Jon Ronson Unravels A White Nationalist Conspiracy In 'The Debutante'

Did Timothy McVeigh act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy? One Oklahoma debutante turned goth turned Nazi could hold the key, as Jon Ronson explains in our new interview.

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Jon Ronson occupies a rare space in journalism. He’s a pioneering gonzo journalist who has disappeared down more rabbit holes and infiltrated more extreme groups than just about anyone, and he’s done it all while maintaining the persona of… well, basically the anti-swashbuckler. Where Hunter S. Thompson was eventually consumed by booze and drugs and the alter-ego he’d created, Ronson remains a soft-spoken, bespectacled British man seemingly more likely to blend into a room than to command it.

The first time I heard Ronson’s subdued and slightly tentative Welsh lilt, I didn’t think I’d last more than five minutes with it. It started to grow on me immediately, eventually became inseparable from his inimitable storytelling style, and now I devour all Ronson’s radio documentaries and podcasts the day they drop, frequently wishing other podcasters could do it more like Ronson.

The difference between Ronson’s report from Bohemian Grove and Alex Jones’, with whom Ronson had infiltrated it back in the 90s, remains a case study in the importance of perspective. Whereas Alex Jones came away bellowing that the group had been practicing literal human sacrifice, that Jones had witnessed personally, Ronson saw a bunch of weird old men performing arcane, oddly homo-erotic bonding rituals — the banality of evil as opposed to Jones’s children’s cartoon of it. The key to Ronson isn’t that he’s studiously sober or dull, it’s that he’s genuinely curious about his subjects. He reports hoping to discover what the story is, not to bolster the story he’s already created in his mind, which makes him uniquely trustworthy, especially when he’s deliberately enmeshing himself in a tangle of conspiracy theories.

This aspect of Ronson’s character is arguably more important than ever in his latest podcast, The Debutante, for Audible. The Debutante is about Carol Howe, an Oklahoma debutante who became a goth, who became a Nazi, who became a government informant, who supposedly befriended Timothy McVeigh, and who, according to some people, is the key to understanding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as part of a broader White Nationalist conspiracy. Ronson began reporting it 30 years ago, as part of a documentary he now says “wasn’t particularly good.” Lately he felt compelled to revisit it.

With White Nationalism on the rise (see Alex Pareene’s “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party,” which seems more relevant every day), it’s easy to wonder whether some of the mistakes made in prosecuting White Nationalists in the 90s allowed the movement to metastasize into what it’s become today. It’s easy draw connections between some of the key events that brought us here. The ATF deciding to raid the Branch Dividian compound at Waco, Timothy McVeigh becoming radicalized due to Waco, the FBI and ATF not raiding other White Nationalist compounds specifically to avoid another Waco, possibly leading directly to the Oklahoma City bombing. And was that investigation wrapped up too quickly, before it could ensnare all those involved, and potentially some of the mentors of today’s White Nationalists?

Somehow, Ronson reports in The Debutante, Carol Howe is at the center of it all. It would’ve been easy for a storyteller to “connect the dots,” fulfilling our most conspiratorial notions without actually doing the work to credibly confirm. Jon Ronson is too dedicated for that, and on some level understands that the root of what makes the people who Howe was running around with dangerous in the first place is their belief in too-easy conspiracies. What is the defining feature of White Nationalists if not their willingness to make blanket generalizations when trying to describe Why Things Are Bad?

Over the course of The Debutante, some of the most tantalizing connections turn out to be pretty vaporous when exposed to the heat of real scrutiny. That might make The Debutante sound anti-climactic, but, along with giving us an intriguing character study (of a woman who followed goth music through to white supremacism before spiraling into opiate addiction, terrorism, and mental illness), The Debutante raises some important questions.

Maybe the root one is, how fascist should we be in fighting fascism? Is the legacy of Waco that the federal government were thuggish brutes, like Timothy McVeigh thought, and some continue to think? Or did that screw-up actually keep the ATF and FBI from being as proactive as they should’ve been, as others think? Is Carol Howe a victim or a villain, and how much responsibility does the FBI bear for ruining her life?

With all Ronson stories, there are the big questions that drive The Debutante, but it’s the characters that make it sing. That’s why, in between grilling him about the existential stuff, Ronson can also weigh in on topics such as “which Nazis were the most polite?”

Ronson, as always, has his conclusions about his latest story, but he doesn’t cut corners to get to them, which is what makes him so valuable.

(This conversation, which took place over Zoom, has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Do I still have to say that? People know that already, right?)

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VINCE MANCINI: I don't know if we've ever done a full video interview before.

JON RONSON: No, I don't think we have. So very nice to see what you actually look like.

I apologize in advance for my face. Of course, I know what you look like, so we're good there. You started reporting this story 30 years ago, basically. What made you take it up again?

It was kind of the story that got away. I wrote a very cursory piece at the time in The Guardian and made a little documentary, but it wasn't particularly good. And I always thought, "I just scratched the surface of this very mysterious story." And I think mysterious for a couple of reasons: first, she, Carol Howe, felt like a very mysterious person to me. You don't expect to find people like that in backwards neo-Nazi training camps. Class-wise, I'm talking about, that she came from the higher classes.

And secondly, the information that she was offering was also so mysterious. Is this a conspiracy theory that might actually be true, that rare thing? So before the pandemic around 2018, 2019, I took it up again really because I just thought, "God, that's the story that slipped through my fingers. If I really dig down into it, what will I find?" And then what happened I think is, I read this really interesting book called How Civil Wars Start. And the book's very much about how the extreme right are banding together and are unified, and we have to really be proactive. And I thought that book was fascinating, but it just reminded me a lot of Carol Howe's story, because at the heart of Carol Howe's story is, should we should proactively stop these people? If you believed Carol Howe's intelligence, then you should be raiding compounds.

Her intelligence in terms of there being this organized group that was looking to do [White Nationalist] terrorism, I suppose?

Yeah, this organized group that basically got away with mass murder, a whole group of people that were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing and they all got away with it [according to the theory] except for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. And then that got me thinking about, well, what are we like as storytellers and as evidence gatherers, what matters to us? How should we think of a story like that? So anyway, all of those thoughts were swirling and I thought, well, the thing to do is to go back into Carol's story and see what I find.

I mean this touches on Waco, and that keeps coming back up in pop culture lately. It seems like the whole Waco legacy is, we're torn between the idea that we need to go out there and confront these right wing groups now, and the idea that during Waco they did exactly that and screwed it up so badly that they made it worse. How do you think about those things?

Well, exactly, and that's so interesting to me. I do think that you could either say the lessons of Waco have been forgotten, or that the lessons have been rethought over the years. When Waco first happened, the lesson very much was, this is a terrible screw-up! Everyone died, and it shows that the government shouldn't be too heavy-handed, and look what's happening in Clinton's America, and we've got this really heavy-handed government who were prodding a hornet's nests, and maybe because the Cold War has just ended and America has all of this firepower, but nobody to aim it at. And what a terrible disaster. But over the years that's changed to like, we should be doing more Wacos because these people are unified and they're going to get us and if we don't get them first. So that's fascinating to me as an old liberal, it's interesting to see the things that I hold dear, I guess slipping through my fingers a little bit.

It seems like there's the same conflict in this story (about Carol Howe), which is, there's a way to read it as the FBI screwed up this woman's whole life.

Yes. It's a very nuanced, complicated story. In some ways the FBI did, I mean the FBI very shortly leaked her name, not on purpose, but just through shoddiness and I suppose through the fact that the Oklahoma City bombing had just happened and they had a lot on their plates. The ATF got her to do incredibly dangerous things and then just dropped her when her mental health started to spiral. And that speaks to the whole subject of confidential informants in America, how these young people, very often young women, are being asked to do things that trained law enforcement officers would find hair-raising. And a lot of confidential informants end up getting killed in drug deals gone wrong and so on. So one version of the story is, the federal government, through a mix of incompetence and just a bad attitude, really screwed up Carol's life. But there's another version of things that Carol had a difficult relationship with the truth and wasn't doing herself any favors either.

[One story covered in The Debutante is how Carol, according to her ex-husband who says he was there when it happened, broke both feet jumping off a monument at a park, and in the aftermath got addicted to painkillers. She would later go onto tell a story that some black guys chased or threw her off.]

The way that she broke her feet doing something kind of dumb and then immediately re-imagined it as a thing that some black guys did to her feels like a tidy little metaphor for the entire White Natioanalist movement in some ways.

Yeah, I think that's true. And she went on and on... She always stuck to her story, that her origin story was that she was at a park and she was set upon by black men and they threw her off a monument and broke her feet, and that's why she became a Nazi. She told that story in court, told it to Diane Sawyer... But when you think about it, that's not a plausible story. If you throw somebody off a roof, they're not going to land on their feet.

And she already had a swastika armband tattoo at that point too, didn't she? [Which would seem to undercut it as an origin story for white supremacy]

Yes, she did. You’re absolutely right. Her and Greg [her boyfriend] got their matching swastika tattoos before her spurious story.

I feel like there's this consistent theme in your work: what is the cognitive dissonance like in meeting someone with these abhorrant political views that maybe you end up finding personally charming or maybe just friendly?

Yeah, absolutely. And the kind of complexity of painting a rounded character portrait of somebody who has abhorrent views. I guess with me it comes from a place of naive excitement that I'm going to... Or, "Oh my God, I'm going to go to a diner in Tulsa to meet some old members of White Aryan Resistance. That's going to be interesting." I never really think about the dangers of it, because I just feel excited about the possibility to do things that other people don't do, which is why we become journalists.

But all my career, I always laugh when I remember an old neighbor of mine, a guy called Jonathan when I lived in London, and I was going for a walk with him, and I was complaining. I said, "God, this cult leader is being so mean to me." And he was really laughing and saying, "Why does this always surprise you? I can't believe this Nazi's being mean to me." Maybe that's a good way to go into any situation, hoping for the best. You have all of your critical faculties intact so that by the end of the story you can tell the story properly, but when you're in the middle of it, you're not being weighed down by preconceptions and biases and you’re just experiencing the story in a more wide-eyed way. I think that could lead to good storytelling.

Have you noticed any difference between, like, are American Nazis more personally polite than British Nazis? Is there some sort of southern hospitality thing that's competing with their politics or do you find it similar in both places?

Well, I've experienced both sorts of Nazi in America. When I went to Aryan Nations, I had all of these skinheads surrounding me and kind of said to me, "What's your genealogy?" That was the word they used, "What's your genealogy?" And I said, "I was Church of England."

They were very sketchy and violent and would've beaten me up I think if they were allowed to. Somebody high up in the Aryan Nations basically calmed the situation down and made some joke and the skinheads had all sort of wandered away from me. To this day, I don't know whether that was just a high ranking member of Aryan Nations deciding to not cause trouble or possibly an undercover informant saving my ass. Those kind of things do happen.

So I've experienced the really vicious young skinhead type of neo-Nazi who was dangerous and violent, but I've also experienced that southern hospitality side of things. I remember turning up at the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Harrison, Arkansas, and they were offering me peach cobbler. And then at one point they were all standing around this cross. This was a Klan that had banned cross burning except for once a year, and I was there for that annual cross burning. And because they were so rusty in it, they couldn't remember whether or not to soak the cross in kerosene and then raise it and set fire to it, or to raise it and then soak it and set fire to it.

So they were all standing around this cross on the ground having this conversation, and then their leader, Tom Robb, came over and said, "Tom, do we raise it and then soak it or do we soak it and then raise it?" And Tom said, "You soak it and then raise it. How the hell are you going to soak it once it's been raised?" And then he gave me a look as if to say, "Jon, I'm so sorry that my Klansmen are such idiots."

So I've had both is the long answer to your question.

Tell me about Elohim City. What was it and how many places are there like it? Are they still around?

Elohim City is still around and it hasn't really been in the news since the 90s, which I would argue is at least circumstantial evidence that they were right to not raid the place. The ATF nearly launched an armed raid on Elohim City shortly after Waco and the FBI stepped in and stopped the raid from happening. I'm telling this less for you than for if you wanted to put this into the interview so people understand what I'm talking about. Basically, Carol gave the ATF information that then led the ATF, even though they dropped Carol as an informant due to her mental instability, they decided to do an armed raid on Elohim City.

This is pivotal to the story because there's a lot of people out there who think that if the ATF had done an armed raid on Elohim City, then maybe the Oklahoma City bombing wouldn't have happened — because Elohim City are these co-conspirators, they have got away with it, blah blah blah. The fact is, Elohim City, as far as I know, was never in the news again after that flurry of stuff in the late 90s about Oklahoma City. Which shows that maybe, ultimately over the decades, they didn't prove to be necessarily the great danger— but maybe I'm wrong about that, because what is true is that really dangerous people went through Elohim City and stayed there for a little while and then left again.

So it's sort of like a white supremacist commune?

Yeah, it's an eccentric Christian identity church in very remote part of the Ozarks, up a dirt road that lasts six miles, and then at the bottom of the dirt road, you're still in the wilderness. I mean, you're not far from the highway that takes you to Fayetteville, Arkansas. It's a very eccentric place. The houses that they all live in are like hobbit houses, and their leader, Reverend Robert Millar, was like an elder hobbit all twinkled eyed with a sort of hobbity beard. When I went there, all the children of the community did a performance of Riverdance to welcome me.

Is that because that's just the most white form of dance that they could think of?

I guess, yeah. I say Riverdance, I mean they didn't say the word “Riverdance,” but I've seen enough Riverdance to know that when you keep the top of your body very straight and then do a load of stuff with your legs, that's basically the Riverdance.

The traditional Aryan dancing, no moving your hips, you can't move your hips at all.

Just your lower legs, you can move those as much as possible. But at Elohim City, undoubtedly strange things have happened and also really dangerous, sketchy people have passed through the place, convicted murderers. People would go to Elohim City, stay there for a while, and then murder black state troopers or do armed robberies for the white cause and so on. It was a serious place, no question. But it's also a place for families.

This is not one place. It's also a place where it's like 150 children and women and visitors — a detergent salesman was there the day that I visited. But the question when you raid a place like that is, you just have to weigh up the morality of that. So McVeigh got a traffic violation very close to the gates of Elohim City, and he telephoned Elohim City shortly before the bombing. And there were sightings of him with people potentially from Elohim City. And the sightings may or may not be true. Anyway though, so lots of people think that McVeigh was heavily involved with Elohim City, even though the official story is that he wasn't involved at all.

It seems like almost every terrorism attack in the US, if you go deep enough into the story, there is a FBI informant or criminal informant or someone who has murky ties to law enforcement in there somewhere. How do you work out the sort of causal relationships there?

Ultimately, I think this is what The Debutante is about. It's about, yes, these are murky stories with strange connections, as journalists or storytellers, what do we do? And I think that speaks to, I suppose, a sort of greater conflict that's happening in journalism between, and I don't want to be too binary about this, but between the old-fashioned sort of evidence gathering where you just go into a story and you just try and gather the evidence as best as you can and tell the story that way, and something more kind of ideologically driven or activist driven.

Your question was my question: what do we about a murky story like that? Do we allow ideology to guide our thought process? Or do we throw ideology out of the window and just try and dig into the evidence gathering as best as you possibly can?

How much do you think drug addiction played a factor in Carol's story?

Well, she definitely took a lot of drugs. According to her first husband, Greg, when she broke her feet, they were just asking for anything, because she came from a high society family, everything they asked the family doctor for, he just gave them — including anti-psychotics and stuff that weren't painkillers at all. So she was definitely into prescription drugs, and there's other stories about her drug taking, which I don't really go into in the show. So drugs were a part of Carol's life, but there was a lot more to Carol too. The mystery of why Carol went on the life journey that she did, making the truly terrible life choices that she made is another, I think, really sort of fun creeping mystery for this story.

When the Waco raid happened, all the Branch Davidians, in the aftermath of it, they became these martyrs for government overreach—

And also for white supremacy, even though they were multicultural group who had no interest in white supremacy.

—But it seems like a lot of the people that have taken them on as martyrs are the same people for whom child abuse and child sexual abuse specifically has become their dog whistle or their bugaboo. Is there any irony to the fact that they're, I mean, obviously there's irony, but do they recognize that they're memorializing a child molester in this story?

That just goes to show how when one's thought process is ideologically driven, one conveniently puts facts like that underneath the rug. Because, you are absolutely right. David Koresh was undoubtedly a child molester. And they just don't kind of mention it and they sort of don't like it. But you see that all over the place.

Do we as liberals and journalists get caught up trying to point out those little hypocrisies when maybe that's part of the point, is to be an authoritarian is sort of to be allowed these hypocrisies?

Well, certainly these hypocrisies have been kind of redefined. I mean, that's been happening since the start of the Trump years. When I wrote the Psychopath Test and I learned the psychopath checklist, and one of the items on the psychopath checklist is pathological lying. But underneath that title is something really interesting, which is that they're not in the slightest bit embarrassed when they're caught lying.

And this sort of combination of people... in So You've Been Publicly Shamed I write about how because we're overusing shame as a weapon, people who behave shamefully are becoming hospital superbugs impervious to shame, impervious to treatment. So it's a combination of a sort of increased respect for some psychopathic values like pathological lying, and also the fact that people on the right got so sick of being shamed online for everything that they did, because we were overusing shame as a weapon, they just became impervious to shame. As a combination of those two things, truth has been entirely redefined in the last seven or eight years. George Santos has announced he's going to campaign again, and he's still there. He's still in Congress and he's going to campaign again. And this idea of just redefining truth through ideological ends, I can't think of anything more horrifying.

And it's happened. Again, this is sort of one thing I wanted to show in The Debutante, I wanted to show by example, by digging into a story, that the principle that the only thing that really matters is facts and evidence is something that we shouldn't just allow to slip through our fingers.

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THE DEBUTANTE is currently available on Audible.