David Icke is back in the news because an interview he gave to London Real, where he discusses 5G and the Coronavirus, was taken down by YouTube. Pointless of course for a few reasons, one is that it’s still viewable on London Reel’s own website, and secondly because David Icke’s been expressing these kinds of views for nearly 30 years.
And what’s more, whether you like it or not, people want to watch David Icke videos. Some people want to buy his books. Some even read them. At his peak he was packing them in at the O2 in London where he’d talk for hours about global conspiracies and how everyone’s life is basically a sham.
Fun times.
The gist of Dave’s whole coronavirus thing is that COVID-19 is made up, probably by the Chinese, and when anyone gets ill they are falsely diagnosed with COVID-19. He also says that many people who die from natural causes but with Coronavirus are then thrown into the mix of statistics. Which is not that controversial for Dave. More so however, is that (surprise surprise) this is all being done with the sole purpose of taking away any rights we have and so on, and to ensure world domination by the new world order (that already seem to have total world domination).
Watch it if you like, I couldn’t make it all the way through myself. I’ve always found that listening to David Icke was like listening to someone’s dad read a car manual in this overly dramatic yet somehow wearisome style, while interspersing it with anecdotes about other car manuals he has read.
Icke is the Alan Partridge of conspiracy theorists. He constantly feels the need to claim terms as his own (‘that’s what I call them’), or to bang on about the fact that he’s ‘been saying all this for 30 years’ and has been ‘constantly ridiculed’ for doing so.
One half expects him to end sentences with, “Needless to say, I had the last laugh”.
Banning him though, you can almost guarantee, makes him a very happy chappy. YouTube has quite the track record of either removing or more commonly, de-monetising, videos that don’t fit certain narratives and points of view.
Plus there is a particular Catch-22 you enter into by banning videos of someone claiming that there is a global conspiracy that wants to control and censor you.
With Icke, as is common among many conspiracy theorists, what he says will be laced with facts like MK Ultra, before they get to the really out there gems. These men (they seem to be nearly always men) might lure someone in because they seem, passionate, well read and informed and have researched it and then BANG! The Royal Family are lizards and everything is the fault of the Jews.
David Icke’s transformation from BBC TV presenter to sporty messiah and sayer of sooths hit the public consciousness in 1991 in his famous interview on the UK chat show Wogan. He sauntered on, all casual like, in a turquoise shell suit, and proceeded to claim to be an ‘aspect of the Godhead’. Going on to compare himself to Jesus.
He predicted that tidal waves, and earthquakes would happen ‘this year’ (1991) and were required because if they didn’t, the earth would explode. He also said Saddam Hussein was dead. Which, he wasn’t. Although I suspect he has an explanation for these missteps.
As with many people at the time, I found the whole thing fascinating. A little unkind because I think we were watching someone have a nervous breakdown on live television. But this was the 90s, so I read his book The Truth Vibrations (ironically) and wore turquoise Converse All Stars (ironically) because everything in the 90s was ironic.
Icke evolved over the years from his fairly hippie dippy, new-age apocalyptic prophet days and turquoise love and wisdom fluffy stuff, to full-on conspiracy theorist shouting at people and getting more and more angry. Not quite Alex Jones angry but still, quite miffed.
He allegedly ‘endorsed the anti-Semitic forgery’ The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, questioned aspects of the Holocaust in one of his books, he said 9/11 was absolutely an inside job, Princess Diana was murdered, the Royal Family, and I think many world leaders, were reptilians, and the Moon is hollow.
He’s dogged by claims that he is anti-Semitic but has always denied this.
The 2010s was a fertile time for the conspiracy theorists. The internet was feeding the conspiracy movement, as was globalisation, VIP grooming scandals, and Occupy, and the 2008 financial crisis nudged it along too. Plus a bunch of bedroom-dwellers looking for some meaning to their lives, too lazy for religion, and looking for someone to blame, helped fund it.
Like quite a few religions, the explanation was usually something unproveable and fantastic, and as far as blame goes, well you can probably partially blame it on the Jews again.
In 2013 Icke was truly at the peak of his popularity, regularly touring the globe and speaking to millions online. That November, I personally went to an open day for something called ‘The People’s Voice’. It was the brainchild of David Icke, a global news and broadcasting network that was billed to challenge the mainstream news outlets.
I chatted to all kinds of people, including the man himself, who it has to be said, was of course quite normal and nice.
There was quite a mix, TV’s Sonia Poulton was on board, and some BBC journos too. Rumours abounded that Noel Gallagher and Russell Brand (David’s new mates) would be joining too. They didn’t.
After an hour or so of chatting to various people, I started to get the feeling that things might not be what they seemed. I met David’s son Gareth, bless him, who despite being central to the project, clearly didn’t know what he was doing, and must have endured all kinds of horrible abuse growing up with your Dad being David Icke. He had been appointed the presenter and organiser of a regular music show called ‘The Banned’. And while he was a musician, he had no experience presenting and well, if it wasn’t nepotism, it certainly did a fine impression of it.
The deeper you got into The People’s Voice, the more it looked not just doomed to fail, but to do so dramatically. I walked away rapidly, feeling that such enthusiasm (and money) was going to be wasted on a horribly arrogant, self-serving and out of touch endeavour.
While everyone else went VOD, streaming, and pre-recorded, David and the team for some strange reason, wanted to shoot and broadcast live. I watched a few ‘shows’ on YouTube, and it often reminded me of that yoof TV sketch in The Young Ones, Nozin’ Aroun’.
Within months it ended, in a whirl of infighting, accusations of fraud and bullying, sexism, and various other feuds. The People’s Voice was more or less silenced, not by the deep state, but by the monumental hubris and bad behaviour of some of those involved. Meanwhile, Icke went back to his home on the Isle of Wight, wrote more books and made more videos.
If you follow or invest in people like David Icke, you may find yourself in a very depressing world. When they aren’t self-congratulating for predicting for years that we are sleepwalking into an Orwellian’s 1984 Orwellian state of Orwellian Orwells, they are telling you that everything you like, love and feel, isn’t real or is controlled by the 1%.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised he’s making a return. Everyone’s locked indoors, ‘fake news’ stories, clickbait, and a blame culture abound, and in a world where it’s stated with all seriousness, that that massive ‘lady’ with the Adam’s apple and bulge is allowed in your changing rooms, perhaps it’s understandable why some might have a problem telling fact from fiction.
Icke was a fairly sheltered lad, whose incredibly promising career as a footballer was ended cruelly by rheumatoid arthritis. He became an accomplished and mainstream tv presenter and then, for whatever mid-life madness caused it, it looked like he went and had a mad trip on ayahuasca, chatted to some spiritualists, and hey sesame, a new star is born.
As that famous philosopher Holly Willoughby once said to Icke on This Morning, when he pronounced we live a ‘Matrix-like’ existence where everything is fake, “What if (she) quite liked (her) fake reality…?” It’s a fair point.
David doesn’t seem happy knowing all this. In fact, he seems angry and miserable.
One of the failings I always felt in the global government conspiracy theory movement, was that most state machines seem so poorly managed, the very thought of them coordinating something well, let alone keeping a secret, seems quite unlikely.
The question which is never answered is “Why?” If it’s all true, that ‘they’ are doing all these things to control us, kill us, restrict us, poison us, why? Why bother? If they’re already all powerful, and have all this technology, why kill us? And why in such a longwinded and dragged out way?
And if they’re that powerful, wouldn’t they have stopped Trump’s election, or the Brexit vote? They can’t have been part of the plan. Or maybe they were…
Nah.
Tom James
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