Making sense of conspiracy theorists
It is 20 years since Jon Ronson wrote ‘Them,’ his eye-popping investigation into conspiracy theorists. Now, in a world awash with tales of pedophile elites and puppet masters, is he any closer to understanding it all?
By Jon Ronson / The Guardian
In 1999 I sat in a Vancouver cafe with a group of anti-capitalist activists. They’d just returned from protesting the WTO in Seattle to find a new, far stranger foe in town — David Icke. He was there to lecture about how the ruling elite are actually child-sacrificing, blood-drinking pedophile lizards in human disguise.
Nobody had ever suggested such a thing before, and the activists were working to get his books seized and destroyed. They were alarmed not just by the echoes of anti-semitism but because something startling was happening. Icke was beginning to win over people who should have been on their side. I wrote back then that they were “seeing an omen of the blackest kind, the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land.” But this wasn’t prophecy on my part. I thought they were probably being overdramatic.