David Icke
David Vaughan Icke (/ˈdeɪvɪd vɔːn aɪk/; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist,[1][2][3][4] and former footballer and sports broadcaster.[5] He is the author of over 20 books and has lectured in over 25 countries.[6][7]
In 1990, while spokesman for the Green Party, he visited a psychic who he said told him he had been placed on earth for a purpose and would begin to receive messages from the spirit world.[8] These events led him to announce the following year that he was a "Son of the Godhead"[5] and that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, a prediction he repeated on the BBC's primetime show Wogan.[9][10] The show turned him from a respected household name into the subject of widespread public ridicule.[11]
Over the next 11 years Icke wrote The Robots' Rebellion (1994), And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001), in which he developed his worldview of New Age conspiracism.[12] His endorsement of the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Robots' Rebellion and And the Truth Shall Set You Free led his publisher to refuse to publish his books, which were self-published thereafter.[13]
Icke believes that the universe is made up of "vibrational" energy and consists of an infinite number of dimensions that share the same space.[14][15][16] He claims that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings called the Archons (or Anunnaki) have hijacked the earth, and that a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, the Illuminati, or the "elite", manipulate global events to keep humans in constant fear so the Archons can feed off the "negative energy" this creates.[14][17][18][19]
He claims many prominent public figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood and are propelling humanity toward an Orwellian global fascist state, or New World Order, a post-truth era where freedom of speech is ended.[8][14][20][21] Icke believes that the only way this 'Archontic' influence can be defeated is if people wake up to the truth and fill their hearts with love.[14] Critics have accused Icke of being a Holocaust denier and an antisemite, with his theories about reptilians being a deliberate "code"; Icke denies these claims.[22][23]
Icke's Facebook page was deleted on 1 May 2020.[24] Facebook stated: "We have removed this Page for repeatedly violating our policies on harmful misinformation
Early life
Family and education
The middle son 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 Icke had wanted to be a doctor, but in part due to the family's limited funds, he joined the Royal Air Force as a medical orderly.[26] In 1943, after an aircraft crashed into the Chipping Warden airfield in Northamptonshire, Acting Squadron Leader Frederick Thomas Moore and Leading Aircraftman Beric Icke entered a burning aircraft without protective clothing and saved the life of a crew member trapped inside.[n 1] The injured Frederick Moore, who rendered first aid, was awarded an MBE for gallantry, and Beric Icke was awarded a BEM.
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,[28] an area that was demolished in the mid-1950s as part of the city's slum clearance.[29] When David Icke was three, 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."[28] 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.[30]
Icke attended Whitehall Infant School, and then Whitehall Junior School.[31][30]
Football
Icke has said he made no effort at school, but when he was nine he was chosen for the junior school's third-year football team. He writes that this 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.[33]
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-14 team.[34] 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.[35]
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 stating that he was often in agony during training, Icke 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.[36] He was earning up to £33 a week.[37] But in 1973, at the age of 21, the pain in his joints became so severe that he was forced to retire.[38]
First marriage
Icke met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa. Shortly after they met, Icke left home following one of a number of frequent arguments he had started having with his father. His father was upset that Icke's arthritis was interfering with his football career. Icke moved into a bedsit and worked in a travel agency, travelling to Hereford twice a week in the evenings to play football.[39]
Icke and Atherton were married on 30 September 1971, four months after they met.[40] Their daughter was born in March 1975, followed by one son in December 1981, and another in November 1992.[41]
The couple divorced in 2001 but remained good friends, and Atherton continued to work as Icke's business manager.[42]
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.[43] He moved on to the Leicester News Agency, did some work for BBC Radio Leicester as its football reporter,[44] then worked his way up through the Loughborough Monitor, the Leicester Mercury and BRMB Radio in Birmingham.[45]
In 1976 Icke worked for two months in Saudi Arabia, helping with the national football team. It was supposed to be a longer-term position, but he missed his wife and daughter and decided not to return after his first holiday back to the UK.[46] 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.[47] One of the earliest stories he covered there was the murder of Carl Bridgewater, the paperboy shot during a robbery in 1978.[48]
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 there until 1985. In 1983 he co-hosted Grandstand, at the time the BBC's flagship national sports programme.[49] He also published his first book that year, It's a Tough Game, Son!, about how to break into football.[50]
Icke and his family moved in 1982 to Ryde on the Isle of Wight.[51] His relationship with Grandstand was short-lived – 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.[52] Icke was by then a household name, but has said that a career in television began to lose its appeal to him; he found television workers insecure, shallow and sometimes vicious.[53]
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 Margaret Thatcher's government introduced that year. 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.[54][55]
Green Party, Betty Shine
Icke began 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.[56]
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,[57] and in 1990 his name appeared on advertisements for a children's charity, along with Audrey Hepburn, Woody Allen and other celebrities.[58]
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.[59] 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 shop in Ryde, he felt a force pull his feet to the ground 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.[60][61][62][63]
Icke visited Shine four times. During the third meeting, on 29 March 1990, Icke claims to have 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.[64][65] 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 destabilised by having oil taken from under the seabed.[61][66][67]
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 Hindu yoga) activating his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness
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