Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson

Author:Jon Ronson [Ronson, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

But it was over. The professor had blown it.

IN THE DAYS that followed this TV debate, some of the coalition began privately admitting to me the whole thing was beginning to backfire. David Icke’s fans were not, by and large, anti-Semites. It was more alarming than that. They were, in fact, the coalition’s core constituents—liberals and antiracists and left-wingers concerned with the perils of global capitalism. These people were beginning to look upon the coalition as the villains, as the hidden hand, as them.

When three representatives of the coalition appeared on a radio phone-in show to drum up support for a mass protest against David Icke, they received a volley of antagonistic questions. Why were they obsessed with denying freedom of speech to someone who clearly wasn’t an anti-Semite? Who was really behind the coalition? What were they hiding? And so on.

The coalition hastily convened a meeting at a downtown coffee bar to discuss new tactics. Sam suggested producing a press release announcing that David Icke was suffering from some form of mental illness.

“To me he sounds schizophrenic,” he said. “Hearing voices.”

“Having visions,” agreed Rob from Anti-Racist Action.

“The nutcase stuff,” said Sam. “Do we want to hang him on that?”

But the others argued forcibly that the coalition should avoid these areas.

“We’re not here to do a psychological analysis on him,” said a woman called Julia. “Just leave it. Let’s leave it.”

But as the evening wore on, the gathering began to seem more like a postmortem than a strategy meeting. A young activist called Ali said she felt she had pinpointed the coalition’s tactical error: They had made young people feel stupid.

“Young people are seeing this big task before them,” explained Ali, “trying to combat economic global corporatization. And a lot of them have read David Icke and thought, ‘Hey! He’s on our side. I’m looking for answers and he seems to have them.’ And we’ve made them feel stupid, like they’ve done something bad by getting sucked in.” Ali paused. “And now they’re saying to us, ‘Don’t tell me I’m stupid!’ What we should have said to them was, ‘You’re not stupid. We understand why you thought he was OK.’ But we didn’t. And now they think we think they’re stupid.”

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