content: I take Icke's intuitions about the players to be something like a metaphor, even the religious sort of metaphor. Stories as big as this are easier to tell with symbolic characters, rather than identifying actual living classes of human beings. That should be obvious. You've witnessed the number of people de-platformed for doing that. Now it seems, even Icke's pseudo-religious metaphors are becoming coherent enough, or rather explanatory enough of the current situation, that they too are being cancelled. I don't think Icke is right about everything. As I said before, I think he is a highly intuitive thinker, a person who is adept at pattern-seeking but without being academic or specialized enough to really encapsulate the multi-disciplinary subjects he talks about into a theory that would be acceptable to certain crowds. Today's epistemology doesn't have much space for this kind of thinking, unfortunately. We don't give it much of a platform. Hell, we don't even treat much of it as artistic even. It has been bottled up in the category of "conspiracy". I don't think we should be so quick to toss these things out. They shouldn't be our only sources, but if we can ascertain a relevant metaphor, and one that seems at least moderately applicable, it's worth listening to. I've heard Icke presentations that were lucid and engaging, and then others where he gets so deep into the pseudo-religious metaphor that it is difficult to listen to. It requires this parallel process to be going on in your mind to extricate the "real life" from the metaphor. For example, the gnostic elements of his theories on Archons. First, you've got to understand that use of symbolism. Then you have to take the next step of understanding the analogical connection to our actual world. The same as you must do with religious texts to understand the esoteric truths of their stories. People like Icke tend to experience the narratives of their worldview in symbols. It might be the case that the way his experience is presenting all of this to him, that the bad characters are something that is lizard-like in nature. Maybe he has not even moved beyond this. It could be the case that Icke lives inside of this religious narrative, and I imagine that is true sometimes, especially since the stories have gained him some kind of popular momentum as the "lizard guy". But I think we have to look for deeper structures. Stop taking everything at face value. The intuitions come to us like shadows, and we have to be more scientific about applying them, even if our "shamans" continue to feed them to us in the metaphorical language. There is this strange bifurcation in the way society learns at the organismal level. We have the spectrum-y people that are very grounded in the empirical data, possess tunnel-vision, and what we'd call common-sense problem solving. But this is not the only way society gets information, and that has NEVER been the case. Intuition, and the way it arises in arts including written arts, is another stream of information. But it isn't the same kind. They're working on different substrates, and I think it is for a sophisticated kind of human being to be able to synthesize the two. Because many times they use exclusive languages. The highly intuitive types don't speak in the language of academia or mathematics. Things come to them as sprawling, dynamic pictures, or internal films, and the true "artists" or "shamans" usually pay a price of tearing themselves apart for life trying to tear the meaning out of those streams, wrought with frustration and suffering because a good deal of society will treat them like freaks for most of it. It's often posthumously that we discover these types' "genius". EDIT: A smart person (@jthun2) pointed out my example was probably a poor one, and after a bit of looking, I believed him. It was not necessary to the point anyway and got off on a tangent. Deleted it for the sake of brevity, and to not be misleading.