A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker's Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs
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On Sunday, the New York Times ran an interview with renowned novelist and poet Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, about what she’s been reading lately. It was a wholesome little exercise that was wildly derailed when people noticed Walker’s effusive praise for infamous conspiracy theorist David Icke. The latest controversy serves as both a timely reminder of who Icke is, Walker’s years-long enthusiasm for him—along with some other, extremely wild ideas that she’s floated on her blog—and, above all, why we should be protecting our elders from YouTube.
In her interview, Walker offered some exuberant words about Icke, whose book, she said, she keeps on her nightstand:
“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke. In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.
This would be startling enough on its own, but it follows a long pattern of Walker praising Icke. In fact, while hardly anyone seems to have noticed this, she dedicated her last book of poetry, published in October, to both Icke and Coretta Scott King. In the dedication, Icke was praised as “the ‘mad’ one, connecting dots, finding arrows, removing them too/when people help.”
Icke has a long and not particularly well-disguised history of anti-Semitism, as many noted; the Times was called out by Jewish news and culture magazine Tablet for not asking any follow-up questions or responding to Walker’s enthusiasm for Icke. Senior writer Yair Rosenberg wrote that the book she named is “an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious anti-Semites.”
All of this is true. Icke is, though, also someone who believes that our world is secretly controlled by a reptilian race, an army of enormous shape-shifting lizard people known as the Annunaki, who include Henry Kissinger, Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, and probably both Bill and Hillary Clinton. And that’s where we get into fascinating territory. Walker has not only chosen to espouse anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for years, but has chosen the weirdest ones possible. It seems impossible that we could somehow keep forgetting that Alice Walker is Like This, and yet culturally we do, over and over again.
Icke was, at one time, a sports presenter in Great Britain and a spokesperson for the Green Party. In 1991, he disappeared for several months and re-appeared in an all-turquoise set of garments—most infamously, a turquoise tracksuit—and declared that he was the “son of the Godhead.” He also told the alarmed and amused public that the world would end in 1997.
That didn’t happen and around 1998, Icke tried again, beginning to promote his theory about the Annunaki, which he also calls the “Babylonian Brotherhood.” The Annunaki, he tells his crowds, are interested in enslaving humanity, and he attributes Great Britain’s ability to create, for a time, a vast empire to the fact that the English monarchy has a good deal of lizard in the bloodline.
It’s here that we get to the Jews. Icke was barred from speaking in Canada in 1999, after many organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, took his Annunaki talk to be a veiled anti-Semitic reference. Since then, nearly every speaking engagement of his outside of Europe has been met with protests.
The uproar wasn’t without cause: as he was forming his new cosmology of the world, Icke began claiming that a small group of vicious, elite Jews hiding among the ordinary masses were responsible for many global events, including, of all things, the Holocaust.
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