Them

by Jon Ronson

  ‘International Bankers’. ‘Internationalists’. ‘Cosmopolitans’. ‘Secret Government’. ‘New World Order’. ‘International Financiers’. ‘That Strange Group Behind the Media’. ‘Culture Manipulators’. ‘The Middle Men in New York’. ‘The New Yorkers’.

  And, yes, Jack McLamb had said some of those things to me. Could they be code words? They seemed so abstruse.

  If people couldn’t figure out that they meant ‘Jew’ – and I am usually sensitive to these matters – what was the point of having them? Where would it end? Was Jack McLamb being clever?

  “Randy Weaver,” said Gail, “is now going round the country giving speeches about what happened to him. And, on a human level, I’m sorry for what happened. But I also know that a” – Gail paused, grappling for the right words – “a sane person upon being asked to surrender wouldn’t have taken their children and their dog and gone into a mountain cabin. This wasn’t a game.”

  “But that makes it sound as if Randy Weaver was fleeing justice and holing up in some cabin, when in fact all he did was stay home with his family,” I said.

  “Randy Weaver could have surrendered,” said Gail. “He didn’t have to take his family up to that cabin at all…” (What, I wondered, did Randy Weaver’s choice of accommodation have to do with protecting the Jewish people from anti-Semitism?)

  “He says it was trumped up charges. Trumped up charges? He tried to sell weaponry to an undercover BATF agent.”

  “But Sammy Weaver was ambushed and he didn’t have a chance,” I said.

  “So Weaver says,” smiled Gail. She shrugged. Then she said, “Do I feel critical of law enforcement in this case? Yes. I’m sad it played out that way. But I’m also sad that the people in charge didn’t make it stop before it started.”

  “The people in charge?” I asked.

  “I mean Randy Weaver,” said Gail.

  “In charge?” I said.

  “Randy Weaver has become a martyr to a government gone crazy.” She sighed. “A martyr to an unfeeling, masterly, all-powerful government that’s trying to take the population of the United States and rub it under its heel. That’s the way the extremists see the government…”

  But the word extremist was suddenly indistinct to me. Unfeeling, masterly and all-powerful seemed smack-on when it came to outlining what befell the Weaver family. Or was I imagining my own family in that cabin? After all, Randy Weaver could have surrendered (I would have). He did attend Aryan Nations (I wouldn’t have).

  “Randy Weaver and his friends see themselves as the only stand-up guys against the New World Order,” said Gail. “And when you stand up against the New World Order bad things happen to you, and now you have Randy Weaver as a martyr and now you have David Koresh as a martyr.”

  ♦

  “Ooh! White supremacist!”

  Randy Weaver grinned and he gnarled his face up like he was a movie villain.

  “That’s big news. Who wants to report on the ice-cream social? That won’t sell a damn thing. This is exciting stuff. People go to car races to see wrecks. They love blood and guts. People are cruel. On the whole,” said Randy Weaver, “I don’t trust people.”

  It was Saturday. I had picked Randy up from Dallas airport and we drove down towards Mount Carmel in Waco, the site of the Branch Davidian church that had been besieged by the same team, right down to the individuals, that had organized and executed the Weaver siege.

  (Randy’s siege became widely known as ‘The Siege at Ruby Ridge’ even though there was no such place as Ruby Ridge. The Weaver family lived in a nameless place somewhere between Caribou Ridge and Ruby Creek. Rachel had told me that ‘Ruby Ridge’ probably sounded kitschy to the reporters at the time, which was why it stuck.)

  Randy drove down Interstate 35. He smoked just about an entire packet of cigarettes during our two-hour drive. His enormous biker sunglasses hid half of his face.

  “I can joke about Ruby Ridge now,” he said, “and keep going. I couldn’t for a while. I can watch a Western again now. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I know we all had it. Even Elisheba. Elisheba remembered that shit until she was two and a half: ‘Blood! Mama fall down! Mama needs help!’ She made everyone in the room start crying. She still says, ‘I wish Mama hadn’t died.’ Well. Hell, yeah.”

  Randy turned the air conditioning on full.

  ♦

  We stopped off for breakfast in a mall en route to Mount Carmel.

  “Did Rachel talk to you about what happened after we locked ourselves into the cabin?” asked Randy.

  “A little,” I said.

  At this, Randy leant forward. He took off his sunglasses.

  “What does Rachel remember?” he said.

  “She remembers the tanks smashing the generator,” I said.

  “I didn’t talk to Rachel about these things for years,” said Randy. “I didn’t even know that Rachel had seen them shoot me and shoot her mother. I just didn’t know that.”

  “What else happened after you locked yourself in the cabin?” I asked him.

  “Vicki used to make up little songs to sing to the kids, and so we sang those songs. Oh, I can’t remember. Did Rachel talk to you about it?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “I remember the radio,” he said. “The radio said, ‘Crazy bastard, white supremacist, has murdered a US marshal.’ So this was a big deal now. You’ve got a dead cop. They didn’t mention that Sam had been killed. This cop is worth more than my son? I don’t think so. Duh. He isn’t worth more than my dog. But a US marshal had got murdered. That was the big thing. Well. It wasn’t the big thing to us.”

  ♦

  Randy had never visited the ruins of the Branch Davidian church at Waco. But for hundreds of thousands of Americans, perhaps even millions, the Weaver siege and the burning of David Koresh’s church are forever linked, proof of a government gone crazy, a New World Order coming to kill whoever does not bow down to them.

  We paid the bill and drove the last few miles. We asked directions. Everyone knew the way. And then the place appeared, among flat green fields, a landscape that looked almost English, off a country road, behind a lake.

  We pulled into the car park, near burnt-out school buses and razor wire and wreckage from the old church, lying in the grass. Amongst this wreckage was a shining new building. For six months local volunteers had been spending their weekends rebuilding the church. It was nearly finished.

  We jumped out of the car. The volunteers stopped working and looked up at us and I heard some of them whisper, “Is that Randy Weaver?”

  Randy was hugged by strangers. When people asked him how he was doing, he said, “I ain’t been shot at lately. Yep. Things are looking up.”

  There was a little laughter.

  ♦

  The volunteers hammered and sawed and painted the doors. Some wore T-shirts that read ‘Death to the New World Order’. I saw one man wearing an official Ruby Ridge T-shirt: ‘Ruby Ridge – Freedom At Any Cost’. Randy sold these T-shirts most weekends at gun shows around the United States, along with the opportunity to ‘Have Your Photograph Taken With Randy Weaver. $5’. This was how he earned a living. The photographs were taken by his new wife, Linda, on a Polaroid Instamatic, and Randy would sign them, ‘Freedom At Any Cost’. But contrary to what Gail Gans at the ADL had said, Randy did not give speeches about what happened to his family. He was not a public speaker, he told me. Even the thought of it made him nervous.

  Inside the new church – it looked just like a normal country chapel – they hung chandeliers. Outside they mowed the lawn between the memorial trees (one for each person who died at Waco – it was now a small forest).

  Randy glanced at the volunteers. He said, quietly, “I wonder which of them are undercover snitches.”

  “Might some be here?” I whispered.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute,” he said.

  “Right here now?”

  “They blend right in,” said Randy.

>   More volunteers approached Randy, shook his hand, and asked him to pose for photographs.

  I got talking with an elderly man called Ron Dodge. Ron started telling me about the Bilderberg Group.

  “I keep hearing about the Bilderberg Group,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “They’re the men that run the world,” said Ron. “They start the wars. They cause the famines. They control the governments. They choose the presidents. Both candidates. They’re setting up the one world order.”

  “Do you believe that there’s a connection between the Bilderberg Group and what happened to Randy Weaver?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” said Ron. “Their plan is pretty basic. They go into a nation. They create chaos. This is their philosophy. Stir up the people. Take over the power. And why have we never heard of them? They own the media.”

  “They say that the people who control this world can sit around one large table and have lunch,” chipped in a passing militiaman from Michigan called John. “That’s the Bilderberg Group.”

  “What’s the Michigan Militia doing here?” I asked John.

  “We are here to ask these people’s forgiveness for sitting around on our butts and watching it on TV,” he replied.

  “What happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco will never happen again, under any circumstances. If it does there will be immediate retaliation, armed resistance, from the Michigan Militia.”

  The volunteers sawed and drilled in nails, and I could no longer hear what Ron and John were saying, so we took a walk through the memorial garden towards the lake.

  “Television’s an interesting thing,” said Ron. “When this siege started here at Waco, I could not imagine that they would burn these people up. But they did. Then I thought there’d be such an outcry it would bring down the government. But the silence was deafening. When I asked people about it they said, ‘David Koresh was a bad guy. He deserved it.’ I started thinking, what’s wrong here? There’s something wrong. I kept thinking about it. Then I found out one day that television is not a steady light, it’s a rapidly flashing light. As soon as I got that little bit of information, I realized what had happened. One of the ways you hypnotize people is with a rapidly flashing light. Everybody is hypnotized. What happened here, and what happened at Ruby Ridge, was that they programmed the world to accept that murder is OK.”

  “Tell me more about the Bilderberg Group,” I said. “Where do they meet?”

  There was a silence.

  ♦

  Dusk fell, and Colonel Bo Gritz arrived in a glistening trailer home. He helped with the hammering for a while, and then the volunteers lit camp fires and ate from a barbecue and Bo and Randy hugged each other and reminisced about the siege at Ruby Ridge.

  I joined them after a while. We sat on plastic chairs next to Bo’s trailer home. Bo Gritz looks just as a retired Green Beret colonel should look. He is heavy set, with a shock of white hair.

  As Randy and Bo and I talked, we began to attract a small audience. Alex Jones came and sat down with us. Alex is a popular radio talk-show host from nearby Austin. His anti-New World Order radio show – InfoWars – is syndicated to forty cities across America.

  Randy said to Alex, “Let me shake your hand. I’m a big admirer of yours. I love your show. You’ve got some guts.”

  More volunteers came and sat down, and our chat became something like the after-dinner entertainment.

  Randy has changed since the siege, since the death of his wife. I imagine that Vicki was the one with the passionate hatred for the New World Order, and Randy was happy to go along with it because he loved her, just as long as she didn’t object to him cutting loose once in a while to go drinking with his friends from Aryan Nations. Back then they read the Bible most nights. Now Randy is an agnostic. He no longer believes that the New World Order, the Bilderberg Group, the secret clique of international bankers, were responsible for the murders of his wife and son. Now he puts it down to a battle of egos – that moment when he made a big burlesque show of refusing to become a government informant.

  “I laughed at them,” he said. “I don’t laugh any more.”

  But in this interpretation, Randy was pretty much alone.

  Just about everyone else sitting around the camp fires considered the international bankers to be responsible for what happened at Ruby Ridge.

  ♦

  “I want to tell you something remarkable,” said Bo, “about what happened when we got Vicki’s body out of that cabin. I expected in August for there to be an extreme smell of death inside that cabin. Remember there were blankets all over the windows. It was very stuffy. Yet I didn’t have that powerful smell. This has got to be tough on Randy.”

  Randy lit a cigarette.

  “Besides from the terrible evidence of Vicki being shot in the face with a .308,” said Bo, “you would not have known that she wasn’t just asleep. Her skin was still supple.”

  “And for how long had she been dead?” I asked.

  “Eight days,” said Randy.

  “Eight days,” said Bo.

  “Eight days,” said Randy.

  “I was in awe of her condition,” said Bo. “The Catholics believe that if the body is not corrupted, they consider that person to have died under grace. They look upon it as one of the criteria for sainthood.” Bo shrugged. “All I know,” he said, “is that her body was unlike any other of the hundreds I have personally handled. Eight days dead.”

  “Eight days,” said Randy.

  “It wasn’t anything like it was supposed to be,” said Bo Gritz.

  ♦

  “How could the Aztecs sacrifice ten thousand people on some public holiday, eat their children’s hearts? I’ve been to their temples, I’ve seen the skulls buried in their walls, some nightmare horror. How could the Romans rip people apart, burn their city, just to do it, just to blame it on people? And we see decadent empires in their final stages of corruption, as they become insane. Engaging in mass murder. Just to do it. This is what is happening today. The New World Order are a bunch of sick control freaks!”

  This was the voice of Alex Jones, every word in capital letters, no light or shade, all bellow, broadcasting live from Austin, Texas, right now, to five million people across America, and live on AOL, broadcasting to the world, if the world wants to hear it.

  “When you allow the government to murder folks at Ruby Ridge, at Waco, at Oklahoma City, at the World Trade Center bombing – all government actions – when you allow this to happen, when you sit back and laugh, and you think you’re on the big team, the A-Team. Boy! You’re rooting for the government’s side! Because you’re a coward! And you sense that you’ll keep your little ostrich neck safe. And then your day is coming.”

  Endearingly, Alex was hollering his powerful apocalyptic vision down an ISDN line from a child’s bedroom in his house, with choo-choo train wallpaper and an Empire Strikes Back poster pinned on the wall.

  “Are you going to be that Aztec villager who hands his child over to be lunchmeat for the priesthood? That’s what’s going to happen to you! In a hi-tech form! We’ll be right back.”

  “From his central Texas command centre, deep behind enemy lines, the information war continues with Alex Jones and his GCM radio network, after this break…”

  ♦

  After I had met Alex at Mount Carmel, I discovered that it was his own idea to rebuild David Koresh’s church. He raised the $93,000 needed through donations from his listeners.

  Randy had told me that Alex Jones was a true and tireless warrior. Now, Randy had flown home to his new wife in Iowa – “She’ll shoot me if I miss my plane,” he said – and so I asked Alex if I could watch him broadcast his show.

  “I am a war reporter,” yelled Alex to me, off the air. “That is what I do. There’s a whole buffet of corruption out there.”

  “Are you sure that the people behind Ruby Ridge and Waco were also behind Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center bombings?” I asked him.

 
“That’s not even debatable!” he roared. “Well. I guess you could debate Oklahoma City. But the World Trade Center is not even debatable. Clinton’s Reichstag. Horror.”

  Alex lit a cigarette. He flicked the ash into a styrofoam cup.

  “We’ve gotta cut the Hydra’s head off,” he yelled, “and drive it back to its black abyss.’”

  “I still don’t quite understand,” I said, “the relationship between the Bilderberg Group and what happened to Randy Weaver.”

  “The Bilderbergers,” said Alex, “are the Roman Senate. It’s a pyramid. They’re way up there. Below them you’ve got the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, then you’ve got us down here, the cattle, the human resources. And Randy Weaver is way out over there. See? He left. They hate that! So they scare the cattle back into the pen. See? Burn ‘em out! I’m living in a place where black helicopters, one hundred and fifty miles south of me, are burning buildings, terrorizing people, and I’m the extremist?”

  “Who says you’re an extremist?” I asked.

  “The Anti-Defamation League!” he yelled. “The ADL are a bucket of black paint and a brush. They’re worse than the Klan. They get massive funding from the globalists. It doesn’t matter if your girlfriend’s Jewish, your little sister’s Korean” – Alex’s little sister is Korean – “anybody who wants to live free is a racist. The ADL is the scum of the earth. You aren’t going to use that last line out of context are you?”

  “No, no,” I said.

  He turned back to his microphone.

  “OK! We’re back!”

  But we weren’t back. Alex was off the air. The ISDN line had mysteriously died.

  “Damn!” he yelled. “Not again! This is the New World Order!”

  Alex thumped the table and looked out of the window and saw a telephone engineer out on the pavement, fiddling with the box that held his ISDN line.

  “There he is. You little turd. I’ve caught you this time.”

  Alex ran outside to the pavement, leaving me in the studio with Violet, his girlfriend.

  “This does not scare me,” said Violet. She looked out of the window. “The point is,” she said, “it does not scare me.”