The Visitors are our friends

If you're a David Icke fan, you'll enjoy this 48-minute documentary about the son of God and leading theorist of the 12-foot lizard view of history. If you're not an Icke fan, this may make you one.

I'm embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Icke before today, but his theory that global politics, finance and culture are being controlled by massive V-style saurians in human form seems as plausible as any other. (I say the burden of proof is on anybody who claims both Presidents Bush, Prince Philip, Kris Kristofferson, and the Queen Mum are not giant reptiles.) Even if that thesis weren't completely plausible, you'd be inspired to keep an open mind just through the combination of Icke's oily charisma and the loathsomeness of his opponents—a legion of doom that includes anti-defamation whores who use various means to shut down Icke's speaking engagements; other conspiracy theorists who fault him for taking things too far; anti-globalization doofuses who want to focus on the "real issues" of multinational corporations; and some Biotic Baking Brigade types who bellyache that Icke's supporters tried to prevent them from hitting him with a lemon meringue pie. (They only managed to take out some children's books.)

At one point the documentarian asks Icke whether his references to "lizards" are really supposed to be taken to mean "Jews." Icke replies that they are not, and the interviewer replies that that denial seems like a "metaphor" for saying lizards are Jews. It's an exchange that is even more insane because it makes a kind of sense. The movie completely fails to make the case that Icke is an anti-Semite, though there seems to be other evidence for this claim. You may end up suspecting the filmmaker Jon Ronson, who does his best to blow his antihero up into a global threat, is a stealth Icke supporter. In any event, Icke's opponents do everything in the playbook of inadvertancy to make him a sympathetic figure: Their bullying and hostility to discussion would be alarming if not for the modesty of the target. The cream of the bien pensant left on two continents has apparently met its match in a cockney who believes the world is controlled by giant, superintelligent lizards.

Thanks to reader "M," who no doubt knows a thing or two about being ostracized by respectable society, and who notes, "Issues of free speech abound, albeit from an unlikely, or perhaps not unlikely, source."