David Icke
David Vaughan Icke is an English conspiracy theorist, author and a former semi-professional footballer, sports journalist and sports broadcaster. He has written over 20 books, self-published since the mid-1990s, and spoken in more than 25 countries.
An aspiring professional football goalkeeper in his early years, he retired aged 21 from playing due to rheumatoid arthritis. He subsequently became a sports journalist. In 1981 he became a sports broadcaster for the BBC, but his contract was terminated in 1990 over his vocal opposition to the poll tax.
In an effort to relieve his arthritis he began to engage with alternative medicine and New Age philosophies in the 1980s, and this encouraged his interest in Green politics. He joined the Green Party and became a national spokesperson within six months, but left the party soon after.
In 1990, Icke started visiting Betty Shine, a psychic who told him he was on Earth for a purpose and would receive messages from the spirit world. This led him to claim in 1991 to be a "Son of the Godhead" and that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He repeated this on the BBC show Wogan. His appearance led to public ridicule. Icke wrote various books over the next 11 years which developed his world view of a New Age conspiracy. Reactions to his endorsement of an antisemitic fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in The Robots' Rebellion and in And the Truth Shall Set You Free led his publisher to decline further books, and he has self-published since then.
Icke contends that the universe consists of "vibrational" energy and infinite dimensions sharing the same space. He argues that there is an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings, the Archons or Anunnaki, which have hijacked the Earth. Further, a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of reptilian shape-shifters – the Babylonian Brotherhood, Illuminati or "elite" – manipulate events to keep humans in fear, so that the Archons can feed off the resulting "negative energy". He claims that many public figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood and propel humanity towards a global fascist state or New World Order, a post-truth era ending freedom of speech. He sees the only way to defeat such "Archontic" influence is for people to wake up to the truth and fill their hearts with love.
Critics have noted antisemitic themes in Icke's statements and writings, and have described Icke as an antisemite and a Holocaust denier, due to, among other statements, his endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his book And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which "argues that Holocaust denial should be taught in schools," and his identification of the Jewish Rothschild family as reptilians, with his theories of reptilians being alleged to serve as a deliberate "code" for Jews, something which Icke has denied. The antisemitic themes of Icke's work and statements and his promotion of misinformation has resulted in his being banned from entering a number of countries. Icke has denied that he is an antisemite.
Early life and education
The middle son of three boys, Icke was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke and Barbara J. Cooke, who were married in Leicester in 1951. Beric Icke served in the Royal Air Force as a medical orderly during World War II, and after the war 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 David Icke was aged 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." He recalls having to hide under a window or chair when the councilman 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. He attended Whitehall Infant School, and then Whitehall Junior School.
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.
After failing his 11-plus exam in 1963, he was sent to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern, where he was given a trial for the Leicester Boys Under-14 team.
Career
Football
Icke left school at 15 after being talent-spotted by Coventry City, who signed him up in 1967 as their youth team's goalkeeper. In 1968 he played in the Coventry City youth team that were runners up to Burnley in the F.A. Youth Cup and again in their successful run in 1970. He also played for Oxford United's reserve team and Northampton Town, on loan from Coventry, in 1970 and 1971, respectively.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 wanted to remain playing, and was signed on a part-time contract by Hereford United player-manager John Charles, including in the first team when they were in the fourth, and later in the third, division of the English Football League.
In 1971, 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.
In 1973, at the age of 21, the pain in his joints became so severe that he was forced to retire from football.
Overall he failed to make a single senior appearance at Coventry or during his two loan spells, but did make 37 appearances for Hereford.
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, did some work for BBC Radio Leicester as its football reporter, then worked his way up through the Loughborough Monitor, the Leicester Mercury and BRMB Radio in Birmingham.In 1976, Icke worked for two months in Saudi Arabia, helping with the national football team. His position on the team was planned to be a long-term position, but Icke decided to stay in the UK after his first holiday back. After his return to the UK, BRMB decided to give 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 there was the murder of Carl Bridgewater, the paperboy 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 there until 1985. In 1983 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 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. 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.
In August 1990, his contract with the BBC was terminated when he initially refused to pay the Community Charge, 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.
Green Party, Betty Shine
Icke began to engage 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. He joined the Green Party and became a national spokesperson within six months. His second book, It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment, was published in 1989.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 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 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 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.
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.
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 activating his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.