The story so far: after embracing an overtly New Age, Theosophical and Gnostic-tinged worldview in an extremely public manner, David Icke finds himself the subject of widespread ridicule. In the mid-1990s he doubles down on this by blending his homebrewed cosmology (cobbled together as it was from other people’s ideas) with his very own Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of everything (which he largely stole from The Gods of Eden and Behold a Pale Horse, and then sprinkled a heap of material from other conspiracy researchers on top of that mashup to obscure the seams).
Meanwhile, Icke’s personal life continued to take twists and turns which ordinarily I wouldn’t touch, except that they have a significant impact on his work. During his early New Age-focused phase, Icke would commence a polyamorous relationship in which he was still with his wife, Linda Atherton, but was also seeing Mari Shawsun, one of the psychics who was guiding him in the process of his spiritual development. Icke’s autobiography, In the Light of Experience, ends up giving the impression that the relationship wasn’t begun with Linda’s prior consent but was simply presented to Linda as a fait accompli.
After Shawsun was expelled from Icke’s circles, Linda and Icke remained married legally speaking. What’s perhaps more significant at this stage, though, is less their romantic partnership and more their business partnership, for Linda and Icke’s children by her would, to this day, be the main movers in Icke’s UK self-publishing company. The company – originally called Bridge of Love so as to leverage its way into the New Age market, then rebranded as David Icke Books, then rebranded as Ickonic for Icke’s latest book (The Trigger) – was a necessary platform for Icke after he was disowned by his previous publishers, the New Age press Gateway.
Gateway had good reasons to drop Icke; in his first major conspiracy theory tome, The Robots’ Rebellion, he’d claimed that the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was a real blueprint for world domination, following the lead of Bill Cooper and Stephen Knight in claiming that the secret society behind the global conspiracy had done a cheeky find-and-replace job on the Protocols to incriminate Jewish people.
Whereas Stephen Knight had broadly gotten away with this and Bill Cooper, whilst not exactly getting away with it, was lucky enough to have a publisher who simply didn’t care about denunciations of Behold a Pale Horse (particularly when Behold a Pale Horse was making them significantly more money than anything else on their catalogue), Icke was unfortunate in that Gateway operated at a very specific level of editorial sloppiness. Specifically, they were editorially lax enough to let the book come out citing the Protocols in the first place, but had enough concern for the impact on their bottom line to stop putting out Icke’s stuff after the inevitable backlash.
Icke’s income would now be based on two things: his books and his lecture tours. It was in the course of a lecture tour of the Caribbean that he would encounter Pamela Leigh Richards. Icke had shortly before had been primed by cold reading scam artist Derek Acorah to expect to meet a new woman in his life, and Icke and Richards were soon an item, with Icke divorcing Linda and marrying Pamela in 2001 (apparently amicably, or at least without sufficient rancour to persuade Linda to walk away from owning and operating Bridge of Love).
Through Richards, Icke met Royal Adams, a US-based businessman. By the end of the 1990s, Icke and Adams had reached an agreement: Adams would set up Bridge of Love US and take responsibility for distributing Icke’s books in the USA, and in return Adams would get a cut of the profits. Having someone in the US dedicating their time to cracking the market would be advantageous in any publishing field, but in addition the “paranoid style” has never quite gone out of style in American politics; the States was perhaps the hungriest market in the English-speaking world for the sort of conspiracy-peddling that Icke was engaged in, and cracking that market would be the next major step in promoting Icke’s ideas.
It’s quite fortuitous, then, that the beginning of Icke’s deal with Adams would coincide with a major new dimension entering into his writing. The first book distributed under the deal, The Biggest Secret, was in many ways Icke’s big break in the US, as well as his major claim to continued infamy; if you haven’t heard about David Icke from his infamous Wogan interview and earlier controversies, odds are you know him for some of the ideas he espoused in the book. The text managed to become a big hit in the conspiracy world through a simple technique: taking a major recent event, explaining it through a conspiratorial lens, and tying this in to an eye-catchingly bold claim. The recent event was the death of Princess Diana. And the bold claim?
Lizard people, dear reader.
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