Jon Ronson

Did the Klansmen ever ask you about your ethnicity or religion?

At one point, Flavis -- Thom's deputy -- asked me if I was Jewish. He actually said, "I don't mind if you're a Jew. Are you a Jew?" I wanted to tell them I was Jewish, but I didn't want to tell them right then. Because I felt that if I told them I was Jewish, they were going to close up. I knew them well enough to know that they weren't going to harm me, but I knew that they wouldn't be as open with me. I always intended to tell them on the fourth and final trip. And then there was no fourth and final trip. It was tactics. But when Flavis said, "I don't mind," it was kind of like I had my answer. When I did tell them -- had I told them -- that's how they would have responded. They wouldn't have gone, "Oh, after all this, you're Jewish!" They wouldn't have changed toward me. They just would have been more taciturn.

You spent a lot of time with these people. Did you ever feel like you were becoming one of them?

Well, I never stayed with any of them for more than one week at a time. Most people in my position, I guess, would have been with them for five weeks or six weeks. I would be with Thom Robb for five days, then I'd go home for a few weeks, then I'd go back to Thom. The longest I was ever away was two weeks.

Doing the trips in small doses really helped me maintain my sanity. Though in Portugal -- when I was with Big Jim Tucker, trailing the Bilderberg Group -- I really did go a bit crazy, thinking the Bilderberg henchmen were following me. What was scary was when the two worlds began to bleed into each other. There was a little while after I returned to London when I was utterly paranoid about what the Bilderberg Group might do to me. Not that I thought they were going to kill me, but I thought they might be surveilling me or something. Which isn't that crazy to think. I began to get kind of panicky. It made me realize how easy it is to cross the line. It only takes a couple of minor car chases to turn into David Icke, believing that the rulers of the universe are a bunch of lizards. I didn't like that at all.

But there was something nice about being in a Klan compound on Thursday and being at Legoland with [my son] Joel on Saturday. I remember being with the Klan in Missouri. We'd been together really intensively for three days. We'd been together every minute, because we were driving across America together. We checked in to this motel and I turned on the television and flipped channels and "Sesame Street" was on. I actually found myself bursting into tears watching "Sesame Street." I was thinking, These are my people! What am I doing with these Klan people? These are my people. I was really moved by Big Bird. It's funny -- spending time with these people can affect you in a subconscious way that you don't even recognize. It does have an impact. It's like having those nightmares that you're being lynched by the Klan. On a conscious level you're rationalizing things, but it seeps into your unconscious.

So when you were traveling with the Klan or Big Jim Tucker, people must have taken you for a Klansman or what have you. Did this make you uncomfortable? Did you ever feel the urge to unmask yourself?

Well, I did. When I thought I was in serious danger, in Portugal, I asked the British embassy to please pass on a message to the Bilderberg Group, saying that I may be with Jim Tucker, but I'm not of Jim Tucker. Also, for instance, when the Klan were being interviewed by a television reporter, Chris Cox -- the Asian woman that they called "the High Yellow" -- and we walked through the corridors, the people at the television station obviously thought I was a Klansman. Because, you know, it was just the Klan and me. How would they know I wasn't a Klansman? I didn't tell the reporter that I wasn't a Klansman. I was just kind of sitting there. And she just assumed that I was one. Then I saw her the next day, at the Klan rally, and I explained who I was to her. And I did feel the urge to do it. Definitely. I did feel the urge to make her realize that I wasn't one of them.

Was she surprised?

No. She said that she had been perplexed -- because I didn't strike her as a Klansman. She was wondering what I was doing there.

Did you have any trouble getting the extremists to allow you to trail them, sometimes for months at a time? Were they worried that you would mock them?

No. The people who were really difficult were the people on our side of the fence. Like, I heard that the Rockefeller Foundation was teaching a philanthropy course for billionaires, so I tried to get in on it. They just looked at me like, why the hell would we let you in on this? What possible reason could we have to let you in? But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

Interesting, considering their distrust of the Jewish media conspiracy.

Maybe they're just really optimistic. Maybe they think that this time it will be better. And you know, in a way, this time it was different. They don't come out of it all that well, but at least they're not portrayed as demons. The book doesn't isolate them as freak shows. It puts them into the context of the real world. The nicest quote I got was in one of the British papers. The reviewer said that the book doesn't just show that the extremists are weird; it shows that their fantasies take sustenance from the real world. It was really important to me to show that. Otherwise, the book would have been about an ironic outsider with an arched eyebrow. And that would have been a rubbish book, I think.

I say that I was trying to see our world through the extremists' eyes and I'm not being arch. I really was trying to do that. Which is why the [Anti-Defamation League] chapter is so important, the Ruby Ridge chapter is so important. There are the times when we begin to understand what motivates the extremists, what gets them into the whirlpool of paranoia. Because at Ruby Ridge, you know, the federal government acted just like the extremists expected them to. Ruby Ridge is where all conspiracy theories come true.

The whole semiotics of it, the whole getting away with it by calling him [Randy Weaver] a white supremacist, I thought that was really kind of shocking. And for me that makes the book more than just a good, fun adventure story. We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

After Sept. 11 there was a strong desire to see the world through the eyes of the terrorists, wasn't there?

The interesting thing about Sept. 11 is that it took a bunch of fanatics to teach us that we do have a belief system. At the beginning of the book I say, "The extremists say that the Western liberal cosmopolitan establishment is itself a fanatical, depraved belief system. I like it when they say this because it makes me feel as if I have a belief system." And I think one legacy of Sept. 11 is that we're now saying, "Fuck you, OK? Our secular, liberal belief system might be fanatical. But fuck you." Which I think is progress. It's taught us how to see ourselves through their eyes, but it's also taught us that we have something worth protecting.

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