Review: "Them," by Jon Ronson (Part 1)

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones, in happier times

Posted on 11/13/2019 by the Salt City Sinner

It’s telling that the debate over Bill Clinton’s conduct found the majority of both conservatives and liberals arguing not about consent, not about sexual harassment or workplace safety, but about libertinage. This allowed both tribes of elderly white men (with some younger white men and a few white women) to sidestep a number of thorny questions. Consent, workplace harassment, and the ever-hungry male gaze (a gaze not bounded on the left or the right, we discovered) – all of these issues were obscured by the prurient details of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the tawdriness of it all. Conservatives got to clutch their pearls, and liberals got to feel contempt for the prudes who did the pearl-clutching.

That was always bullshit, of course, and both liberals and conservatives knew it. Conservatives never gave a toss for personal probity or morality in any real sense – only for the advancement of their ambitions afforded them by playing sycophant to Christian totalitarians. Liberals, on the other hand, also fell woefully short of their supposed convictions when put to the test. Perhaps most infamously, there was the 1998 essay “Why Feminists Support Clinton,” penned by Gloria Steinem, in which the famous champion of women’s liberation stuck up for an oft-disgraced sexual predator and confidante of Jeffery Epstein. The Lewinsky affair was where some Boomer women and some supposed second wave feminists proved their true colors --- the colors that would shine most ferociously decades later when a majority of them voted for Donald Trump.

The toxic, reeking shadow of the 1990s was a palpable presence in 2016, polluting everything it touched. The Clinton body count, the relevance of World Net Daily, black helicopter conspiracy-mongering – all of the Greatest Hits of the decade that marked the high water mark of Boomerdom were back for their hideous encore performance. And tucked in among the many liars and propagandists who cranked out complete horseshit for Team Trump in 2016 was a little fellow named Alex Jones. Jones is infamous nowadays as the man who turned a tidy profit by shamelessly promoting the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Massacre was a government-staged false flag, the heartless, inhuman hobgoblin who sent his employees to scream conspiracy theories into the faces of grieving parents on-camera, the squat, no-neck hustler whose advertisements have provided much mirth for Jon Oliver’s audience. Alex Jones is, in short, probably more famous right now than he’s ever been.

That fact says something very damning about the moment in which we live. There was a time when Jones may have found his niche as a ranting right-wing barfly – a time, even more recently, that he would have been relegated to ranting in the Jon Birch Society newsletter, ignored by the wider world. Instead, Alex Jones helped get a President elected, a President whose late-life political ambitions were in no small part shaped, fueled, and given life by conspiracy theories. Jones worked for twenty years to prepare the ground for Donald Trump, although he may not have been aware that he was doing so. Unlike Evangelicals, however, whose allegiance to Trump is truly shameful, I think that conspiracy theorists recognize one of their own in the person of our Commander-in-Chief. Trump is obviously milking religious Americans for their votes: with conspiracy weirdos, I think there’s a degree of political utility, to be sure, but I also think that Trump actually believes a lot of the shit that Alex Jones and his ilk believe.

For those who want to know more about Alex Jones, my recommendation would be to  check out the podcast Knowledge Fight, in which Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes provide an in-depth, episode-by-episode (but very funny) breakdown of the World of Jones: his narratives, his many lies, his likely motives, and some of the nuts and bolts of his operation. Dan is an InfoWars obsessive in the same way that I was once a World Net Daily and Glenn Beck obsessive, and as such, his debunking and dissection of various Jones nonsense can get a bit into the weeds at times (and I mean that as a compliment).

Before Knowledge Fight came along in 2017, there was another person who wore the mantle of Jones Whisperer: a Welsh journalist named Jon Ronson. Ronson is a gifted and funny writer, the author of books including The Men Who Stare at Goats (the basis for the movie of the same name), The Psychopath Test, and a book in which Jones figures prominently: Them: Adventures with Extremists. The premise of Them is that Ronson spent time hanging out with various groups of weirdos, criminals, and terrorists who have in common a belief that a small group of elites – whom Ronson seems to think he has identified as existing in reality in the form of the Bilderberg Group – run the world in secret. Ronson opens the book chumming it up with Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical Muslim cleric self-described as “Bin Laden’s man in London” (remember: much of the research for Them was done in 1998 and 1999, in the looming shadow of the oncoming 9/11 terrorist attacks, but before the time period in which hanging out with Omar may have gotten Ronson rendered in a most extraordinary fashion). Omar is now in prison in Lebanon. Most of Ronson’s book, however, is spent in the company of various stripes of racist right-wing American asshole; Randy Weaver, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and our friend Alex Jones.

Ronson’s shtick has led to him being variously described as either a gonzo journalist or a “faux-naif,” both labels that accurately describe his narrative approach in Them. He puts himself very much front and center in his work, and uses his self-deprecating charm and distinctive soft, gentle affect to disarm his subjects, whom he seems to genuinely like and feel some degree of sympathy for. And that’s where we run into some very big problems very quickly. Ronson is not himself a racist or a fascist (is, in fact, Jewish), but the light in which he portrays his subjects – in particular Weaver and the Klan, but Jones, as well – is both highly selective and quite problematic.

One particular episodes of Knowledge Fight that I would encourage anyone and everyone to listen to is called “How Not to Cover Alex Jones.” In it, Dan lays out some of the problems that arise whenever Jones is covered by mainstream journalists who are unaware of or only passingly acquainted with the body of Jones’ work. I’d love to see a broadened version of the Knowledge Fight guide called “How Not to Cover Fascists.” It’s a subject that is depressingly relevant in 2019, and exhibits A through M in that guide could come from Them. Does Ronson marvel at how “normal” Randy Weaver and his family are, while arguing with a straight face that Weaver – who spent multiple camping trips hanging out at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho and subscribed or subscribes to Christian Identity – has been unfairly tarred by the US government as a white supremacist? He does! Does he go out of his way to paint the head of one of America’s largest Ku Klux Klan groups as likable and even “nebbish-y” (I shit you not)? Does he seem, in fact, to have a genuine soft spot for the Klan? He does and he does!

And then there’s Ronson’s relationship with Alex Jones. The two used to have a genuine fondness for each other, perhaps because they are such entertaining and complementary polar opposites: Jones being the loud, boorish Texan to Ronson’s effete, well-mannered European. Until astonishingly recently the two counted each other as friends, although their relationship seems to have fallen on rocky times since Trump took office. Ronson met Jones while researching the portion of Them that deals with the Weaver family’s standoff against the federal government at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, around the time that Jones oversaw the reconstruction of the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas. This is something that Ronson glosses over a bit, and it should tell you a great deal about Jones, given the views of Weaver and David Koresh, and the fact that Jones is hardly a fellow who would support them despite their views, rather than because of them (like, for example, the ACLU did in the Skokie Nazi case).

This buddy comedy duo, Jones and Ronson, reached their zenith in an adventure that Ronson recounts in one of my favorite sections of Them: the infiltration of Bohemian Grove. If you aren’t acquainted with Bohemian Grove, it’s a very secret men’s club that meets in the woods of Northern California to get trashed, piss on trees, and engage in a bit of what is either malign black magick or the community theater of the rich and powerful, depending on whom you ask. One of the most telling and hilarious indicators of Ronson’s and Jones’ divergent approaches to journalism is to compare and contrast their versions of the infiltration. To Ronson’s eyes, the Grove, like Bilderberg, is a secretive place where elites with a great deal of money and power rub elbows (and, most likely, other bits as well) – a snapshot of immaturity and corruption, at its most damning. To Alex Jones, the Grove is a place where literal Satanists engage in (possibly real, possibly mock) human sacrifice in service of Moloch, or the Devil, or who knows what – interdimensional space aliens, maybe? All of this was no doubt quite entertaining while Ronson was researching his subjects at the close of the 20^th century and the dawn of the 21^st. Living as we do in 2019, however, we bear the curse of hindsight, and seen from that perspective Ronson’s book tells a deeply cautionary tale – not about the Bilderberg Group or the Bohemian Grove, but about the perils of writing about fascists.

The fact that Ronson – who, remember, is Jewish – spends so much time in the company of and is so charmed by a man named Big Jim Tucker is instructive here. Ronson begins the section of his book that features Tucker by sketching a portrait of a salty, old-time journalist, a figure with some crazy ideas that turn out to be closer to the truth than most of us would accept – a character right out of 90s staple The X-Files. One problem: Jim Tucker is a fucking Nazi. He was a longtime writer and editor for The Spotlight, a publication  which was (until its demise) the “journalistic” organ of the National Alliance, a white nationalist fascist organization founded and run by Willis Carto, one of the American Nazis. Ronson barely makes a passing mention of any of this at the very end of that section. Let me be as blunt as possible. Giving a platform to people like Tucker and Jones (not to mention the Klan, the Weavers, etc.) makes Ronson culpable in the recent mainstreaming of white nationalism. His naïve, “golly gee, aren’t these guys kooky?” approach to covering the issue is emblematic of the refusal of the West to reckon with a rising tide of fascist violence and vile incitement.

Continued (and concluded) in Part Two