Them

by Jon Ronson

  “Who is in charge of the New World Order?” I asked him.

  “The anti-Christ Jew,” he said. “The same one that murdered Abel.”

  “All Jews or just some Jews?” I asked him.

  “All Jews,” he said. “It’s a blood order. DNA has proved it.”

  “But not all international bankers and multi-nationalists are Jews,” I said.

  “If you are against the white race, you are anti-Christ. And if you are anti-Christ, you are a Jew,” he said. “Simple as that.”

  A big, bearded man holding a baby begged Pastor Butler’s indulgence at this point. He said he would like to add something. Pastor Butler allowed it.

  “Some of the people who control the banking system say they are not Jewish,” he said. “But they are racially Jews.”

  “So even if they are, say, Christian, they are actually Jewish?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Look into their genealogy. You’ll find a Jew in there somewhere, adulterating the blood. Then there’s no going back.”

  I was anxious to leave Aryan Nations. I felt that coming here was a stupid mistake. I said my goodbyes and I headed out towards my car, chaperoned by Staff Leader Reichert Von Barron. But my path was blocked by two skinheads.

  “What’s your genealogy?” asked one.

  There was a silence.

  “My genealogy?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I have no idea,” I snapped. “I’m Church of England.”

  The skinheads continued to stare at me. They didn’t move. I could see they didn’t believe me.

  “Church of England, huh?” interrupted Staff Leader Reichert Von Barron. “They’re the ones that make you pay! Ha ha! Passing round the old collection bucket!”

  He smiled at me. The two skinheads drifted away. I do not know why Reichert stepped in to alleviate the situation. But I was very glad that he did.

  Reichert and I made small talk until we reached my car. I asked him what the skinheads were doing that night. He said that a bunch of them were planning to make a pilgrimage down to the Weaver cabin, and just sit there for a while and take it all in.

  I got into my car and turned on the engine. I wasn’t the only person leaving. A young woman pulled out in front of me. She needed to do some chores in town. She headed off down the drive, and then she stopped, as if she had forgotten something. She reversed back, and wound down her window.

  “Sieg Heil!” she yelled.

  “Sieg Heil!” yelled the skinheads milling around in the car park.

  Her Sieg Heil felt to me like fortification – like a multivitamin – something with which to steel herself, to carry with her into the evil lands that lay beyond Aryan Nations.

  She drove off. I followed.

  ♦

  Some months passed. Then one day Thom Robb called to say that he was taking the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on the road, for a rally in Michigan. This was an opportunity for Thom to show the people of Michigan that his Klan was different, that he ran a positive and cheerful Klan that didn’t concern itself with slurs.

  “Come along for the ride!” yelled Thom. “We’ll have fun!” After my uneasy journey into the world of racism that lay beyond Thom’s amiable Klan compound, it was nice to be back, sitting inside his no longer startling white building. Thom was happy to have me back too. He greeted me like an old friend who had been on a hazardous journey. We laughed and joked.

  I suspect that Thom likes Jews when he doesn’t realize we are Jewish. He seems to appreciate Jewish traits. Not, of course, the traits he consciously associates with Judaism – that we are direct descendants of Satan, that our Zionist Occupied Government secretly controls the world, et cetera – but the other traits, our urbanity and quick wit. Possessing these particular traits in spades, I was careful to tone them down when I first met Thom. But I soon stopped doing this because nobody seemed to mind.

  ♦

  We set off at dawn. There were four of us in the van. Flavis, Thom’s deputy, was sleeping. He was once a hardliner, a member of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood down in Mississippi. But now he was New Klan. He was big and unshaven with a bushy moustache and a pony-tail. Thom’s grown-up daughter Rachel was asleep too.

  Thom looked around and he saw that Flavis and Rachel were sleeping.

  Quietly, and apropos of nothing, he said to me, “Do you think I’m weird?”

  There was a silence.

  “I’m sorry?” I said. I looked over at Thom, assuming he was kidding around, but he wasn’t.

  “Do you think I’m weird?” said Thom. There was an intimacy, an awkwardness, in his voice. “As a person,” said Thom. “You know.”

  I ummed and ahhed. Was Thom weird? He is the leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But as a person. Thom wanted to know whether I considered him weird as a person. I felt that Thom, as a person, was in a transitional phase between weird and not weird.

  Thom said, “The thing is, I spend all my time with, you know, Klansmen. So how do I know if I’m weird. We’re all weird.”

  “There’s no benchmark,” I agreed, “if one spends all one’s time with Klansmen.”

  “That’s the thing,” said Thom. “That’s exactly the thing. There’s no benchmark.”

  “There’s no comparison point,” I said. “I can see how that may frustrate you.”

  “Exactly,” said Thom. “So what do you think?”

  “You have to be liked,” I explained to Thom. “The thing is, most people don’t like the Klan. They think that you are frightening.”

  “That’s exactly the thing,” said Thom. “That’s why we put on a show in our rallies. You know, David Letterman said ‘America wants cheap tricks’. So we don’t go out there and scream and holler at the protesters. We put on a show. You’ll see that. We’ve got music, uniforms and flags, so there’s certainly some entertainment in that.”

  “People want to be entertained,” I said. “You’ve got to be entertaining.”

  “Exactly,” said Thom, thoughtfully. “It’s like those Hollywood movies that portray the Klan as ignorant tobacco-chewing rednecks. When you’re watching a movie like that, your mind joins in with the storyline, and their message slips in through the back door.”

  Thom showed me the book he’d brought with him for the journey, Tony Scott’s Living a Diamond Life in a Rocky World. He read to me from the jacket:

  Tony Scott takes you through an interpersonal look at the Diamond Life. How to get it and how to live it. You’ll be challenged to look at your accomplishments and failures and dreams like you never have before. Multiple victories are yours.

  Rachel was awake now, and reading Laws of Leadership.

  Flavis was awake and reading Tactics of Very Successful People.

  At 7 p.m., we arrived in Paw Paw, Michigan. We checked into a cheap motel in a horrible strip-mall. As soon as I arrived in my room, I put down my bags and started surfing the forty channels on offer. I stopped on Channel 22 to hear a CBS announcement: “Coming up next. The new face of Ku Klux Klan hatred in America.”

  I lay down on my bed. I wondered whether I should call Thom to tell him that there was a possibility that he was about to be featured on national television. But I considered that if the news report was going to feature him, he’d have known about it.

  The ads ended and 48 Hours began – 48 Hours is a prime-time coast-to-coast news programme.

  There was a woodland in moonlight. The music was foreboding, a single, menacing, throbbing note. The music warned me that something evil was in this forest, and it was about to come out and get me. A hooded figure appeared. There was a red glow to him, a glow emanating from a nearby burning cross.

  “Meet Jeff Berry,” announced the commentary. “He’s the man some call the new face of hate in America.”

  “It’s Jeff!” I thought, in the way you think when you see someone you know on TV.

  Then Jeff was standing on the steps of a courthouse. He was surrounded by his followers,
who wore a variety of multicoloured robes. One man held up a noose, from which was hanging a lynched black baby doll wearing a nappy.

  Jeff yelled, “The Klan is getting bigger, aren’t you glad you’re not a nigger?”

  And then, “I have a daughter that’s twenty-one and a son that’s twenty-three, and you know what? They hate niggers too!’”

  As I lay on my bed, I wondered whether Thom and Flavis and Rachel were also watching this news report.

  ♦

  The next morning, as we drove from the motel into town, it turned out that all four of us, in our individual rooms, had turned on the television set the moment we’d checked in, and discovered the report while surfing the forty available channels. The mood in the hire van was understandably subdued. Flavis seemed haunted by Jeff Berry’s good fortune.

  “I did notice that he uses the N-word rather a lot,” I said.

  “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” murmured Flavis. “That’s all they want. They don’t want somebody up there telling white people to love their children. They just want somebody up there hollering nigger, nigger, nigger. He’s speaking from a script.’” Flavis gazed mournfully out of the window. He said, “If it wasn’t for Jerry Springer he’d be a nothing and a nobody and nobody would know him.”

  “Flavis has called the Jerry Springer Show on countless occasions to suggest they have the real Klan on,” said Thom, “but they don’t want to know. They never call back. They just want the idiots up there.”

  “The idiots,” said Flavis, “who say nigger, nigger, nigger.”

  ♦

  Thom had a meeting in town with Christine Cox, a journalist on the local paper. Chris was Asian. The American media routinely send non-whites to talk to white supremacists, to see if they will be abused or refused an interview. (No wonder the Klan thought that the media had been overrun by a multi-racial conspiracy orchestrated by the Jewish moguls.)

  We wandered through the newspaper’s corridors. Typists stopped typing mid-sentence and stared at the Ku Klux Klan. There were whispers.

  “So,” said Chris, when we were seated in a private conference room, “shall I call you guys the Klan? Would that offend you?”

  “That won’t offend us,” said Thom. “Call me Thom.”

  “So, I hear that you guys were on TV last night,” said Chris, brightly.

  Flavis flinched. He stood up. He paced the room.

  “No,” said Thom, patiently. “That wasn’t us.”

  “Ah,” said Chris. “OK.”

  Flavis explained the differences between Thom and Jeff Berry, who was a clown and a moron and not even a real Klansman. Thom interrupted to tell Chris that he didn’t hate anyone. He was, instead, filled with love and one day he hoped to represent white Christian heterosexuals in Washington, DC.

  For an hour or so, Chris listened to Thom’s vision of an upbeat Klan, a Klan that didn’t hate anyone. Finally, she said, “OK. So let’s say that the Klan did get in control of government, and this became a homeland for white Christian, straight people. Do the rest of us get to stay or do we have to leave?”

  “That’s a hypothetical question,” said Thom.

  “But that’s what you’re aiming for, right?” said Chris. She pointed at Rachel. “She’s President.” She pointed at Flavis. “He’s Speaker of the House. You’ve got a White House full of Klansmen – ”

  “We’d take a vote,” interrupted Thom. “OK? We’d take a vote. Thank you for your time.”

  Chris held her hand out so Thom could shake it.

  “Hey!” said Thom. “Wow!”

  He gave Chris a big, friendly handshake, and then they collected their papers and left the office.

  ♦

  Outside in the car park, and unaware that I was standing right behind them, Flavis and Thom discussed their feelings about Chris Cox. And I heard a strange Thom, a different Thom, say to Flavis, “I thought she was a pretty good reporter. But she’s a…she’s a High Yellow, I think. I think she’s a High Yellow.”

  Flavis said, “I think she’s Asian. She’s Asian and…uh…”

  Thom turned around. He saw me standing there. I smiled awkwardly.

  “She’s Asian,” said Flavis, “and…”

  Thom touched Flavis lightly on his arm.

  “She’s Asian…” said Flavis, still unaware of my presence.

  “We don’t have to talk about that now,” said Thom.

  Flavis saw me. He looked down. He adjusted his tie.

  Then the three of us just stood there for a moment not saying anything.

  “OK!” said Thom, brightly, clapping his hands together. “Let’s boogie!”

  ♦

  Saturday. The day of the rally. Thom’s half-dozen flag-holders greeted us at a farmhouse in the countryside outside St Joseph, Michigan. They took turns in the bathroom, fixing their hair with hairspray provided by Rachel. Fully suited and lacquered, Thom called the flag-holders outside for a last-minute briefing.

  “If the protesters throw anything,” he said, “you simply move to the side. Like this. But don’t give the appearance that it emotionally tore you apart, like you’re going to whine about it now. If the protesters holler, ‘Your flies are open’, just ignore them. OK? Don’t look down.”

  There were nods.

  “I don’t want to see you flip the finger at anyone. No smoking and no chewing tobacco. OK? And no chewing gum because it may look like you’re chewing tobacco.”

  Thom introduced me. He said, “So I don’t want to hear anybody say anything that will embarrass us in front of our friend from England.”

  “Our future supporter from England,” added Flavis, slapping me heartily on the back.

  “Be good,” said Thom. “I don’t want to hear any bad words slip out.”

  “And try not to sway,” said Rachel.

  ♦

  We set off into town. The police were lined up on horseback down Main Street, dozens of them. Thom wound down the window and gave them friendly waves. They nodded and their faces were masked by visors.

  “The police are really great, really supportive,” said Thom, turning back to me. And again, to the police, “Have a good day!”

  And we parked up behind the court house. We passed through the metal detectors. We turned the corner through a doorway cut out of a tall steel fence, which was slammed shut behind us. And then we were in the car park.

  The podium stood to our left. In front of us was a vast nothingness, a tremendous field of tarmac stretching out all the way down to another high steel fence, behind which stood two dozen people, little distant specks of colour – the audience.

  This enormous space was what Thom had assented to in his negotiations with the town officials. He had agreed, albeit with reluctance, to this void that lay before us. He had hoped to hold the rally on the steps of the court house, just as Jeff Berry had on TV. Court-house steps have a gravitas. One can picture weighty and legitimate declarations delivered on court-house steps, imparted to the expectant crowds below.

  But the town officials had said no to the steps. They insisted Thom spoke instead in the car park next to the court house. They also demanded a 300-foot gap between the podium and the audience, for security purposes. Now – vast and empty of cars and bordered with high wire fences that separated the Klan from the audience – the car park suddenly resembled a cage for dangerous animals at a very humane zoo.

  Most of the audience was black. They poked their fingers through the fence. They held their babies up to get a better view of the Ku Klux Klan.

  “Why do you think it’s such a low turnout?” I asked Thom.

  “It isn’t a low turnout,” said Thom. “Look at those people over there, and those people way over there, and those people way over by the street corner over there.”

  “So you’re going to be speaking to the people beyond those people standing at the fence?” I said.

  “Actually,” said Thom, “I’m speaking to those people over there.”

  Tho
m pointed at the press enclosure, fenced off to the right. It bustled. There were camera crews, TV news reporters, journalists with notepads. The press outnumbered the audience. They even outnumbered the huge police presence.

  “So our object here,” said Thom, “is to have some good soundbites and not make any mistakes, and not say anything foolish, so when they do report on us they’re limited to positive statements.”

  We walked back to the podium, now dressed with flags held by motionless Klansmen, much like a mini Nuremberg rally. Flavis hooked up the PA and he pressed play.

  ‘Amazing Grace’ thundered across the emptiness. This was the musical entertainment Thom spoke of in the van.

  “You’re going to have difficulties with body language,” I said to Thom.

  “Yes I am,” concurred Thom.

  “There doesn’t seem any point in even trying out body language today,” I said.

  “This is what I hate, you see?” said Thom. “These town officials don’t understand the nuances of what goes into public speaking.”

  He took to the stage.

  “Good afternoon my white brothers and sisters,” he said, and his words boomed through the public address system, across the cavernous car park, across the acres of tarmac, to the audience that stood such a terribly long way off, behind the faraway fence.

  “Fuck YOU!” replied the protesters, their faint echoes reaching back to us at the podium.

  Thom stood to attention and he smiled broadly, as if to say that this juvenile behaviour was hurting nobody’s feelings. It was, however, impossible for the audience to note Thom’s facial expression from such a long way away.

  When the heckles finally subsided, Thom cleared his throat and he addressed the car park.

  “That was delightful,” he said.

  “You’re delightful,” came the distant response.

  “I heard a rumour just the other day,” said Thom, “I heard that the local churches were having prayers that it would rain today. I heard they were having this intense prayer that it would rain all day and rain us out! Ladies and gentlemen, God didn’t hear their prayers today!”

  There was a moment’s startled silence and then an incensed “Fuck YOU!”