Five years ago I spent eleven hours listening to David Icke, and wrote near nine thousand words on the topic. Here are the cliff notes, in preparation for his ten (I’m assuming ‘plus’) hour talk this coming Saturday.

#Introduction

Back in 2011 I spent eleven hours of my life listening to David Icke talk at the Manukau Events Centre . Not just that, but I was nursing a newly sprained ankle, had spent $80 getting to the venue, and stumped up $120 for the ticket. ‘The Lion Sleeps No More’ was a big investment no matter how you look at it.

Don’t let anyone tell you I don’t do my research before opining on a subject!

This summary of the 2011 talk largely follows the order in which Icke presented his views. If you only like reptiles, and don’t favour philosophy, it’s best you skip ahead to the third section.

I won’t be offended, honest.

##The Epistemic Icke

Let’s start with philosophy, since that is, after all, my primary interest. Icke’s general philosophical thesis resembles both the co-opted (or pseudo) Eastern mysticism which generated conspiracy and UFO theories in the 1960s and 70s (such as the Hidden Masters thesis), as well as the Phenomenalism that was popular at the end of the 19th, and beginning of the 20th Century. In essence (ha, Philosophy joke), Icke believes that the world in which we live is illusory, and there are multiple levels of existence. These are:

1. The Vibrational,
2. The Electrical,
3. The Digital, and
4. The Holographic/Hologrammatic.

Each level of existence sits on top of another, and have different vibrational frequencies and densities. The workings and relationships between these different, and nested, levels of reality allows Icke to tell a story about the existence of other entities, life on other planets, the non-existence of resource scarcity, and the like, whilst at the same time explaining how certain entities control how we perceive the world. In essence his view boils down to the claim that our limited perceptual access to just one of these levels (the holographic) means we cannot see how the world is really constituted.

Icke’s overall theory, that we live on a ‘prison planet’ is based, then, upon us just not being able to perceive the more fundamental layers of reality. No. It is also the claimed that the physical world which we perceive is illusory! That is to say, it is not a true representation of what really exists in the world around us. We are imprisoned in a holographic version of reality, controlled by outside forces operating at higher planes of existence.

Now, the problem everyone points out about this view is this: how can someone – anyone, not just Icke – piece together the information about the other layers if everything is mediated by the illusory? Isn’t our limited perceptual experience blocking our ability to discover the truth of how things really are? Icke has an answer to this, which is based in a physio-epistemological theory, one that concerns hearts and minds.

The heart, according to Icke, is the organ for knowing, or finding out, about the true nature of things. This is an intuitive process.

The brain/mind (which is not embodied consciousness, because consciousness is infinite and unlimited) merely believes things.

By ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’ Icke doesn’t necessarily claim we are talking about literal hearts and minds; I’m fairly sure that he would see a cardiologist if he had a heart attack. Rather, this is talk of feels and rationality, where feels have the ability to reach beyond our limited perceptual ability, whilst rationality is constrained by the level in which we exist.

Icke’s argument, then, for knowing about the other levels is that intuitive knowledge (heartfelt intuitions) gives us knowledge about the other realities, whilst the justified beliefs of the mind are limited to beliefs about the level we are stuck perceiving (thus placing us in a ‘prison’ planet).

This is an interesting model because Icke buys some version of the justified belief model with respect to knowledge, in that the mind can be justified in its beliefs, but it cannot know; that function belongs to the heart, which is an intuition-pump. ((Another philosophical joke. Thank you!))

Then there is the role of synchronicity. Aside from being a holistic/lateral thinker, Icke also believes that synchronicity is an important factor in working out how to break free of the prison we are in. Icke places a lot of importance on events being meaningfully connected: for example, he might read a book on psychics, and then have a vision about how that work connects to his overall theory. He might wonder whether the Moon is actually a spaceship, and a week later reads an article which says that it is: these events, he takes it, are not just coincidental but connected in a meaningful, synchronistic, way.

Under his view the synchronic connection between all things is evidence they are that way. Scientists, who think with their heads, and rarely with their hearts, are simply unable to connect the dots. Not just that, but science is a system of control, designed to manipulate and eliminate imagination.

##That’s no moon…

Here’s an example of Icke’s epistemic system in action, which just happened to be the second topic of the day.

The Moon is a spaceship, and it is transmitting and amplifying a signal from Saturn, a signal which is locking us into this holographic reality/prison planet. This signal affects our DNA, which has been modified through interbreeding, and this allows the reptilians to gain control over our genetic characteristics; thus the signal allows them to control us.

Icke’s theories on the Moon and Saturn were all rather new at the time, and it felt apparent that Icke was still formulating how to talk about this whilst he was on stage. Icke’s revelation started with a thought-form (an idea that was placed into his mind by another, higher entity). The thought-form contained the revelation that the Moon was an non-natural satellite. As a firm believer in synchronicity, this thought-form was shown to be true because within days he found that other people had had exactly the same thought(form) as well.

But, really, you are here for the lizards, right?

##On the reptilian rulers of our prison planet

Who controls the world? Well – at least back in 2011 – it was these four interests:

• The Freemasons,
• Satanists,
• Child-abusers (and their support networks), and
• Rothschild-Zionists

I’m going to push that last one to the side for just a moment (and it really is just a moment). If we just focus on the first three, this is not an unsurprising set of ‘bad people who want to ruin the world for the rest of us’: for example, local conspiracy theorists like Ian Wishart and Greg Hallet (with his probably fictional mate, ‘the Spymaster’) have long argued that our political realm is dominated by non-Christian child abusers, who just happen to be homosexuals. Child abuse and Satanism is a well-worn link in many a conspiracy theory, and Satanism and Freemasonry has a similar association in the literature.

It’s the fourth group that is controversial in a ‘even controversial amongst conspiracy theorists’ sense, because Icke has often been accused of being an anti-Semite. Now, he denies that he is anti-Semitic. Rather, he is anti-Zionist (well, specifically, anti-Rothschild-Zionist).

So, what is this Rothschild-Zionism that Icke is so concerned with. It is part-and-parcel of the claim that the State of Israel is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rothschild family, and their interests. For Icke, Israel is not a nation but, rather, part of a global conglomerate that is run for, and by, big business.

Icke does not like the Rothchilds. Amongst the list of things the Rothchilds are responsible for are the Simon Wiesenthal Center (a ‘worthless institution’, apparently), and Mossad (which he claims is the enforcement arm of the Rothschild family). Among the many things the Rothchilds’ are responsible was the Arab Spring. He is sceptical of the role of social media and Google in the fomenting of revolutions (because Google, et al, are all Rothschild organisations). So, as such, he is deadset against the revolutions in the Arab world because they are the product of a conspiracy designed to control us all.

Now, Icke argues that we need to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. He, correctly, points out that you can be Jewish without being a Zionist, and that there are Zionists who are not Jewish. He singles out Zionists as being the problem, but his rhetoric all-to-often falls back on the usual canards of anti-Semitism. He talks about the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ as being a blueprint for a master plan to take over the world, whilst admitting that the work itself is fake. He talks about the purported practice of Jewish people drinking the blood of Gentiles (since it ties in the vampirism he says the hybrids practice), and the infiltration and control of the media industry by Jewish figures. These all come straight out of the anti-Semite playbook, and it’s not at all obvious how these stories figure into Rothschild-Zionism specifically. If Icke wants to avoid being labeled an anti-Semite, he really needs to do more work to ensure that he doesn’t echo anti-Semitic language and arguments.

This is to say that all of this talk of Rothschild-Zionism as one of the four great evils really just looks to be a way of preserving traditional European anti-Semitism, dressing it up with a new name. In the old days ‘they’ drank the blood of children: now they are the vassals of inter-dimensional, big business. Signalling out the Rothschild (a Jewish family) as being of similar kind to Satanists and child abusers seems suspiciously like traditional anti-Semitism: blaming a group of outsiders (the Jews) for the West’s self-made problems.

Ah, but Icke claims, this is a red herring. The real issue is that the Rothschilds are one of the many families of reptile-human hybrids. They are lizards. He’s not anti-Semite. Rather, he’s anti-reptile. It just happens that the Rothchilds masquerade as Jewish. You could say that if David Icke hates Jews, it’s only lizard Jews he has issue with.

That seems like cold comfort if you don’t believe in the existence of alien, shape-shifting reptiles.

The human hybrid thesis is possibly the thing Icke is most famous for, and it is difficult not to talk about it, because of its notoriety. That being said, whilst there was a lot of talk of hybrids in his talk, it’s not clear whether it is as central to his story now as it was in the Nineties. Yes, he does definitely believe that lizards control the world, but that’s not as interesting to him (so I gathered) as the system by which they control the world. Icke seems more interested in dismantling the matrix of control than trashing the alien. If the former goes, then the latter goes with it, whilst too much focus on the latter just enforces the system of control. As Icke himself regularly joked through the talk, who seriously listens to someone who talks about alien lizard rulers?

#Conclusion

David Icke is not stupid. He has a dogged determination to get to the bottom of things, which is admirable. He has the charisma and presentation skills to keep an audience captivated for eleven hours. ((Even true believers get leg cramps, the urge to eat and the like, but this crowd stayed the duration.)) No matter what you might think of his views, he has a very systematic, fine-grained model of the world, and how he thinks it works. Icke is no vapid conspiracy theorist; his views may be controversial, and his beliefs may well be considered weird, but he advances non-trivial arguments for his views. Those of us interested in discussing and dissecting conspiracy theories would be wise to paid heed to what he says. After all, even if people disagree with his conclusions, the arguments he cites in support of them are by no means trivially unsound.

Which is why, when walking (or, in my case, hobbling) away from Icke marathon presentation, I was struck by the curious tenor of his overall message. Icke doesn’t really advocate people doing anything to change the world themselves; he doesn’t require that we do anything other than continue to believe that we can be free. Rather, everything will be okay as long as we are awake to the reality of the world in which we live.

That is his message: hope for the best, and it will be realised in your lifetime. Icke’s thinking is that if enough people know the truth, then the truth will set the world free. He wants us to embrace a spirituality that will bring us together in some earthly paradise, free from the sins of those who would have control over us. It is an oddly passive message, I find; think the right thing, free yourself of the shackles of the prison planet, and hope that everyone else is doing that too. That way lies freedom, or so he claims. I can’t help but think that it smacks a little too much of ‘think as I think’ sans ‘do as I do’. It’s an easy recipe for feeling good about your own little acts of transgression, but surely what is needed is a call to arms which is less a spiritual battlefield, and more an actual revolution?

Summary

So, here we are at the end of my account of the day spent listening to David Icke.

What to say?

Section four of his presentation was about changing the world or, to be precise, about preparing yourself for the change that is coming.

Recall that Icke thinks we are currently being controlled by a very particular harmonic vibrational energy, one that imprisons us in five-sense reality. However, this is a temporary state of affairs: as we move out of one age and into another a new frequency will emerge and shift us out of our lethargy and imprisonment. This is the truth vibration. All we need to do is wait.

Icke’s message is interesting insofar that he doesn’t really advocate people doing anything to change the world themselves. For example, the changes that are being advocated by environmentalists and the like are, to Icke, just more symptoms of our imprisonment. Icke thinks anthropogenic climate change is a scam, energy efficient lightbulbs are part of the system of control (he believes that they are amplifiers and transmitters of the vibration that currently imprisons us) and smart meters bathe us in malign radiation. Icke doesn’t require that we do anything other than continue to believe that we can be free: we can help the revolution not through action but rather by subscribing to his particular groupthink. Once again, I can’t help but think, if we grant some of his claims, that maybe Icke is part of the system of control he rales against, given that he advocates inaction and just wants his followers to hold on long enough to see the truth. It is as if he is proposing inaction as a covert way of letting the Illuminati keep their control over us.

Of course, Icke’s regime of doing nothing fits his theory: the world only looks ravaged by industrialisation and filled with starving, impoverished billions because we are trapped in one, limited, form of sense-reality. If we could see past five-sense reality we would know the world is still environmentally pristine and that there is food enough for everyone. We could move beyond nation states and partisan disagreements (He talked about Israel specifically in the past tense during this part of the talk) to equality, harmony and love.

Classic Western-style, based on Western views of Eastern, mysticism, which is fine for people in the developed world to believe, but is cold comfort to those in the undeveloped world (“It’s not that there is no food for you: you just can’t see it!”).

That is his message: hope for the best and see it realised in your lifetime. Icke’s magical thinking, the notion that if enough people know the truth then the truth will set the whole world free, reminds me a lot of the notion of the nousphere, an idea that had a lot of traction in the 50s and 60s and can be traced back to the work of such thinkers as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (on whom I wrote my MA). Teilhard’s work focused on the sphere of human thought being the next big evolutionary change for our species: when we finally learn to think in unison we will change the world for the better. In many ways Icke is a relic of the mid-twentieth Century. He is a reminder of what conspiracy theories used to look like.

By the end I felt like I was back where Icke began, with that that classic Wogan interview. Icke likes to look like he’s changed and learnt over the years: he claims to have moved past that messianic stage and embraced a bigger world picture, and yet the message he was trying to impart (quite successfully too, given the audience of over six hundred attentive people) wasn’t any different from the one he started out with. Then, as now, he wants us to embrace a spirituality that will bring us together in some earthly paradise, free from the sins of those who would have control over us. Sure, he’s added touches of science fiction to it, and dabbles in a little, light anti-Semiticism to get in the crowds, but it’s still the same story. It is still platitudes and false hopes which will make you feel good about doing nothing in particular.

David Icke is not a stupid man. Indeed, he has a dogged determination to get to the bottom of things which is admirable and, if it had been expressed and nurtured properly, probably would have led to him being an excellent science reporter for the BBC (given that he was, I am told, a perfectly good sports journalist). He has the charisma and presentation skills to keep an audience captivated for eleven hours, let us not forget. Even true believers get leg cramps, the urge to eat and the like, but this crowd stayed the duration.

As did I.

So, what happened? Why is David Icke a promoter of weird mysticism rather than a rationalist? I cannot say for certain, but he did tell a story which kind of explains it.

He was in his twenties, back when he had a sporting career, and he made a poor financial decision which was sufficient to make his life uncomfortable. He said that, at the time, he was conflicted about what to do: his head said to do one thing and his heart another. He followed his head because, well, that was what he (and the rest of us) have always been taught to do. Unfortunately, that turned out to be the wrong decision and so he decided, from that day forward, that he would follow this heart in all things.

Because of this he has been able to survive all the ridicule and infamy that has come from being David Icke, promoter of weird and wacky views. He does not, in his own words, “give a shit” about what other people say because he knows, in his heart, he is right.

The kind of belief formation process Icke uses (which he calls “synchroncity”) may well have come out of that conscious decision (was it his head or his heart who decided this, I wonder?) to follow his heart but I can’t help but think that there is a possible world where Icke, burnt by that bad financial decision, decided to ask “So why didn’t that work out?”

It’s a world in which he investigated why decisions which seemed good on paper don’t always work out, a world in which he looked into why even the best epistemic practices don’t always lead you to performing the best action.

It’s a world in which David Icke became a skeptic rather than a believer.

I thought that in writing this account of Icke’s talk and my thoughts upon it, that it would help me sort through his theory. To an extent, it has. For one thing, I now think his view is nowhere near as novel as it perhaps appears. Yet I’ve also gained a greater respect for Icke the person. He seems to really believe what he says… Which is tragic. I think he doesn’t quite realise just what his ideas lead to and who his fellow travellers are.

In truth, I don’t know how to end this account. I plan to go back to the beginning and rewrite it into something more succinct and less reliant on what one commentator called “prison paragraphs.” Perhaps on the third go round I’ll come to some conclusion.

Perhaps.

Next time: Errata.

On the rulers of this prison planet

If you have been waiting anxiously for talk of reptiles, people of Jewish descent and Satanists, this is the post for you. Having covered Icke’s phenomenology and theories about the Moon and Saturn, let me move on to the third section of his eleven hour talk, where he described, in angry tones, the four groups which he claims have control over us, the denizens of the prison planet/our hologrammatic reality.

For reasons which will become all too clear, Icke decided to initially talk about three of the four controlling interests, which are:

That’s quite a trinity all on its own.

It’s also not a surprising set of “bad people who ruin the world for the rest of us:” for example, Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu’s (New Zealand) Greg Hallet and the Spymaster (the Spymaster has a real name but won’t let anyone know it… or is Greg Hallet’s alter-ego, much like HORansome is mine) have argued for a long time that our political masters are non-Christian child abusers who also happen to be homosexuals. Child abuse and Satanism is a well-worn link in many conspiracy theories, and Satanism and Freemasonry has a similar association.

Icke argued that whilst not all Freemasons are child abusers, all child abusers are Freemasons. He thinks there are some honest Freemasons who are utterly unaware that their organisation is really just a child abusers’ social club, but to become a high-ranking Mason requires that you are, or become, a child abuser.

Given that Icke thinks that Saturn is the source for the signal that prisons us in five-sense reality and he also believes that Saturn and Satan are one and the same, Satanists are a logical choice for yet another of the groups which control the prison planet. Still, I suspect Icke’s newfound interest in Satanic Saturn comes from his pre-existing fascination with Satanism in general, and given that the Freemasons have long been attacked for their engagement in the Black Arts ((This is the organisation, remember, that apparently was founded by the Knights Templar, who were, apparently, notorious Satanists… Or, if you don’t buy that origin story, the Freemasons are a pre-Christian cult, and most world religions are apparently based around snake worship, so obviously the Freemasons are snake-cum-Satanists… Or something like that.)), they are obviously part of the system of control.

All three of these groups engage in vampiric activity: you might recall that the entities that control us feed upon our base fears: child abusers are just another kind of vampire, one that prays on base emotion rather than (solely) on blood. “They” abuse children because it provides “them” with energy. When the child is completely drained, their bodies are sent off to crematoria where the bodies are then disposed of: yes, the reptilian hybrids control the furnaces too.

Still, all of this was really a prelude to the “Yes, but…” moment that is Icke and the Jewish people. For, as you probably expected, the fourth group which Icke singles out as being part of the system of control is the Jews.

Well, not the Jews. Zionists.

Well, not Zionists exactly: Rothschild-Zionists.

Confused? Read on.

Icke has been accused of being an anti-Semite. He has been accused an awful lot. As my friend Isaac pointed out in one of the breaks, Icke’s response to that accusation is always a “Yes, but…” manoeuvre, which is meant to signal “No, I’m not an anti-semite, really” but almost always makes the problem look so much worse.

Icke denies that he is an anti-Semite. Rather, he is anti-Zionist. Well, specifically, an anti-Rothschild-Zionist. In some cases he will claim that he is an anti-Semite, but only with respect to hybrid Jewish people: he’s fine with human’s who have Jewish ancestry. Every time he tries to lay out these distinctions, he gets into trouble. This is because when you finesse Icke’s claims about what he really believes about the state of Israel, Zionism and Judaism, he really does seem to be an anti-Semite (although you also get the impression that he doesn’t realise this). Despite his claims, his theory seems to lead him to anti-Semitism.

So, what is this Rothschild-Zionism that Icke is so concerned with. Well, Zionism is obviously Zionism (I say, channeling the spectre of the terrible Ayn Rand), but Rothschild-Zionism is the claim that the State of Israel is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rothschild family and their interests. For Icke, Israel is not a nation but part of a global conglomerate that is run for and by business.

Icke does not like the Rothschilds. Amongst the list of things the Rothschilds are responsible for are the Simon Wiesenthal Center (a “worthless” instituition, according to Icke) and Mossad (the enforcement arm of the Rothschild family). Claiming that the Simon Wiensthal Centre is worthless is an interesting claim: I would have thought that if you were distinguishing between Rothschild-Zionists and the Jewish people (I hesitate to say “proper” here), you might think that the Wiesenthal Centre’s work might be tarnished but still worthy.

Let us not forget (although first we might need to know) that the Arab Spring is a Rothschild plot. Well, let us imagine that it is before we forget about it. Icke is deadset against the revolutions in the Arab world, because he thinks they are a precursor to the third world war. He heaped especial scorn on the role of social media and Google in the fomenting of these revolutions, because Google, et al, are all Rothschild organisations.

But back to Israel.

Icke argues quite reasonably that we need to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. He, correctly, pointed out that you can be Jewish without being a Zionist and that there are Zionists who are not Jewish. He singles out Zionists as being the problem but he then falls back on the usual canards of anti-Semites. He talks about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as being a blueprint for a master plan to take over the world (he admits that the work itself is fake but buys into the notion that it’s fake that happens to reveal an actual masterplan: remember, the hybrids like to hide evidence of their plans everywhere). He talks about the purported practice of Jewish people drinking the blood of Gentiles (since it ties in the vampirism he says the hybrids practice) and the infiltration of the media industry. These are not new arguments, and they come straight out of the anti-Semite playbook.

More importantly, why Rothschild-Zionism? Why the Rothschilds? Why this group which, really, isn’t actually that big or important on the world stage (for example, why not talk about China and Falun Gong?)? I hate to be so frank, but Zionism is one of those things which seems bigger than it really is. Don’t get me wrong: the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a terrible thing, the Holocaust was a terrible thing, but the actual role of Israel and the weight of Zionism as a movement is not as big a political issue as maybe we, in the West, think it is. To say that Rothschild-Zionism is one of the four great evils really just seems to be a way of preserving traditional European anti-Semitism and dressing it up with a new name and a new reason as to why we can be suspicious of, or dislike, the Jewish people. In the old days they drank the blood of children: now they are the vassals of inter-dimensional big business. Signalling out the Rothschilds (a Jewish family) as being of similar kind to Satanists and child abusers is, at the very least, a weird thing to do and seems suspiciously like the kind of thing people like Icke have been doing for centuries: blaming a group of outsiders for their self-made problems.

So, what is it that these people (the Four) want, you might ask? Well, an electric one world currency, for a start. If we had a completely electronic commerce system, then “they” could control what we can and cannot buy. This, combined with their complete control of the ratings agencies and baking systems, means they can control us economically, which is important to know, because this will lead to a war with China, a war we will lose.

Ah, yes, the forthcoming war. The Arab Spring, fomented by the Rothschilds and Google, will lead to a fight with China. We in the West will not win this fight and when China takes over the Illuminati will be able to take complete control over our lives. I spent some time trying to work out why this Illuminati plot is so convoluted, because it seems to me that a far simpler way to gain this control over our lives would simply to not let the Enlightenment have ever happened. Icke thinks of China as a monolithic state which controls everything (a dramatic simplification that ignores the role of regional authorities in China and overemphasises the power of Beijing), which looks an awful lot like Europe several centuries ago. Why let the Enlightenment project ever take hold if all you are going to do is take it all back? I’m assuming it has something to do with giving us the illusion of choice and tapping into our base fears and the like, but this is hardly a convincing argument. The West likes to think it is exciting and modern and trendy, and that all nation states aspire to be Western and that most states are like us, but that simply isn’t true. Icke, like so many Westerners, sees the rest of the world as being, if not Western, Western-like. He fails to realise just how small the West, and its culture, really is.

Let me finish this section on a curious note. Isaac and I began to notice that Icke kept saying “You humans…” this and “You humans…” that, as if he was not human anymore. Does Icke think he has advanced beyond mere human identity, or is he, in some way, admitting what he really is. Is Icke part of the system of control, a messiah of disinformation designed to keep us trapped in this five-sense reality? Certainly, it is interesting that the masters of the prison planet let Icke talk about his revelations. If what he says is true, then surely they would want to be rid of him. Perhaps he is one of them. Part of Icke’s thesis about the masters is that they can’t help but leave clues to their existence in our culture and their works. Is Icke one of them? Or is he just completely wrong aboout the prison planet, the hologrammatic nature of reality and science?

Yes. Yes he is. More on that next time.

Ampli-fly me to the Moon…

Icke’s eleven-hour presentation started with a discussion of his philosophy and ends up with his pointing the finger at those who are responsible for all the bad things in our reality. However, to get there he had to take us to Saturn and back, in a move that can only be called “audacious.” He makes this move in a haphazard way: the second section of the talk was scatty and a little vague on particulars (I was going to say that it was the weakest section, but, really, the final two and an half hours were an hour too long). Thus this section might seem a bit scatty (a bit like the last one, really), but it’s all going to come together (admittedly in a weird way) when we get down to the four groups who control our prison planet.

On with the show.

In what can only be described as a moment of having it both ways, Icke revealed that people like the Bilderbergers are not the people who are really in charge. Rather, it is the people behind the Bilderbergers et al who are in control of the prison planet. Now, this is a case of having it both ways because, should you challenge Icke, he can always say “Well, yes, I’ve been talking a lot about the Rothschilds and you are right to say they aren’t the real threat: it’s the people who control them who are the real threat!” His views about who is in control cannot be falsified because he has a built-in escape clause that allows him to suggest (yet) another shadowy group is behind the shadowy group you don’t think is really to blame ((There’s also an interesting problem here about conceding too much to Icke and his views. At one point, when Icke was waxing lyrical on the evils of paedophiles, the Freemason’s and the like, I ended up thinking “Surely these people can’t be responsible for all of this” (“this” being “The evils of the prison planet”). It was only a few seconds later that I realised that I had just implicitly accepted the existence of a conspiratorial group and was merely denying that they were as bad as Icke made them out to be ((Maybe, in retrospect, making my example here about paedophiles was a bad idea: I don’t want to make it sound like I’m not denying that paedophiles are bad people. They are bad people. I’m just not sure they are conspiring against us.)) This is the kind of easy mistake I warn others about: if you spend hours listening to someone explain their controversial thesis to you, you will, at some point, end up going “Okay, I’ll accept this point for the time being to see where they go with it” and moments later you forget that you only provisionally accepted that claim, start believing it and thus end up going ever deeper into the rabbit hole.)).

Icke, in developing his talk of who is (or, really, when you gloss him properly, might be) in control touched on the recent report by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In short, they did an analysis of which companies own other companies and discovered that about 150 companies control near half the world’s wealth. Icke puts this forward as both proof of his thesis ((Which, I would argue, it isn’t. If the number of controlling interests had turned out to be a small band of, say, 12 companies, that might have suggested tight collusion amongst a set of people with shared interests, but the number of interests the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reports indicates controls a chunk of the world’s finances looks more like the normal operation of capitalist interests: big companies like to invest in other big companies just in case mistakes are made at home.)) and yet manages to say that as it was put out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich group it can’t be trusted because, as we all know, the Gnomes of Zurich are part of the system of control over the prison planet and therefore nothing they say should be taken seriously.

Icke likes to have it both ways a lot.

Still, all that was by-the-by and fairly standard stuff. What I wasn’t expecting was to find out that the Moon is a spaceship and that Saturn is a giant transmitter, part of the system of control that locks us into this holographic reality.

The second part (of Icke’s four-part journey into his belief system) ends up on Saturn, via the Moon, but first he gave a potted history of his thesis that the Illuminati bloodlines have been interbreeding with humans for most of our history. I suspect I can’t really do his radical reinterpretation of all human history much justice, given how sweeping and ahistorical it is. Wikipedia is probably your safest bet.

Anyway, for some reason the Illuminati focused their attention on Europe (and ignored, it seemed, the vast majority of the rest of the world), but during the Colonial Era (i.e. that time when Europeans decided to visit their patent brand of destruction upon other cultures) ((Icke’s view of the world is oddly Euro-centric. Whilst he talks about how world cultures share common traits and thus show that the reptilian shape-shifters have been interfering in all of out lives for the a very long time, he also seems to think that the Illumanti’s control of world politics is relatively recent.)) they moved out of Europe and set up secret societies to control the world as their traditional systems of control (monarchial bloodlines) were being disestablished (which was, of course, part of the plot to make us think we were gaining back control of our destinies) ((One dastardly thing these reptilians did was to forbid artists from depicting them in their reptilian form. Icke believes some artists tried to get around this by giving the shape-shifters reptilian features when they depicted them, and some radical artists just drew other reptiles as placeholders for the public figures they wanted to expose or lampoon. Any image that is even slightly reptilian, then, could be an image of the reptilians.)).

Anyway, that was sort of by-the-by: the potted history of humanity and the Illuminati was there to provide a backdrop to Icke’s startling claims about the Moon and Saturn. Icke has a theory about who controls the world, and for how long, and now he has a revised theory about how that control is maintained.

By a giant spaceship in orbit around the Earth, amplifying signals sent from Saturn.

Icke’s revelation started with a thoughtform (an idea that was placed into his mind by another (higher) entity). The thoughtform contained the revelation that the Moon was an non-natural satellite. Now Icke, as previously established, is a firm believer in synchronicity and thus this thoughtform was shown to be true because because he then, within days, found that other people had had exactly the same thought(form) as well ((Which means it might not be synchronic at all: if you accept that there are alien entities putting thoughts into peoples’ heads, then the fact that Icke found supporting evidence might well be evidence of a conspiracy by those entities. Why are they trustworthy? Who do they work for?) and had even written books about it (and Icke does seem to treat publication as showing that the idea has passed the process of peer-review (well, independent publication. Obviously academic publishers are just in it to help the status quo keep pushing out disinformation)).

Now, how do we know that the Moon is non-natural and thus a spaceship.

Because it’s hollow, silly.

It’s hollow because the centre of the Moon is an empty fuel tank ((The Moon has other secrets: the dark side of the Moon (the side we don’t see) is apparently covered in bases. Icke showed a series of images of what he claimed were badly doctored photos released by NASA of the dark side of the Moon as proof that NASA is trying to hide something. Now, it is true that the photos he displayed looked badly doctored, but they also looked as if they were digital images that had been spliced together, with all the attendant faults and distortions you would expect from such a process. Whilst the photos might be doctored, the job is so bad that it seems much more likely that the images have errors in them. If NASA can’t afford to doctor an image properly, then I don’t want to be in league with them.)).

Icke tells a story about how NASA set-off explosions on the Moon to record how long it would take for the concussion wave to travel to the centre and back again, and how the results where startling. “It rang like a bell for thirty minutes,” Icke exclaimed (he didn’t froth at the mouth: indeed, there was no frothing at all during the day). Icke rightfully points out this stumped the scientists, but that the answer is simple: the Moon must be hollow. However, what Icke fails to point out (and perhaps this is because he isn’t aware of it, given that once he finds a supporting reference to one of his claims he doesn’t really look for countervailing evidence) is that the result was striking because it didn’t fit with the then current model of how the Moon was thought to be composed. The result meant that that model had to be revised and a new model formulated. The new model doesn’t say the Moon is hollow, though ((So many footnotes. Icke also believes the moon landings were faked and that Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the footage. As my friend Isaac pointed out, this was the only time in the presentation that the audience seemed to laugh at Icke rather than with him. Kubrick, apparently was a Hollywood insider and thus was aware of the Illuminati and their plots/capers. Icke suggested that Kubrick used his films to reveal how the Illuminati worked, so “2001: A Space Odyssey” was made to reveal things about NASA and the space programme, whilst “Eyes Wide Shut” was meant to show how Hollywood is infested with Satanists (Icke believes the Hollywood execs killed Kubrick so they could edit out twenty-eight minutes of Satanistic revelation from that film). Not only that, but the “Star Wars” films of George Lucas also contain clues about the real nature of the Moon. I kid you not: Icke showed an image of the Death Star and an image of the Moon side-by-side and claimed that one was meant to symbolise the other. It gets better, though: one of the people who worked on the “Star Wars” films was director John Carpenter, and his film “They Live,” Icke claimed, was proof positive of the existence of the reptilians. Now, why Hollywood lets these films play is anyone’s business. They do seem to be giving the game away.)).

Other planets also have non-natural “moons:” Icke seemed to suggest that Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, has also been placed there artificially ((I’m a little confused about Icke and his contention that the universe is teeming with life. He claims that if we were able to see the other vibrational realities we would realise there is life everywhere. So, presumably, there is life on Mars but it is invisible to us but is being controlled by a visible moon. Whatever it is these Illuminati are up to, it’s very confusing to someone trapped in five-sense reality.)). What these non-natural satellites do is amplify a signal that emanates from Saturn.

Icke’s theories on Saturn are all rather new and I (and my colleague in crime) rather felt that it was apparent that Icke was still formulating how to talk about this whilst he was on stage. He started off by pointing out that worship of the Sun was really worship of Saturn (a claim which seemed implausible when I heard it but seems impossible now I’ve written it down: the Sun can be easily seen by the naked eye and plays a very obvious role in the day-to-day life of most human beings. Saturn: not so much) and that Satan and Saturn (the god Saturn) are one and the same. Not only that, but Santa is also Satan: because Christmas occurs in the traditional period of Saturnalia, and worship of Saturn is actually worship of Satan, it is obvious, in retrospect, that Satan is Santa ((There you go: if you want to explain why you aren’t giving Christmas gifts this year, all you need to say is that you don’t engage in Satanist festivities.)).

Anyway, Saturn is sending out a signal, a sub-Matrix, which gets amplified by our Moon (and presumably by Phobos to whoever it is who lives on Mars) and has been since the Moon first appeared ((Icke has a number of theories as to when the Moon first appeared, some of which don’t fit in with the conventional wisdom of its necessity for the evolution of life on this planet. Icke is also a subscriber to the “Words in Collision” thesis that states the solar system is in a different arrangement now to the way it formed. So, basically, he can explain away any discrepancy between his view and the theories about abiogensis and the subsequent evolution of life by claiming that whatever role the Moon might have played was played in whatever arrangement the solar system was in prior to that Moon arriving in orbit.)).

The signal sent from Saturn, and amplified by the Moon, affects our DNA. Icke makes a lot out of the claim that scientists don’t really know what a lot of our DNA actually does (he claims that 98% of our DNA is unexplained) but that the answer is simple: through interbreeding, the reptilians have control over our genetic characteristics and thus the signal allows them to control us. They have built up our civilisation to allow them to control and use us for cattle.

As to who “they” are, exactly… Well, more on that soon.

Next time: Freemasons, Satanists, Child Abusers and Jews… Sorry, “Rothschild-Zionists.”

Preamble

Never let it be said that I criticise a view without trying to understand it. I spent eleven hours listening to David Icke. I also had a sprained ankle and spent $80 getting to the venue. When you add in the near $120 for the ticket, “The Lion Sleeps No More” was a big investment for me: I did not attend lightly.

I mention the money associated with seeing David Icke not just so I can run the “I’m a poor student” line and thus garner sympathy. No, the cost of seeing Icke, even if you just factor in the ticket price and you bought your ticket early, was about NZ$90 (the listed ticket price online was in Australian dollars). That’s an expensive ticket to what was, in essence, a lecture (admittedly, a value for money lecture if the ratio of dollars-to-hours is a factor). Even I, who studies conspiracy theories for a kind of living, thought twice about attending for financial reasons alone.

The pricing of any event will decide who goes and who doesn’t. Now, I realise there are certain costs to bringing someone over to Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu which make the price tag somewhat explicable, but at around $100 a ticket, you can really only expect true believers and people like me to even think of attending ((At one stage I did worry that maybe some former students of mine would be in the audience, and how I might react to finding this out. I decided, from that point onwards, to not look at peoples’ faces in the hope that no one would recognise me and, most importantly, I wouldn’t recognise anyone.)).

And boy, was it attended. Icke had an audience of over six hundred people, of all ages, all ethnicities and pretty even split on gender. They clapped when they were supposed to clap, laughed when they were supposed to laugh and Mexican waved when they were told to Mexican wave (this is true: it happened at least twice).

It’s a terrible thing to admit, but I did notice a few people and thought “Ooh, they look nice,” only to then think “Matthew, you can’t have amorous thoughts about anyone today: imagine the awkward conversations.” I also thought, possibly too much, about whether some people were there because their partners wanted to go. How would you cope being in a relationship with someone who thinks alien shape-shifting reptiles rule the world when you don’t think that seems very (or at all) likely? Then I thought “Well, people seem to cope with partners who believe in the gods, which is similar…” and realised that maybe my intolerance of dissenting opinions is ruinous to my life in general.

The crowd was in a genial mood, promoted by promoter Adam Davis when he started proceedings about how hard it is to keep believing in theses like that of Icke’s when the rest of the world pours scorn and ridicule on you. He then bade us hug and congratulate one another, a command I completely ignored as I started what would become forty-two pages of hand-written notes ((Which, miraclously, I can read, given that they were written in the dark and at great speed.)). A man behind me noticed this and tried to engage me in conversation, which I managed to wrangle my way out of by just being a bit terse. I was not ready to out myself as someone who is sceptical of Icke’s work not just because I didn’t want a repeat of being outed at Richard Gage’s Auckland talk but also because I thought that if I did out myself, even to just one person, I might be stuck with them all day, a faithful companion trying to persuade me that Icke is right and my scepticism is just part of the Illuminati’s plot to keep me in the prison planet ((I also considered that maybe he might be a sceptic (or even a skeptic), at which point I might encounter the other trouble: many skeptics can’t see why people would believe in theses like that of Icke’s, and, as such, they seek only to ridicule the believers and supporters. I was there to try and map out his system of thought and work why he thinks it is a plausible story to tell about how our world is constituated. I didn’t want to have to deal with an unsympathetic skeptic.)).

Luckily, before he could try to engage me in conversation again, the light’s dimmed and a video started playing. It was footage of Icke wandering, in a solitary fashion, down a path as the narrator told us about the hardships and turmoils of Icke’s life in his role of visionary. They then played a bit of the famous Wogan interview (which I thought was both brave and appropriate: Icke, at the very least, owns his past), before Icke took the stage. I’ll talk about what he said in the first part next time. Still, one last thing before I go:

If you decided to give an eleven hour talk, do please think of your audiences’ bottoms. The seats at the Telstra Clear Pacific Events Centre were terrible. Plastic chairs with only a token layer of loose cushioning. My bottom is still in distress almost a week later.

David Icke: Think about my bottom!

In the next part: I discuss Icke’s theory of phenomenalism and judge his personality.