Them

by Jon Ronson

  “I don’t think of it as this day or that day after that. I just remember it as one long terrible day.”

  ♦

  The military set up base camp a few hundred yards down the mountain. The rumour went that some army person hammered a sign into the ground outside the tents calling their temporary barracks ‘Camp Vicki’.

  “I remember hearing people underneath the house rustling through our stuff,” said Rachel. “I remember the floodlights coming in through the cracks in the curtains and hearing their stupid half-tracks rolling over our stuff in the yard.”

  Rachel told me this as we sat at her kitchen table. There are very few ornaments in her house. Where you might have a painting, binoculars hang from a nail in the wall next to the front window. (Rachel told me they were there for birdwatching, but during our time together a car happened to stop on the road near the front of her long driveway and she grabbed the binoculars and peered through them and only sat down again once it had driven away.)

  “The tanks crunched our generator,” said Rachel, “rolled over our outhouse. Not to mention, after they shot our dog and my brother, they ran over the dog.”

  Rachel said, “Just sick.”

  She said, “Every day they would shout at us through some bullhorn. They’d yell, ‘Vicki! Vicki! Tell Randy to pick up the phone. Vicki! We’re having blueberry pancakes for breakfast. What are you having for breakfast?’ And Dad would scream out, ‘You sons of bitches, you shot her. You know she’s dead.’ And they’d never answer us. I know they could hear us through the walls. These were just plywood walls. I remember being really mad at them for acting like nothing was wrong.”

  The spinning had begun straight away. The FBI said that Randy himself might have shot Sammy in the back. They said the marshals had been ambushed, that they were pinned down and had not returned fire. They said that Randy was wanted for bank robberies, that he was a white supremacist, that the Weavers lived in a ‘mountain fortress’, and then ‘a bunker’, and ‘a stronghold protected by a cache of fifteen weapons and ammunition capable of piercing armoured personnel carriers’.

  They said that the two shotguns Randy sold the undercover informant were ‘the chosen weapons of drug dealers and terrorists’.

  Most of this was unnecessary, of course. The two crucial words were ‘white supremacist’. That did it. Randy was henceforth referred to in all media as, ‘White supremacist Randy Weaver’.

  I dug out a tape of a chat show aired at the time, Politically Incorrect from New York, in which Randy’s case was discussed by the comedian Bill Maher, Nadine Strossen of the American Civil Liberties Union and Garry Marshall, the creator of Mork and Mindy and Pretty Woman.

  BILL MAHER:

  He was in Aryan Nations. Come on. Oh, boo hoo!

  NADINE STROSSEN:

  Belonging to Aryan Nations is not a crime. That’s his right.

  GARRY MARSHALL:

  In my neighbourhood if a guy puts swastikas on his kids, I would be a little suspicious. I wouldn’t say: “Come on over! We’ll have some fruit!”

  AUDIENCE:

  (Big laugh.)

  BILL MAHER:

  They shot the dog in the back. Can you believe that, Garry? Oh, man, that’s a Canine American! He has his rights!

  AUDIENCE:

  (Laugh.)

  GARRY MARSHALL:

  That was the worst thing that happened!

  AUDIENCE:

  (Laugh.)

  NADINE STROSSEN:

  He wasn’t causing any danger to anyone.

  BILL MAHER:

  If you’re bringing up your kids in Aryan Nations you are causing danger because you’re spawning hate in America.

  AUDIENCE:

  (Applause.)

  The white supremacist angle was clearly working.

  ♦

  I left Rachel that evening. Before I got into my car, she told me I should be careful not to over-romanticize her family. She said that the people who did not call them white supremacists tended to go on about fields of cotton and running through cornfields.

  “Running through cornfields?” I asked.

  “A friend of my dad,” she said, “started writing a book about what happened, and Dad was reading the first chapter, which was all about him as a boy running through cornfields. And Dad said, ‘What a bunch of bullshit.’ He never ran through cornfields. But Dad’s friend likes to write and he wanted to make it great.”

  Rachel laughed.

  “Running through cornfields,” she said.

  ♦

  I left Rachel’s house and drove two hundred miles – through Missoula, near where the movie stars live (Meg Ryan, Peter Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, etc.), and into Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, past a sign that reads ‘Winding Road Next 77 Miles’ – and I stopped twelve miles past Kamiah, where Jack McLamb lives.

  Jack McLamb lives in a trailer home in a small Christian community called Doves of the Valley. He looks like a friendly church minister, with a bouffant of white hair. In fact he is an ex-policeman, drummed out of the force after he created an organization called Police Against The New World Order.

  I asked Jack how he first heard of Randy Weaver.

  “They were calling him a neo-Nazi on the radio,” he said, “an anti-Semitic hatemonger, a violent radical, any nasty name you can think about. You’re the scum of the earth and they have a right to kill you, see?”

  “I guess that the worst thing you can be called is an anti-Semite,” I said.

  “Boy,” said Jack, “the worst thing. Not racist. Not homo-phobe. Anti-Semite. There’s such a power there. Boy. You get labelled an anti-Semite you’re in big trouble. The media picked it up, of course, and used those words. They needed to demonize these people in case it ever got to court. They knew they were in big trouble. I mean, oh my goodness, talk about jury appeal. When you machine gun a little boy in the back and shoot a mother holding a baby in the head, you’ve got yourself some jury appeal.”

  Jack said, “Anti-Semite. That’s the first thing they hit you with when you start to investigate the New World Order. I’m learning this myself. I’ve been labelled an anti-Semite just because I’m speaking out against this damnable world system.”

  “Who is calling you an anti-Semite?” I asked.

  “The Anti-Defamation League out of New York,” said Jack. He quickly added, “It isn’t true, of course. I am an honorary member of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms.” Jack paused. “Some people think this is a Jewish conspiracy, some think it’s a Catholic conspiracy, some people think it’s a Masonic conspiracy. But I know what it really is.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It is a satanic globalist conspiracy,” said Jack.

  ♦

  I was surprised to hear from Jack that the first thing Randy Weaver yelled through the cabin walls at him, the very first thing he yelled to the outside world, having been under siege for a week, was not, “They killed Vicki. They killed my bride.” (That was the second thing he yelled.) It was not, “I’ve been shot too.” (That was the third thing he yelled.) The first thing he yelled was, “Why is the radio calling me a white supremacist when those are not my views?”

  Jack said to me, “The saddest days of my life were spent on the top of that mountain. It just broke my heart.”

  It was a warm evening, and so we sat outside.

  “You know why they shot Vicki Weaver?” said Jack. “They knew Vicki was the strongest member of the family. This is what you learn in military training. Take out the head. This was a family. But they were treating them just as a military target. I get tears in my eyes thinking about it.”

  “How did you end up being there?” I asked Jack.

  “OK,” he said. “I was living in Arizona at the time, and Colonel Bo Gritz came into town campaigning for the presidency of the United States. Colonel Bo Gritz is the most decorated Green Beret in the US army. Movies have been made about his exploits. So Bo said, ‘Jack, can I have breakfast with
you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘There are some things going on in Idaho. A guy by the name of Randy Weaver is barricaded into his home with his family, and his son has been killed and it looks like there could be more death if something doesn’t happen. I’ve been asked by the FBI to become involved because Randy Weaver served under me in the Special Forces, and they believe he will talk to me. So I’m going up there and will you come along as my back-up?’”

  “Why did he feel he needed backing up?” I asked.

  “Colonel Bo and I are hated by the government,” said Jack. “He was worried that he’d go up there and all the guns would be pointed at him. They’d blow him to pieces and blame it on Randy Weaver. So I was his insurance.”

  “What happened when you arrived?” I asked.

  “It was surreal,” said Jack. “It was incredible. I’ve never seen so many FBI agents, US marshals, local police, state police, in one place in my life. There were bullet-proof vehicles that were used to transport troops in, armoured personnel vehicles, military uniforms, face paint on their faces, bullet-proof vests. They had completely taken over this very small town.”

  Jack paused.

  “And by now there were around 2,000 people on the other side of the barricade, there to support the Weaver family. You had a mixed bag from preachers, to neighbours, to people like me, to neo-Nazis from Aryan Nations up the road, to even some liberals.”

  “Aryan Nations were there?”

  “You know what,” said Jack. “There are probably no more than fifteen of those radical crazies up at Aryan Nations at any one time, but the media likes to portray that there’s thousands up there. But the neo-Nazis were down at the roadblock for the wrong reasons. You’ve got the radio saying that an anti-Semite has killed a US marshal, and Aryan Nations thought, ‘Good. Let’s go down there and support him.’ So there are citizens on one side of the barricade and military and police on the other side of the barricade.”

  “And when you got up onto the mountain,” I said, “what conversations did you have with the Weaver family?”

  “Randy was crying and the children were crying,” he said. “So I would speak for a while and then Bo would speak for a while. We’re trying to calm the girls down, get them to stop crying and to focus on something other than their mother lying underneath the kitchen table in a pool of blood. This was unbelievable trauma. Every time they had to get food, there was her body.”

  “And this was a week after she’d been killed?” I said.

  “A week after,” said Jack, “in a cabin that was very stuffy. And Kevin had gangrene, having been shot by the sniper. They had blocked the windows and the doors with rags so the government couldn’t see them and shoot them. So it was real stuffy.”

  “What were the conversations about?” I asked.

  “Bo found a stick about this long,” said Jack. “He got onto a stump and he was holding this big staff. He looked like Moses.”

  “So you were still outside at this time?”

  “The girls didn’t want to let us in,” said Jack. “They didn’t know us and they didn’t trust us. Anyway, it was really something. Bo had found out that Randy and the girls knew all about this world conspiracy. Randy and Vicki were very good parents. They’d explained it all to the kids, about how this group of very powerful people are setting up a New World Order. So Bo went over all these stories about how the money is controlled, about these secret organizations like the Bilderberg Group. But Randy and the girls already know this. So what Bo’s doing, see, is he’s talking to the five hundred militarized police lying in the bushes. He’s talking to them. So he had a captive audience all day Saturday.” Jack laughed. “The government hated us for that. These guys are not supposed to know about all this, and Bo’s giving dates and names and times. Randy and the girls knew what he was doing. It was really neat.”

  This is what Jack said that Bo talked about that day: he said that the secret rulers of the world call themselves the Bilderberg Group and they rule the world from a secret room somewhere. He said that every year this global elite go to a secret summer camp north of San Francisco called Bohemian Grove, where they get together and ‘do all types of debauchery, sexual perversion, you name it. It’s a really weird club and the same people who belong to the Bilderberg Group belong to it. They’re witches and warlocks, and they are into anything that is evil.’

  Jack said that what happened at Randy Weaver’s cabin was a great awakening, not just for him and for Colonel Bo Gritz and for the five hundred troops lying in the bushes in full jungle camouflage, but for the world in general and the United States in particular.

  It is true to say that during the months that followed the end of the siege, the United States militia movement which had not previously existed, to speak of – reported a massive upsurge in their membership. Jack was inundated with enquiries about how to fight the New World Order.

  ♦

  It was the Monday lunchtime, ten days into the siege, that Bo and Jack finally convinced the Weaver family to come out of the cabin and take their case to court.

  “It was so wonderful to see the door opening and those little girls come out and take off their weapons,” said Jack. “And they were the saddest days of my life that were spent on the top of that mountain. When I realized that my fellow police officers and soldiers were capable of that. These militarized men in their woolly bully outfits had executed the boy. When Sammy Weaver saw his little dog being shot, when little Sammy saw that and he opened fire, they almost cut his left arm off. Little Samuel who looked like he was ten, they shot his left arm to where it was hanging by the flesh, and he yelled, ‘Dad, I’m coming home, Dad’, and at that time my fellow officers took this MP5 machine gun and just sprayed him up the back…

  “Well, I carried the little girls down to the military force, these big guys, face paint, they all looked like trees and bushes, and their tears were coming down and streaking their face paint. They were all crying.”

  Jack cried as he recounted this story. Then he said, “And that’s why there are so many people today that are speaking out against this damnable New World Order.”

  ♦

  In the end, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris were charged with murder, conspiracy and assault. The trial was a disaster for the government. The jury acquitted Kevin Harris of all charges, and convicted Randy only of failing to appear on the original firearms charge. He served sixteen months in jail.

  The government paid Rachel and Sara and Elisheba $1 million each in an out of court settlement, hence Rachel’s house and horses and mini-gym in the spare bedroom.

  The American media, while continuing to refer to Randy Weaver as a white supremacist – which they still do – became highly critical of the handling of the case by the FBI and the BATF It was just about the worst publicity these two law-enforcement agencies had ever received. The judge declared that the government had shown a ‘callous disregard for the rights of the defendants’.

  Jack McLamb said it was no coincidence that at the height of this bad press, the BATF announced with some pride that they were taking military action against a violent, child-abusing gun-hoarding religious cult holed up in a compound down in Texas.

  I don’t know if it was a coincidence or, as Jack said, an exercise in public relations. Whatever, six days into Randy Weaver’s trial, fifty-three adults, including David Koresh, and twenty-three children were burnt to death at Mount Carmel in Waco.

  The remains of the Weaver cabin became a place of pilgrimage for this new army of believers in the secret rulers of the world. One of the pilgrims was Timothy McVeigh who visited Randy Weaver’s cabin, alone, some months before blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and killing 168 people. McVeigh considered the Murrah Building to be local New World Order headquarters.

  ONE OUT OF EIGHT AMERICANS HAS HARD-CORE ANTI-SEMITIC FEELINGS

  This quarter-page advertisement occupied the front page of the New York Times a few weeks after I visited Jack McLa
mb. The ad had been paid for by the Jewish defence organization, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith.

  When journalists report stories about American anti-Semites, they often end up paying a visit to the ADL in their New York headquarters. The ADL provide you with fact sheets. They have fact sheets on pretty much everyone – from obscure, uncelebrated militia leaders through to famous Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazi organizers.

  They have offices in every state in America, a budget big enough to take out front-page adverts in the New York Times, and a direct line to the President and the State Department and the FBI, who act on the information they provide.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the ADL has the last word on who is an anti-Semite and who is not. They are the ones who decide. Then they inform the rest of the world, and the rest of the world, including me, goes along with it.

  So I visited Gail Gans, their chief researcher into anti-Semitism in the American heartland.

  Gail told me that one out of eight Americans has hardcore anti-Semitic feelings. She said that much of that has to do with those people who like to mythologize the Weaver siege as evidence that the ‘New World Order’ – which is a code-word for ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’ – really exists.

  Gail said that the job of the ADL has become akin to that of a code breaker.

  “We lay out the program to the people of the world,” she said. “This is who the anti-Semites are. These are the words they use. This is a code word and this is what it means.”

  Gail rifled through her drawer and she handed me pamphlets with titles such as ‘Armed And Dangerous’. They referred to Colonel Bo Gritz as ‘an extremist’, Randy Weaver as ‘an extremist’, and Jack McLamb as ‘an anti-Semitic extremist conspiracy theorist’.

  “I’m surprised,” I said. “And also shocked. I’ve been with Jack McLamb, and he really didn’t strike me as an anti-Semite.”

  “That’s because he’s clever,” said Gail. “He doesn’t come right out and say anti-Semitic things. He uses code words.”

  I asked Gail to list for me the code words – the words that mean Jew without actually saying Jew. Here are some of them: