Early life and education

Icke was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke (born 1907) and Barbara J. Icke (née Cooke, died 2006), who were married in Leicester in 1951. There was a brother, Trevor, seven years older than Icke, and another, Paul, seven years younger. Beric had wanted to be a doctor, but his family had no money, so he joined the Royal Air Force instead, becoming a Leading Aircraftman and medical orderly. He was awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry in May 1943 after helping to save the crew of an aircraft that had crashed into the Chipping Warden air base in Oxfordshire. Along with a Squadron Leader, he ran into the burning aircraft, without protective clothing, and saved the life of a crew member who was trapped inside. 1479714 Leading Aircraftman Beric Vaughan Icke, Royal Air Force, RAF website, taken from the London Gazette, May 14, 1943. The citation reads: "One night in March, 1943, an aircraft crashed on a Royal Air Force Station and immediately burst into flames. Squadron Leader Moore (the duty medical officer) saw the accident and, accompanied by Leading Aircraftman Icke, a medical orderly, proceeded to the scene. Squadron Leader Moore directed the removal of the rear gunner, who was dazed and sitting amongst the burning wreckage, to a place of safety. The aircraft was now enveloped in flames and ammunition was exploding. Nevertheless, despite the intense heat and the danger from exploding oxygen bottles this officer and airman entered the burning wreckage in an attempt to rescue another member of the crew who was pinned down. Without any protective clothing they lifted aside the burning wreckage and, with great difficulty, succeeded in extricating the injured man. Squadron Leader Moore rendered first aid to the rescued man. Squadron Leader Moore sustained burns to his chest and hands in carrying out the operation. This officer and airman both displayed courage and devotion to duty in keeping with the highest traditions of the Royal Air Force. Acting Squadron Leader Frederick Thomas Moore, B.S., F.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. (23417), Reserve of Air Force Officers was awarded the MBE for his part in this action."

After the war, Beric got a job in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a slum terraced house on Lead Street, near Wharf Street in the centre of Leicester; then, when Icke was three, they moved to a housing estate known as the Goodwood, one of the massive 1950s council estates the post-war Labour government had built, their new home just across the road from the hospital. The family had nothing. "To say we were skint," he wrote in 1993, "is like saying it is a little chilly at the North Pole." He remembers having to hide under a window or chair when the council man came to collect the rent—after knocking, the rent man would walk round the house peering through the windows to see whether anyone was at home. His mother never explained that it was about the rent; she just told him to hide, and Icke writes that he still gets a fright when he hears a knock on the door.

He was always a loner, and felt different from other children, spending hours playing by himself with little steam trains that he had, and preferring to cross the street rather than speak to anyone. He attended Whitehall Infant School, then Whitehall Junior School, where he spent most of his time nervous and shy, often to the point of feeling faint during the morning assembly and having to leave before he passed out. The family doctor suggested a referral to a child psychologist, but his father put his foot down. He made no effort at school and failed at practically everything, but when he was nine, he was chosen for the junior school's football team. It was the first time in his life that he had succeeded at anything, and he came to see football as the only way out of his poverty. He played in goal, which he writes suited the loner in him, and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.

Football and first marriage

He failed his 11-plus, a test that was used at the time to divide children between grammar schools, supposedly for the brightest, and secondary moderns or technical schools for the rest, so Icke was sent in 1963 to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern. He left at 15 after being talent-spotted while playing football, and was signed up as a goalkeeper for Coventry City. Every Saturday when not playing himself, he would travel the 60 km to Nottingham to watch Peter Shilton, one of England's legendary goalkeepers. Arthritis in his left knee—which later spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists, and hands—stopped him making a career out of football, but as well as playing for Coventry, he managed to play for Oxford United, Northampton Town, and Hereford United, before he had to give it up completely in 1973 at the age of 21.

He met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa. She was working at the time as a van driver for a garage in Leamington. Shortly after they met, Icke had another one 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 tiny bedsit and worked in a local travel agency during the day, travelling to Hereford in the evenings to practice or play football. He and Linda were married on September 30, four months after they'd met. Their daughter, Kerry, was born two years later on March 7, 1975, followed by a son, Gareth, on December 12, 1981, and another son, Jaymie, on November 18, 1992.

Journalism

Icke found a job in 1973 as a reporter with the weekly Leicester Advertiser, through a contact who was a sports editor at the Daily Mail, though he writes that he got the job because he was the only applicant. He advanced quickly through local radio to television, and became a regional sports presenter for the BBC's South Today in 1982, around the time his first son was born, and the year he moved to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, somewhere he had always wanted to live. He appeared on the first edition of British television's first national breakfast show, Breakfast Time, on January 17, 1983, presenting the sports news for them until 1985. He published his first book in 1983, It's a tough game, son! about football and how to break into it. He worked for BBC Sport until August 1990, often as a stand-in host on Grandstand and snooker programmes, and also at the 1988 Summer Olympics, but a career in television began to lose its appeal for him—he wrote in Tales from the Time Loop that he found the people working in television to be insincere, shallow, and vicious, with rare exceptions.

His contract with the BBC was terminated in 1990 when he refused to pay his poll tax, a new local tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher that was controversial because the same payment was required by everyone, regardless of income. He ended up paying it in November 1990, but his initial announcement that he was willing to go to jail rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.

Green Party

At some point during the 1980s, he began to flirt with fringe medicine and New Age philosophies in an effort to find relief from his arthritis. He wrote his second book in 1989, It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment, and became involved with the Green Party from 1988 to 1991, rising to the position of one of their four national Speakers, a position the party had created in lieu of a leader. He soon became the party's most alluring speaker, The Observer calling him "the Greens' Tony Blair." He became a household name, appearing on talk shows and in debates. He was invited in 1989 to debate whether animals should have rights at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, alongside Tom Regan, Mary Warnock, and Germaine Greer, and in September 1990, his name appeared on advertisements in national newspapers for the children's charity, Children's Vigils, alongside a cast of American and British celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Woody Allen, Cher, and Whoopi Goldberg.

Sessions with a psychic healer

Icke writes that it was when he was working for the Green Party, and particularly while he was writing the book in 1989, that he began to feel a presence around him, as though there was always someone else in the room, even when he was alone. He writes in Days of Decision (1993) that it was a time of considerable personal despair for him, though he gives no details. In March 1990, he had an experience in a newsagent's that felt as though a magnetic force was pulling his feet to the ground, and he heard a voice tell him to look at a particular section of books. One of the books was by Betty Shine, a psychic healer, or channeller, in Brighton. He decided to visit her to ask for help with his arthritis. She told him she had a message for him. He was a healer who had been sent to heal the Earth, she said, and would become world famous, but would face enormous opposition. The spirit world was going to pass on ideas to him, which he would then speak to others about, sometimes not understanding the words himself. He was told he would write five books in three years; that in 20 years there will be a different kind of flying machine, where we can go wherever we want and time will have no meaning; and that there will be great earthquakes in unusual places, because the inner earth is being destabilized by having oil taken from the seabed.

In February 1991, Icke decided to travel to Peru, where he visited the pre-Inca Sillustani burial ground near Puno. He writes that he felt drawn to a large mound of earth, at the top of which lay a circle of waist-high stones. As he stood in the circle, he felt his feet pulled to the earth as if by a magnet, just as he had experienced in the newsagent's in Ryde, and an urge to outstrech his arms. His feet started to vibrate and burn, his head felt as though a drill was passing through it, and he felt two thoughts enter his mind: first, that people will be talking about this in 100 years, and then, "it will be over when you feel the rain." He said his body started shaking as though plugged into an electrical socket and new ideas began to pour into him. Time became meaningless, he writes, and he has no idea how long he stood there, arms outstretched. Then it started raining, and the experience ended as suddenly as it had begun. He described it later as the "kundalini"—a term from Indian yoga describing a libidinal force that lies coiled at the base of the spine—exploding up through his spine, activating his brain and his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.

He returned to England and began to write a book about the experience, Truth Vibrations, published in May that year. At a Green Party conference in Wolverhampton on March 20, 1991, before the book appeared, he resigned as one of the party's four prospective parliamentary candidates and Speakers, 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.

Turquoise period

What followed became what Icke calls his "turquoise period." He began to wear only turquoise because, he explained, it is a conduit of positive energy. He had met Deborah Shaw, an English psychic living in Calgary, Alberta, in August 1990, and after he returned from Peru, he struck up a relationship with her, which became close and led to the birth of a daughter, Rebecca, in December 1991. At one point, Shaw moved in with him and his wife. Shaw had changed her name to Mari Shawsun, while Icke's wife became known as Michaela, an aspect of the Archangel Michael, and they became known in the press as the "turquoise triangle," though Icke insisted at the time that he and Shaw were just friends. He answered reporters' questions about the relationship with, "if you resonate on this higher level then you see not two ladies, but two bodies with energy patterns."

In March 1991, a week after resigning from the Green Party, he, his wife, and Deborah/Mari held a press conference to announce that he had become a "channel for the Christ spirit," a title conferred on him by "the Godhead." He said the world would end in 1997, preceded by a number of disasters. There would be a severe 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. Los Angeles would become an island, New Zealand would disappear, and the cliffs of Kent would be under water by Christmas 1991. He said the information was being given to the three of them by voices and automatic writing.

In In the Light of Experience (1993), Icke wrote that, at the time he gave the press conference, he didn't feel in control. He heard his voice predicting the end of the world, and was appalled by what he was saying. "I was speaking the words," he wrote, "but all the time I could hear the voice of the brakes in the background saying, 'David, what the hell are you saying? This is absolute nonsense'." His predictions were splashed all over the next day's front pages, to his great dismay.

Terry Wogan interview

The headlines attracted an invitation from the BBC's prime-time Terry Wogan talk show on April 29, 1991. Icke told Wogan, amid howls of laughter from the studio audience, that he was "the son of God," and that Britain would be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He later said that he had been misinterpreted, and that he had used the term "the son of God" to mean an "aspect" of the Infinite consciousness. The interview proved devastating for him. As the audience laughed, Wogan memorably pointed out that they were laughing at him, not with him, and his humiliation seemed complete. He disappeared from public life, and for several years was unable to walk down the street without people pointing at and mocking him. His children were followed to school by journalists and ridiculed by schoolmates, and his wife would open the back door to get the washing in, only to find a camera crew filming her. Icke told Jon Ronson:

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.

The BBC was criticized for allowing the interview to go ahead, Des Christy in The Guardian calling it a "media crucifixion." Wogan interviewed Icke again in 2006, acknowledging that his comments had been a bit sharp, but Icke said the situation had been the making of him in the end, that the laughter had set him free. He wrote that every bridge back to his past was ablaze, giving him the courage to develop his ideas without caring what anyone thought of him.

Icke's core ideas are put forward in four books, each around 500 pages long: The Robots' Rebellion (1994), And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the World (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001). Much of his work is self-published by his Bridge of Love Publications or David Icke Books. Philosophical discussion about the nature of consciousness is intermingled with unsourced allegations against named individuals, including that certain senior politicians are Satanic paedophiles, and that the Swine flu vaccinations are a deliberate attempt to cull the world's population. He argues that human beings are the result of a breeding program conducted by a race of reptilians called Anunnaki from the Draco constellation, and that what we call reality is nothing but a "five-sense illusion," or holographic experience. The only reality is the realm of the Absolute. He believes in a collective consciousness that has intentionality, in reincarnation, in other possible worlds that exist alongside ours on other frequencies, and in acquired characteristics, arguing that our experiences change our DNA by downloading new information and overwriting the software. We are also able to attract experiences to ourselves, via good or bad thoughts.

Global Elite

Icke's basic argument is that humanity was created, and is controlled, by a network of secret societies run by a race of interbreeding bloodlines originating in the Middle and Near East in the ancient world. Icke calls them the "Babylonian Brotherhood." The Illuminati, Round Table, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the IMF, United Nations, the media, military, science, religion, and the Internet are all Brotherhood created and controlled. The Brotherhood is mostly male. Their children are raised from an early age to understand the mission; those who don't are pushed aside. Key Brotherhood bloodlines are the British House of Windsor, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, European royalty and aristocracy, and the Eastern establishment families of the United States. The origin of the bloodlines is extra-terrestrial. At the apex of the Brotherhood stands the "Global Elite," the same group identified throughout history as the "Illuminati"; at the top of the Global Elite stand the "Prison Wardens." The goal of the Brotherhood—their "Great Work of Ages," or the "Brotherhood Agenda"—is world domination and a micro-chipped population.

Icke introduced the idea in The Robot's Rebellion that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was first laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, which supposedly presented a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. The Protocols is the most influential piece of antisemitic material of modern times, portraying the Jewish people as cackling villains from a Saturday matinee, as Ronson puts it, widely drawn on by the far right and neo-Nazi groups. Mark Honigsbaum writes that Icke refers to it 25 times in the book, calling it the "Illuminati protocols," and it is the first of a number of examples of Icke moving dangerously close to antisemitism, according to Michael Barkun of Syracuse University—see below.

Reptilians and shape-shifting

In The Biggest Secret (1999), Icke introduced the idea of the "Reptoid Hypothesis." He identifies the Brotherhood as originating from reptilians from the constellation Draco, who walk on two legs and appear human, and who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. They are the same race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eli?. Tyson Lewis of Montclair State University and Richard Kahn of the University of North Dakota write that Icke has taken his "ancient astronaut" narrative from the Israeli-American writer, Zecharia Sitchin. Icke's idea of "inner-earth reptilians" is also not new, though Barkun writes that Icke has done more than most to expand it.

Sitchin writes that the reptilians came to Earth for its precious metals. Icke argues that the Anunnaki came specifically for "monoatomic gold," a mineral he says can increase the carrying capacity of the nervous system ten thousand fold. After ingesting it, the Anunnaki are able to process vast amounts of information, speed up trans-dimensional travel, and shapeshift from reptilian to human form. They use human fear, guilt, and aggression as energy in a similar way, part of the reason they organize human conflict. The more negative emotion we emit, the more the reptilians absorb:

Thus we have the encouragement of wars, 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.

The Anunnaki have crossbred with human beings, the breeding lines carefully chosen for political reasons. He believes they are the Watchers, the fallen angels, or "Grigori," who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha. Their first reptilian-human hybrid, possibly Adam, was created 200,000–300,000 years ago. There was a second breeding program around 30,000 years ago, and a third 7,000 years ago. It is the half-bloods of the third breeding program who today control the world, more Anunnaki than human. They have an extremely powerful, hypnotic stare, the origin of the phrase to "give someone the evil eye," and their hybrid DNA allows them to shapeshift when they consume human blood. In Children of the Matrix, he expanded his description of those in charge, adding that the Anunnaki also bred with another extraterrestrial race called the "Nordics," on account of their blond hair and blue eyes, to produce a race of human slave masters, the Aryans. The Aryans retain many reptilian traits, including cold-blooded attitudes, a desire for top-down control, and an obsession with ritual, lending them a tendency toward fascistic militarism, rationalism, and racism.

Lewis and Kahn write that the Nordic hypothesis means Icke is mirroring standard claims by the far right that the Aryan bloodline has ruled the Earth throughout history; for Icke, Sumerian Kings and Egyptian pharoahs have all been Aryan reptilian humanoids, as have 43 American presidents and the Queen Mother, who he writes was "seriously reptilian." All have taken part in Satanic rituals, paedophilia, kidnapping of children, drug parties and murder, needed to satisfy their reptilian blood lust, which allows them to retain their temporary human form.

Dimensions

The reptilians not only come from another planet, but are also from another dimension, the lower level of the fourth dimension, the one nearest the physical world. Icke writes that the universe consists of an infinite number of frequencies or dimensions of life that share the same space, just as television and radio frequencies do. Some people can tune their consciousness to other wavelengths, which is what psychic power consists of, and it is from one of these other dimensions that the Anunnaki are controlling this world by possessing certain bloodlines—though just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they are controlled, in turn, by a fifth dimension. The lower level of the fourth dimension is what others call the "lower astral dimension." Icke argues that it is where demons live, the entities Satanists summon during their rituals. They are, in fact, summoning the reptilians. Barkun argues that the introduction of different dimensions allows Icke to skip awkward questions about which part of the universe the reptilians come from and how they got here.

Problem-reaction-solution

In Tales From The Time Loop (2003), Icke argues that most organized religions, especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are Illuminati creations designed to divide and conquer the human race through endless conflicts, as are racial, ethnic, and sexual divisions. He cites the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, and 9/11 as examples of events organized by the Global Elite. The incidents allow the Elite 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". There are few, if any, public events that are not engineered, or at least used, by the Brotherhood in their bid to sow division and centralize power. He suggested that the 1996 Dunblane massacre, for example, was organized by the Elite to strengthen gun laws.

You want to introduce something you know the people won't like. This may be more power to the police, a further erosion of basic freedoms, even a war. You know that if you offer these policies openly the people will react against them. So you first create a PROBLEM, a rising crime rate, more violence, a terrorist bomb, a government collapse, or you get one of your Illuminati puppets like Saddam Hussein to go to war. You make sure someone else is blamed for this problem and not you, the real people behind it all. So you create a "patsy," as they call them in America, a Timothy McVeigh or a Lee Harvey Oswald. You then use your media to tell people what they should think about your manufactured event and who they should blame for it. This brings us to stage two, the REACTION from the people—"This can't go on; what are THEY going to do about it?" This allows THEM to then openly offer the SOLUTION to the problems they have created—new legislation which advances their agenda of centralisation of global power or the erosion of more basic freedoms.

Red Dresses

In Infinite Love is the Only Truth (2005), Icke introduces the idea of "reptilian software." He says that there are three kinds of people. The highest level of the Brotherhood are the "Red Dresses." These are "software people," elsewhere called "reptilian software," or "constructs of mind," without consciousness, without free will. Their human bodies are holographic veils.

A second group, the so-called "sheeple"—the vast majority of humanity—have what Icke calls "back seat consciousness." They are conscious, but they do whatever they are told and are the main source of energy for the Brotherhood. They include the "repeaters," the people in positions of influence who simply repeat what other people have told them. Doctors repeat what they are told in medical school and by drug companies, teachers repeat what they learned at teacher training college, and journalists are the greatest repeaters of all.

The third group, by far the smallest, are those who see through the illusion; they are people like Neo from the film, The Matrix. They are usually dubbed dangerous or mad. The "Red Dress" genetic lines keep obsessively interbreeding to make sure their bloodlines are not weakened by the second or third levels of consciousness, because consciousness can rewrite the software.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Holocaust

Icke is highly critical of any ideology that serves to categorize and divide human beings, including racism, sexism, nationalism and religion. He is particularly critical of Judaism and Christianity. His criticism of the former, and his reliance on the Protocols, his questioning of the Holocaust, and his claims about Jewish involvement in the "Global Elite," have attracted the attention of Jewish groups, who fear that his talk of lizards wanting to rule the world is a smokescreen for the kind of classic antisemitic claims about Jews that have long been made by the far-right. The argument is that Icke may be antisemitic in effect, if not in intent. Journalist Louis Theroux cautions against accusing Icke of antisemitism, arguing that it might not only be unfair, but may also lend a patina of seriousness to Icke's ideas.

Icke introduced the idea in The Robot's Rebellion that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was first laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, which supposedly presented a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. The Protocols was written around 1897, probably under the direction of the Russian secret police in Paris, and purports to be transcripts of 24 addresses given to a group of Jewish elders. It was exposed as a hoax in 1920 by The Times of London, which showed it was a work of plagiarism derived from two sources: The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) by a French satirist, Maurice Joly, which had nothing to do with Jews, and Biarritz (1868), an antisemitic novel by a German writer, Hermann Goedsche. Parts of it were serialized in a Russian newspaper in 1903, and it was published in English throughout the U.S. in 1920 by The Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford's weekly newspaper, becoming mixed up with conspiracy theories about anti-Christian Illuminati, international financiers, and the Rothschild, a powerful Jewish dynasty involved in banking. After it was exposed as a hoax, Michael Barkun writes that it disappeared from mainstream discourse until interest in it was renewed by the American far right in the 1950s.

Icke's use of the Protocols in The Robots' Rebellion was greeted with dismay by the Green Party's executive, who argued that his book promoted fascist and antisemitic views. They had allowed Icke to address the party's annual conference in 1992, despite the controversy over his "son of God" interview, but in September 1994 they decided to deny him a platform. Icke wrote to The Guardian protesting their decision, denying the book was antisemitic, and arguing that racism, sexism and prejudice of any kind were both horrific and ridiculous, but in the same letter, he insisted that whoever wrote the Protocols "knew the game plan" for the 20th century. Barkun argues that Icke is trying to have it both ways—offended by the allegation of antisemitism, while "hinting at the dark activities of Jewish elites," but Icke strongly denies that his reptiles represent Jews in any way, calling the claim "frig' nonsense." "There is a tribe of people interbreeding," he told Jon Ronson in 2001, "which do not, do not, relate to any earth race ... This is not a Jewish plot. This is not a plot on the world by Jewish people".

During one of Icke's speaking tours to Canada in 1999, when there was debate about whether to allow him to speak at the University of Toronto, law professor Ed Morgan wrote to Robert Prichard, the university's president, arguing that Icke's views should have "no place in the Canadian marketplace of ideas." He described Icke's work as "precisely the type of vilifying material with which the Supreme Court was concerned in its decision regarding the Criminal Code of Canada ban. The publications praise classic antisemitic tracts, and are replete with references to a secret society carrying on a global conspiracy led by a manipulating Jewish clique." Icke explicitly blames such a clique for the first and second world wars, and the rise of Hitler, and indeed writes that Hitler's father was a Rothschild:

I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This Jewish/non-Jewish Elite used the First World War to secure the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish State of Israel in Palestine (for which, given the genetic history of most Jewish people, there is absolutely no justification on historical grounds or any other). They then 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.

In chapter seven of And the Truth Shall Set You Free, Icke appears to flirt openly with Holocaust denial. Alick Bartholomew of Gateway, Icke's former New Age publisher in Bath, told journalist Mark Honigsbaum in 1995 that an early draft of And the Truth Shall Set You Free contained material questioning the Holocaust, and that Icke was allegedly dropped because of it. The September 2004 edition still contains material that is arguably revisionist. Sam Taylor writes in The Observer that, having read that chapter, he does not believe Icke is antisemitic, but argues that he is "tapping into a seriously paranoid, aggressive strain in U.S. society." Mark Honigsbaum writes that Combat 18, the British neo-Nazi group, publicized a 1995 talk Icke gave at Glastonbury in its magazine, Putsch. The talk was understood as antisemitic both by Combat 18 and by the Isle of Avalon Foundation, the New Age group that had promoted Icke's tour, which not only disowned him, but started handing out leaflets in protest at his presence. Perhaps unfairly projecting its own views onto Icke, Putsch wrote that Icke had talked about "the big conspiracy by a group of bankers, media moguls etc.—always being clever enough not to mention what all these had in common." Icke dismisses Combat 18's attentions, writing that it is a front for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Mossad.

Protests in Canada

Icke was detained by immigration officials when he tried to enter Canada in 1999, after Ontario's Hate Crime Unit had his name added to an all-ports watch list because of complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress. The officers combed his luggage and reading material for evidence of antisemitic material. Jon Ronson writes: "Finally, after four hours of questioning, they concluded that when David Icke said lizards, lizards was what he meant."

While his lecture in a downtown Vancouver theatre attracted an audience of 1,200—attended, according to Icke, by the head of the Hate Crimes Unit himself—his books were removed from Indigo Books and Music stores, and several venues on his speaking tour were cancelled. Human rights lawyer Richard Warman, working at the time for the Canadian Green Party and later for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, took credit for much of this in an interview with Jon Ronson for the latter's documentary about the Canadian tour, David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews (2001), in which Ronson catalogues the cancelled radio interviews and book signings that Warman appears to have engineered. In response, Icke's Children of the Matrix (2001) reportedly accused Warman of being an Illuminati "gatekeeper," and of working to stop the exposure of child abuse, which triggered a lawsuit from Warman. According to Maclean's, Warman issued libel notices to Canadian public libraries that he would include them in his action if they did not remove Children of the Matrix from their shelves. The B.C. Libraries Association cited the notices on an Internet database of censorship attempts, which attracted another libel warning from Warman. To settle it, the Association agreed to remove quotes from Icke's book from its website.

Place within the conspiracism genre

There seem to be two views of Icke: that he is a regular conspiracy monger, or that his lizards may be some kind of Swiftian allegory, a narrative Icke has invented to question and confront what he sees as an emerging global fascist state.

"Improvisational millenialism"

Michael Barkun sees him as a conspiracy theorist of the Alex Jones variety, though he argues that Icke is the most fluent of them. Barkun calls Icke's work "improvisational millennialism," with an end-of-history scenario involving a final battle between good and evil. Because everything is connected in the conspiracist world view, every source can be mined for links, and the greater the stigma attached to an idea, the more attractive it becomes, because the vehemence with which the mainstream rejects it becomes a measure of its validity. For Icke, therefore, the widespread ridiculing of the lizard theory is a guarantee that there's something to it, Barkun argues.

According to Barkun, Icke has actively tried to cultivate the far right. In 1996, he spoke to a conference in Reno, Nevada, alongside opponents of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act—which mandates background checks on people who buy guns in the U.S.—including Kirk Lyons, a white nationalist lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan. Barkun argues that the relationship between Icke, the militias, and the Christian Patriots is complex because of the New Age baggage Icke brings with him, and he stresses that Icke is not actually a member of any of these groups, but it is nevertheless true that Icke has absorbed the world view of the radical right virtually intact. "There is no fuller explication of its beliefs about ruling elites than Icke's," he writes. Icke regards Christian patriots as the only Americans who understand the truth about the New World Order, but 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."

Alex Jones, an American talk show host and one of the country's best-known conspiracy theorists, initially claimed that he thought Icke was a conman, insane, or he's working for "them" directly. In 2001, as part of an interview with Jon Ronson for his 'David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews' episode of the The Secret Rulers of the World series, Jones stated:

So what does David Icke do? He talks about the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, these Global Elitists, these power structures—all real, all true, all demonstrated by bills and executive orders and prime ministers, and premiers, and presidents. All real, meat and potatoes, something you can bite into. Something that is easily demonstrable. And then you've got David Icke and at the end of all this, he says, "By the way, they're blood-drinking lizards." Al Gore needs blood to drink, so does Prince Philip, I mean it's asinine. It's being picked up by people, and it discredits all the reality we're talking about, and that's the problem with David Icke. He's got a good line to a point, and then he discredits it all. It's like a turd in the punchbowl.

In more recent times Jones has changed his stance on Icke and has invited him onto his shows several times. In an a 2010 interview with Icke on his Infowars show, Jones opened the programme by stating that he now "agreed with 98%" of his theories.

Swiftian allegory

Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn see Icke as a spiritual philosopher, arguing that it's not clear he believes in the reptilians himself. They write that he has produced an extraordinary, all-inclusive narrative, a consolidation of all conspiracy theories into one massive project with unlimited explanatory power. There is an almost obsessive-compulsive element to his writing, they argue, whereby he ferrets out any minutiae he can find to support a narrative structure that allows him to pole vault from ancient Sumer to modern America in a way that "defies the laws of academic gravity."

His work cuts across political, religious, cultural, and socio-economic divisions, uniting the political left and right—they write that his lectures might see neo-Nazis and Christian Patriots sitting next to 60-something UFO buffs and New Age earth goddesses—and as such he represents a truly global counter-culture and should not, they argue, be dismissed as fringe. He has lectured in 25 countries, his books have been translated into eight languages, his website gets 600,000 hits a week, and his lecture tours attract thousands. The Biggest Secret has gone through six reprintings since 1999, and Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster is a top-five seller in South Africa.

They argue that the lizards may be allegorical, a Swiftian satire intended to demonstrate the emergence of a global fascist state. In Children of the Matrix, Icke writes that, that if the reptilians did not exist, we would have to invent them. "In fact," he says, "we probably have. They are other levels of ourselves putting ourselves in our face." He argues, "We are the reptilians and the 'demons' and, at the same time, we are those they manipulate because we are all the same 'I'." Lewis and Kahn make use of Douglas Kellner's distinction in Media Spectacle (1995) between a reactionary clinical paranoia, a mindset dissociated from reality, and a positive, progressive, critical paranoia, which uses the culture of suspicion to question and confront power. They argue that Icke displays elements of both, writing that what they call his "postmodern metanarrative" may be politically empowering, a way of giving ordinary people a narrative structure with which to question what they see around them.

Books

• It's a Tough Game, Son!. Piccolo Books, 1983. ISBN 0330280473
• It Doesn't Have To Be Like This: Green Politics Explained. Green Print, 1989. ISBN 1854250337
• Truth Vibrations. Gateway, 1991, 1994. ISBN 1858600065
• Love Changes Everything. Harper Collins Publishers, 1992. ISBN 1855382474
• In the Light of Experience: The Autobiography of David Icke. Time Warner Books, 1993. ISBN 0751506036
• Days of Decision. Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1993. ISBN 1897766017
• The Robot's Rebellion. Gateway, 1994. ISBN 1858600227
• Heal the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation. Gateway, 1994. ISBN 1858600057
• ...And the Truth Shall Set You Free. Bridge of Love Publications, 1995. ISBN 0953881059
• I Am Me, I Am Free: The Robot's Guide to Freedom. Truth Seeker, 1996, 1998. ISBN 0952614758
• Lifting the Veil: David Icke interviewed by Jon Rappoport. Truth Seeker, 1998. ISBN 0939040050
• The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World. Bridge of Love Publications, 1999. ISBN 0952614766
• Children of the Matrix. Bridge of Love Publications, 2001. ISBN 0953881016
• Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster. Bridge of Love Publications, 2002. ISBN 0953881024
• Tales from the Time Loop. Bridge of Love Publications, 2003. ISBN 0953881040
• Infinite Love Is the Only Truth: Everything Else Is Illusion. Bridge of Love Publications, 2005. ISBN 0953881067
• The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy (and how to end it). David Icke Books Ltd, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9538810-8-6
• Human Race Get Off Your Knees - The Lion Sleeps No More. David Icke Books Ltd, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9559973-1-0

DVDs and videos

• Speaking Out: Who Really Controls the World and What We Can Do About It
• David Icke: Turning of the Tide (1996)
• The Reptilian Agenda (1999) (DVD)
• David Icke: Revelations of a Mother Goddess
• David Icke: The Freedom Road (2003)
• David Icke: Secrets of the Matrix, Parts 1—3 (2003) (DVD)
• David Icke, Live in Vancouver: From Prison to Paradise (2005) (DVD)
• Freedom or Fascism: The Time to Choose (2006) (DVD)
• David Icke: Big Brother, the Big Picture, (2008) free Internet Video
• Beyond The Cutting Edge (2008) (DVD)
• David Icke Live at the Oxford Union Debating Society
• Secret Space
• Secret Space 2

• DavidIcke.com, accessed June 20, 2010.
• Pamela Leigh-Richards Icke, accessed June 20, 2010.
• Banyan, Will. "The Big Picture" A review of Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster (pdf) Paranoia Magazine Online (book reviews), October 2003, accessed June 20, 2010.
• Lewis, Tyson and Kahn, Richard. Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Shermer, Michael (2006). Illuminati, The New World Order & Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists (PCTs), The Skeptic's Dictionary, accessed June 20, 2010.

Audio/video

• David Icke: Was He Right?, Channel Five, UK, December 12, 2006.
• Britton, Fern (1991). Interview with David Icke, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3, BBC's Coast to Coast People, YouTube, November 15, 2009.
• Icke, David. Presenting snooker for the BBC, 1980s, YouTube, accessed November 15, 2009.
• Icke, David (1989). Does the Animal Kingdom need a Bill of Rights?, Royal Institute of Great Britain, Arena, BBC2, accessed November 15, 2009.
• Icke, David (2009). Addressing the Oxford Union, YouTube, accessed November 15, 2009.
• Maher, Bill (2008). Interview with David Icke, Religulous, accessed November 13, 2009.
• Ronson, Jon. "David Icke, the Lizards, and the Jews" 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 5/5, Channel 4 Television, UK, YouTube, accessed November 14, 2009.

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