Review: "Them," by Jon Ronson (Part 2)

(This is part two of my review of Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson. You can read part one here.)

Posted on 11/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner

Two decades are sprawled between our present moment and the time period captured by Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures with Extremists. That represents a pretty substantial chunk of data that we can use to assess Ronson’s analytical prowess in profiling extremists. What did Ronson tell us about the Klan, about Alex Jones, and about Omar Bakri Mohammed? The edition of Them that I read contained a forward by Ronson, penned in June of 2002, that attempted to answer this question in the period just after 9/11, a time period in which billing one’s self as “bin Laden’s man in Great Britain” may not have been the wisest move (Omar was eventually arrested, released, deported… It’s a long saga, but it ends with him in a prison cell in Lebanon, where he languishes as of 2019). Ronson recalls a conversation he had with Mohammed when the pressure on the Islamist began to mount:

 “Oh Jon,” said Omar. “I need you more than ever now. You know I am harmless, don’t you? You always said I was laughable, didn’t you? Oh Jon. Why don’t people believe you when you tell them that I am just a harmless clown?” 

 “I have never thought you were a harmless clown,” I said.

See, here’s the thing, though, Jon – you do portray Omar Bakri Mohammed as a clown in your book, albeit one who flirts with danger more than a truly harmless Bozo would. Sections of the book like the one where Omar buys a huge plastic novelty Coke bottle in which to collect donations for Hamas? That’s meant to de-fang him, to make him look silly and less threatening than he is. And you know what? I’m 100% certain that Mohammed knows this about Ronson, and used him for exactly this purpose.

Ronson’s “check out these nutty guys” shtick is especially heinous when he’s dealing with the Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, it apparently bears repeating, is a white supremacist terrorist organization, one responsible for thousands of deaths and countless acts of cruelty, violence, sadism, and hate. They are, without a doubt, one of the most disgusting and evil blights to ever be produced by American racism – and that is saying something, given the competition in that category. Ronson treats them like a goofy failed PR re-brand; more The Office than “Strange Fruit.” There’s an outside chance that this incredible blindness to historical context could be either a function of his Welsh background or part of his “faux-naif persona,” but I think there’s something else going on – something that speaks to the reckoning that we are currently suffering through as a country.

There are countless ways to tell the story of the 1990s. Some of them, like the story of the clash between Boomer libertinage and Evangelical moralism or the story of the clash between patriarchal rape culture and feminism, can be told to some extent via Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. That’s all well and good. A lot has been said about those subjects over the years (much of it gross), and plenty still remains to be said. There’s also the story of the road to 9/11, one that is told in gripping detail in Lawrence Wright’s excellent The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The story I’m interested in telling here – the one that keeps me up at night right now, thinking back to my political awakening and how things shook out – can be told in the jagged line between four points. Those points are Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine.

What those four moments represent – and what Them displays in a scaled-down sense – is a cultural and political failure on the part of North Americans and Europeans, a failure that finds its expression in two phenomenon: savage acts of violence by white men, and a refusal on the part of white Americans and Europeans to take those acts as seriously as we should. “Hang on,” one might say, “weren’t Waco and Ruby Ridge both examples of an out-of-control Federal government murdering innocent conservative Americans? Weren’t the government’s responses to the Weaver family and the Koresh cult too drastic, too draconian, simply too brutal? Wasn’t a lot of innocent life lost in both of those cases?” The answer to all of these questions is “yes.” The government’s actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge were ham-fisted and brutal, and in both cases a different strategy on the part of law enforcement most likely would have led to better outcomes. Or not, who knows – in 1985, when dealing with the Black dissident group MOVE, the police in West Philadelphia dropped two dynamite bombs onto the roof of a row house the group was holed up in, then ordered firefighters to let the house (and, in the process, sixty-five other houses) burn. A city block was leveled in the process, but while Waco and Ruby Ridge are practically household names in America, few have heard of the MOVE bombing. I’d say that, in the grand scheme of things, becoming acquainted with the blunt force of the State is easier for white conservatives than for any other group – and certainly arouses more public and media condemnation than when the government brings the hammer down on brown people.

Waco and Ruby ridge are the first two points in my line because they represent legitimate examples of government overkill that, in addition to leading to needless deaths, led to both a too-lenient view of right wing extremism in the US and actual policy changes at the federal level that made it easier for conservative and racist terror groups to gain the momentum that has led to our current moment. Concrete examples of the aftereffects of Ruby Ridge and Waco abound, and not just in Jon Ronson’s sympathetic reporting. Embedded (stylized EMBD) is an indispensable podcast from NPR that I strongly recommend. Their current run of episodes concerns white supremacist violence in America before and after the El Paso massacre, and is both chilling and fascinating. The first episode of this season concerns a Klan member and all-around swell guy named Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., who was arrested after a standoff in 1987 in possession of a truly awe-inspiring arsenal of weapons with which he had “declared war” on the US Government. His stockpile included semi-automatic rifles that had been illegally modified to full-auto fire, hand grenades, and C4 plastic explosives. He served three years in Federal prison, and after he was released in 1990, he eventually received little to no government surveillance. He went on to murder three people in an anti-Semitic terror attack. Arguably, without the leniency afforded the white power movement during and after the 1990s by the feds, those deaths may not have occurred.

The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 could have provided a moment for course correction. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were not “lone wolves.” In fact, as Leonard Zeskind has argued in his masterful Blood and Politics and as combat journalist and podcaster Robert Evans has documented in his insightful and deeply researched audiobook The War on Everyone, the concept of “lone wolf” right-wing terror is one that their movement relies on to mask their connections, their online ties and shared resources. In 2019, it’s finally beginning to become widely accepted that incidents like the massacre in El Paso, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and the New Zealand mosque attacks aren’t unrelated incidents or “copycat killings.” They are part of a distinct lineage of white terror, a movement that recruits and radicalizes online, engages in horrific acts of violence, infiltrates law enforcement and the military, and has deep roots that are going to be difficult to tear out. The white separatists and far-right militia goons who were magnetically drawn to the specters of Waco and Ruby Ridge were attracted by something that was an old wound suppurating with a new infection.

Then, in 1999, Columbine happened. 

I’ve read the argument that we should consider the Columbine school shooting an act of neo-Nazi terror. While there were certainly disturbing fascist elements to the whole affair, I think labeling Columbine a political / ideological act is a misclassification. What Columbine did demonstrate, however, was the disturbing access to firearms that the perpetrators had and the penchant for acts of shocking public violence that some young white men in America possess. The perpetrators of Columbine did also flirt with Nazi imagery and some beliefs, but the differences between their actions and a clear-cut case of right wing terrorism like the one in, say, New Zealand are numerous. They are best understood as an example of the precursor stage of the current generation of killers, an intermediate form between Charles Manson and 8chan. The proof of concept of their innovations in public violence is hard to argue with, and twenty years – and a mountain of corpses – later, here we are.

Lest anyone think I’m being too hard on Ronson, perhaps it would help if I explained that my flagellation of him is really a form of self-flagellation (which, as a former Catholic, is a beloved pastime of mine). In 2001, when Them was first published, I was a college student and a pretty hardcore left-libertarian, a confused young freethinker who read both George Soros and Ayn Rand. At the time, I believed in both capitalism and a robust, expanded welfare state (the latter, at least, I still believe in). Most importantly, I was a free speech and freedom of assembly absolutist, a guy who thought the best way to combat Nazis (who I viewed as an endangered species well on the way to extinction) was to engage them in the marketplace of ideas – to, in the parlance of ding-dongs like Glenn Greenwald, “fight bad speech with good speech.”

I am not advocating laws like those in parts of Europe that restrict Holocaust denial or “hate speech.” In fact, I literally have a deeply held religious objection to such policies, given that I hold the “freedom to offend” as one of my Tenets. However, when I read Ronson and note his failure to take groups like the Klan seriously, or when I listen to him brag about his friendship with Alex Jones (albeit a friendship he seems to finally be reexamining), I see myself twenty years ago. Indeed, in those days, I hung out with many people who, in retrospect, are probably as horrible as Jones. And looking back, I want to shake some sense into younger me (and younger Ronson). “These guys aren’t clowns,” I would say to me/him. “They are a threat to your liberty and your way of life – but much more importantly, to the way of life of people we care about who can’t, say, pass for ‘one of them’ if a Christian militia were to roll through town.” Ronson could schmooze his way to safety, most likely. I might be able to as well.

That I’m speculating about this possibility should tell you everything you need to know about the distance traveled between the America portrayed in Them, when fascists and conspiracy cultists were risible objects of derision, and the current moment, when they’ve taken the White House. Perhaps Jon Ronson could write about that transition – if he were still on speaking terms with his old “friends.” Those relationships seem to have cooled, however. It’s almost as if Ronson were being used in the late 90s as an unwitting propaganda laundering service for fascists.

But that kind of thinking? I’m sure it’s just a crazy conspiracy theory.