Jon Ronson

Surprisingly enough for someone who’s just spent the best part of the last five years courageously riding in the slipstream and skulking in the shadows of some of the greatest enemies of democracy in the western world (neo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, American militia-men and the like), Jon Ronson comes across not so much as a man possessed of steel nerves, but rather as a somewhat tense, anxious and nervy individual – the kind of jittery guy you’d hate to wind up sitting beside on a long-haul flight. Despite his self-depreciating writing style, I’d expected somebody a little more… calm.

Uncomfortably seated across the table from me in his room in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel, the 34-year-old Cardiff-born writer and documentary film-maker, is awkwardness personified, his short and somewhat ungainly frame rarely staying still for more than a few seconds at a time. He ungracefully bends his rubbery limbs with alarming frequency and continuously punctuates his speech with windmill-like spins of the hands, as though trying to physically float his words over to you. Friendly but frenetic, he reminds me of nothing so much as a Welsh Woody Allen.

“I’m not normally as bad as this,” he laughs, shifting yet again in his seat, when I comment on his apparent nervousness. “It’s just that I’m really tired and I’m going on TV a little later. I’m actually more intimidated about going on The Late Late Show tonight than I ever was about being chased by unknown forces or whatever.”

He’s going on The Late Late Show to promote both his newly-published book Them (subtitled Adventures With Extremists) and his forthcoming five-part Channel 4 series Jon Ronson’s World Of Conspiracy. Unfortunately, this reporter hasn’t actually seen any episodes of the documentary series but if they’re anything like the book they should make for riveting viewing – especially the scenes where the Cardiff-born Ronson is actually being chased by “unknown forces.” Although hilariously written, the book – a trip through the wires of some of the world’s weirdest wackos and extremists – is not without its nerve-wracking moments. Somewhat surprising then, that a Jew who bravely infiltrated both a Jihad training camp and an American Aryan Nations compound in the name of research, should be intimidated at the prospect of being interviewed by Pat Kenny.

“I just don’t like the media spotlight,” he shrugs. “I don’t like it one bit. But at the same time I really want to sell books so doing television is a necessary evil. Something like this – you know, a press interview – I quite enjoy because it’s easy. But, then, I guess life’s too short to be getting all nervous.”

Although, a brief flirtation with the music industry aside, Ronson has worked in the media all of his adult life – contributing articles and columns to The Guardian, Loaded and Time Out, amongst others, and making documentaries on a variety of social issues for British radio and television – this is his first ever book tour (and, indeed, Them is his first ever book). He’s finding it quite an educational experience, being the interviewee, rather than interviewer. One of them, rather than one of us. Or vice-versa.

“I’m learning a lot about media from all of this,” he says. “Something really interesting happened to me last week and I think you’ll appreciate this anecdote having read the book. In fact, I’m thinking of writing this up as a new chapter for the paperback. I went on the Big Breakfast last week and I sort of turned up and the researcher read off a clipboard and told me that this was how they were going to introduce me – ‘here we are in the Big Breakfast attic with crazy conspiracy theorist Jon Ronson’. I was like ‘crazy conspiracy theorist??!!’ They were trying to turn me into one of the nuts that I’ve been chronicling! And what they were also doing to me is exactly what most of the people I interviewed for the book say gets done to them all the time. So it shows it’s true. They demonise or ridicule the things they don’t want you to know too much about.”

Of course, who ‘they’ are depends entirely on who you are. And in the world of Them, you’re never quite sure whose side you’re on – or, indeed, even how many sides there are. By way of introduction to the vast vistas of whole-scale paranoia and distrust contained within the pages of his book, Ronson has helpfully quoted that great political thinker and orator George W. Bush at the start: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who they are, but we know they’re there.”

Of course, given that he’s a child-abusing, blood-drinking twelve foot lizard in reality – one of Them’s better known characters genuinely believes – you can take everything Dubya says with a pinch of salt. Confused? We’ve only just started…

Them began life one fateful summer’s afternoon in 1995, when Ronson came into contact with a certain Omar Bakri Mohammed – on the surface a surprisingly open and friendly Islamic fundamentalist whose stated aim in life is to overthrow democracy in Britain and live to see the Black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. Having already won awards for his humorous journalistic profiles of people living on the margins of society, Ronson saw Omar as ideal journalistic fodder, a colourful character worth his weight in column inches. Little did the writer realise that investigating the paranoid world Omar would open up for him would eventually wind up occupying the next five years of his life.

“The book began life as a series of profiles of extremist leaders, but it quickly became something stranger,” he explains. “My original plan was to spend time with those people who had been described as the political and religious monsters of the western world - Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis and so on. I wanted to join them as they went about their everyday lives. I thought that perhaps an interesting way to look at our world would be to move into theirs and stand alongside them while they glared back at us.”

And this is exactly what Ronson did, for a while at least, starting with his fundamentalist friend. On and off, he spent almost a year with Omar, following him around London as he conducted his campaign of Holy War – which, a couple of botched rallies aside, mostly involved distributing leaflets with titles like ‘Homosexuality, Lesbianism, Adultery, Fornication and Bestiality: THE DEADLY DISEASES’ on the streets of London and sticking ‘JIHAD!’ stickers in phone booths.

It was through Omar and his Islamic associates that the journalist first heard mention of the mysterious Bilderberg Group – a tiny cabal of powerful and pernicious individuals who meet once a year in a secret room and make decisions that determine the course of world events. According to Omar and his buddies, the Bilderberg Group are the people who start wars, elect presidents, own the media and destroy – by covert violence or propaganda – anyone who gets too close to the truth.

Although initially highly sceptical, Ronson was surprised to find that the London fundamentalists weren’t the only people to believe in the Bilderberg Group’s existence. In fact, as he gradually came into contact with different groups of extremists – PR-conscious Ku Klux Klansmen (nowadays, in an attempt to improve the Klan’s image, they’ve apparently banned use of the N-word!), ZOG-obsessed journalists, Christian fundamentalists etc. – he found that this was the one belief that they all had in common.

“They all believed that a tiny elite rules the world from inside a secret room,” he explains. “It is they who start the wars, I was told, elect and cast out the heads of state, control Hollywood and the markets and the flow of capital, operate a harem of underage kidnapped sex slaves, transform themselves into twelve foot lizards when nobody is looking, and destroy the credibility of any investigator who gets too close to the truth.”

Intrigued, Ronson set out to find the “secret room”, if it existed, and attempt to somehow infiltrate it. It was a vague plan, to say the least. “I wasn’t interested in conspiracy theories until these people began telling me about it,” he says. “And I just kept on hearing about it. I kept hearing about the Bilderberg group and stuff. And I didn’t even think of it as conspiracy theories, I didn’t sort of put two and two together and think ‘they’re conspiracy theories’ until much later. I just sort of thought to myself wouldn’t it be funny, wouldn’t it be good narrative, to not only hang out with these people but actually go off and try and do a travel book, trying to track down this secret room. And that’s as far as I got, I just thought it’d be funny.”

He was certainly right about that. Thanks to his sharp, unpretentious and self-depreciating style (not to mention the hugely original raw material), Them is one of the most hilariously funny and thought provoking books I’ve read in years. Interviewing extremists of all persuasions, the book documents Ronson’s own increasingly paranoid mental state as he hops around the globe in search of the truth, never knowing who or what to believe. Five years of hanging out with political and religious fanatics can certainly take its toll – and not just mentally. His quest for answers took so long that he wound up having to expand the project and make a television documentary to cover his costs.

“It was paid for with half the book advance and half Channel 4. Because the book ended up taking a year longer than I was paid for – so I had to make some films. And Channel 4 went with the idea. Although they didn’t expect it to end up the way it did. I think they thought it would be me taking the piss out of various crazy wacko conspiracy theorists. Instead, the show wound up with me sharing their paranoia!”

Although the book is essentially humorous in tone, some of the issues raised and characters encountered are extremely serious indeed. At times, it all makes for hugely disturbing reading. As much as you laugh at the occasionally hilarious, em, extremities of the extremists, the reality of some of the events described is often less funny. His account of the pre-Waco stand-off at Ruby Ridge – where US government authorities shot the mother and son of the Weaver family dead in a botched raid, before laying siege to the family home for more than a week – makes for sad, compelling and infuriating reading. Ronson’s tone is always kept light but the heavily armed and hugely paranoid militia men he encountered whilst doing his research certainly weren’t to be taken lightly. Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh made a pilgrimage to the scene of the Ruby Ridge siege shortly before detonating a bomb that killed 168 people. Did Ronson ever get the sense that any of the militia men he interviewed could be capable of similar atrocities?

“Absolutely. It’s funny but it’s not at the same time. Well, obviously I kind of like the clash of those things – writing humorously about quite dangerous people. And at times when I was hanging out with the militia, I certainly felt that the next Timothy McVeigh was the kind of unobtrusive guy sitting in the corner, saying nothing. I definitely got that sense.”

Did many of the people you encountered strike you as being particularly evil or did you see most of them as simply being misguided?

“I think Aryan Nations felt like that to me. They were pretty evil guys. I went to their headquarters and they sussed that I wasn’t one of them fairly quickly. When they all started surrounding me, screaming, and asking me what my genealogy was, I just thought ‘this is insane!’”

Did the fact that you’re a Jew have any influence on the way you approached the material?

“I don’t think my Jewish-ness came into it really. I’m non-practising and it’s never really been an issue with me.”

It was a slight issue with the Reverend Ian Paisley – whom Ronson accompanied to Africa on a preaching tour – who contemptuously referred to him as “the Jew” throughout the trip. Paisley also believes in the world being controlled from a secret room, though he believes the cabal consists of Machiavellian papists, rather than Jews or capitalists. Although the Paisley chapter of the book is extremely funny, you get the strong impression that Ronson didn’t particularly enjoy his time in the Rev’s company.

“I don’t really have that many funny anecdotes about Ian Paisley. In fact, I was in Belfast last night and I had to be very careful not to call Ian Paisley an extremist. People kept on asking me why I’d put him in the book when he wasn’t an extremist, which was kind of difficult to answer. Because I think that the dictionary definition of an extremist is what (Ian) Paisley is. I mean, Bob Jones is an extremist and Bob Jones is kind of the American Ian Paisley. You know, the Pope is the anti-Christ and all this stuff. That’s pretty extremist.”

Something that’s particularly strong about the fast-paced narrative is the way in which the reader is drawn into the paranoid world of conspiracy along with the author. About midway through Ronson’s journey into the heart of darkness, you’re no longer sure who – or what – to believe anymore. Did he start believing any of the theories at any point?

“Well I don’t believe that the world is being secretly ruled by shadowy figures and I never really did,” he smiles, “though it is being vaguely ruled in another kind of way. When I was researching this I was really trying to understand economics and how it works. I was talking to people who work in the City and things like that, just to get the background. And all the City people assured me that nobody rules the world because the flow of capitalism is just a completely anarchic thing. It’s uncontrollable. And I sort of believe them when they say that. You know, nobody’s really got enough money or power these days – these days being the days of free trade and rampant internationalism – to actually control the course of world events. Even Alan Greenspan isn’t powerful enough to do anything. Everything’s reactive so the world really can’t be ruled.

“I mean, apparently Alan Greenspan sits in his bath every morning and reads local papers about things like how tin-mining is going on in wherever, or how wheat’s doing in Kansas – and he decides whether to raise or lower interest rates based on these kind of reports he reads in the papers. So in that sense he’s kind of less powerful than the journalists who are writing for these local papers.”

But then the journalists are often controlled by someone else?

“Which brings it back to Alan Greenspan!” he laughs. “But of course it is sort of true as well. You are back down to networking between Kissinger and Rockerfeller – what do they talk about over breakfast? And who’s affected by what decisions they might make?”

Although he doesn’t locate the “secret room” until the end of the book, it didn’t take Ronson long to discover where the Bilderberg Group (yes, they do actually exist) were meeting. With the help of a supremely paranoid American journalist, he traced them to a five star hotel in Portugal, where, he had been informed, various politicians and CEO’s were secretly meeting. You share his scepticism right up to the moment when one of his accomplices points out the Satanic stare of Peter Mandelson as he’s being driven past them in an armour-plated bus. Did you get a shock when you saw him?

“Well, I was just completely perplexed at that point,” he recalls, laughing. “When I was actually doing that stuff I was thinking to myself, ‘ok, I’ve got no idea what’s happening here and in a way I don’t wanna know. I want to be in the dark about this stuff.’ It was like an exercise in… (pauses) Em, I suppose I could have gone on the Internet and found out a lot about Bilderberg but I deliberately made the decision not to do that.

“But yeah, the Mandelson moment. I did think it was quite weird. I did think it was quite funny because the guy who I was with – Brendan from the Weekly News – is a very kind of handsome young South African bloke and I’m pretty certain that when Mandelson was kind of staring out the window at him, he was actually eyeing him up. That’s what I think. Brendan’s looking up and seeing a Satanic stare and Mandelson’s looking down going, ‘hmm, he’s a bit of alright!’”

Portugal was also the location of one of his scariest moments – suddenly realising that he was being followed by dark-suited goons, who were obviously Bilderberg’s security men.

“That really freaked me out. I felt genuinely paranoid because I had no idea what we were up against at that point. All I knew was that the henchmen of the secret rulers of the world were now following me in a Lancia. It was like, ‘what the fuck is going on here?’”

Exactly what went on inside the Portugal conference he never found out. What he was sure of, because he had seen it with his own eyes, was that some seriously wealthy and powerful individuals had met in absolute secrecy – and weren’t acknowledging it (he wrote twice to Mandelson’s office to ask what he had been doing there but received no reply). The plot thickened. Without spoiling the book for you, I can tell you that his further investigations did eventually lead him to the secret room - though it wasn’t quite the den of internationalist iniquity the conspiracy theorists thought. Them’s journey ends in California, at a secluded campsite called Bohemian Grove. The campsite was the “secret room” – and those present included George Bush, Dick Chaney, Henry Kissinger and John Major. Amazingly, Ronson and his accomplices managed to get in and wander around. Was he surprised to find the “secret cabal” so easy to penetrate in the end?

“Yeah, I was amazed. I was totally amazed that we could do that. It was remarkable. Apparently the secret service were all over the town a week earlier. I’m completely amazed that it was so easy. I’ve no explanation for it except that it probably doesn’t happen that often.”

Another notable multi-millionaire who wasn’t actually present on the day in question but is a member of the “cabal” is none other than Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons!

“Yeah, I met Mr. Burns. Harry Shearer has been to Bohemian Grove and I interviewed him for the TV series – though he wouldn’t do it in the voice. He said a really interesting thing though. He said that he thinks that conspiracy theorists are the great narrative writers of the century. They write compelling narratives. And I think that’s true. Just look at David Icke.”

David Icke, for those of you who don’t know, is the former football-pro and TV pundit who self-destructed his career in 1991 by going on Wogan and announcing that he was the son of God. Despite widespread derision, he now makes a tidy living on the lecture circuit, positing his controversial theory that various political and showbiz notables – George Bush, Boxcar Willy, Prince Philip and Ted Heath amongst them – are in fact twelve-foot lizards in disguise. Ronson spent a tough few days with him in Canada where he was banned from almost every TV and radio station he had been due to speak on, because of protests accusing him of anti-Semitism.

“He was tough going, a really tough-going guy,” he laughs.

Is he mad?

“He’s really hard to fathom. Is he mad? I can’t sort of go down on one side or the other on that one. I do think that when he says lizards, he means lizards. Because some people think ‘lizards’ is a code-word for ‘Jews’ but I really do think he means lizards.”

Why do you think people don’t sue him for accusing them of, em, being lizards?

“I think because they’re lizards!” he laughs. “Or they think it’d be too ridiculous. Or if they do sue then David Icke is gonna bring a series of wackos to the witness stand and it’s just gonna be embarrassing for everyone. That, or they’re lizards!! Anyway, if they win, what’s David Icke got to lose? He’s not really worth anything. I think he’d be delighted if they sued him, he’d love it. So I really think they just don’t care. I mean, if somebody said that you were a 12-foot lizard – and a blood-drinking paedophile lizard, to boot – what would you care? So it’s either that they don’t care - or they’ve got something to hide.”

Speaking of people with things to hide, are the Bilderberg Group aware of your book?

“They certainly know about the book because there was a big extract in The Guardian and it was the Bilderberg chapter. So they know about it definitely. I interviewed Martin Taylor, who’s the secretary general of the Bilderberg Group and the chairman of WH Smiths. I spoke to him last week and one question I asked him was, ‘you might think I’m being paranoid but were you aware that I’ve been doing this?’ And he said ‘no’. And I just don’t know whether that’s true or not. But he also said that when he took over the Bilderberg Group, he made a decision whether or not to be interested in the conspiracy theories, and he decided not to be interested.

“He said he had searched the web a few times looking to see what people say about Bilderberg. But putting Bilderberg into the Internet is like putting ‘clitoris’ into the Internet – you get about 25 billion sites full of crazy conspiracy theories! But it’s all there on one site called bilderberg.org, which is run by a guy in Bristol who’s an arch-Bilderberg conspiracy theorist. He’s put it all together.”

What kind of people are conspiracy theorists? What drives them?

“Well they’ve always got agendas. For instance, Tony Gosling – the guy responsible for bilderberg.org – I recently learnt is a kind of n-th times Christian. You wouldn’t know this from reading his website - which looks really rational – but his agenda is that Bilderberg is the fulfilment of the Book of Revelation. You know, the powerful group that will form that is Satan.

“But I think most people who’re conspiracy theorists… Em, it might be a little trite but it might be true, conspiracy theorists are nationalists – extreme nationalists – and the secret cabal are internationalists. But at the same time, Slobodon Milosovich thinks that the world’s against him – and it is! So a lot of people who think that the world’s against them are right. The world is against them – neo-Nazis and the like. So I think it’s people who try to rationalise why they’re so fucked, basically. Why everything they believe in is opposed by others. Or why things have gone wrong for them.”

Are you worried about any of the book’s characters taking offence at what you’ve said about them? You’ve really taken the piss out of some of them.

“Have I taken the piss out of them?” he laughs, innocently. “I’d like to think that I was celebrating them!”

What about Omar Bakri Mohammed?

“Well I hope Omar likes it because I’ll be in trouble if he doesn’t.”

But he comes across like a cheerful chappy! And a shameless self-publicist!

“Yeah, he comes out of it alright.”

But surely he doesn’t want to be perceived that way?

“I think Omar wants to be perceived as a kind of intellectual academic.”

But he doesn’t come across that way!

“No, he doesn’t and he’s going to think I’ve ridiculed him,” he says, as though it’s only just occurred to him that an Islamic fundamentalist who was once dubbed “the most dangerous man in Britain” by the Daily Mail, might not be overly happy to be portrayed as a harmless crank in print. “You’re probably right. But I hope not!”

Have any of the other extremists read the book?

“No. And they’ve not seen the films either because Channel 4 wouldn’t let them. It’s just their policy.”

What kind of reaction do you expect?

“Well, some of them are not gonna like it much – certain parts anyway! But you’ve gotta do it.”

Will this be an ongoing thing for you, now that the book’s out?

“Yeah, I think so. For a while anyway. I still feel that I’d like to write more for the paperback. But, otherwise, I’ve no idea what to do next.”

Going into hiding might be an idea…

Them – Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson is published by Picador, priced IR£16. Jon Ronson’s World Of Conspiracy will be screened by

Channel 4 in May