David Icke is a British writer and public speaker who has devoted himself since 1990 to researching “who and what is really controlling the world.”

Icke’s core ideas are outlined in four books written over seven years: The Robots’ Rebellion (1994), … And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the World (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001). The basic theory is that the world is controlled by a network of secret societies referred to as the “Brotherhood,” at the apex of which stand the “Illuminati” or “Global Elite.” The goal of the Brotherhood is a world government, a plan that Icke says was laid out in the anti-semitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Icke says are really the revealed plans of the Illuminati. Icke says the methods of these conspirators include control of the world’s economies and the use of mind-control techniques.

The Global Elite controls the Brotherhood and the world using what Icke calls a “pyramid of manipulation,” consisting of sets of hierarchical structures involving banking, business, the military, education, the media, religion, drug companies, intelligence agencies, and organized crime.

Icke cites the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of events financed and organized by the Global Elite. British journalist Simon Jones writes that, according to Icke, “Ordinary people are being massively duped into believing that the ordinary course of world events are the consequence of known political forces and random, uncontrollable events. However, the course of humanity is being manipulated at every level. These individuals arrange for incidents to occur around the world, which then elicit a response from the public (‘something must be done’), and in turn allows those in power to do whatever they had planned to do in the first place.” Icke refers to this as problem-reaction-solution,a variation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s “Hegelian Dialectic”.