Them at 25: Jon Ronson’s adventures with extremists made him famous – and Alex Jones, too

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…