Alice Walker is in trouble for endorsing a book written by David Icke during an interview with the New York Times:

Critics call it anti-Semitic, saying it places Holocaust revisionism at the center of an odious and addled worldview. Its title has been borrowed by followers of QAnon, a conspiracy movement that favors President Trump and peddles baseless theories about government secrets and cabals. But Alice Walker, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “The Color Purple,” calls “And the Truth Shall Set You Free” by David Icke a “curious person’s dream come true.” She offered this endorsement in a New York Times interview published in print on Sunday, in which the 74-year-old author said that the 1995 book was among those resting on her nightstand. “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about,” she said.

Is David Icke an anti-Semite? Probably. But, in one sense, it doesn’t really matter, because Icke is a goddamned lunatic. The man’s a kook, a madman, a maniac. He’s certifiable. This is a guy who believes quite seriously that:

An inter-dimensionary race of beings called the Archons have hijacked our world and have stopped us from realising our true potential. Instead, they keep us trapped in “five sense reality”, feeding off the negative energy created by fear and hate. Frequencies broadcast from a “hexagonal storm” on Saturn are amplified through the hollow structure of our artificial moon (whereas a standard conspiracy theorist might be satisfied by not believing that man walked on the Moon, Icke doesn’t even believe in the Moon itself). A genetically modified human/Archon elite of shape-shifting reptilians manipulate global events to keep us in this state of fear. Only by waking up to the truth and filling our hearts with love can we defeat this Archontic influence.

Icke is a guy who believes that he is the “Son of the Godhead.” He’s a guy who went on national TV and explained — to derisive laughter — that Britain was about to be destroyed by tidal waves and earthquakes, and that this was a good thing. He’s a guy who argues with a straight face that that Queen Elizabeth II and George W. Bush are “blood-drinking, flesh-eating, shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptilian humanoids.” I met Icke in the early 2000s at an event he held in Oxford, and I can confirm that he is completely, utterly off his trolley. Is he an anti-Semite? Of course he’s an anti-Semite. But he’s an anti-Semite in the way that people who entertain bizarre, all-encompassing conspiracy theories tend to be anti-Semites: as reflexive adopters of the oldest conspiracy theory in the world. To focus in on his anti-Semitism as if it tells us much of import is a little strange — akin to hearing the guy who thinks his microwave is controlling him say that he dislikes oil companies and saying, “well that’s an interesting opinion.” It’s not. The guy talks nonsense from start to finish:

What’s Alice Walker’s excuse?