Room 207 Press Webinars #6: The Color Turquoise

In late 2018, celebrated author Alice Walker was asked by the New York Times to do one of those regular “books I have on my bedside table” pieces that fill a few inches in the weekly book review supplement. And that quickly got weird, because one of the books she waxed lyrical about was by David Icke, and this quickly got picked up by people who pointed out that Icke's book was really antisemitic, in that it blamed all the ills of the world by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers. Who were in fact extraterrestrial lizards who have been ruling the planet for millennia.

And this reminded everyone that David Icke – prophet of conspiratorial, antisemitic extraterrestrial doom – existed. Every so often he pops up and we get that poisonous, vaguely ill feeling that Icke brings with him. Recently, he's been back with the whole “link between the novel coronavirus and 5G” question (spoilers: there isn't a link between the novel coronavirus and 5G), shortly before getting his YouTube removed.

But how do you get a David Icke? Where do ideas like his come from? What is the secret history that causes an idea to metastasise into a state where a professional goalie turned sports commentator turned Green Party politician becomes the visionary king of the conspiracy theorists? 

In my next Zoom seminar, The Color Turquoise, I'll be explaining the strange origin of the ideas that led to David Icke, and the trajectory that led from the early origins of the New Age movement into its wildest fringes, and how a semingly benign New Ager could become one of the most popular antisemitic conspiracy theorists in history.

The talk was held twice on Monday 13th July, at 8pm BST (UK time) and 8pm EDT (Eastern US/Canada time). Patreon backers automatically get in, and get access to the videos afterward, so if you missed it, there's still the Patreon.