Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists launched him to worldwide fame – and more dubiously, launched conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Though Jones has been deplatformed, his influence lingers: just this week, it was reported that Australia’s far-right One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts praised Jones in 2024 as “a beacon of hope around the world”.

Researched and written in the years preceding September 11, and published in April 2001, Them – which Ronson described in a preface to its second edition as “a snapshot of life in the Western world on 10 September 2001” – is turning 25.

Ronson’s original plan was to spend time with people who’d been described as “the extremist monsters of the Western world” as they went about their everyday lives. They included neo-Nazis, militias and Omar Bakri, a UK Islamic fundamentalist who called himself “Osama Bin Laden’s man in London”, and whom Ronson shadowed for a year in 1996 for a documentary.

Among other things, Ronson recorded the “clownish” Bakri watching the Lion King with a baby on his knee, and asking him to guard the money he’d been collecting for Hamas in giant Coca Cola bottles, while he retrieved a coat – which he agonised over as a Jewish person, but did (seemingly to avoid awkwardness).

Bakri, who told the Daily Mail the September 11 attacks were “exciting”, was barred from the United Kingdom after leaving in 2005. In 2010, he was arrested in Lebanon and sentenced to life in prison after a terrorism trial. Released pending retrial, he was sentenced again in 2015 to six years hard labour.

“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 ours,” Ronson writes. But what started as a series of profiles of extremist leaders “quickly became something stranger”, when he realised the very different people he was following all shared a belief in the New World Order: a conspiracy theory that imagines “a tiny elite rules the world from inside a secret room”.

This tyrannical, shadowy elite, Ronson soon discovered, was said to launch wars and wield almost unimaginable power. It has the ability to, among other things, “select and cast out the heads of state, control Hollywood and the markets and the flow of capital, operate a harem of under-age kidnapped sex slaves”.

If there was any truth to the theory, Ronson reasoned, there must be an actual secret room, and it had to be located somewhere. So he resolved to find it.

At various points, he found himself chased by men in dark glasses and surveilled from behind trees. He also managed to witness robed international chief executives participate in a bizarre effigy-burning ritual in the forests of northern California – an experience he shared with Jones, then a harmless-seeming regional radio crank, based in Texas.

Now, 25 years on, that worldview has arguably become easier to sustain than Ronson could have imagined. Revelations surrounding figures such as Jeffrey Epstein – who did operate a network of underage girls he coerced into sexually servicing powerful men – have shown the wealthy and powerful can and do conceal serious and shocking crimes through networks of influence and privilege.

But rather than confirming the existence of a secret cabal directing world events, such scandals have often been absorbed into far broader conspiracy narratives – from QAnon to claims about bloodthirsty global elites harvesting adrenochrome from children – further blurring sometimes porous lines between fact and fiction.

Genuine curiosity and refusing........

© The Conversation