with the far right, Icke's New Age beliefs create a division between him and them, according to Barkun. Although Icke regards Christian patriots as the only Americans who understand the New World Order, he also told a Christian patriot group: "I don't know which I dislike more, the world controlled by the Brotherhood, or the one you want to replace it with". James Ward argues that Icke's underlying message is hopeful, and that therein lies his appeal: as Icke said at Wembley in 2012, "If we want a world of love and peace, we have to be loving and peaceful with everyone, even people we don't like."

Relying on Douglas Kellner's distinction between clinical paranoia and a "critical paranoia" that confronts power, Lewis and Kahn argue that Icke displays elements of both, and that his "postmodern metanarrative" may be allegorical, a Swiftian satire used to give ordinary people a narrative with which to question what they see around them and to alert them to the alleged emergence of a global fascist state.

Selected works

Books

Videos