Podcaster Jon Ronson on his adventures in extremism and the absurd

It was in the mid-1990s, while researching Them, his book about extremists, that the British writer and documentarian Jon Ronson first came across the name Carol Howe. “I was spending a lot of time with white supremacists at the time,” he says from his home in New York, where he has lived for 10 years. “Two weeks after my son was born, I was at a Ku Klux Klan compound. So much for paternity leave.”

The daughter of an oil executive father and charity hostess mother, Howe was a wealthy debutante from Tulsa, Oklahoma who in 1994 joined a white separatist group based in a rural encampment called Elohim City, and who was later recruited by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) as an informant. At the time, Ronson was investigating the rumoured links between white supremacists and the Oklahoma bombing, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds more in 1995. In the midst of his research, Howe’s odd trajectory from society girl to neo-Nazi crusader to government spy was, he says, “the story that got away”.

Now, in his new podcast The Debutante, Ronson, 55, picks up Howe’s narrative, tracking down those who knew her with his customary rigour and thoughtfulness. Among the more persistent conspiracy theories around the bombing was that the main perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, had accomplices who were known to investigators but were never brought to justice. McVeigh claimed the bomb plot was his own work, though Howe’s diaries, submitted to officials at the time, tell a different story. “So,” says Ronson, “the question is whether this is that rare thing: a conspiracy theory that could actually be true.”

Extremists and conspiracy theorists have long been Ronson’s stock-in-trade. In 1997, in the film Tottenham Ayatollah, he documented his year in the company of Omar Bakri Muhammad, a London-based Islamist leader who had said he wouldn’t rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. Ronson was also the first journalist to interview Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of the far-right website InfoWars, who last year was ordered to pay almost $1.5bn in damages to parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook School shooting, after falsely claiming it was a hoax.

Ronson’s brand of journalism — also seen in his 1999 film New Klan, about a politically correct faction of the Ku Klux Klan, and the books The Psychopath Test (on the psychology of psychopathy) and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (about the culture of shaming on social media) — has been described as gonzo, the style closely associated with the writer Hunter S Thompson. But Ronson has always resisted the label on the basis that “I never took drugs and then went off to interview somebody. Thompson would take LSD and then go to a police convention, and I never did that. I think my style is closer to Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism, with the admission that whenever a journalist enters the room everything changes, so it’s more honest to tell the story through the prism of yourself.” The common threads in his work, he says, are “power, cruelty, and how our decisions affect other people. Most of all, they’re mystery stories. When I discover something dissonant that I don’t understand and that feels somehow absurd, that’s when I know it’s a story I want to tell.”

It’s only in recent years that podcasting has become Ronson’s preferred medium. Following two unexpectedly poignant series about the modern-day porn industry, 2017’s The Butterfly Effect and 2019’s The Last Days of August, in 2021 he made the critically acclaimed BBC podcast Things Fell Apart, in which he investigated the roots of today’s culture wars. “I love the fact that, in these narrative non-fiction podcasts, you’re still able to experiment,” Ronson reflects. “It’s still the Wild West of storytelling. As long as you’re not being self-indulgent, you can meander in interesting ways. And I really love being a miniaturist. I feel like I’m making doll’s houses when making my podcasts. Every fraction of a second has been thought about hundreds of times.”

Before he began making documentaries, Cardiff-born Ronson was, very briefly, a musician, playing keyboards with Frank Sidebottom, the comedian and pop star notable for wearing a giant papier-mâché head. (Ronson later wrote the screenplay for the 2014 film Frank, based on his experiences.) He recalls the band’s drummer and manager, Mike Doherty, kindly dispensing a home truth: “He told me, ‘You’re not cut out for the music business. You’re going to end up being some sort of writer.’ And I thought, ‘I hope not, because that sounds like a solitary life.’”

After being fired both by Frank Sidebottom and the indie band he was managing at the time called Man from Delmonte, a lifeline came in the form of Terry Christian, then soon-to-be presenter of the late-night Channel 4 series The Word, who brought him in to co-present a radio show on the Manchester station KFM. At the same time, Ronson began writing a column for the London magazine Time Out for which he would “go into shadowy places and have adventures”. The column led to a BBC documentary series, The Ronson Mission, which in turn got the attention of a commissioning editor at Channel 4 who asked him to make Tottenham Ayatollah.

Ronson’s rise to TV fame coincided with that of Louis Theroux, who was similarly interested in fringe figures and extreme ideologies. Ronson and Theroux are friends, though when interviewing Ronson on his podcast Grounded with Louis Theroux in 2020, Theroux admitted to feeling a sense of rivalry. “I was actually pleased to hear it, because I had always thought that, while I felt rivalry with Louis, he felt none with me,” Ronson says now. “Although I think I was cured of it when I was writing Them. I knew then that Louis will always be better than me at TV documentaries, but I write well.”

Despite his repeated exposure to the dark side of humanity, Ronson retains a healthy optimism about the world, though he concedes his research for 2015’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed tested his resolve: “I despaired a bit about how casually cruel we can all be towards each other.” He is perhaps less gung-ho than in the early days when he would spend weeks embedded with extremists, many of whom saw him, a Jewish man, as the enemy. For The Debutante he met with a handful of neo-Nazis from the Elohim City days, though he never felt in danger, “largely because they’re all really old now and the chances of them acting violently towards me was greatly diminished. They could barely find their way into the café that I met them in.”

Ronson’s manner — compassionate, curious, non-judgmental ­— continues to stand him in good stead. As he puts it, “I’m an outsider just trying to figure things out.”

 ‘The Debutante’ is available now on Audible