David Icke

Americans might need reminding about David Icke. He was a British soccer player who went on to become a popular sports presenter for BBC television in the Eighties, and that’s how most people thought of him until he popped up on the Wogan talk show in 1991 and agreed that, yes, the reports were true: he was the Son of God. Icke appeared with a mullet haircut, a turquoise tracksuit — turquoise is ‘the frequency of love and wisdom’ — and the blank eyes of a madman. The world would end in 1997, he told the audience, who reacted with laughter. He replied that people had laughed at Jesus too. The laughter was liberating. The mockery of the small-minded lost its sting and he became a proto-Alex Jones, the TV conspiracy theorist host of Infowars, only with more mysticism.