Them

by Jon Ronson

  Why are Jewish groups calling you anti-Semitic?

  DAVID:

  Because I’m getting too close to the truth.

  PROFESSOR (laughing):

  Don’t get into these convoluted paranoid fantasies that people are trying to shut you up –

  This was, under the circumstances, the wrong thing to say. David could be accused of many things, but fantasizing that he was being censored was not one of them. David smiled a little, and then he went in for the kill.

  DAVID:

  I have had three major interviews pulled this week. I’ve had book signings cancelled. You wanna read the papers a bit more, mate!

  The Professor faltered.

  PROFESSOR:

  Well, uh, if you have nothing better to do than to insult me, then I’m sorry for your process of thought –

  But it was over. The professor had blown it.

  ♦

  In the days that followed this TV debate, some of the coalition began privately admitting to me the whole thing was beginning to backfire. David Icke’s fans were not, by and large, anti-Semites. It was more alarming than that. They were, in fact, the coalition’s core constituents – liberals and anti-racists and left-wingers concerned with the perils of global capitalism. These people were beginning to look upon the coalition as the villains, as the hidden hand, as them.

  When three representatives of the coalition appeared on a radio phone-in show to drum up support for a mass protest against David Icke, they received a volley of antagonistic questions. Why were they obsessed with denying freedom of speech to someone who clearly wasn’t an anti-Semite? Who was really behind the coalition? What were they hiding? And so on.

  The coalition hastily convened a meeting at a downtown coffee bar to discuss new tactics. Sam suggested producing a press release announcing that David Icke was suffering from some form of mental illness.

  “To me he sounds schizophrenic,” he said. “Hearing voices.”

  “Having visions,” agreed Rob from Anti-Racist Action.

  “The nutcase stuff,” said Sam. “Do we want to hang him on that?”

  But the others argued forcibly that the coalition should avoid these areas.

  “We’re not here to do a psychological analysis on him,” said a woman called Julia. “Just leave it. Let’s leave it.”

  But as the evening wore on, the gathering began to seem more like a post-mortem than a strategy meeting. A young activist called Ali said she felt she had pinpointed the coalition’s tactical error: they had made young people feel stupid.

  “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.”

  ♦

  The next morning the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith – the most powerful and respected groups within the anti-racist alliance – cut their losses. They telephoned Sam to say they were withdrawing their support.

  This was a tremendous blow. Now, the only people left battling Icke were Sam and his young friends from Anti-Racist Action. On Friday night these tatters of the opposition met at the Havana bar on Commercial Drive. It was a melancholy occasion.

  “I guess it’s over,” I said.

  There was a silence.

  “No!” said Michael. “It isn’t over.”

  Michael is young and handsome. He had been pepper-sprayed in Seattle and trampled by Mounties in Vancouver. You could still smell the pepper spray on his bandana.

  “Thousands and thousands of people,” said Michael, “went down to Seattle, risked their lives to try and address the problems created by the evolution of global capitalism, and now this pompous wingnut, this buffoon has flounced into town…”

  Michael didn’t need to finish his sentence. We knew. David Icke had flounced into town with his lizard thesis on the dangers of international capitalism and he was cleaning up, winning the hearts of those Michael himself had hoped to convert by serious debate about global economics, swiftly followed by some kind of direct action.

  Rational thought was being vanquished, and the lizards were winning.

  “He can discredit the whole movement,” said Michael. “I can see the World Trade Organization saying, ‘If you oppose us you’re just scared of some…some…lizard conspiracy.’ And that’s the most scary thing to me…”

  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, DC 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.

  Now Michael said, “This ridiculous guru has blinded the people of Vancouver, and there’s only one thing for it.”

  “Which is what?” I asked.

  “Icke needs his pomposity pricked in public,” said Michael. “He needs to be humiliated, disgraced, he needs to become a laughing stock. Only then will his followers see him for what he is, a self-important, humourless clown.”

  And, as we sat on the terrace of the Havana bar, Michael understood how he could make that happen.

  ♦

  It was Saturday morning at Michael’s house. Michael and Sam and a few of their friends were making the final preparations for today’s physical assault on David Icke.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked them.

  “I’m getting butterflies,” said a woman called Linda. “It’s exciting. I just hope no militia wingnut acts in a hostile way.”

  “Oh, it’ll be just new-age flakes there,” said Michael.

  “No it won’t,” said Linda. “Just look at Mr Militiaman who turned up at the meeting last week. He was dangerous.”

  “The point is,” agreed Tony, “if someone is unstable enough to believe that lizards run the world, God knows what they might do to us.”

  ♦

  The plan was this: at 2. p.m. David Icke was scheduled to make a personal appearance at Granville Books in the centre of town. Sam and Linda would arrive first to create a distraction.

  “Some chanting,” said Sam.

  “Any kind of confusion,” said Michael. “And then I’ll just run in, get to the front of the queue, and smack the meringue pie right into Icke’s face!”

  “Excellent!” said Sam.

  “A flaky pie for a flaky guy!” said Michael.

  The anti-racists envisaged a devastating result. The mask would slip the moment Icke’s face was publicly splattered with meringue. His self-importance would blow up into the most hilarious tantrum, and he would be seen for the pompous fool he was.

  “We’re going to ridicule the idiot,” said Michael. “Are we ready, my fellow les en tartiers? Let’s go…”

  ♦

  At 1 p.m. David and I walked the three blocks from the Rosedale Hotel to Granville Books. I was feeling terrible about my passive role in the impending pie attack. I believed that Michael was correct in his analysis of how David would respond to this public humiliation. But I had decided to remain an impartial observer, and so I gave him no clue as to what was about to happen.

  David was in high spirits. He started reminiscing about the events of the early 1990s, the bad days that followed his appearance on the Wogan show.

  “You know,” he said, “one of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter I’d been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was t
ransformed into ‘Icke’s a nutter’. I couldn’t walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule…”

  David carried on walking and talking.

  “You have to keep walking and talking,” he said.

  In the aftermath of the Wogan show, David told me, he exiled himself from Britain. He took to travelling in the United States and South Africa – countries that knew nothing about his predictions of cataclysmic flooding. Their failure to materialize had damaged his credibility in Britain even further. Nonetheless, he began to blame the media for the ridicule he suffered at the hands of the general public.

  “Yes, I said some pretty astonishing things back then,” he explained, “but the media still managed to massively exaggerate them. And what I realized, with all the laughter and all the ridicule, was just how easy it is to get vast numbers of people to believe anything. You just have to print it in enough newspapers. So I started to look into who was in a position to orchestrate this kind of global manipulation. And that’s how I learnt about the Bilderberg Group.”

  David became an avid reader of Big Jim Tucker and The Spotlight. Blaming the global elitists, in part, for scheming the assault against him in the British media, he researched and wrote two books about the spider’s web of secret societies that controlled the planet.

  He wrote that the global elite are hopelessly drawn to strange rituals, that they run around in robes and burn giant wicker owls at a secret summer camp called Bohemian Grove in the forests north of San Francisco. Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller are rumoured to be amongst the berobed.

  (Jack McLamb too believed that Bohemian Grove was a hot-bed of global elite debauchery. He had suggested to me back in Idaho that the rituals undertaken at Bohemian Grove proved that the New World Order were witches and warlocks. It became increasingly clear to me that I should pay a visit to Bohemian Grove to see if I could witness any of their rituals with my own eyes, to clear this matter up once and for all.)

  David came to believe that the global elite were not just stealthily influencing free-trade legislation so as to ease the way for complete global domination; they also operated, out of the White House, a harem of kidnapped and hypnotized underage sex slaves.

  Shocked by his findings, he looked to ancient times, hoping to find some validating evidence.

  He discovered primitive cultures that had carved effigies of lizard-men descending from the skies. He put two and two together. This was the key. The reptilian invaders were the secret rulers of the world.

  Now he was ready to publish.

  It was a hit. His career went into turn around. He was invited to speak all over the world.

  “And you see,” said David, “it all turned out all right. Now my children can hold up their heads and say, ‘That’s my dad. You laughed at him. But look at him now.’”

  ♦

  Granville Books was packed with fans and TV crews and journalists.

  “Nobody’s going to travel miles and hours just to come and see an anti-Semitic madman,” suggested a fan to me. “Whatever Mr David Icke has to say is more than fascinating.”

  David’s entrance was greeted with whoops and applause.

  “You are one of the great thinkers of truth!” yelled a lady from the back.

  “Hooray!” responded the crowd.

  “Thank you,” said David. “Once we free our souls, the hierarchies of all religions, the Muslim hierarchy, the Jewish hierarchy – I call them ‘OppoSames’ – can’t touch us.”

  This statement was greeted with cheers and spontaneous applause, and autographs were signed.

  ♦

  It was thirty minutes later that Sam and Linda entered the shop to create their distraction. They noisily elbowed their way into the middle of the crowd.

  “Tell us why you’re against Jews!” yelled Sam, the television cameras now on him. “Tell us about the Protocols of Zion…”

  “Don’t care!” screamed the supporters. “Don’t care! Get out of here!”

  Two old ladies grabbed Sam and pushed him – with unexpected savagery – against a display of new-age literature.

  “Out!” they chanted with ferocity. “Out! Out! Out! You’re not welcome! Get out!”

  Michael slipped into the shop. His face was hidden by a scarf, his pie buried beneath his trenchcoat. He noticed me and he winked.

  I looked away.

  Michael quietly walked towards the front.

  “…OUT! OUT! OUT!…”

  Fans and TV crews blocked his path. He hesitated for a moment. But then, miraculously, a gap appeared, a window of opportunity.

  Michael opened his coat, retrieved his pie, and took aim.

  The meringue pie flew through the air. It lightly brushed David’s sleeve and continued its journey. It splattered, with a devastating thud, all over the children’s book section.

  “Well,” murmured David, brushing the pastry flakes from his jacket, “that massively backfired.”

  “We’re just booksellers,” said the manager softly. “You’re wrecking the store.”

  “Shame,” said some old ladies.

  There were sad tuts of disapproval.

  The manager produced a sponge and began gently to clean the children’s books.

  “Please leave,” he said.

  And, as the anti-racists slipped quietly away, a few members of David’s entourage grinned behind their hands.

  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.

  ∨ Them ∧

  7

  The Klansman Who Won’t Use the N-Word

  Somewhere in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, northern Arkansas, is an unusual white building. It stands surrounded only by trees and hacked-out clearings and dirt tracks. The road up here is strewn with chunks of rusted corrugated iron and abandoned pick-up trucks and shacks with brutal No Trespassing signs, illustrated with cartoons of giant snarling dogs, and I wondered who would dare to trespass all the way out here in conspiracy-theory country, armed-response country, Ku Klux Klan country. The signal on my mobile phone had failed along the way.

  This unusual white building looked a little disturbing to me, as it is quite obviously inspired by the architecture of the Third Reich, using local timber and whitewash, with vast blood-red flags draped from roof to porch at either end. These strange flags are centred with thick black crosses in white circles. The dirt driveway is also marked out with these flags, a column of them in the darkness, illuminated by a nearby bonfire. This building, and all the odd neo-Nazi pomp surrounding it, seems incongruous out here in the deep forest. From high clearings, you can just about make out little distant specks of everyday global corporate life – strip-malls, NikeTowns, Marriott Hotels, Wal-Marts, Holiday Inns and Burger Kings.

  The Ozark Mountains make the news from time to time when neo-Nazi gunmen or abortion clinic bombers pursued by scores of FBI agents vanish into them. It is a hiding place, a labyrinth of forests and dirt tracks and compounds populated by an informal army of supremacists and separatists allied by a common purpose, which is to see the supremacists and separatists of a homeland where the white race can live in peace and separation and not be bothered by the government or the immoral liberalism that infects the United States via Hollywood and stems, essentially, from the Jews.

  The homeland they dream of is, in fact, not unlike the Ozark Mountains themselves, where the FBI can rarely find their man, where there are virtually no black people, and even fewer Jews. I was probably the only Jew within a hundred miles or more, and I was doing my best to tone it down, sitting out here on the porch of the strange white building. I was consciously suppressing my hand gestures and attempting not to be overtly cosmopolitan.

  This strange white building and the compound that it stands in, a hundred acres in total, i
s owned by Thom Robb, the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Thom and I sat outside, as night was falling, and we talked for an hour. This was the night before the opening day of the Ku Klux Klan’s annual National Congress. All the preparations had been made. The marquee had been erected. It was orange with white stripes. It looked like a tombola tent at a village fête. The Welcome banner flapped in the evening breeze. The words ‘Ku Klux Klan’ were surrounded by friendly red and blue stars.

  I had come to see Thom Robb because he was undertaking an unusual task. Thom too believed that the New World Order, the Bilderberg Group, met in secret rooms to plot a planetary takeover. But unlike Omar Bakri and David Icke and the others, who seemed resigned to constrain themselves as boisterous outsiders, appearing at Speaker’s Corner, theorizing about giant lizards, and so on, Thom Robb wanted to fit in. He wanted to slide into the mainstream. He wanted his own TV show, he said, with jokes and music, like David Letterman, or Regis and Kathy Lee with him as Regis and his daughter Rachel as Kathy Lee.

  That was his number-one plan. But first he had to teach his members to stop saying ‘nigger’ when they were in public.

  ♦

  Some Klanspeople had already arrived from states across America, and they were standing in the darkness, their faces illuminated briefly whenever they took a pull from their cigars. Thom reminisced about a fateful day, 29 June 1996, when the Klan rallied in Chicago and got beaten up by Communist Negroes.

  “I’m a little guy, huh?” said Thom. “I’m not aggressive. You can see that. I’m not a violent man. But I beat this guy up pretty good. Yeah! I hit his fist twenty-nine times with my nose! Ha ha. Oh yeah, I beat his fist up pretty good with my nose. But I’ve got nothing against those black fellas. They should be proud of their…uh…skin. That’s cool. There’s my wife, Muriel. Muriel! Come and meet Jon!”

  “Hi!” called Muriel from over by the bonfire.

  Thom waited for Muriel to arrive before he said: “You know, when I met Muriel, I knew she was Miss Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always! Ha ha! No, no. I’m just kidding.”