YouTube channel." Icke's appearances in videos uploaded by other users were only to be removed if their content breached the same rules. On 29 August 2020, Icke was a speaker at an anti-lockdown protest in Trafalgar Square, London, organised under the Unite for Freedom banner. During his speech he stated, "Anyone with a half a brain cell on active duty can see coronavirus is nonsense" and, "We have a virus so intelligent that it only infects those taking part in protests the government wants to stop". He also stated, "This world is controlled by a tiny few people" who "impose their agenda on billions of people". He told the police who were present at the rally that they were "enforcing fascism that your own children will have to live with" and urged them to "join us and stop serving the psychopaths". In early November 2020, Twitter permanently suspended Icke's account on the platform for having violated its rules regarding COVID-19 misinformation. Reception Interest in Icke's conspiracy theories is widespread and has cut across political, economic, and religious divides. His audiences hold a wide range of beliefs, uniting individuals, and left and right wing groups; from New Agers, and Ufologists, as well as far-right Christian Patriots, and the UK neo-Nazi group Combat 18, which supports his writings. Icke's work is representative of a major global countercultural trend. American novelist Alice Walker is an admirer of Icke's writings, along with comedian Russell Brand, and musician Mick Fleetwood. Icke has emerged as a professional conspiracy theorist within a global counter-cultural movement that combines New World Order conspiracism, the truther movement and anti-globalisation, with an extraterrestrial conspiracist subculture. Accusations of antisemitism Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League told The New York Times in December 2018: "There is no fair reading of Icke's work that could be seen as not anti-Semitic". However, Icke has repeatedly denied the accusation that he is an antisemite. In 2001, when he was questioned by Jon Ronson, Icke declared that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is evidence not of a Jewish plot but of a reptilian plot. He also said, "the families in positions of great financial power obsessively interbreed with each other. But I'm not talking about one earth race, Jewish or non-Jewish. I'm talking about a genetic network that operates through all races, this bloodline being a fusion of human and reptilian genes…