It’s late evening on Monday, February 16. Icke is a keynote speaker at the Los Angeles Conscious Life Expo. For the past three days, both Hilton ballrooms and a separate conference center have been filled with secret crystal shaman worshipers, people with copper-wire pyramids stuck on their heads and crown chakra snake oil salesman. Despite the economic malaise, the speakers – dilettantes in Oriental mysticism, Mayan apocalypse prophesies and Babylonian tablet claims – each charge a stiff fee. At 95 bucks, Icke’s “Mega Talk” fee may be the stiffest. But Expo organizers have definitely saved the best for last. Amongst the innocuous crystal worshipers has suddenly stepped a fiery, half-mad demagogue known for televised selfdeification and his prophesies of British doom by tsunami. Right-wing nationalist groups on both sides of the Atlantic have praised him for his rants on international institutions and Judaism. Icke’s Howard Beale-esque ravings have intrigued me for years. I’ve been waiting to check out the Mega Talk for months, but since I can’t afford a ticket, I had to sign up as a volunteer at the Expo to get in. For 15 hours throughout the weekend, I stuffed baggies with promotional literature and made sure that everyone going into the exhibitors’ area had the proper armband – all for the chance to earn my freedom from the Obama administration’s reptilian mind control machine. “Get ready for seven hours of pure madness,” a fellow volunteer warned me before Icke went on. “He’ll blow your mind.” That was no exaggeration. “Puppet! Puppet! Puppet!” Icke says, hunched in front of a projector and flipping through photos of Obama, George Tenet, Treasury Secretary Geithner, Obama mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Rahm Emanuel’s father was part of a terrorist group that bombed Israel into existence,” Icke says. “Brzezinski wants a world bank controlling a microchipped population. These are real blood-drinking bloodlines, people!”
wo decades ago, David Icke had an awakening – an intergalactic fascist conspiracy is afoot. A retired pro footballer and sports anchor, Icke was working as a Green Party spokesperson at the time. “I got hit by a bloody Exocet missile, is what happened,” he says of his illumination. “Couldn’t remember me name for three months, mate. I was minding me business, and me head blew off.” Orchestrating the conspiracy is a cabal of inter-dimensional, shape-shifting, oft-invisible, cannibalistic, psychopath reptilian-humanoids – progeny of bloodlines from the Draco constellation. Icke has produced 13 thick books about the conspiracy and has traveled the world prodigiously since his awakening,
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spreading the word to all those with the will and means to listen. Every person in a position of power in every realm of society – politics, mass media, science, academia, banking, industry, military – they’re all either reptilians or helpless pawns in the reptilians’ plot. The reptilians have engineered every major event in the history of the world to manipulate the human body-politic. A few years ago, while tripping on Ayahuasca in the Brazilian rainforest, Icke heard a “female voice” tell him many things about our former president, for instance. The reptilians deployed George W. Bush to break the country down, Icke says. Then they offered up Obama as a savior. Icke’s “great friend” Credo Mutwa, a South African witch doctor, further warned him of this “hope hoax.” In a poem, Mutwa calls Obama “Judas” and tells him: “They will put around your head a bloodwet martyrs crown/Oh black Kennedy following the one before/May God forgive thee and thy fiery spouse.” The cover graphic on the speaker’s latest book – The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy, on sale at the Expo for $25 – shows the flags of the European Union, NATO, Israel, England and Algeria all swirling into a reptile eye, alongside portraits of Queen Elizabeth, Rudy Giuliani, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hillary Clinton. If all this sounds crazy, there seems to be no shortage of people willing to eat it up. “What most impressed me,” said one man in line before the show, “is that [Icke] has a picture of Obama with the word ‘fraud’ right on the front of his website. I always knew Obama was a fraud.” “The election was rigged,” he continued. “Probably black ops,” his friend said. Amongst my coworkers at the Expo is Andy, an animated Redondo Beach dude whose friends think he’s lost his mind, and two tattooed rockers named Sean and Tom. Like me, Andy was putting in three shifts for Icke. Sean and Tom won positions as parking enforcers while the rest of us stuffed baggies. After our first shift, Sean and Tom invited Andy and I to smoke a bowl in the underground parking garage. As we hotboxed Sean’s subcompact, Tom filled me in on a dark, Illuminati coming-of-age ritual. A mother imprisons her child until the child becomes extremely thirsty. She brings a pitcher of water to the child at intervals, but does not offer him any. If the child asks for a drink, she beats him to a pulp. “The kid’s thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is my mother!’” Tom said. “And she’s just beating the living shit out of him.” Only when the child stops asking, Tom explained, does she give him a drink: “It’s about learning that ‘you do not ask. You are given.’” After we finished and went back upstairs, Andy downed two glasses of wine and claimed that his family are Illuminati. His grandmother, he assured me, was a broomflying witch. “I’ll just put it this way,” he said, “we had roosters, and they disappeared.” He insisted the reptilians will soon
lure us all into underground concentration camps by way of a pandemic hoax. “They want to drink your blood,” he said, “but they prefer to do it when you’re terrified. They like the chemicals your body releases when you’re terrified.” Andy says he once worked as a producer under Clint Eastwood. He would sort Eastwood’s mail and insists the actor is a reptilian. Eastwood would receive letters from the “Bohemian Club.” As a higher-up told Andy, “it’s just a bunch of rich guys who act like total fags for a couple weeks every year. But they rule the world, so don’t fuck around with it, and never open any of that mail.” “When the reptilians think, you can see them moving their reptilian tongues around in their mouths,” Andy said, “like this.” He closed his mouth and rolled his tongue around under his cheeks. “I used to see Clint doing that.”
eptilians have a long history in Los Angeles. They constructed one of their elaborate subterranean cities below downtown 5,000 years ago. According to Hopi legend, “their city is laid out like a lizard,” the Los Angeles Times reported on January 29, 1934. “Its tail to the southwest, far below Fifth and Hope streets, its head to the northeast, at Lookout and Marda streets. The city’s key room is situated directly under south Broadway.” Icke says it all began with the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Back then, people were able to levitate, cause spontaneous combustion and talk to whales. When those continents sunk, the reptilians established all the ancient civilizations of the world. They’ve since littered history with symbols of their dominance and reptilian origins: the Chinese dragon, the Alfa Romeo logo, the Statue of Liberty, and “an enormous willy” called the Golden Penis of Nimrod. An English Nazi militia called Combat 18 once reckoned that Icke was one of their own, perhaps because his theory resembles so closely that of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Russian rabble-rousers of old often drummed up pogroms against the Jews by calling them blood-drinkers. Icke responded by claiming that Combat 18 is a front for the Anti-Defamation League, which is in turn a front for the Mossad, which is controlled by the Rothschild banking conglomerate, who are shapeshifting reptilians. “Zionism is Rothschildism!” Icke further explains at the Expo. “It is Illuminati-ism! Jacob Rothschild doesn’t give a damn about Jews. Rothschild wants war with Iran! Rothschild wants war with China!” Icke is too paranoid and scatterbrained to be a Nazi, though. The reptilians probably consider him a 40th-tier threat. In the realm of mainstream politics, Icke would fall somewhere between a radical libertarian and a schizophrenic anarchist. In appealing to kooks across a spectrum ranging from
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neo-Nazi to wave-field stoner, he exposes his theories as devoid of tangible content. He hates the establishment, and that’s about it. Anyone else who hates the establishment can sympathize. There is no point in pegging him. He defies all conventions of reasonable discourse. As Andy put it: “I just love to hear him stick it to The Man.”
t’s at least four hours into the seminar and Icke isn’t slowing down. “Ted Heath!” Icke spits as he flips to a slide of the former British prime minister. Icke says he once encountered Heath alone in a dressing room. “Heath didn’t say a thing, just looked me up and down. It was like he was scanning me. And then his eyes went black. Looking into them was like looking into a black hole, but I knew I was really looking into another dimension. Ted Heath! There you have it: satanist, blooddrinker, child molester, mind controller, shape-shifting reptilian ... .” Icke goes on to explain that one of the reptilians’ latest hoaxes is global warming. “Temperatures are falling,” he insists. Temperature changes are the work of nothing more than sunspots. Al Gore and other members of the “Babylonian Brotherhood” have engineered an hysteria to force another level of control on the world population. “I learned long ago that anything Al Gore is involved in is a hoax,” Icke says. “The environmental movement is being played like a violin! “The world is so bloody crazy, it thinks it’s sane. They say I’m out of my mind, and I say good! We need to get out of our minds.” By hour seven, I am so exhausted from trying to keep up with Icke that I nearly miss his last proclamation. In the future, humans will not have to eat. Our need for food is simply a symptom of the reptilians sucking our energy from us. “When consciousness manifests itself,” Icke says, exuding measured profundity, “animals will not have to kill each other to survive. The lion will lay with the lamb. “Miracles can happen!” “Woo!” shouts a front-row spectator. Assorted clapping. The gray-haired lady sighs. Sitting amongst the cheering throng, the whole scene suddenly begins to make sense. These people probably all know Icke is basically batty, but that doesn’t mean they think he’s wrong. He’s a court-jester version of Morpheus from The Matrix. The notion that there is something vast and deeply malicious behind this cruel mess we call the world isn’t particularly novel. The reptilians are a representation of forces beyond our control – a Star Trek Satan. $95 can buy a person two weeks’ worth of food. But, strange as it sounds, Icke’s audience seems to be receiving something more nourishing. Icke straightens and looks into the distance. “We are consciousness!” he says, rising to a crescendo. “I am freedom!”✶
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