Adventures with Extremists

Them: Adventures with Extremists
© 2011 Jon Ronson
338 pages

Personally, dear reader, if I were infiltrating Bohemian Grove, where the American aristocracy gathers to sacrifice children to Moloch and dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, I wouldn’t take Alex Jones along with me. He’s entertaining company, sure, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a quiet mode – and when one is trying to violate the meeting of people with private armies and access to dungeons and the like, one wants to go unnoticed. Jon Ronson, however, had better ideas – and considering that he’d been outed as a Jew in front of both jihadists and Klansmen, I suppose he figured he could survive anything. Them is an entertaining collection of Jon Ronson’s adventures in this vein, as he attempts to learn why so many people believe in a secret cabal that runs everything, whether they be lizards or Jews.

Unlike Will Storr’s The Unpersuadables, Them was not a project undertaken to understand why people believe unusual things; instead, it’s one collection of many of Ronson’s articles about people on the fringe. As such, we’re not diving deeply into how people’s beliefs originate, but rather spending time with them through Ronson and marveling at the weird places the human mind can take itself. Easily the strangest group he spends time with is David Icke’s circle, who believe the world to be dominated by shape-shifting lizards whose numbers include most prominent politicians and celebrities. Icke gives a recap of how he came to be aware of the lizard people, but it’s very cursory and has some….story-telling gaps, shall we say. Many of the chapters are linked by Ronson’s attemps to understand what the Bilderberg group is, and he goes as far as Portugal to attempt to learn about that year’s conference there. He is approached, confronted, and followed for mile after mile, pushing him into thinking that for an organization of perfectly respectable businesspeople talking about business and philanthrophy, they’re awfully sinister. By far the most entertaining chapters were Ronson’s visit to the new head of one Klan organization, in which we learn of Thomas Robb’s approach to leadership, with principles drawn from self-help books and psychological profile – followed by Ronson’s infilitration of Bohemian Grove, accompanied by Alex Jones. The idea of Jones wearing preppy clothing and trying to pass himself off as an IT venture capitalist is hysterical – made all the better by his sinking into wide-eyed paranoia when Ronson and he witnessed (among other things) the bizarre Cremation of Care ceremony. (Jones filmed this during their joint incursion, and used it as part of an early ‘documentary’ which effectively launched his career. So, if you hate Alex Jones, you can thank Jon Ronson!) Inspite of its weirdness, Ronson viewed the Bohemian Grove meetup as something kin more to a college kegger given its copious drinking and drag/Elvis costume contests. Some of the stories were more miscellaneous: the opening chapter among jihadists (pre 9/11) was amusing enough, but his travel to Africa with an Irish politician-turned-preacher & militia founder appeared out of place.

On the whole, Them made for entertaining reading, but there’s little insight here, and I wasn’t impressed with the background Ronson did, if any. He asserts that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City because it was an office of the New World Order, but I’ve never encountered that in anything I’ve read on McVeigh. McVeigh chose the Murrah building because it held offices for both the FBI and ATF, both of which he had an especial hatred for owing to their murder of Vickie Weaver and the men, women, and children of Branch David in Waco. The book is not devoid of serious implications, though: Ronson quickly realizes how quick the media is to grab onto a narrative and marry it, facts not withstanding. He himself is repeatedly described by the media as a conspiracy theorist despite being an outside observer, and he is shocked to discover that the “fortress” that Randy Weaver “fled” to was, in fact, a simple wooden cabin that was his and his family’s house. Weaver didn’t “flee” anywhere, he simply didn’t leave his home to show up in court.

Quibbles and occasional superficiality aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I’ll admit to having a soft spot for people with eccentric ideas, provided they’re not in my face ranting. Finding their blog or listening to them talk to someone else is quite sufficient. It helps, of course, that as someone with a strong libertarian bent, I’m considered ‘fringe’ myself — an object of dismay to progs and conservatives alike. (Not to mention: when you’re an anti-state type, you run into other anti-government types, and some of them are a little nuts. I’m sure some readers of this blog often wonder if I’m not a little nuts.) I think Ronson was generally fair — never mocking his subjects, and undoubtedly courageous. I plan on looking into more of his works, though judging by reviews he’s gotten more partisan and less curious over the years. His book on psychopaths looks particularly winsome….