How Football Legend David Icke Changed My Mind About Conspiracy Theories (Part I)
It’s midnight. You have scrolled too far down Instagram’s reels. The algorithm is fighting for its life. It brings you a video of a 90s talk show. The host and his audience are allegedly making fun of a football legend turned conspiracy theorist. You do a quick search about him. You see the word “Zionists” related to his works. That word has appeared on your Twitter feed in connection to a current war.
Your fate is sealed.
You are now taking a deep dive into David Vaughan Icke’s “Turquoise” theories with me.
In 1991, David Icke joined Terry Wogan on the Wogan Show for a now famous segment in British media history.
Wogan introduces Icke with a cheeky, “The world as we know it is about to end.” Laughter rings out. An unsuspecting Icke thinks Wogan is on his side.
Icke was on the show to warn the world about tidal waves and earthquakes that were about to hit Great Britain.
Unaware of the mocking laughter, Icke says that it’s important to laugh because it is the best way to exorcise negativity. To which Wogan replies, “But they’re laughing at you. They’re not laughing with you.”
Those words cut deep into Icke for a moment that lasted months.
However, at this point Icke was on the precipice of his former life as a sportsman and media personality. An idea had been planted in his mind by one of the “hippie moles” of the hipster generation.
This interview was the tipping point. His ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’ moment?
“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.” — Interview with Jon Ronson, 2001.
Icke suffered from Rheumatoid arthritis throughout his teenage years. The ‘joint monster’ cut short his football career as a goalie. In the 80s, he started engaging in alternative medicine and new age philosophies in an effort to find relief. Around the same time he started feeling a mysterious presence around him. The feeling became so strong that one quiet day in March 1990 he snapped. “If there is anybody here, will you please contact me because you are driving me up the wall!”
A few days after that one-sided encounter, while in a newsagent shop he felt a force lift him and guide him to a bookshelf where he picked up “Mind to Mind” by Betty Shine. During the second last visit (four in total) with Shine, Icke says he “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.”
She told him he had been “sent to heal the earth 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.”
Icke is mostly a product of his time like many other hipsters who came up with conspiracy theories. For example, he had a “Turquoise period” during which he claimed the colour exudes positive energy conducive for communication with spirit worlds. He had a three-way relationship with his wife and one of his psychics. He joined the fight for the environment (which he later turned against saying climate change is a hoax).
It is strange that they came up with so many of these theories as if to justify their “love and light” movement. Why not just practice love and light, tone down the guilt and shame and work with the present evil without inventing new evil?
In Icke’s case, his message was/is simple. Love will heal the world.
There’s a catch.
Love will heal the world by weakening the negative energy generated by the evil controlling the world. So, you have to learn about this evil in order to know how love will heal…the evil? You? You decide, I guess.
To be fair, you can take his positive message at face value. He doesn’t say you MUST read the books first.
I dared.
I am blown away by the complex mind of this man. And his enthusiasm. Frankly I’m envious. He wrote five books in three years. Science Fiction missed out on this one.
Following the Wogan interview, he stops caring what people think of him.
He gradually becomes less lovey-dovey (The Truth Vibrations (1991), Love Changes Everything (1992), Days of Decision (1993), In the Light of Experience (1993), Heal the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation (1993) after 1994 in his theories about the world around him. I don’t blame him. Even Jesus had a bad run-in with humans.
I have a bad run-in with humans as they are portrayed in conspiracy theories.
I will argue against any conspiracy theory 90 percent of the time. The 5 percent is reserved for scoffing and rolling my eyes at the hubris conspiracy theorists give fellow humans. I simply refuse to believe that any group of humans more concerned with their pockets and status is “an extraterrestrial race of reptile-human hybrids controlling the planet from a fourth dimension intergalactic spaceship”.
I mean do you even hear yourself? Somewhere in that theory you are suggesting that spaceships might have been around before the universe.
While reading about one of his incredible theories (the Reptoid humanoids), I felt this wave of fear in my chest and had to put the material away for a moment. I couldn’t continue to the other theories even when I reframed them as fiction. I respect the minds that believe this stuff and live that reality.
I got down to a question I always have for every conspiracy theory.
What now?
Even if these things are real, it doesn’t change anything in the grand scheme that they target, does it?
So.
What now, Icke?
Icke proposes a crazier albeit sobering conspiracy theory…
See you in part II.
