Them: Adventures with Extremists

by Jon Ronson

At this point, I think that Omar registered my disappointment. He brightened. “Would you like an ice cream?” he said. “I can get you an ice cream.” “Yes, please,” I said. “OK,” said Omar. “I will get you an ice cream.” Omar wandered inside again. He came out a few minutes later with a chocolate sundae.

Two local journalists reported seeing the FBI load fuel into cylinders and load the cylinders into a helicopter, which they flew above the cabin. Perhaps they intended to firebomb the family to eliminate the witnesses (Randy, Rachel, Sara, Vicki, Kevin, and Elisheba). It is a matter of debate. Whatever, the FBI saw that the journalists had witnessed the maneuver and the helicopter landed again.

“Young people are seeing this big task before them,” explained Ali, “trying to combat economic global corporatization. And a lot of them have read David Icke and thought, ‘Hey! He’s on our side. I’m looking for answers and he seems to have them.’ And we’ve made them feel stupid, like they’ve done something bad by getting sucked in.” Ali paused. “And now they’re saying to us, ‘Don’t tell me I’m stupid!’ What we should have said to them was, ‘You’re not stupid. We understand why you thought he was OK.’ But we didn’t. And now they think we think they’re stupid.”

I think that in David Icke, Michael was seeing an omen of the blackest kind. He was seeing the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land, much as racism had done the previous century, when Washington, D.C., was a blaze of white, the white of a million Ku Klux Klansmen marching past a Klan-friendly White House and a Klan-friendly Capitol Hill.

Later, over dinner, I heard one of them murmur: “Well, the fat Jews fucked up.” David didn’t hear this comment. When they saw that I had, they blushed and fell silent and said nothing like it again.

I was struck by Thom’s choice of words. He respected the self-help authors so he didn’t want to imply that they were secret Klansmen. This was an unusually self-deprecating position for the leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to take. I remembered Omar telling me that I should be proud to be a Jew, that assimilation was the worst thing of all, and I considered offering similar advice to Thom.

“We could work with those Islamic guys,” said Pat from Alabama. “You know, when I see those Nation of Islam guys at rallies, I go right up to them and tell them I’m in the Klan, and most often they give me the thumbs up.” “Do they?” I asked. “Oh, yeah,” said Pat. “They say, ‘You just keep on keeping on, and we’ll just keep on keeping on.’ ” “We’re certainly working for the same goal,” said Thom.

It has been estimated that 25 percent of all Klansmen are undercover federal officers. I wondered which of Thom’s Klansmen were secretly working for the government.)

wonder how many federal workers were actually believing and into the KKK

IT WAS CLEAR that the Texans’ interpretation of the ceremony differed from my own. My lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the pseudo-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed to be trapped in their college years. I wondered whether the Bohemians shrouded themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than that they thought it was cool.

Mike had a tear in his eye now. I gave up. I believed I was right, but who knows? Perhaps Alex and Mike’s interpretation was equally correct.

I got tired. I turned off my computer.