Jon Ronson - The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the “Alt-Right” (Kindle Single)

The Elephant in the Room
A journey into the Trump campaign and the Alt-Right
By Jon Ronson

Copyright 2016, Jon Ronson

THE TVS AT THE EQUINOX were showing a Donald Trump rally. Hillary Clinton might have been holding her own rally somewhere but, if so, it wasnt on any of these screens. In fact, a few weeks ago MSNBC, Fox News and CNN had ignored a Hillary Clinton speech entirely, choosing instead to broadcast a live feed of the empty podium from which Donald Trump would soon speak. His empty podium: thats how insatiable our appetite was to hear Donald Trump say staggering things in the spring of 2016, back when it was new and strange.

I plugged in my headphones and heard someone in the crowd shout out to Trump: Are you going back on the Alex Jones show?

Alex Jones? Trump said. He was a nice guy! You like him?

It was a GREAT interview! the man called back.

Oh good, Donald Trump said. Alex Jones. Nice guy.

I was so jolted by this exchange I almost fell off my elliptical. Donald Trump knows Alex Jones?

I AM BASICALLY ALEX JONESS Simon Cowell. I star-spotted him in the late-1990s. Hed been a locally renowned radio talk show host in Austin, Texas, back then, but I gave him the idea that catapulted him to fame. My idea was for the two of us to sneak into a secretive summer camp in the forests of Northern California called Bohemian Grove, where powerful men like George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger were rumored to undertake an annual ritual in which a human effigy was thrown into the fiery belly of a giant stone owl.

That cant be true, I thought when I first heard of the ritual. I wonder if I can get in and film it?

I didnt want to infiltrate the camp alone, because if I failed there would be no story. It would just be me failing to enter a summer camp. If I failed alongside the charismatic fledgling conspiracy talk show host Alex Jones, however, I could at least write about him failing.

We didnt fail. We succeeded wildly. But our relationship foundered soon afterward. We were like the gold prospectors in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre it was our success that tore us apart. Before long, we were trading insults on talk shows. Our fight centered on our differing interpretations of the ritual we had managed to witness. Alex was suggesting we had possibly witnessed an actual human sacrifice which we definitely hadnt. To counter his irresponsible claim that Bohemian Grove was the place where world leaders gather to satiate Moloch, their owl god, I was forced into the awkward position of defending the Bush familys proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What we had actually seen was a pageant amateur dramatics albeit a very odd pageant.

The 1990s became the 2000s. I was aware that Alex was growing in prominence. I noticed him trending on Twitter from time to time, for telling his now millions of fans that U.S. scientists were covertly creating man-fish hybrids, that atheists worship Lucifer, and that the government puts secret chemicals in juice boxes to turn Americans gay: After youre done drinking your little juices youre ready to put makeup on, wear a short skirt, put together a garden of roses or something.

And then there were terrible things, like Alexs assertion that the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children was completely fake they clearly used actors. Inspired by claims like this, Sandy Hook truthers had begun bombarding the parents of the murdered children with messages like: Youre a fraud and an asshole. Rot in hell you fucking prick. (That one had been sent to Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son, Noah, died in the shooting.)

But I paid little attention. I had moved on from the conspiracy theory world. It didnt seem like it mattered.

Suddenly, Alex mattered.

Donald Trump: Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. And I think well be speaking a lot. And youll be looking at me in a year a year into office youll be saying, Wow. He did a great job.

Alex Jones: Donald Trump, I hope you can help un-cripple America. You will be attacked for coming on. We know you know that. Thank you.

Infowars, Alex Jones Internet show, Dec. 2, 2015

On a personal level, I like Alex. I consider our Bohemian Grove infiltration to be among the great nights of my life, and how could I not feel warmly toward the man I had shared the adventure with? But Donald Trump might be on the verge of becoming the leader of the free world, and it was incredible to discover that he takes Alex seriously that Alex might be influencing him.

Alex is basically the most irresponsible man I have ever met. He uses his powers to inflame paranoia. He boldly makes stuff up to suit his weird agenda. Alex eschews facts and reason and he definitely should not have political sway.

The world in which Alex is a leading voice a loose collection of internet conspiracy theorists and nationalists and some racists suddenly had a name: the alt-right movement. As 2016 continued, Trump delighted them, or derived inspiration from them, in other ways. He suggested that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks. He retweeted compliments from a Twitter user called white-genocide-TM, whose location was listed as Jewmerica. The woman he named as a campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, would tweet things like: Perfect, Obamas dad born in Africa, Mitt Romneys dad born in Mexico. Any pure breeds left?

The last time I heard archaic phrases like pure breeds spoken by people who pore over lineages to spot contamination was when I spent a year with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Harrison, Arkansas. Id overhear their leader Thom Robb grumble to his people about nearby Asians: Shes a High Yellow. And then there was the time I visited Aryan Nations a white supremacist compound in Idaho and the skinheads, peering at my Jewish face, surrounded me to ask my genealogy. I said I was Church of England. They looked dubious, but reluctantly didnt beat me up.

Pure Breed. High Yellow. Genealogy.

I would never have predicted that these people would one day have the ear of a presidential nominee that their movement might carry a man to victory. How had it happened? On a nuts-and-bolts level, who had brokered the meeting between Alex and Donald Trump?

And then, as I watched Trump praise Alex on the TV screen at the Equinox, I suddenly had an exciting realization. I had had no way into Trumps world. But now I did. If I could somehow rekindle my damaged relationship with Alex, he was my way in. The Republican National Convention was approaching. Perhaps Alex would be there. I flew to Cleveland.

* * *

THE STREETS ARE GOING TO EXPLODE today. The man telling me this was a documentary producer, Greg. We were talking on the street outside my Airbnb in Clevelands warehouse district. It was Monday, Day One of the convention. Greg had been preparing for Cleveland for months, he told me. He had crews positioned all over downtown, poised to chronicle the violence.

Greg saw violence as inevitable. It had been escalating ever since Donald Trump starting telling his supporters at rallies, If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell I will pay the legal fees. And, to a protester being thrown out of his event in Nevada: I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? Theyd be carried out in a stretcher, folks. Id like to punch him in the face. There were screams of laughter from his fans.

In Tucson, Arizona, a protester was sucker-punched to the floor by a Trump supporter. While he was down, other Trump fans gathered around to kick him. In Las Vegas, a Trump fan shouted Sieg Heil at a black protester. Light the motherfucker on fire, someone yelled. When CNNs Don Lemon asked Trump if he planned to tell his supporters to ease up on the violence, Trump replied, I certainly dont incite violence.