There’s a moment in my live show with David Icke where I completely lose it.

  “I know why you haven’t been killed for saying the stuff you say,” I yell at him. “It’s because you are one of them! You are part of the Trap!”

It was something like that, anyway. You’ll have to check out the podcast yourself (I’ve now depaywalled it) — https://delingpole.substack.com/p/david-icke— to hear the exact words. But what I do vividly remember as I made the accusation was how shocked I felt to be saying it. I’d begun the evening expecting that we were going to end it as good mates. Instead, here I was, effectively accusing one of the world’s most red-pilled influencers of working for the Enemy.

  This was the point in the evening where I realised I’d lost about half my audience. I could actually hear their groans of disappointment and disbelief. How dare I question the integrity of the heroic, magnificent and sacrosanct guru who first led them down the rabbit hole and who has been proved right about so much since?

  Contrary to popular belief, I don’t enjoy confrontation. But I’m definitely not shy of giving it back if I’m feeling provoked. Icke had already irked me mightily with his sludgy monologues, his inability to answer a question straight, and his reluctance to hold anything resembling a conversation. The final straw, though, was when he started making sneering references to my ‘religion.’

  Now I certainly hadn’t gone on stage intending to defend Christianity to a known atheist. I mentioned my own faith, en passant, just because I was starting to get a bit frustrated by Icke’s vagueness on the nature of his philosophical/religious outlook. Icke is very good at telling you stridently what the deal is: that we’re all living in a simulation, that there are these demons feeding on our energy, and so on. What he is much less able to do, it seems to me, is to provide a persuasive account as to why we should believe him.

  And I don’t think I was being unreasonably demanding here. If you are going to travel round the world, appearing on stage to adoring audiences, expounding a particular world view, then surely it behoves you to be able to justify it. For me, it would be the work of moments to explain why the Bible narrative - that we were created in the image of a loving God, who imbued us with a moral compass and a yearning for truth and beauty - makes emotional and intellectual sense. And I’ve got texts to back it up. All I wanted from Icke was his own apologia for why it is that he thinks what he thinks.

  But Icke either couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver. This for me was a massive tell. I’d started out, as I do with all my podcast guests, wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. But now there were red flags all over the place. Why, when talking about truly monstrous evils, like the Satanic bloodline families and how they torture and kill children in order to harvest their adrenochrome, did he sound so curiously unmoved? Why, given his oft-stated view that only through ‘love’ can we transcend the simulation, was he so viciously antipathetical to Christianity? Could it be that the ugly rumours about Icke which I’d be so careful not to investigate beforehand might actually have a grain of truth in them?

  You’ll find the answer to these questions in two revealing videos. Perhaps I should have watched them before I did the live event. Then again, had I done so I would have cancelled the whole thing for what they tell us about Icke does not make me warm to him or trust him. Icke is a theosophist; a New Ager; essentially - though he might not use that specific term - a Luciferian. Now that might not sound too worrying if you don’t know what those labels mean. So let’s spell it out: David Icke shares the same religious belief system as the wicked master rulers he has spent the last thirty years supposedly exposing.

I’m surprised by how little this is talked about or even understood in Awake circles. But I think that may partly be a function of the way Icke markets himself. If you’re one of his 500,000 Twitter followers, for example, you get edgy, incisive commentary on everything from Israel/Gaza to the credibility of Alex Jones and Elon Musk. This is the Icke of the popular imagination: unafraid to go where others will not dare; completely on the money with his predictions of what the New World Order will do next; a martyr to the cause of truths that They just don’t want you to hear.

  I fell for this myself. It was the whole reason I had him on the podcast. Though it’s true - as I admitted in our stage show - that I’d never read any of Icke’s books I know lots of people who have and who credit him as their main inspiration for much of what they know about the machinations of the Illuminati. And then there’s that video, which I did see, showing Icke at least ten years ago predicting with uncanny prescience all the things that have since come to pass from the fake pandemic and poisonous vaccines to the menace of digital ID. How could someone so right about so many things that matter possibly not be one of the good guys?

  What I now realise is that David Icke is a game of two halves. There’s David Icke the red-pilled truth warrior with whom it’s hard to disagree on much. But there’s also David Icke the New Ager, whose laborious, dogmatic, third hand ruminations on the true nature of existence deserve much more scrutiny that they generally get from his devotedly cultish audiences.

  For chapter and verse on the latter, I highly recommend this deep dive investigation by Chris White, which quotes closely from Icke’s written work, interviews and stage lectures. It is called David Icke: Where Did He Get His Theories?

Though Icke’s position on some issues has shifted over the years - he used to claim that he conversed regularly with Jesus; now he claims Jesus never existed, for example - the essence of his spiritual philosophy remains much the same as it was over thirty years ago, when the information was fed him by a spirit guide, an ‘ascended master’ called Rakorski.

  Rakorski, it turns out, is not some random guru from the ether who chose on a whim to confer his wisdom on a former Hereford United goalkeeper. He also happens to be a key figure in the automatic writing and inspiration of Alice Bailey, founder of the Luciferian (the clue’s in the name) Lucis Trust, and herself a student of Madame Blavatsky, the Russian mystic, likely a complete charlatan, who in the late Nineteenth Century established a hugely fashionable new religion called Theosophy.

  Theosophy, a mish mash of occultism and Eastern philosophy, mutated into what we now know as the New Age movement. Most people think of the New Age, if at all, as an amiably batty phenomenon - now largely defunct - that surfaced some time in the late Sixties, and gave us the musical Hair (“This is the dawn of the Age of Aquarius”), the more mystical elements of the hippy movement, Shirley MacLaine on a beach shouting to the waves ‘I am God I am God’, shops selling crystals, and so on.

But far from going away, the New Age is now so well assimilated in Western culture it has become a permanent fixture. Yoga, mindfulness, the whale music playing during your Reiki or aromatherapy treatment, the notion that love and hate vibrate at different frequencies, meditation, ashram retreats, “I’m not religious but I’m definitely spiritual’ - we’re most of us part of the New Age these days without even knowing it.

  Having dabbled with quite a few of the above in my time I can perfectly well appreciate their appeal. The problem with the New Age is that it’s a bit like the nice old lady with the cats who couldn’t be more warm or helpful but turns out to be the one who wrote the poison pen letters which destroyed the village. That is, beneath its apparently benign, wise, professedly loving exterior is a core of ruthlessness, intolerance and malignity. Even discerning Awake people often fail to grasp this.

  Indeed, the New Age might have been tailor made for the Awake community in particular because it appeals to their instinctive distrust of the System, their sense that there’s so much more to this world than what we’ve been told, their feeling that something radical needs to change if we are to escape from the current paradigm - and also to their heartfelt belief that more than anything what we need right now is peace, love and unity.

  The New Age appears to be the answer to all this and more. It tells of the dawning of a collective consciousness which will free us from the shackles and superstitions of organised religion (most especially Christianity, which it sees as the main obstacle) and will enable us to maximise our true potential by achieving the latent godhead which resides within us all.

  Sounds great, right? I mean, what could be cooler than discovering that you - yes, little old you! - are actually a god? And the only reason you didn’t realise this is that all pesky religion you had rammed down your throat when you were a child, Christianity being by far the worst, led you up the garden path. But now you’re in on the secret that the world’s elites have known for centuries. Finally you can escape the Matrix and save the world (just like Neo and Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker did: the people who made those movies KNEW) by achieving that state of divine wisdom which some call ‘gnosis.’

  Well if this is all true then clearly it’s the way to go. But how do we know it’s not just another trap - what Christians would consider to be a Satanic ploy - designed to lure us away from the only true form of salvation offered by Jesus? The answer is that we cannot know. Not with any certainty. So I feel in no position to judge any of those myriad Awake types who’ve gone down the New Age path - or variants thereon, such as gnosticism - because they might yet be right and I might be proved a gullible idiot.

  What I can say, though, with absolute certainty is that the spiritual/philosophical world view preached by David Icke is utterly incompatible with the Christian one. If one of them is correct then the other one isn’t. It’s a zero sum game. But you’d be amazed how many Awake people are oblivious to this fact, as I discovered in the aftermath of our event. “You and David have so much more in common than you realise,” well meaning people kept telling me. “You can’t quite agree on terms but essentially you’re saying the same thing.”

  No, we are not. Really we are not. We are talking about polar opposites. From the Christian perspective, Icke’s philosophy is exactly what we were warned about in Genesis 3:5. When the serpent tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge he claims: “For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods.”

  You can dismiss the Genesis account of man’s fall as a fairy story, if you wish. But believing Christians do not - and nor, perhaps more pertinently, do the people who run the world. The key difference between them is that the Cabal - or the Predator Class, the Illuminati, call them what you will - see the serpent not as the Enemy but as mankind’s benefactor: the bringer of knowledge who freed man from the tyranny of ignorance with which a cruel and capricious God held him prisoner. In the Cabal’s version of events, in other words, Satan or Lucifer is the good guy; as he is also in the New Age belief system which Icke claims to despise (“It is an emotional wreck with a crystal in its hand”) but yet embodies.

At our live show Icke sought to present our clash as one between my religious dogma on the one hand and on the other his enlightened, non-judgemental, free-thinking, hard won, deeply researched insight. This was slippery of him. The New Age may not be too keen to admit it but it is at least as much a form of religious dogma as Christianity is. It just uses all that airy fairy talk of raised consciousness and oneness with the universe and so on to disguise its true purpose: the age old Luciferian mission of abolishing God. Any doubts on this score can be cleared up by glancing at the works of Madame Blavatsky or her acolyte Alice Bailey, whence much of Icke’s spiritual philosophy is derived. For more details, watch this video by E511 Ministries

So which version of events do you trust? In the Christian one, God created man in His image, gave him dominion over a world of exquisite beauty, then sent His only son to redeem man for his sins since the Fall which was engineered by the enemy of creation, Satan/Lucifer. In the Ickean one, the wonders of creation are an illusion, man is but an NPC in a gigantic video game, ‘there is no good and evil, only consciousness’ and the God of the Bible is a malevolent control freak from whose shackles we can free ourselves once we release that we - not Him - are the true gods.

Both propositions are plausible. For me, the decision comes down which side has the most persuasive evidence. Of course, I’m aware that there all manner of ‘conspiracy theory’ takes on the Bible - everything from the integrity of the translations and the role of Paul to the behaviour of the Church since. Even so, I think it requires quite an imaginative leap to believe that Icke’s sources of authority for his claims - a mix of personal revelation provided by entities from another realm, sundry texts and interviews of questionable reliability - are more trustworthy.

I’ll give you one example of where I think Icke fails badly on this score. It comes from his book The Biggest Secret (2000) - the one with the lizard-headed royals - in a passage which pours scorn on those foolish enough to take the New Testament literally. Here it is:

“Horus was the ‘son’ of God in Egypt. He was derived from the Babylonian Tammuz and, in turn, provided another blueprint for the later Jesus. The connections are devastating for the credibility of the Christian Church: Jesus was the Light of the World. Horus was the Light of the World. Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life. Horus said he was the truth, the life. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the ‘house of bread’. Horus was born in Annu, the ‘place of bread’. Jesus was the Good Shepherd. Horus was the Good Shepherd. Seven fishers board a boat with Jesus. Seven people board a boat with Horus. Jesus was the lamb. Horus was the lamb. Jesus is identified with a cross. Horus is identified with a cross. Jesus was baptised at 30. Horus was baptised at 30. Jesus was the child of a virgin, Mary. Horus was the child of a virgin, Isis. The birth of Jesus was marked by a star. The birth of Horus was marked by a star. Jesus was child teacher in the temple. Horus was the child teacher in the temple. Jesus had 12 disciples. Horus had 12 followers. Jesus was the Morning Star. Horus was the Morning Star. Jesus was the Christ. Horus was the Krst. Jesus was tempted on a mountain by Satan. Horus was tempted on a mountain by Set.”

‘Devastating’ indeed. Or at least it would be if these claims were true. Icke seems to believe that they are, having often used them in his stage shows, and having yet - so far as I am aware - to issue any retraction. They have also received wider circulation in Zeitgeist: the Movie. They’re even cited in Mark Millar’s comic book series The Chosen One. The problem is, though, that they do not seem to have any basis in actual Egyptian mythology.

Icke himself cites the source of these ‘devastating’ comparisons between Horus and Jesus as an author called Albert Churchward, a freemason who claimed in the 1920s that Jesus didn’t actually exist. Churchward’s brother James promoted another of the stories that Icke has since championed: the notion of a lost civilisation on the sunken continent of Mu. James Churchward claimed to have found proof of this via the Naacal tablets, prehistoric records he had encountered on a trip to India, and which were translated for him by an Indian priest (one of just three people who could read this lost language). It’s possible that James Churchward got this idea from Madame Blavatsky, who claimed to have discovered a similarly ancient lost text - the Stanzas of Dzyan - on a trip to Tibet. Translated for her from the unknown language of Senzar by the Occult Brotherhood, this was then used to inform her book The Secret Doctrine, which purported to tell us the mystical philosophy of the earliest humans.There is no evidence that the Naacal tablets or the Stanzas of Dzyan or the lost continent of Mu ever existed. The Horus/Jesus comparisons too, according to Chris White, who has tried unsuccessfully to trace them to an earlier source, appear to be yet another fabrication.

Part of Icke’s schtick, repeated almost daily in the aggrieved, martyrly tone he adopts on his Twitter feed, is that he is a fearless, outspoken seeker-after-truth who has been vilified and marginalised for exposing secrets that our evil controlling overlords would prefer remained hidden. Well, fine. Nothing wrong with that. But if that is the claim you make for yourself, surely the bare minimum you ought to be able to offer your audience is the guarantee that the ‘truths’ you are revealing are actually true - and not just yet more of the made-up shit you are continually berating your enemies in the mainstream for producing.

This ought to be a sine qua non for any author or public speaker seeking to inform the world about, well, anything really. One of the reasons it took me so long to write my demolition of the climate change industry, Watermelons, is because I had to make damn sure that all my claims were properly sourced and accurate. Had I not done so, I would have offered an easy target to that vast, rich and vindictive Climate Industrial Complex just gagging for an opportunity to embarrass one of its critics.

The fact that Icke does not appear to hold himself to the same standards is a red flag for me. Like most truth seekers, I’m genuinely open to the possibility that everything I currently understand about the world - and the afterlife - may be wrong, up to and including the shape of the planet or esoteric stuff like ‘soul traps’ and whether, when you die, you’re meant to avoid the light or follow it. Icke, judging by the stridency of his tone, the dogmatism of his assertions, and his ill-disguised impatience with those who don’t share his point of view - Christians most especially - appears to think he knows all the answers. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. And if his sources are as obviously tainted as, say, a pamphlet published in the 1920s by a freemason with an obvious axe to grind and no evidence to back up his claims, I can’t say I’m terribly convinced.

In his documentary Where Does David Icke Get His Ideas?, White gives several other examples of Icke’s sketchy sources. The lizard headed stuff, for example, appears to have been relayed to him via the testimony of a mind-control victim - by definition an unreliable witness - named Arizona Wilder. Some independent confirmation might have been nice, do we not think?

David Icke has been right about many things in the past and continues to be so. But this is no reason to give him the free pass he often gets from his cultish acolytes who appear blind to the possibility that he might be pushing an agenda inimical both to their interests and the cause of truth - not to mention of their immortal soul.

Not only is at least some of his research slipshod but when challenged on detail he is often evasive and defensive. These are not responses which bespeak honesty and integrity. In my experience, at any rate, researchers promoting a contentious point of view which goes against the grain of mainstream thinking are only too happy to be questioned on their thesis. That’s because they are on a mission to explain and elucidate - and evangelise.

In Icke’s defence, it might be argued that he is not a quick fire intellect, and that his curmudgeonly demeanour is the product of all those wilderness years he spent being dismissed as a tinfoil hat lunatic. But those days are long since past. He has a large, appreciative audience for his books and live events, an internet TV show - Ickonic - and the satisfaction of having many of his predictions vindicated by events. At this point, his continued playing of the victim card looks to me suspiciously like a passive-aggressive defence mechanism designed to ward off honest criticism. This was certainly my feeling in the aftermath of our live event. The main priority of Icke and his family was not to respond to the criticisms I made - but rather to try to blacken my name as a rude, insensitive, pushy, lying (“You’re like Tony Blair, mate” - I was told) arriviste who, under false pretences, had taken cruel advantage of a noble freedom fighter and truth seeker whose boots I was not fit to lick.

I’m not buying it. Most especially I am not buying Icke’s spiritual philosophy which he pretends is antithetical to the binding strictures of ‘religion’ - but which is clearly just a warmed over version of the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the New Age, which in turn are just an update of the Babylonian Mystery Religions followed by our ruling elites since the dawn of tyranny.

This is why I titled this piece David Icke’s gingerbread cottage. It’s an analogy which I think answers the obvious question: “If Icke is really working for the Enemy how come he has been allowed to do so much to expose them?” All those bang-on predictions, all those juicy revelations, are just the bait…