It’s a thought experiment. Honestly. I don’t really think this. Or do I? I mean, it makes sense?
No, no, hear me out.
What if David Icke is actually a tool of the true Conspiracy Bad Guys? What if he's an op? I mean I’m only half serious here, but 50% serious is still more than 0%. You know what I think about David Icke by now, and if you don’t maybe you’re on my Patreon and you can see the video I did. You’re all set. Go watch it. I’ll wait.
OK, David Icke, right. David Icke is an op. Totally certain of it. Let's look at the evidence.
1. As of 2021, peaceful protests have been largely outlawed in the UK. And yet, when Icke did his superspreader in Trafalgar Square more or less a couple of weeks after that happened, one where speakers were literally calling for the murder of health professionals, no one in power batted an eyelid. Where were the police? Why weren’t they cracking heads? It's almost like they're OK with it. Compare what happened at that women's vigil for Sarah Everard (I’m almost certain you remember, but Sarah Everard was the woman who was murdered by an off-duty police while out running). Women peacefully holding candles? Frothing examples of the wide intersection between anti-vax and Holocaust denial? One of these things gets people’s heads cracked by the Thick Blue Line. Funny which of those it is.
2. Icke is totally against the minor inconvenience of putting something over your face, but why? Some sort of thing about controlling us, but – and let's face it, England, the most surveiled country in the world, was among the very last countries to issue a mask mandate and they could not wait to withdraw it. Like, they did it at the very first possible moment. Who cares if they work or not? Masks hide your face from CCTV. Normalising wearing a mask for whatever reason scares the hell out of the forces that would really keep the people down because they can't keep track of you if you can cover your face without people thinking you’re a criminal. And if you present as female, you don’t get randoms telling you to smile. And they keep your face warm when it’s cold. And you can pretend you didn’t recognise people when you clock them (and they legit might not recognise you – it’s a win-win). And it’s another venue for accessorising. And you can totally pretend not to have said the last thing you said because no one can hear you anyway. And if you wear a hoodie, you can pretend you’re one of those guys from Mortal Kombat. And I DIDN’T CATCH A SINGLE FUCKING COLD BETWEEN FEBRUARY 2020 AND DECEMBER 2021. Just saying.
3. David Icke (sincerely) believes that thing about the International Jewish Conspiracy being run by reptilian aliens. And I've written at length on how that idea didn't come from a vacuum. And about how it being aliens makes it MORE antisemitic, because the people who did the Holocaust (hang on, next point) didn't see Jewish people as human, and this is the final result of that viewpoint.
4. I used to have the private opinion that being anti-vax was intellectually on the same level as Holocaust denial, and one of the many not-really-surprises of the last few years is that the Venn Diagram between actual Nazis and Holocaust deniers might not be entirely round, but there’s a big fat intersection in the middle (turns out that the same is true of the gender critical movement, but that’s another rant). David Icke makes common cause with Holocaust deniers (and his own take on the Shoah technically isn't really denial, while also it absolutely is). He's mates with Nazis. If you're so tied to your principles that you'll hang with fascists, you didn't really have principles.
5. And actually, once you get past all the stuff about conspiracies, and read Icke’s books (and I've read six, so you don't have to), if you look at where he stands ideologically, he's super, super conservative. Full-on traditionalist. Way more in common with your Rees-Moggs and Goves and Taylor Greenes than you'd think. Not a friend of the LGBTQ community by any means, not a friend of antiracists, not a friend of people who'd support free movement, basically opposed to any actual progressive cause. Considers the NHS to be a tool of evil. Opposes the international enterprise that prevented war in Mainland Europe for the longest period in history. Icke bangs on about conspiracies that control us, but the culprits of his supposed conspiracy are people who were nearly exterminated, while he totally supports forces that crush people who are actually oppressed. He claims the role of a maverick, but he's only got maverick narratives, married to hyper-conservative ideological stances. His narratives sound bonkers, but they’re old standards, going back more than a century. You can follow the line right back to Blavatsky. He’s not an original thinker.
6. Does he have a point sometimes? Of course he does. If he didn't have any point at all, how could he be used as a tool of distraction and control? You get big lies past people with small truths (see also: Vlad Putin using the indisputable fact of Ukraine having an endemic Nazi problem as a convenient plank for his war effort. Vlad doesn’t care about Nazis). Basic Manipulation 101.
Now. You can use all of these points to argue that David Icke is an MI6 op.
Not a CIA op, because some of Icke’s right-wing takes depart from the usual QAnon nonsense (see his view on Trump). And as Anybody Who's Into Conspiracies Knows, British and US intelligence agencies have been quietly at war since WWII OBVIOUSLY, ever since the Americans discovered the existence of MI18, the agency dedicated to investigating our allies*.
(*I literally just made that up. But it's true that although now it’s just MI5 – parallel to the FBI – and MI6 – counterpart to the CIA – originally British Military Intelligence went from MI1 to MI19. But, peculiarly, there wasn't an MI13, because spies are superstitious, and there wasn't an MI18, and no one knows why that one was skipped, and no one has ever admitted it existed, so it's super easy to make up any old nonsense when you've read enough of this.)
Constructing a theory that MI6 are using David Icke to destabilise and undermine progressive causes and to radicalise a demographic of far-right activists who they've used Icke to hoodwink into thinking they're rebels is easy and fun.
Well, fun if you're me.
But surely if this were true, wouldn't we have heard about it?
NO, BECAUSE THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO.
Great, isn’t it? I’ve almost convinced myself. I could be dangerous if I wanted to be.