Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson
Jon Ronsonis a Welsh journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and radio presenter whose works include the best-selling The Men Who Stare at Goatsand The Psychopath Test. He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming something of a faux-naïf character himself in his stories...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth10 May 1967
constant jew
But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.
few five home longest thom
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.
flown planes telling trade
I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically - not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that - but in the general sense.
bohemian cracks narrative sort takes
Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.
followers maybe people
Yeah, but in the end his followers take what they want from his philosophy. Maybe it doesn't matter what's going on in David Icke's mind. It's how other people take him.
david referring rule says secretly
When David says that 12-foot blood-drinking child-sacrificing pedophile lizards secretly rule the world, he really is referring to lizards.
answer crazy family fbi living music next plays rather respected
They said, 'Come on, who would you rather have living next to you? The crazy white-separatist Weavers or a family of respected FBI agents?' ... The only answer I could come up with was, 'Whichever one plays their music quieter.'
human paint relate
I was always out to paint them with human characteristics we could relate to. They really are, by and large, personable in the flesh.
believe certainly crazy mountain threat top utterly
I certainly believe the Weavers were utterly innocent, were a threat to nobody, and if you can't believe crazy things on top of a mountain in Idaho, where can you believe crazy things?
hate writing ambition
As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
adventure trying littles
Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.
relationship childhood understanding
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.
mad people personality
Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
rejection sides talk-to-me
But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.