#821: Jon Ronson Returns
Today, Jordan sits down with Jon Ronson to have a lively chat about his new series The Debutante, covering all sorts of territory involving the Oklahoma City Bombing and the tale of Carol Howe.
June 23, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
02:08:13
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and George. | ||
| Knowledge. | ||
| Fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're on the air. | |
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I am Jordan, once again alone without my co-host Dan. | ||
| I am luckily joined, however, by the one and only John Ronson, author of many books and a staple of NPRs everywhere. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| Ooh, see, now it's fun whenever people actually know who we are. | ||
| The last few people I've interviewed have had no idea exactly what was going on, so this is a delight. | ||
| I will tell you that my bright spot is a new video game called Final Fantasy XVI. | ||
| That's my bright spot. | ||
| And how about you, John? | ||
| I'd never planned a bright spot, so there's few. | ||
| But I'm just surprised that... | ||
| They called it Final Fantasy and then they had 16 sequels. | ||
| Oh, you are... | ||
| Well, one, if we're at 16, I'm going to tell you, you're a little bit late to the joke. | ||
| That was there after Final Fantasy 2, I think. | ||
| I must have a bright start. | ||
| What could it be? | ||
| I was watching Silo, but it's not so great that I should call it a bright spot. | ||
| That is a devastating review of Silo. | ||
| Hey, it's not bad, but it's not my bright spot. | ||
| It's not bright spot-able. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I was on the treadmill and I was watching the Bruce Springsteen No Nukes concert from 1979 that just got released. | ||
| It was like lost footage that just got released. | ||
| And it's sensational. | ||
| It's Springsteen, you know, turning 30. It's his 30th birthday. | ||
| He's at his like very pinnacle. | ||
| And it's like watching an Olympian, like the amount of energy he has. | ||
| Well that's a great bright spot! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's the Springsteen Madison Square Garden 1979 No Nukes concert. | ||
| Well, then that is a delightful bright spot. | ||
| So then I will say that you're here, or you agreed to join me, because you have just released a new podcast slash audiobook called The Debutant. | ||
| And before we get into it very, very deep, because I've got notes and notes. | ||
| Could you just give a rundown of the general conspiracy theory that led you to make this? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So there's a conspiracy theory that doesn't really come from the right. | ||
| It comes very much from the mainstream world, like NBC and so on, and also academics on the left. | ||
| So it's an unusual conspiracy theory in that regard. | ||
| And the theory is that Timothy McVeigh, who... | ||
| He obviously blew up the Alfred P. Miller Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. | ||
| History says that he was essentially a lone wolf. | ||
| He coerced two old army friends into helping him, but essentially he was a lone wolf. | ||
| And the theory is that he wasn't a lone wolf, and in fact he had help from a mysterious and very odd white supremacy compound in the Ozark Mountains called Elohim City. | ||
| And particularly two men there, a man called Andy the German and a man called Dennis Mahan. | ||
| And the reason why the world knows this is because at Elohim City was a very unlikely, unexpected undercover informant who was a former debutante and high society young woman named Carol Howe, who became a white supremacy spokeswoman before turning and becoming an undercover informant. | ||
| And if the world had only listened to her information, then the Oklahoma City bombing would never have happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Excellent. | |
| That is a perfect summation. | ||
| It's taken me a while. | ||
| You should hear me. | ||
| You know, whenever I do a story, because, you know, you're so in the weeds when you're doing a story. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And all of my stories take, you know, months or years. | ||
| And then somebody says, you know, what's it about? | ||
| And the first time you try to explain it to someone, whatever it is, it sounds terrible. | ||
| Because you make the show, but then you have to figure out how to... | ||
| Explain the show, which is a whole different thing. | ||
| You're talking to a guy who does a podcast about Alex Jones, and we've done 830-odd episodes. | ||
| The idea of explaining what I do to people gives me nightmares. | ||
| So anyway, in short, I'm glad that I've managed to tell the story, to summarize it in a pretty clear way. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| So yeah, so then let's tear that whole thing apart. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| I mean, it obsessed me for... | ||
| Well, it obsessed me back in the 90s when I first stumbled on the story. | ||
| And I did a pretty lacklustre... | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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So all the other episodes were great. | |
| That one wasn't. | ||
| It's always sort of bugged me as, you know, such an interesting story and I got nowhere. | ||
| So just before the pandemic, I decided to give it another shot. | ||
| And for the last three or four years on and off, I've been doing just that. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So then you start, I think, obviously, at the beginning with her childhood. | ||
| But what I noticed whenever I was listening to it is that your interviews about her childhood were sparse at best. | ||
| The stories were not very specific and so on. | ||
| So did you interview more people than made it onto the show? | ||
| No, I think we pretty much included everyone we interviewed. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Her story kind of comes to life when she's a high school senior. | ||
| That's where you really start to get to know who she is. | ||
| And then you massively get to know who she is a couple of years later when she... | ||
| Marries her first husband, Greg, who I did a great interview with. | ||
| But yes, I agree. | ||
| We didn't, you know, people from her school wouldn't talk to us. | ||
| So if you have learned anything, I know that I love this research. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| Full on, full disclosure. | ||
| We were talking before we started recording. | ||
| I've done a significant amount of research for this interview. | ||
| And on the SBL's own website, SPLC's own website is her, or at least what was her assumed name in, I think, 2015 or whenever it was published. | ||
| It is Amanda Bryn Collins. | ||
| And Bryn Collins is specifically the writer of the Toxic Parent Survivor Guide. | ||
| So, as far as her childhood is concerned, I will tell you that... | ||
| I assume you weren't able to talk to her parents. | ||
| I know her mom's dead. | ||
| Yeah, her mom recently died. | ||
| You know, the reason why I didn't approach her father was because we were holding out for an interview with her. | ||
| And so we thought, well, I can't, you know, it seemed right etiquette-wise to... | ||
| Not approach her father before we got a yes or a no from her. | ||
| And right up until the end, it was a possibility that we would interview her. | ||
| I want to caveat it by saying that, you know, it's a pain in the ass there and it's unusual, I think, for me that I don't get to interview absolutely everyone involved in the story. | ||
| So this is unusual that I didn't get to talk to her. | ||
| But I got to talk to so many, like, extraordinary... | ||
| People involved in the story, including our first husband, that it's still like a very rich listener. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the central thing about the story that I find so fascinating, is that everybody was lying to you pretty much all the time, almost constantly. | ||
| Like, your interviews with Greg, with Rachel Patterson, are non-stop lies. | ||
| It's so fascinating to me. | ||
| Okay, so I want you to tell me everything that you know. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Well, let's just start with her childhood. | ||
| So you interviewed one of her childhood friends who was also adopted, and she recalled her from high school, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| She passionately wanted to talk to us because she felt... | ||
| You know, she remembered the nice Carol before it all, everything turned horrific. | ||
| And because of her good memories, she felt kind of, you know, morally compelled to talk to us. | ||
| Yeah, so that's why she spoke to us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And then the next interview is, chronologically, is with Greg. | ||
| Her first husband, whom she married on a whim, on a dare, practically. | ||
| So the story there, could you give that kind of clearer for me, the picture of how that happened? | ||
| Because as far as I understand it, it was, they were drunk one night, etc. | ||
| Yes, okay. | ||
| So here's the story that Greg told. | ||
| And I should say, everything that Greg told me, we much later... | ||
| Got hold of the FBI report that... | ||
| God, I've forgotten his name. | ||
| But anyway, the guy who was investigating Carol when she rejoined, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| We'll get to that in a bit. | ||
| And in this report was a contemporaneous interview that he did with Greg back then. | ||
| Greg's only ever given two interviews, one to me and one to the FBI. | ||
| And what I will tell you, and the reason why I... | ||
| I trusted Greg, so I'm interested to hear what you're going to say. | ||
| Is that the story he told me and the story he told the FBI at the time really tally with each other? | ||
| For instance, we'll get to how she broke her feet. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, of course. | |
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| I don't want to jump back and forth. | ||
| To be clear, I don't want to say that Greg was lying about the stories with Carol. | ||
| I want to say that Greg is lying because you do not get a swastika tattoo. | ||
| Just because your wife is going, oh, let's get a swastika tattoo tonight. | ||
| Yeah, I have no doubt that that's true. | ||
| He's very downplaying the whole, oh, I'm sure I got a swastika tattoo. | ||
| A huge one. | ||
| But it was a childhood mistake! | ||
| And a giveaway of that was they just got outlined the first night. | ||
| And he said that he really regretted it the next day, but he's still got it all filled in. | ||
| I didn't know that part. | ||
| I didn't know that part. | ||
| So the story is that Carol... | ||
| So let me go back a little bit. | ||
| She leaves high school, moves to Colorado for a mysterious year where we think she joins the Colorado chapter of the Temple of Psychic Youth, which... | ||
| People of a certain age and people interested in this kind of stuff will know was a kind of offshoot of the band Psychic TV, which was an offshoot of the band Throbbing Gristle. | ||
| This was like British. | ||
| Think of like a British... | ||
| Oh, 20 Jazz Greats or whatever is the name of the album. | ||
| Yeah, I know who Throbbing Gristle is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so kind of think, you know, think in the sort of Nine Inch Nails kind of genre. | ||
| But with some suspect beliefs, I'd say. | ||
| But anyway, so we think that Carol joined their fan club, which had all these sort of weird sort of pseudo-sex rituals and so on. | ||
| Then she comes back to Tulsa and she's at a party, Halloween 1993. | ||
| She's at a party, catches the eye of this young stoner drifter, Greg, who you can tell, just for meeting him now, 30 years later, Was, you know, dashing, young, you know, handsome, charismatic. | ||
| You can see why she went for it. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| He seems very charming in the interview. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Great raconteur. | ||
| Yeah, I loved it. | ||
| So anyway, so yeah. | ||
| With, and it just so happens, a giant swastika tattoo on his shoulder. | ||
| Which he's had to disguise now. | ||
| He's had it covered over with little... | ||
| Yes, I believe your quote is, it looks like an effeminate swastika. | ||
| An effeminate swastika, if I recall correctly. | ||
| Yeah, because it's hard to completely disguise this huge swastika. | ||
| So, yeah, so they're dating. | ||
| They hook up at this Halloween party. | ||
| They have a whirlwind romance. | ||
| After three weeks, she says, let's get married. | ||
| So they elope to Vegas, stealing one of her mother's, you know, thousand-dollar dresses. | ||
| Go to Vegas. | ||
| They're getting drunk every night and watching war movies. | ||
| And, of course, Carol's on the side of the Germans and gets, like, pissed off at the end of every war movie. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And then there's an origin moment, and the origin moment is at this park in Tulsa in Easter 1994. | ||
| There's an Easter monument, and they're drunk and playing on it. | ||
| And these little kids, white, by the way, which becomes relevant in a minute, are jumping off. | ||
| The Easter monument. | ||
| And Carol says, I want to do that. | ||
| And she jumps off and smashes both of her feet. | ||
| So Greg scoops her up, takes her to the hospital. | ||
| Because Carol comes from a fancy family, the hospital is just like throwing whatever drugs at them that they want. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Antipsychotics, you know, whatever. | ||
| Whatever you want. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We're an open book for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They didn't get the talk that I got when I had kidney stones for Percocet, where they said, people like you get addicted. | ||
| Do you mean writers or? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think he meant like, you know, don't think that it's only, you know, people in Ohio who get addicted. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| People with fancy Moscow glasses in New York City. | ||
| Yeah, people who can afford it get addicted too. | ||
| So then when Carol is convalescing, Greg's out running errands for her and she is phoning. | ||
| A local telephone answering service called Dial a Racist. | ||
| Here's one dispute, by the way, between Carol and Greg's story. | ||
| Later in court, Carol said that it was Greg who got him into Dial a Racist. | ||
| And Greg says that she got into it of her own volition. | ||
| But she's phoning Dial a Racist. | ||
| And Dial a Racist is like a pre-internet way of getting your daily dose of racism. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, it is very much a podcast. | ||
| What is so fascinating about it is that you just transposed things 30 years ago. | ||
| It's the same garbage. | ||
| It's the same shit. | ||
| That guy's releasing a daily podcast or whatever in the form of a voicemail. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, the international corporations and the Jews control America about to destroy the white race and that kind of stuff. | ||
| Now, this guy... | ||
|
unidentified
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Yada, yada, yada, that whole, oh, sure, the whole they're going to kill us all thing. | |
| You know how it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So he turns out to be a man named Dennis Mahan, who really is, like, even within the genre of American white supremacists, is, like... | ||
| In a very sort of unique, you know, I tend to, because I'm interested in psychology, I tend to quietly try and figure out... | ||
| Like, what disorder does this person have? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And with Dennis Mayhand, he just, it's all over the place. | ||
| It's a panoply of disorders. | ||
| Oh, you play a voicemail that he left for Carol that is one of the most insane, rambling, nonsense things. | ||
| Just that, no, I wasn't spying on you. | ||
| I decided to sit down to the tree and then I sat down and I decided to take a little nap. | ||
| And yes, I had my eyes open. | ||
| Sure, my eyes were open. | ||
| That was because the FBI was planning a raid on you. | ||
| I was trying to save your life. | ||
| And yes, it wasn't that. | ||
| You know, it was so disjointed and like, yeah, it was pathetic. | ||
| The one thing that you forgot from that message was he also said that, you know, that I was doing you a favor because I just wanted to show, like, you know, I was hiding behind the tree and that shows that the ATF could put an invisible laser behind the tree and beam it at your house and pick up everything that you're saying from that tree. | ||
| Yeah, but that one's true. | ||
| So, yeah, but that's jumping ahead a little. | ||
| So basically, she's listening to Dennis Mahan. | ||
| Dennis Mahan had been a member of the Klan. | ||
| And I'm trying to remember whether it was David Duke's Klan or not. | ||
| But anyway, he left and joined White Aryan Resistance, which is obviously much more hard, you know, even more hard than the Klan. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And became like the Tulsa. | ||
| You know, head of White Area Assistance. | ||
| So he's, like, broadcasting his messages and Carol, like, falls in love with The Voice and calls him up and they start dating. | ||
| You do feel for Carol's parents. | ||
| Like, they really hated Greg. | ||
| You know, they wanted Carol to marry a squire for the debutant ball. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But so when she left Greg... | ||
| They must have breathed a sigh of relief, but then she ends up marrying someone so much worse. | ||
| Or not marrying, dating someone so much more terrifying than Greg. | ||
| I will say this, and here's another important detail that I think goes somewhat unremarked upon. | ||
| She does get married to Greg on a whim. | ||
| And it is her being a rich person, getting married on a whim to some pauper, if you will, the classic tale, all to piss off her parents. | ||
| Very, very clearly to piss off her parents. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And what do they do? | ||
| They go... | ||
| Well, I suppose that's what you do. | ||
| And she receives no consequences for trying to piss off her parents. | ||
| They just go, fine, we'll throw you a wedding, just like everything is totally fine. | ||
| That pattern already is in place of she will not receive consequences for anything she does. | ||
| And if she gets into trouble, she can run home to daddy. | ||
| That's already there. | ||
| So let's keep that there from the beginning. | ||
| And in fact, does, you know, at some time sort of run home in a way that others couldn't. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Not only did they throw her at like a wedding party, they sent them off on a shopping spree. | ||
| And Carol was like, you know, buying like a $3,000 crystal horse's head. | ||
| So if you're somebody who wanted to piss off your parents... | ||
| And instead, they wanted you to buy a $3,000 glass or crystal horse head. | ||
| We can start to see who this person is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so what I know about her parents is that they were definitely philanthropists. | ||
| Like her mother, who had MS, was a rich charity person, but seemed to spend her life on non-profits and charitable foundations and so on. | ||
| And their father was the head of a Fortune 500 energy company called Mapco. | ||
| They adopted two kids, her and a boy who I know very little about. | ||
| So clearly they were trying to be good philanthropic people. | ||
| See, now what I find fascinating about that, and it's part of what I find so frustrating about the audiobook in general, right? | ||
| And I have a unique perspective on this because I absolutely hate rich people with every fiber of my being, regardless of whether or not they come off as some sort of philanthropist. | ||
| So in the audiobook, by virtue of calling them philanthropists, you know, you're doing a lot of... | ||
| Actually, I did do that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You're carrying a lot of water for whether or not they are good people. | ||
| Now, to give you a little context from being an American... | ||
| Tulsa is and was one of the most racist and awful places on this fucking planet. | ||
| Oh, no doubt. | ||
| And it wasn't in spite of people like Carol's dad. | ||
| It is because of people like Carol's dad. | ||
| So whenever there's that question of where she became racist and all of those things, I can tell you that she grew up rich, white, in Tulsa, in Reagan's America. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| She was born racist. | ||
| I will tell you this right now. | ||
| Let me give you the, well, not born, in your theory, adopted racist. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I was, yes, yeah. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| Like, sure. | ||
| But let me give you a bit of sort of counter suggestions here. | ||
| So her friend Laurie swore that she wasn't, Racist in high school and she became, she came back racist from Colorado. | ||
| So the story that we tell in the show is that if she joined, and we were told by a source that she had joined the Temple of Psychic Youth. | ||
| And the thing about the Temple of Psychic Youth is that just like, you know, a lot of bands back then. | ||
| But I think Psychic TV were more hardcore. | ||
| They were like playing with Nazi imagery and rituals and fascism. | ||
| And as the guy from the Temple of Psychic Youth said to us, when you play act being a Nazi long enough, maybe you actually become one. | ||
| So from speaking to her high school friend, from speaking to the guy from the Temple of Psychic Youth, and then obviously speaking to Greg when she gets back from Colorado for the Temple of Psychic Youth, the narrative that I put together, just based on what I could pick up, was that in high school she didn't display any racism. | ||
| In Colorado she joined this group. | ||
| We think, which had all of these connotations. | ||
| And then she came back from Colorado being racist. | ||
| And the other thing I'd say is when I met the head of her debutante committee, who now lives in a retirement home on the edge of Tulsa, I thought very much what? | ||
| You know, I think people generally think that if you're the head of a Tulsa debutante committee, you're going to be some, you know, right wing, you know, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And she wasn't. | ||
| I mean, her name's Dixie Reppy. | ||
| She wasn't. | ||
| She was a Democrat. | ||
| And she got into being the head of the debutante committee because she was, like, into theatre and she liked the dresses. | ||
| So what I'm saying is, like, if there's things in this part of the story that frustrate, you know, that do frustrate you, it's because... | ||
| I'm just going by what bits of information that I pick up and I'm trying to piece together. | ||
| Well, again, that's the thing that I'm really, really interested in is because that is a context that is absolutely there. | ||
| Whether or not the interview subjects who have a vested interest in not being on a national John Ronson story revealing that they were gigantic racists 30 years ago, I will just say this. | ||
| Regardless of whether or not she expressed or showed that racist behavior, if you were a debutante growing up in Tulsa High Society only, what, four or five years after? | ||
| Wow, but you got late in Oklahoma. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Tulsa is one of the worst places for racism. | ||
| It's still segregated in most ways. | ||
| And so, regardless of what they might say, she was told, probably by her teachers in school... | ||
| In Reagan's America at that time, that black men were crack-addled rapists. | ||
| And that's what she would have been raised thinking. | ||
| And so that's why whenever we're talking about the story, you know, your origin moment for her, and we're about to get right into it, because this is where we kind of transition right into that. | ||
| Her origin moment, you know, is given with this idea that this story... | ||
| Comes from her being in Colorado and then learning the lingo of the far-right Nazi world and then bringing it back. | ||
| And I will say that in Tulsa society, that idea of black men are predators was... | ||
| Regardless of political party, you can be a Democrat in the late 80s. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, no, I don't dispute that at all. | ||
| And in fact, I just remembered something you said, was there anybody that I interviewed that I didn't put in the show? | ||
| And there actually was someone, and it was from that period. | ||
| And the only reason I didn't include it was because she didn't actually say anything, you know, that was very helpful to the story, except for the thing I'm about to tell you. | ||
| Yeah, well, great! | ||
| And it's a very small side thing. | ||
| She left it out just because it would have been too short an interview. | ||
| That she remembered the school chants and that, you know, they were at Metro Christian Academy, which is a fancy school in Tulsa. | ||
| And when they would, like, play whatever sports you people play. | ||
| Because I know it's not soccer. | ||
| I want that twice. | ||
| I want you to get a clean take. | ||
| Because I've got John Ronson saying, you people. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I'm not letting that one go. | |
| That's a soundboard! | ||
| When they play whatever sports, you people play. | ||
| No, the chants. | ||
| One of the schools would chant at the other one. | ||
| We've got money. | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| We've got money. | ||
| How about you? | ||
| And the other school would chant, we've got more. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| That's the society that Cal grew up in. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to throw this out there for you. | ||
| I'm going to guess that there were not a ton of black people in those schools. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| No? | ||
| No? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, in that case, if you're going to give me an eyewitness account of her friend from high school... | ||
| Why would she hear her say racist things? | ||
| It was just white people around. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| No, I'm not disputing any of this. | ||
| But, you know, I suppose what I'm... | ||
| You know, if there's a difference between the way we would do that part of the story... | ||
| It's just because my natural thing is to, like, interview people. | ||
| And I know that, you know, people... | ||
| Oh, no, of course. | ||
| And I totally understand that. | ||
| And I respect it. | ||
| Believe me, I'm not, like, trying to attack your angle on this. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm just, I'm sort of thinking about it. | ||
| It's just like, you know... | ||
| Like, obviously, Greg was more of a Nazi back then. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But that's so implicit in the way he tells the story that I, you know, I don't know if I felt the need to sort of point it out because it's kind of obvious. | ||
| I mean, I understand. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's totally reasonable. | ||
| It should be. | ||
| It should be very obvious, if you get a swastika tattoo, that you're probably lying about how racist you were back then. | ||
| Yeah, and I do certainly believe that he's not anymore. | ||
| Like, he's had it all covered over. | ||
| And, as I say, by the time he's interviewed by the FBI a few years later, you know, the stuff he was saying to me now was, well... | ||
| Let's get to the moment of the Easter Monument. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| There we go. | ||
| We're at a passion play. | ||
| There's the Christ. | ||
| The setting is there. | ||
| It's like in Bruges. | ||
| You've got everybody Irish all over the place. | ||
| And these kids are jumping off of a statue. | ||
| Yeah, and she jumps off, breaks her feet. | ||
| Convalescing, phone-style racist, meets Dennis Mahan and the story that she tells him, which is the same story she tells repeatedly to journalists in court, in court on the witness stand. | ||
| In one of the books that I read, they print that story without comment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's the story that I believed when I went into researching the story, because there's no alternative story out there. | ||
| And the story, well, and Dixie, here's something. | ||
| So Dixie Repi, the head of the Tulsa Debutant Committee, she brought that story up and she said to me with some concern, because her story that she told Dennis Mahan and told the world was that she had been chased by a gang of black men and they broke her feet. | ||
| And that's what happened. | ||
| Very conveniently fitting into the single most prominent narrative about black men at the time. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And in fact, Dixie Reppy, who was the very first person I interviewed, she was the head of Cowboys debutante committee, said to me, like, with concern, I think when the tape was on, you know, when we weren't recording, like, that part of her story, like, about her being, you know, beaten up by black men. | ||
| Like, what are you going to, you know, how are you going to put that in the show? | ||
| And she was concerned, like, how am I going to put that in the show without perpetuating racism? | ||
| So she believed the story was true. | ||
| At that point, I believed the story was true. | ||
| There's no alternative version out there. | ||
| But Greg told me, and the FBI at the time, that she jumped off and broke her feet. | ||
| But in fact, as Carol repeatedly told... | ||
| Told the lie. | ||
| And as Andy Strassmeyer, who I interviewed later on in the story, points out, if you're going to be pushed off a roof, you're not going to land on your feet. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, so there you go. | ||
| No, I mean, that's one of the things about this story that I think can't go unnoticed, and that's part of why I bring up the Tulsa stuff. | ||
| Everybody bought that shit, and that is garbage. | ||
| That's absolute garbage. | ||
| What the fuck are people doing believing that noise? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| But everybody bought it. | ||
| And it doesn't matter if you were quote-unquote left or right at the time. | ||
| Everybody printed that story. | ||
| And they didn't even barely... | ||
| They didn't question it. | ||
| They were like, oh, of course. | ||
| Yeah, naturally. | ||
| We've all been there. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Let's just reprint this story of an implausible group of black men. | ||
| Roving black men just chasing people. | ||
| You know how it happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And nobody thought, you know, what Andy's trust about, who is a white supremacist, like the one person who pointed out the absurdity of this story. | ||
| I mean, he has a vested interest to besmirch Gowell because of what happened later on in the story. | ||
| But, you know, he was the one who pointed out, you know, you don't land on your feet if you're thrown off the roof. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, here's what I also find interesting there, is that once you do that, To me, you are now forever an unreliable narrator. | ||
| There's no going back. | ||
| And I mean forever. | ||
| I don't care if she changes it. | ||
| Later on, after she becomes a confidential informant, as you said, in the area, I don't care. | ||
|
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She is still an unreliable narrator. | |
| Well, this is so interesting because of who has come to believe Carol's story. | ||
| Which I'm sure we'll get to later on. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| In about four hours. | ||
| I sent you the email that I'm the only person who's ever asked Joe Rogan if I could go now. | ||
| If I bore you as much as him, then I'm the one at fault here. | ||
| So, yeah, because that becomes a really important part of the story later on as to who believes Carol and why. | ||
| But I agree with you. | ||
| After studying her story for four years on and off, I came to believe that she's an unreliable narrator. | ||
| I think there's parts of her story where she did behave well. | ||
| I don't doubt the information that she gave when she was an undercover informant. | ||
| But we should get to that too, right? | ||
| Because I think for the listeners, it's good to keep to the chronology of her story. | ||
| Where we're at now is she's been with Greg for a few years. | ||
| She's on the Dial a Racist thing. | ||
| Actually, just a few months. | ||
| Just a few months. | ||
| She gets bored with Greg. | ||
| She just up and leaves Greg on a whim. | ||
| Which, again, there's so many small things about her character that I feel add up over time to a picture that I'm going to tell you that I think is 100% accurate. | ||
| But that is another one of those things. | ||
| The moment she got bored, she up and left, and then went back home to Daddy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so she starts dating Dennis Mahan. | ||
| She's with him for some months. | ||
| He told me back then, back 30 years ago, and in letters he sent me from prison now, that she had wanted to commit acts of violence. | ||
| And he thought that she'd be wasted in the shadows. | ||
| He wanted her to become like an Aryan spokeswoman because not many women in the movement are, you know, smart and charismatic and extremely good looking. | ||
| He thought he could, like, get her on Oprah. | ||
| Which, by the way, as we know, I don't know so much about Oprah, but you could certainly get white supremacists on mainstream television in many different outlets back then. | ||
| Better believe it. | ||
| Hey, you went on Joe Rogan's show, so... | ||
| Twice. | ||
| White supremacists can get you on their shows, too, so there's definitely that. | ||
| Well... | ||
| But yeah, so he wanted to get her on Oprah. | ||
| He had her recording Dial of Racist Messages herself, but that didn't work out because her voice was so flat. | ||
| She's terrible on mic. | ||
| You play a little clip. | ||
| She's absolutely terrible on mic. | ||
| It's amazing to listen to, actually. | ||
| We better start picking up our weapons. | ||
| So uninterested in destroying the Jews. | ||
| She was so bored with destroying the Jews. | ||
| You know, she didn't have that passion. | ||
|
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Yeah, like one of the bored girls in a high school. | |
| Oh, yes, we have to kill the Jews or whatever. | ||
| Geez, why do I have to record these? | ||
| But he did get them on TV once, and that was a German documentary that was filming at Elohim City. | ||
| Now, Elohim City is the next big part of the story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in the Ozark Mountains on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border is this... | ||
| It's this place called Elohim City. | ||
| It's such a contradictory place. | ||
| And I've been there. | ||
| Yes, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Could you give me a more kind of visual portrait of what's going on in Elohim City? | ||
| Because I don't see it. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I kind of, through the debutante, I kind of see something similar to a compound, or I see like an almost trailer park vibe. | ||
| I don't know which it is that I'm trying to see. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not trailer park. | ||
| It's sort of fancier than that. | ||
| Because I went there 30 years ago, but I remember it. | ||
| I remember it very clearly. | ||
| So it's a long way away from civilization. | ||
| It's like it's off a road that takes you from Oklahoma to Fayetteville, Arkansas. | ||
| But you go like six miles up a dirt road. | ||
| And then you stop outside the place. | ||
| You don't walk in because they'll shoot you. | ||
| So you stop and honk your horn until someone comes together. | ||
| We were given very stern, explicit instructions. | ||
| Sit in the car, honk your horn. | ||
| So that's what we did. | ||
| And they came to get me. | ||
| And it looks quite eccentric, the architecture of the place, of all these little kind of hobbit houses. | ||
| I haven't seen Lord of the Rings, but it looks like I assume the little place where they all live in. | ||
| Or the Ewoks, whatever they're called. | ||
| Ewoks! | ||
| On the moon of Andor! | ||
| All right! | ||
| Yeah, that's what it's like, the moon of Andor. | ||
| They live in these little kind of hobbit homes. | ||
| There may be trailers there, I can't remember, but my main memory is seeing these kind of quite eccentric hobbit homes. | ||
| And then there's a big main hall, which is the meeting place and where they have their church. | ||
| And it's Yahweh Christian. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people know it's like the Jews are descended from Satan. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| People of colour are, you know, mud people and the white race is blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Completely different from Mormonism in the 90s. | ||
| Completely different. | ||
| Not anything similar to that whatsoever. | ||
| This is so weird. | ||
| This is not a mainstream religion in the United States at the time. | ||
| This is crazy people in LOM City who believe this stuff. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| In 1979, Godfrey decided about black people. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's so weird how that happened. | ||
| So I was taken into the main hall at all these... | ||
| People of the community came in to see what was going on with me. | ||
| There was a chiropractor there called Dr. Buzz and I was a detergent salesman too. | ||
| Sorry, there's a chiropractor named Dr. Buzz. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| I just needed to get through that. | ||
| Okay, I've dealt with it. | ||
| I've dealt with it now. | ||
| We can move on. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
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And then they asked me, and all of these young men came in all putting their guns on the gun rack. | |
| So there's clearly a kind of gun fetish that they walk around with guns all the time. | ||
| But you take them off. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, of course. | |
| Well, I mean, there's women present. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| The demographic actually is interesting. | ||
| So, again, this will, I'm sure, come up later. | ||
| But there was a lot of talk about whether to do an armed raid on Elohim City. | ||
| I think one of the main reasons why it didn't happen was because if there's, these are very sketchy figures, and I could be wrong, but let's say there's 200 people living at Elohim City. | ||
| Only 15 or 20 of them are like young men of, you know, killing age. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| And the rest are like children or very old people or women. | ||
| So, you know, there's lots and lots of children running around. | ||
| They put on a performance of Riverdance to welcome me. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| And then they got me to like... | ||
| Dr. Buzz was dancing with his feet. | ||
| Okay, gotcha. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So that's one version of Elohim City. | ||
| The other equally true version of Elohim City is that the combination code was 0420, Hitler's birthday. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It was founded by Dr. Reverend Millar, or whatever his name is. | ||
| Yeah, Robert Millar, who was a Canadian Mennonite. | ||
| Yeah, and he's one of the more evil people that will appear in this story. | ||
| Well, it was a safe haven for white supremacists who had murdered people. | ||
| There was a lot of those people there. | ||
| Were you disputing me or agreeing with me? | ||
| No, I'm agreeing with you. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I almost heard a but there, but then I was like, okay, okay, we're good. | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, I'm very much agreeing with you. | ||
| It's a very hardcore, very hardcore place. | ||
| Or let me caveat that, the people who they allowed to live there and hide out there. | ||
| Some of them were very, very hardcore people. | ||
| So there's a connection between Elohim City and the murder of Alan Berg, the radio DJ in Denver, I think it was. | ||
| For people who don't know, Alan Berg was like a sort of left-wing Jewish jock who would mock white supremacists on the air and then a bunch of them murdered him in his driveway. | ||
| And they hung out, they hid out at Elohim City. | ||
| Then there's the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, which was another really hardcore group. | ||
| They hid out there. | ||
| A guy called Richard Wayne Snell, who murdered, who tried to blow up the Moa building in Oklahoma City years earlier, murdered a black state trooper and a pawn shop owner who he wrongly believed was Jewish. | ||
| He hid out there, and in fact, when he was finally executed, he's now buried there. | ||
| So, you know, it's a serious, hardcore place, Elohim City. | ||
| Yeah, I find Snell to be... | ||
| So you give Snell one... | ||
| Sentence? | ||
| Maybe a run-on sentence. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| I tell the Snell story, but the reason why I keep it contained was really... | ||
| For storytelling reasons, when you're juggling a whole load of balls, you know, the job of this kind of storytelling. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| No, no, that's another part that I'm interested in. | ||
| I'm 100% interested. | ||
| I'm not trying to be a dick. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Honestly, I mean, say whatever you like, of course. | ||
| And I'll just sort of try and explain why I made the decisions that I made. | ||
| So with Snell, I think I tell the whole story. | ||
| But the thing is, there is no resolution to the story. | ||
| So here's the Richard Wayne Snell story. | ||
| And it is extraordinary. | ||
| And this is, for me, if you're going to believe the Carol Howe, Timothy McVeigh, Elohim City conspiracy theory, this is probably the most, you know, this is probably the most sort of potent clue. | ||
| See, what I find fascinating is that I think this is the clue that is so much better at disproving. | ||
| The whole thing. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Well, I would love to hear it. | ||
| Well, go ahead and tell the story, because I do think that there's something very important here with Snell. | ||
| Right, okay, yeah. | ||
| Because I don't believe the... | ||
| I should say, I'll jump forward to it. | ||
| No, no, no, yes, sorry. | ||
| You don't believe the conspiracy theory, and you do a very good job of picking apart the... | ||
| Quote-unquote evidence that's given in the final episode. | ||
| Yes, but I don't pick apart the story I'm about to tell because I didn't know what to make of it. | ||
| And I say this in the show, I don't know what to make of this. | ||
| So if you've got something, I would love to hear it. | ||
| So the story is that Snell, you know, kills a black state trooper, a pawn shop owner. | ||
| He's on death row. | ||
| The date of his execution is set for April the 19th, 1995, which is the same day, the two-year anniversary of Waco and the day that Timothy McVeigh is going to blow up the mower building in Oklahoma City. | ||
| So as he's waiting to be executed, he asks the prison guard if he could turn the TV on. | ||
| So they turn on the TV and Robert Millar from Elohim City, who's his spiritual advisor, and Snell are sitting on death row watching this footage of things blowing up, of the building blowing up. | ||
| And Snell is like the prison guard notes in his logbook that Snell is like nodding and smiling. | ||
| And of course you could, you know... | ||
| If you believe the conspiracy theory, then what you believe is that Timothy McVeigh is one of the reasons why he blew up the building on that day was in protest of Snell's execution. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, you know, I don't know necessarily. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a complete coincidence or it's a weird fucked up thing that the justice system did to execute Snell on the same day as Waco. | ||
| That's wild that those two things happened at the same time. | ||
| But what I find fascinating about that is that that suggests that they did know that it was going to happen and Carol didn't. | ||
| Do you understand what I mean? | ||
| It doesn't matter if Carol's... | ||
| Because Carol never says shit in her diary and any of the things that... | ||
| Carol doesn't say shit about him. | ||
| But they did know. | ||
| Do you understand? | ||
| That is very clear to me. | ||
| Yeah, that's a very good point. | ||
| So, hang on a second. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| But you're saying they did know? | ||
| Or you're saying you think Malab and Snell did know? | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. | |
| Because here's the thing. | ||
| What I find so interesting about this is the idea that I feel like people in this have been really close to the idea that Carol has anything to do with anything. | ||
| And that leads them to think that there was an individual person that had anything to do with anything to help with McVeigh. | ||
| But what the reality is, based on the fact that we've spent our lives now in listening to people like this talk, in listening to people of this order, is that it's just talking shit. | ||
| Everywhere Timothy McVeigh went. | ||
| He was a gun show guy, right? | ||
| So he traveled all around the country, especially the American Southeast and Southwest. | ||
| He goes around to all of these gun shows. | ||
| Everybody's talking about the Turner Diaries. | ||
| Everybody knows who Snell is. | ||
| Everybody knows all of these people. | ||
| They're all in the network. | ||
| And so Timothy McVeigh didn't need individual help from people. | ||
| They gave him the target through a million different conversations. | ||
| And it's a social movement. | ||
| And McVeigh was the person who executed it. | ||
| So you're saying that you think that Snell and Robert Millar did know that McVeigh was going to blow up that building that day. | ||
| But as you say, there didn't need to be a wider conspiracy than that, because they all have the Turner Diaries. | ||
| The Turner Diaries is enough to teach you. | ||
| That's the idea of leaderless resistance. | ||
| That was the whole thing that they were aiming for, and then they succeeded. | ||
| Okay, so here's my question. | ||
| Here's a question. | ||
| If that's true, then the implication is that McVeigh went to Elohim City, and we don't... | ||
| And we don't know if that's true. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, we don't necessarily need to have that connection. | ||
| He doesn't need to speak to any of these people directly. | ||
| Like, he's speaking to people who also speak to them. | ||
| They're in a network. | ||
| All of these people. | ||
| So, whoever's in Elohim City is listening to Robert Millar talk, and then they go to a gun show, and Andy Strassmeyer's there, and they're just talking shit. | ||
| And all of them are talking shit. | ||
| They're all talking shit because they're like dude. | ||
| Dude energy-ing, like trying to outdo each other with how revolutionary and cool they are. | ||
| Trying to outdo each other with their racism. | ||
| All of this stuff. | ||
| Just like they did at, what was it? | ||
| The Forest Reserve standoff with the Bundys? | ||
| Oh, the Bundys. | ||
| I want to say. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that idea of them all sitting around a campfire, relating war stories to each other, of things that they never did. | ||
| I'm going to blow up this building on the anniversary of Waco. | ||
|
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|
Totally. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, it's plausible that that kind of informal thing was going on without there being any more of a conspiracy than that. | ||
| And I'll tell you the main reason is the only person in your story that I believe is not... | ||
| Outright exaggerating, falsifying, or lying is Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| He's the one that makes sense. | ||
| He said it all. | ||
| Here's what happened. | ||
| He went to the Gulf War, notorious for being one of the most one-sided asymmetric wars as far as technology and shit go. | ||
| Comes back. | ||
| He's disappointed, depressed, and pissed off. | ||
| Waco happens, and he watches the same asymmetric warfare happen where a tank is brought to somebody's house. | ||
| And then he says, there's no consequences for this. | ||
| No one's doing anything about it, so I'm going to give you consequences. | ||
| And the reason that the conspiracy theory to me, the reason that it's so attractive, is because in the conspiracy theory... | ||
| A heroic act can stop a bombing. | ||
| And in the reality, it is the sins of our country coming home to fuck us, you know? | ||
| So that's my take on this story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think that's fascinating. | ||
| I think that's a very interesting perspective. | ||
| See, I was focused on this very particular theory that springs up around Carol Howe. | ||
| And we should explain. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Sorry for jumping in and giving a whole monologue there. | ||
| I think it's fascinating because the Snell thing is definitely a very strange fact. | ||
| An unexplainable fact. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, you can't. | ||
| It's odd. | ||
| I mean, Millar later said, no, he wasn't smiling and nodding. | ||
| He was devastated. | ||
| I can't believe that Millar would lie to us. | ||
| Especially given remembering that Snell actually tried to blow up that building himself. | ||
| He's not going to spend the last day of his life thinking, oh, that's terrible. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Snell has a... | ||
| Yeah, I think that is fascinating. | ||
| So where Carol fits into all of this is the one part of Carol's life where I think she behaved, as far as I can tell, she behaved. | ||
| Pretty impeccably was her few months as an undercover informant because we managed to get hold of her diary, which I didn't know. | ||
| Tell me if you know differently. | ||
| It's apparently really hard to get hold of. | ||
| I couldn't find it. | ||
| I couldn't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wanted it. | ||
| I wanted it so bad. | ||
| Kudos to my producer, Miles. | ||
| We were at somebody's house and he had the diary. | ||
| And Miles was like, oh, you know, we should, you know. | ||
| Steal it. | ||
| You should steal it. | ||
| It should be yours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Run away with it and never look back. | ||
| While we were there, we scanned every page. | ||
| The guy's dead now. | ||
| While we were there, we scanned everything of natural causes, I should tell you. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Neither did we murder him nor was he the victim. | ||
| I mean, that's such a specific thing to throw out in my world. | ||
| We scanned this thing that's very difficult to find. | ||
| Davis is dead now. | ||
| You're on the wrong show to have that go uncommented upon. | ||
| Well, so we scanned every page. | ||
| And it was only like a couple of years later when we put the show out, when we put the debutante out, that people were like, how did you get onto that diary? | ||
| And I assumed it was easily available because we got it so easily. | ||
| But no, this is apparently a real... | ||
| Coup that we got the diary. | ||
| It's definitely legit, you know. | ||
| The handwriting's exactly the same with letters that we know that Carol wrote and et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So it's definitely a legit document. | ||
| And it's like, because obviously she couldn't wear a wire while she was at Elohim City. | ||
| We've got tape of her wearing a wire at other Nazi events, including a dinner party that she held for some Nazis at her house. | ||
| But obviously she couldn't wear a wire at Elohim City, so she was keeping a secret diary and handing pages to her ATF handler, and we got a hold of the diary. | ||
| And it's an extraordinary record. | ||
| I mean, we quote pretty substantially from it, but it's all amazing. | ||
| Just to see what life's like at this place, and the fact that she has a good tone of phrase. | ||
| You know, it's just an extraordinary document. | ||
| The first thing she writes is that the elders had a meeting on her and they decided that she was excellent breeding stock and she had been approved for residency. | ||
| And then she says these little character profiles of all the people who lived there. | ||
| She fingered one of them as John Doe too at one point, Timothy. | ||
| And she wrote about him before the fact. | ||
| A jerk. | ||
| People don't like him. | ||
| Slow. | ||
| And he's the one that she said might have been John Doe, too. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the funny part about that is that of all the things that you can describe McVeigh as, those aren't three, unfortunately. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| so yeah so she writes this voluminous diary about life at Elohim City and all the violent talk and you know blowing things up and how Dennis Mahan wanted to blow up a Mexican video store and Dennis Mahan my god you know she tells these stories about how she's standing there smoking a cigarette and Dennis Mahan walks up to her with a can of gas that's leaking and she's like I'm smoking a cigarette like Jesus so | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| So then... | ||
| She gets deactivated as an informant in February 1995 because she's clearly spiralling. | ||
| She's self-harming and she checks herself into hospital a couple of times. | ||
| One of the occasions she says she was attacked by a gang of... | ||
| Black men! | ||
| Oh, that's so crazy. | ||
| Second time. | ||
| Second time she's attacked by a gang of black men in open spaces in Tulsa. | ||
| It's fucking Mad Max out there. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| So rightly, the ATF deactivated her in February. | ||
| But what's wrong? | ||
| And this is a whole side story that's probably we don't want to get into, but just the cavalier way that the federal government treats its young undercover people. | ||
| Oh, no, I do want to get into that. | ||
| Yeah, she's thoroughly fucked over quite hard. | ||
| And I think I saw another interview you did recently where you referenced... | ||
| The throwaways? | ||
| The New Yorker article. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that is, it is stunning to me that they are allowed to get away with that shit. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| So the main story in The Throwaways, which is an excellent New Yorker article by Sarah Stillman, is about this young woman called Rachel Hoffman, who was like a college student. | ||
| She was caught with a bit of weed and a bit of ecstasy. | ||
| And they just terrified her. | ||
| Like, you're going to go to jail for a long time unless you become an informant. | ||
| They sent her. | ||
| Her very first mission is to buy, like, handguns and a massive amount of drugs from these two, like, really sketchy guys. | ||
| send her in there with no training. | ||
| Obviously, there's a tail on her, but the tail managed to lose her. | ||
| She's murdered on her first mission. | ||
| And that sort of, you know, outrageous cavalier... | ||
| behavior towards young informants, forcing them to do things that trained officers would find terrifying. | ||
| You see echoes of that in Carol's story. | ||
| The fact is, she was sending back these messages to the ATF saying that she was sleeping with white supremacists to get information out of them. | ||
| And I haven't seen any evidence that the ATF was trying to rein her in. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So that's the other thing about your story. | ||
| What I find so interesting is that there are absolutely no good people in your story. | ||
| There are none. | ||
| There are no good people in your story. | ||
| There's no heroes. | ||
| There's no one who is even acting rationally. | ||
| I mean, it is a wild story. | ||
| And I'm talking about everybody from the FBI agents you interviewed to... | ||
| Her prosecutors. | ||
| Oh, they're disgusting human beings. | ||
| They disgust me. | ||
| Like, truly. | ||
| Always talking about her little Mary Jane dress. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, this is only a few years removed from the FBI murdering Fred Hampton. | ||
| They do not have anything good going on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. | ||
| The only good person. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Some of the minor characters, like a high school friend, Laurie. | ||
| Yeah, Laurie seems fine. | ||
| Yeah, but you're right. | ||
| When you really get into the meat of the story. | ||
| There's very few people to root for. | ||
| No, which also gets us to the next person who is lying through their teeth to you. | ||
| You interview, I think her name is Rachel Patterson. | ||
| Okay, so let me tell you the backstory and then tell me what you know about Rachel Patterson. | ||
| We spent ages, over three or four years, trying to get people... | ||
| From Elohim City to talk to us. | ||
| Now, at the time, they let me in and I interviewed Malab. | ||
| I mean, this is 30 years ago. | ||
| But trying to get anybody to talk to us now was just impossible. | ||
| But Rachel Patterson clearly enjoys talking. | ||
| She's kind of gossipy and liked to kind of remember those days. | ||
| So she talked to us. | ||
| So the story she told us was that she didn't trust Carol. | ||
| Carol, who was about 23 at the time, Was dating Rachel's son, who seems to be quite a sort of vulnerable 18-year-old. | ||
| And so she was pissed off with Carol for that. | ||
| And then Carol starts dating Andy Strasmeyer, Andy the German. | ||
| And Rachel was very suspicious of that because Carol was very good-looking and Andy Strasmeyer was sort of gangly with buck teeth. | ||
| And so, you know, she was suspicious about Carol. | ||
| And that's, you know, by and large, that's the sort of main crux of her memories of Carol. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But I just find it impossible to believe anything she says to you. | ||
| Not least of which, think about this, alright? | ||
| We know... | ||
| In your story early on, that Elohim City is thoroughly aware of propaganda opportunities, to the point where they wanted to turn somebody into a propagandist in your story. | ||
| Now, you struggle to find anybody who will talk to you at Elohim City for years, and then the person that you talk to has so many nice things to say about Elohim City! | ||
| It's so nice! | ||
| It was really nice. | ||
| I know you think that there's so much far-right activity going on there, but it was a whole... | ||
| It was about raising children. | ||
| That's what the place was about. | ||
| And her suspicions after the fact are so great. | ||
| She knew from the beginning. | ||
| She was like, ah, he was dating my son. | ||
| This incredibly rich, pretty woman is dating my son, and I'm against it. | ||
|
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At Elohim City. | |
| Where I want my kid to have as many kids as possible, as fast as possible. | ||
| That's a very good point. | ||
| I have mixed feelings about that last thing that you said, everything else that you said. | ||
| There's no way that she couldn't have been aware of, you know, members of the Order, members of the Covenant's Order, the Arm of the Lord. | ||
|
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Totally. | |
| Like, you know, white supremacist murderers were frequently at Elohim City back then. | ||
| That may have changed since the Oklahoma City bombing, but at the time, no question. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I totally agree with that. | ||
| The last part, though, I'm sort of thinking if you've got a kind of... | ||
| Look, on the one hand, the ideology of the place was have as many white children as possible. | ||
| That's the woman's role in the movement, is to flood the world with white babies. | ||
| So ideologically, yes, Rachel would have really wanted Carol to be dating her son. | ||
| But if she was... | ||
| As a mother... | ||
| If her son... | ||
| And her son does come over as, you know, isolated and vulnerable. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And as a mother, would she... | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| I sort of think, you know, is this woman taking advantage of myself? | ||
|
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You know, I think I'd have been suspicious of Carol if I was... | |
| Right. | ||
| I think 2023 her would have been very suspicious of Carol. | ||
| I disagree about 1990s. | ||
| I am in Elohim City listening to Robert Millar's sermons every night, her doing that. | ||
| So, I mean, this is, it's like, the reasonable behavior for the time is so completely different from what we would expect right now. | ||
| You know, like that idea of, oh, well, Carol's mom is a philanthropist with MS. She's obviously going around doing good things for people. | ||
| Is also forgetting that the norm, the baseline is throwing the N-word around and not letting people listen to NWA. | ||
| You know, like it's the combination of those two things that exist in Tulsa as the context. | ||
| I mean, sure. | ||
| But the one thing, but when I'm at the head of the debutante committee, and as I said, like in Tulsa society, you would think that the head of the debutante committee is going to be like the most extreme example of that. | ||
| And she wasn't like that. | ||
| And she wasn't like that then, and she's not like that now. | ||
| She was really worried about, you know, whether we would be inadvertently spreading racism by telling the story about the black men pushing Carol off the bridge. | ||
| So, you know, I entirely hear what you're saying, but at the same time... | ||
| The sort of absoluteness of what you're saying, I'm not sure about. | ||
| Believe me, I am a person who says absolute things only believing 97% of them. | ||
| So don't be concerned about that. | ||
| I'm not saying this as a way of brooking no argument about it. | ||
| I'm just saying that if I am going to acknowledge the history of the United States in these stories, that is the context I bring first. | ||
| Because that's the context that has been ignored for the past all of the time. | ||
| That's why, you know, we have books that'll just reprint her story about being chased by black men off of a statue all the time. | ||
| That idea is far more damaging to me than assuming that rich white people in late 80s Tulsa, Oklahoma are racists. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, no, I hear you. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Rachel, so going back to Rachel Patterson, I don't know. | ||
| I just got this instinctual sense that she was worried about her son dating Carol and that gave Carol suspicions. | ||
| I mean, that gave her suspicions about Carol. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, maybe I'm wrong and maybe she's being revisionist, but... | ||
| That's certainly, you know, I sort of just... | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| I didn't speak to her. | ||
| So I'm more likely to be wrong than you are. | ||
| Well, I mean, I could be wrong. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| But I'm just remembering that moment and I didn't doubt it. | ||
| And I think the reason why I didn't doubt it is because I think she says, like, you know, he was a naive boy and, you know. | ||
| So I think, yeah, just digging into that moment. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Again, that's one of the things that I find fascinating is because... | ||
| You and I both know that at the very least she was lying to you sometime. | ||
| Oh, no question. | ||
| So then our conversation is like, how much? | ||
| And that's a conversation that we're never going to get an answer to. | ||
| You know, that's never going to be correct. | ||
| So that's why I'm very fascinated by the idea of, like, you actually talking to her and having this point of view and me not and coming away with a different one. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, look, I sometimes maybe I veer to... | ||
| Because I always want to enter into stories with curiosity because I just think curiosity is just better than... | ||
| It just takes you to more interesting places. | ||
| Sure, I can be at fault. | ||
| I can be at fault there. | ||
| But it's kind of one or the other. | ||
| Like, you know, I either entered to the Rachel Patterson interview. | ||
| Thinking, you know, there's a famous Jeremy Paxman line who was a British, he used to be a very scabrous interviewer of politicians. | ||
| And he said every time he interviews politicians, what's constantly going through his mind, whatever they're saying is, why is this bastard lying to me? | ||
| So, you know, so the fact is, you could either go in just on a practical level, you could either go into an interview with Rachel Patterson thinking, why is this bastard lying to me? | ||
| Or go in and just think, OK, I'll go where this takes me. | ||
| And both versions have their positives and both have their negatives. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Oh, no, I understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I think what I point to, though, is by leaving details out about the overarching context of the world at the time. | ||
| There's a different presentation of who these people are and who they could be and how it is that they behave and why they behave that way. | ||
| The idea of the debutante is, again, it's so easy for everyone in the story. | ||
| And this is why I'm kind of trying to embody the story here. | ||
| Everyone in the story is blown away by this rich white lady. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Everyone is blown away by the debutante because of what the image and the superficiality of it carry with them, the promises that they carry. | ||
| Which is very much what the second half of the series unpacks. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So just before we move on to that, because I think that's really interesting stuff. | ||
|
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But I would say, I don't think I left anything out. | |
| Sure, sure. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm speaking more of just a more in general situation as opposed to this in specific. | ||
| I apologize for not making that clearer. | ||
| No, no, no problem at all. | ||
| So what I love about the debutante as a storytelling is the first few episodes are digging into the biography of her. | ||
| Dark comedy about the terrible life choices that she makes. | ||
| And if you think she could get any worse, then she does and so on. | ||
| And then, you know, we managed to get this amazing, you know, archive that no one's ever heard of these messages, answer phone messages that Dennis would leave her when she's wired up and reporting for the ATF. | ||
| So we get all of this stuff. | ||
| But then, you know, when the Oklahoma City bombing happens... | ||
| Everything changes, and everything changes in our story too. | ||
| So she's deactivated in February. | ||
| Presumably the ATF have got her Elohim City diary and all the tapes. | ||
| And then on April the 19th, the bombing happens. | ||
| So she's called into the FBI on April the 21st. | ||
| And they say, you know, tell us everything you know about Elohim City. | ||
| So at the time... | ||
| She says that maybe the, you know, maybe, because there's this sketch of John Doe 2 going around, this man who McVeigh might have been spotted with at a truck rental place. | ||
| So she says, oh, maybe he was at Elham City, a guy called Tony. | ||
| And she says that she doesn't recognise McVeigh. | ||
| She may have once seen him in a photo, in a photo album that she saw at a Ku Klux Klan rally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two days after the bombing, that's the story that she tells the FBI. | ||
| On our show, we call that weak shit. | ||
| Well, yeah, but her story then changes, like, repeatedly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people believe her changed story. | ||
| So her story becomes, oh no, I think I spotted... | ||
| Timothy McVeigh at Elohim City walking with Andy the German, Andy Strasmeyer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So she starts telling that story. | ||
| She tells it on Diane Sawyer. | ||
| I think she tells it in court at Terry Nichols' trial. | ||
| Then she tells other people that she was introduced to Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| And so on. | ||
| So her story repeatedly changes about her McVeigh sightings, which happened to coincide with moments in her life where it would benefit her to be a hero who could have stopped the bombing. | ||
| It's so crazy how that worked out. | ||
| It was almost like every time she needed it, her story got better. | ||
| It's a story of overcoming limitations. | ||
| She's like the Hoosiers of liars. | ||
| Every time she needs to step up her game. | ||
| Because, again, I should point out for listeners who haven't heard the show, and it's probably better, I still like to say this now, it's probably better that people hear the show before they listen to this. | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| It's a little later in the day for that. | ||
| So, yeah, because what happens is, so after the bombing, obviously, Oklahoma is flooded with journalists and amateur sleuths and people like me, you know, just all... | ||
| Digging around the white supremacy world. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And at the heart of it was this guy called J.D. Cash. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So J.D. Cash was a real estate guy. | ||
| And associates. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| On the day of the bombing, he decided to become an investigative journalist. | ||
| So for the tiny McCurtain Gazette in Ida Bell, Oklahoma. | ||
| And sure enough, J.D. Cash, you know, this completely untrained, you know, guy, comes up with all of this stuff. | ||
| Some of which, by the way, was very good. | ||
| Some of it was true and good. | ||
| Like, he got into Elohim City and, like, forged a relationship with Robert Malar and so on. | ||
| So he definitely managed to... | ||
| Do some good stuff as a fledgling journalist. | ||
| but he also came up with all of this information, which has subsequently haunted the imaginations of vast numbers of people. | ||
| Oh, the one that I think is the most interesting Or perhaps least convincing thing I think I've ever heard in my entire life is the strip club tape. | ||
| That's absurd to think that that is meaningful. | ||
| It is absurd. | ||
| Yeah, what a start. | ||
| But the reason why it's endured so much is because, well, I kind of postulate in the show that, you know, the Oklahoma City bombing was, you know, just an infinitely terrible thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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And suddenly in the middle of it, you've got a narrative about mysterious comments made at a strip club. | |
| We can't do this every time! | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So I'll tell the story. | ||
| So the story is that J.D. Cash, who's basically an amateur sleuth, and two very reputable journalists from NBC, like Betcho and Bob Sand. | ||
| You know, countless Emmys for reporting in Afghanistan, like a proper journalist. | ||
| But they were caught up in the middle of all of this too. | ||
| And they were just, you know, they thought it was their duty to follow every lead. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, and one of the leads takes them to this strip club called Lady Godiva. | ||
| So the story, so they turn up at the strip club and what they discover is that there's a tape, a CCTV tape. | ||
| Of what? | ||
| Well, it's an hour long. | ||
| I've watched it. | ||
|
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Basically... | |
| There's a strip club in Tulsa called Lady Godiva and a group of out-of-town dancers from Arkansas. | ||
| We're like performing at Lady Godiva on this particular night. | ||
| And a big fight breaks out in the dressing room between like, you know, like West Side Story. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| It's a very different type of dance fighting. | ||
| It's a very different type of dance fighting. | ||
| Very different. | ||
| And a lot more shouting. | ||
| So this big fight breaks out in the dressing room of the strip club where the Arkansas... | ||
| Dancers are screaming at the Oklahoma dancers. | ||
| And it seems like, I don't want to pass judgment, but it seems that the Arkansas dancers were the ones that fought. | ||
| They were kind of a little out of control. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I can see that you're clearly slandering the great state of Arkansas. | ||
| It's notorious in America for being our greatest state. | ||
| So I think... | ||
| And it's all captured on CCTV. | ||
| The manager of this strip club is passing this tape around. | ||
| Now, the reason why he's doing it to other strip clubs in the area. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| To warn them about the dancers. | ||
| He's not an underground world star hip-hop thing. | ||
| He's trying to warn people about the Arkansas dancers of death. | ||
| On the rampage. | ||
| Don't let them into your strip club. | ||
| That's an 80s movie right there. | ||
| That's the stuff. | ||
| Now, as you say, to one degree or another, everyone in the story is lying. | ||
| What I think was the real reason, I don't want to be slanderous, but it feels like another reason why this tape is being handed around is because of the sort of visceral sight of these naked women screaming at each other in the back room of a street club. | ||
| Again, somebody screamed world star hip-hop. | ||
| Yes, we're there. | ||
| So this other... | ||
| You know, this other bouncer from another strip club is watching this tape. | ||
| And so he watches the fight between the women. | ||
| But then he decides to watch the rest of the tape. | ||
| I mean, you know, you're right. | ||
| He got high one night and he's like, I don't know. | ||
| He just left it on. | ||
| He's not telling you the truth. | ||
| He didn't decide to watch the rest of the tape. | ||
| He wants to watch an hour's lot of naked women getting changed in the dressing room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, sure enough, you know, the tape is full of just women changing clothes and so on. | ||
| But at one point, a woman comes in. | ||
| And this really does happen. | ||
| She comes in and she says something a little unintelligible, but basically what she's saying is something weird just happened outside. | ||
| I'm sitting with a group of men and one of them says to me, and this is the part that's completely intelligible. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| One of them says, you're going to remember, I'm a very smart man. | ||
| I said you are. | ||
| And he said, I am. | ||
| And you're going to remember me on April 1995. | ||
| You're going to remember me for the rest of your life. | ||
| And this was 10 days before the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| So when NBC and J.D. Cash get hold of this tape, they go and interview all the dancers. | ||
| And this is where things get a little murky. | ||
| Some of the dancers... | ||
| Well, so this... | ||
| Story of the strip club for conspiracy theorists is like a huge clue. | ||
| Because it's fairly close to Elohim City, right? | ||
| So the strip club, as I understand the argument for why it's an excellent clue, it's fairly close to Elohim City. | ||
| The men of fighting age at Elohim City are not allowed to drink there. | ||
| So what they do is they go blow off some steam at the local strip club. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And so they go back and interview the women at the strip club. | ||
| And the story that Mike and Bob told me and the story that's kind of, you know, out there in the ether is that they showed them pictures of Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and then... | ||
| men from Elohim City like Andy the German and a couple of others and they identified them as being the men who were in the bar that night. | ||
| So there's a sighting of McVeigh bragging about what he's going to do in 10 days'time or 9 days'time while sitting with Andy Strassmeyer from Elohim City, so Smoking gun. | ||
| You got him. | ||
|
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Whoa, so, so salacious. | |
| And so James Elroy. | ||
| And hypocritical, and so everything. | ||
| Oh, it's juicy. | ||
| And so noir. | ||
|
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If you're writing a new story, oh yeah, that's what you want. | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, it's straight out of, you know, like... | ||
| It's straight out of, you know, Humphrey Bogart movie, right? | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Straight out of Sam Spade. | ||
| So that's, you know, why it caught fire so much. | ||
| And then there's two other pieces of evidence that seem to link McVeigh to Elohim City too. | ||
| So you've got Snell, which we've already discussed. | ||
| You've got Lady Godiva. | ||
| And then you've got a couple of other things. | ||
| So one is that McVeigh, very shortly after hiring the rider truck that he uses for the bombing, foams Elohim City. | ||
| And asks to speak to Andy the German. | ||
| Now, Andy the German is this guy that Carol is spying on. | ||
| She's having an affair with him to spy on him for the government. | ||
| And he's like the most, according to Rachel Patterson, he's one of the most outspoken people at Elohim City. | ||
| He's the one plotting, saying we need to be more white supremacist. | ||
| We need to blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then it turns out, to make matters even murkier, that Andy Strasmeier comes from a political family in Germany where his father worked for Helmut Kohl and was heavily involved in the reunification of East and West Berlin, you know, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. | ||
| So, fuck, what's this guy doing at Elohim City? | ||
| Oh, I'm going to tell you this in my researcher zings. | ||
| I couldn't... | ||
| Verify this. | ||
| And that's why I don't believe it's true. | ||
| But what I believe is that the conspiracy theory has metastasized even further. | ||
| In your debutant, in the conspiracy theory, he's from a wealthy political family with high connections. | ||
| Maybe he's an informant. | ||
| Maybe he's a spy. | ||
| Maybe he's all of these things. | ||
| And then later on, you go into it, and the surprise is you wind up speaking to Andy. | ||
| And he tells you that he's, it was like a mid-level, no big deal political family. | ||
| Conspiracy theory metastasized. | ||
| Now his grandfather helped set up the Nazi party. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| No, the thing is, like, right. | ||
| I mean, I sort of discounted that because... | ||
| You know, everyone was a fucking Nazi. | ||
|
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I don't know if that's a discountable thing! | |
| Well, but the fact, you know, my grandfather was a milliner. | ||
| Like, he made hats. | ||
| That doesn't impact, you know, the choices that I made, you know, two generations ago. | ||
|
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Sure, sure. | |
| That's fair. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| But your grandfather's values were passed down to your father were passed down to you. | ||
| You know, there's definitely a lineage with the grandfather thing. | ||
| It's not to be completely discounted. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| If your grandfather is a Nazi, that's worse than if your grandfather was not a Nazi. | ||
| We're going to throw that out there. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| When I said that, what I was going for is that that's not a further clue that Strassmeier was actually a... | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Statistically, everybody was a goddamn Nazi. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't give any more credence to the idea that he was an undercover agent himself. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what did happen was that McVeigh did phone Elohim City and asked to speak to Andy the German. | ||
| And the other thing, this is like the other sort of cornerstone of the conspiracy theory, is that McVeigh was stopped for a traffic violation. | ||
| Very close to the very remote Elohim City. | ||
| So then what I do in later episodes of the show is dig into all of those things to try and figure out, you know, can you use your rational mind to try and figure out what to think of those things? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the idea is he's caught speeding on I-85. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Actually, it was overtaking in a no-overtaking stretch of the road. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Just to be pedantic. | ||
| Apologies. | ||
| It's on me. | ||
| So he's on the main highway, though, as opposed to being near the Elohim city. | ||
| It's not like he's on the six-mile stretch of dirt road. | ||
| And we know that he's a guy who literally crisscrossed the entire area over and over and over and over again. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's not really compelling evidence to say that he was there. | ||
| Talk about metastasizing. | ||
| That's a real example of that. | ||
| Because it wasn't just on the road. | ||
| Even people, you know, even... | ||
| People from the SPLC were saying, you know, who don't believe the conspiracy theory, were saying, this is odd. | ||
| Like, you know, like how being pushed off the roof by black people, this is something that's pretty much just generally accepted, that McVeigh was stopped really close to Elohim City. | ||
| It was actually like a 40-minute drive. | ||
| It was on a main road. | ||
| It wasn't on the dirt road. | ||
| And it was much earlier. | ||
| It was like 18 months before the bombing. | ||
| So, you know, when you dig into that one, it kind of crumbles. | ||
| Most, if not all, of the evidence crumbles. | ||
| Crumbles, exactly. | ||
| Which then takes us to another, what I think, extraordinary thing about the story, which is that despite when you dig into the evidence, it all crumbles. | ||
| People are refusing to give it up. | ||
| People are refusing to give it up for lots of different and really interesting reasons. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Which I'm sure we'll get on to. | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| So, yeah, so here's, I feel like where we are. | ||
| We are at, just after the OKC bombing, when Carol's story. | ||
| I'm hesitant to just say, like, let's skip over the OKC bombing. | ||
| I assume... | ||
| A vast majority of our listeners will be extremely familiar with the OKC bombing. | ||
| But just to give a rundown, what's going on is all of a sudden, one day, Timothy McVeigh blows up the Murrah building with an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb in a truck. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And winds up killing just a... | ||
| 80 people, something? | ||
| No, no, 168 people. | ||
| 168 people, that's right. | ||
| No, I got that switched up with the number who died at Waco. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because those two things are very, very related to each other. | ||
| Yeah, very related. | ||
| Including 19 children who just arrived at daycare. | ||
| It seems pretty likely that McVeigh didn't know that there was a daycare center there. | ||
| Because it sort of... | ||
|
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Well, it didn't matter to him. | |
| Well, he certainly justified it in his mind. | ||
| There's a chilling quote that he gave, which was when his biographer said to him, what about the secretaries? | ||
| And he said, well, he was a big fan of Star Wars. | ||
| And when they blow up the Death Star, lots of innocent people die in the Death Star, but nobody in the cinema audience minds. | ||
| Do you know what's so funny about that? | ||
| Is that in the movie Clerks, they have that argument. | ||
| Only a few years before. | ||
| So they had a huge long conversation about how we are contextualizing the Death Star in such a way as to erase the fact that Luke and his team were terrorists who were going around blowing up all of these innocent people on the Death Star. | ||
| Wow, so do you think McVeigh was plagiarizing clerks? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I just think it's ironic that it's a chilling quote in the context of Timothy McVeigh. | ||
| Whenever Kevin Smith writes a dialogue about it, it's very, very funny and light. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Clerks was before. | ||
| What year was Clerks? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| I want to say 88, 87, something like that. | ||
| You know, I would not put it first. | ||
| Actually, you know what? | ||
| I got to look it up because people are going to be very mad at me if I get it right. | ||
| If it was before the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| Oh, 1994. | ||
| Okay, so a year earlier. | ||
| I think I put money on McVeigh plagiarizing clerks. | ||
| Timothy McVeigh watched clerks and then gave that quote as, oh my god. | ||
| I think you've got something there. | ||
| I am getting to the bottom of these conspiracy theories left and right! | ||
| Well, you know, his pseudonym was Tim Tuttle, and he always denied it, but obviously Tuttle is De Niro's character in Brazil. | ||
| I wouldn't be at all surprised if McVeigh watched Brazil as well. | ||
| And I'll tell you this. | ||
| Here's one of the biggest, easiest ways to kind of corroborate that is everything in this world is about movies. | ||
| That's the one thing that we've learned over and over and over again through Alex's show. | ||
| It's just movies. | ||
| It's over and over and over again. | ||
| This is what they're doing. | ||
| It's exactly like in this movie. | ||
| It's exactly like in this movie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When I was writing The Minister at Goats, that was a real revelation to me that the reason why, one of the reasons why, All of these special forces people would try to walk through walls and become invisible and stuff is because they were inspired by movies. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| It's people who cannot distinguish the difference between fiction and reality that extremely overpopulate the group, which is, again, why Timothy McVeigh is so fascinating as a parallel to Carol Howe. | ||
| I mean, Carol is lying nonstop. | ||
| Carol lies to everyone. | ||
| Carol tells everyone what they want to hear. | ||
| And Carol gets whatever she wants from these relationships. | ||
| And Timothy McVeigh is the complete opposite. | ||
| All he does is tell the truth. | ||
| He doesn't get close to anybody. | ||
| He keeps going from place to place like a drifter. | ||
| And then he's a believer and he follows through. | ||
| It is such a fascinating parallel story. | ||
| And the people who are obsessed with the conspiracy theory are trying to smush them together. | ||
| Because if you squint real tight, these parallel stories intersect. | ||
| But they just don't. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| It's so fascinating. | ||
| Can I say, by the way, that the amount of thought you've put into this is so kind of admirable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop. | |
| No, I refuse to accept compliments from anybody, let alone you. | ||
| Don't casually name drop I wrote the men who stare at goats and then be like, oh, I'm surprised you thought about this, you clown. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That Clerks thing, I had no idea about. | ||
| And I really believe, I think there's a very strong chance that they got that from Clerks. | ||
| Well, I mean, it wouldn't be the first time that a joke turned into a right-wing meme that led to a death. | ||
| Well, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, because then what happens is Carol sort of vanishes from history for a while. | ||
| And then, remarkably, you know, we leave Carol right after the bombing. | ||
| She's gone to the FBI. | ||
| She's told them what she knows. | ||
| She's clearly remorseful. | ||
| She was a good informant, like I'm sure of that. | ||
| I don't think it's anything that she did as an informant that you can criticise her over. | ||
| She gave good information. | ||
| So she leaves the story as a kind of hero, and then she vanishes from history, and then reappears in the most unexpected way, like 18 months later, in 1997. | ||
| It's so funny to me because this was one of the biggest moments where I was like, oh, I know this person. | ||
| I know exactly who this person is. | ||
| And what's so funny is, so she reappears 18 months later with Thor. | ||
| Thorson. | ||
| Thorson. | ||
| A new Nazi boyfriend. | ||
| He's not the real Thor. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And she is Freya. | ||
| Yeah, she's Freya. | ||
| So she's rejoined a Nazi group as leader. | ||
| And now they're recording Dialeracist messages themselves and, you know, plotting violent revolution. | ||
| You know, warning that if the white revolution doesn't start in the next two weeks, this is from memory, I might be slightly wrong, they're going to start it and so on. | ||
| So they're arrested. | ||
| He... | ||
| Is found guilty and sent to jail for three years, but she gets Tulsa's best lawyer and gets off. | ||
| And as you say, she goes through life without... | ||
| I wonder why I hate rich people. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| It's so weird, you know? | ||
| It's so odd that I would despise rich people. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Anyways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So while she's standing trial for plotting... | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| There is one person in the story who I trusted and believed, and maybe naively, I don't know. | ||
| But the FBI guy who arrested her and discovered this new Nazi group she was in 18 months later. | ||
| And I've just drawn a blank on his name, annoyingly. | ||
| But he gave us a bunch of stuff. | ||
| He gave us a letter that Carol wrote to her parents and gave us that. | ||
| And he... | ||
| The letter is another one of those things that is such a great, I know exactly who this person is moment. | ||
| I mean, and I'm going to tell you my understanding of Carol. | ||
| It comes from the letter. | ||
| That's what made it all very clear to me who exactly Carol was, is because the letter is one of the most self-aggrandizing, self-mythologizing, heroic, woe-is-me-ass, fucking, I-can't-believe-that-I-am-both-a-hero-and-the-world-is-against-me letters that I've ever read or ever heard. | ||
| And also when the letter was written is very relevant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| That's a huge part of it. | ||
| But the one part that I couldn't get out of my head, I couldn't get out of my fucking head, is when she writes down the exact cost of her guns. | ||
| That was the thing. | ||
| That was the thing where I was like, I know who this person is. | ||
| This is fucking Alex Jones if he was terrible on Mike. | ||
| This is an amazing thing because she has a very similar upbringing. | ||
| She's never received consequences. | ||
| She doesn't tell the truth to anybody. | ||
| She has a parasitic social lifestyle. | ||
| John Ronson, I'm going to tell you this right now. | ||
| I got a copy of The Psychopath Test just to run Carol through it. | ||
| And boy, howdy! | ||
| Well, I mean, she definitely has a sort of... | ||
| Shallow affect. | ||
| That's the thing about the 18 months, is everybody was like, how did she come up there? | ||
| And to me, it made so much sense. | ||
| What, was she going to get a fucking job? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the story that she tells in court, which is believed, and for me, this was the moment. | ||
| The longest time, you know, trying to figure out what do I believe about Carol, you know, and what should I make of Carol? | ||
| And for me, the moment when it all starts to crumble was her defence. | ||
| So, yeah, so she's found 18 months later. | ||
| And her defence was that the FBI... | ||
| She had sloppily revealed her name to the world, which is true. | ||
| The FBI did do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Again, no good people in this story whatsoever. | ||
| And as a result of that, she had to get in deeper. | ||
| And then she comes up with this very convoluted defense, which is that the reason why she set up the new Dialer racist was in part because she had to get in deeper. | ||
| Because the FBI had revealed her name and she was in danger. | ||
| And B, she was using Dala Racist as like a honey trap to attract two racists who then she could report on to the ATF, even though she'd been deactivated years earlier and had no connection to the ATF whatsoever. | ||
| But because she had like... | ||
| A great lawyer. | ||
| Everybody would agree that if you were in trouble in Tulsa and you had the money, get Jack Brewster. | ||
| He's currently Stormy Daniels' lawyer. | ||
| So it was believed. | ||
| She won. | ||
| She got off. | ||
| And on what seems to me like a really implausible... | ||
| Oh, it's an absurd story. | ||
| Yeah, it just defies rationality. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| There's so many people, and we're not talking about Infowars audience. | ||
| We're talking about people from completely different stratas of society who really believe Carol's story, despite everything that we've just talked about. | ||
| And I think there's a very simple and obvious reason for that. | ||
| And I'll tell you this. | ||
| I never looked at a picture of Carol. | ||
| Not once. | ||
| So for this entire thing, when you said that when it's named the debutante, whenever it opens with her being an appearance-based human being, you know, I thought, well, that is easily the thing that tricks everybody. | ||
| So just don't do that. | ||
| And I think it's a lot easier to understand once you don't know what she looks like. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that is a very big part of it. | ||
| Her wealth. | ||
| She's charismatic. | ||
| I mean, she may be sort of shallow. | ||
| Shallow, charismatic, bored easily, parasitic lifestyle. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| It's funny, even though I said that I always try to think of what disorders people have, I tend not to say them out loud because I always think it's not fair. | ||
| But the people who have said to me, Carla comes over, it's like classic borderline. | ||
| That's not right. | ||
| Because, you know, and a few people have said that to me, but, you know, the big book about borderline personality disorder is called I Hate You, Don't Leave Me. | ||
| And Carol isn't a I hate you, don't leave me person at all. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| She picks people up and throws them away like nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, and I'm not diagnosing her, because I don't, I mean, even your book about the psychopath test is, hey, don't do the psychopath test. | ||
| So believe me, I'm not doing that. | ||
| But I will say that her pattern of behavior, what I would strongly suspect of her childhood, and everything that she's done in your story, leads you to that point. | ||
| And I think part of the reason that people look over it is appearance. | ||
| She's a woman. | ||
| There's so much misogyny baked into this tale that it's wild. | ||
| To see how much of it is just like, oh yeah, no, no, that's how it was back then. | ||
| That's just the way everybody did things, you know? | ||
| Well, yes, because the big thing, so, you know, so a bunch of like mainstream people, just mainstream journalists believe Carol's story. | ||
| Victims of the bombing believe Carol's story. | ||
| She's like a sort of femme fatale for like everyone, for the white supremacy guys that she was dating, but also for conspiracy investigators and for victims of the bombing, you know, who want answers and closure. | ||
| She, as you said, she tells people what they want to hear. | ||
| All the time, yeah. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| And one of the legacies of that is she's also now become a very kind of totemic figure, if that's the right phrase, for people. | ||
| And this is where it gets into slightly more complicated areas. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm down. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| So for people, as you know, there's a big move in some sort of academic quarters on the left to say that... | ||
| That the anti-government right in America are much more white supremacist than we think and much more unified and connected than we think. | ||
| So we have to, you know, they're plotting against us, they're plotting civil war, so we have to, like, raid, you know, we have to proactively do stuff about it, like, for instance, raiding Elohim City. | ||
| So, and Cowell fits very neatly into that narrative, because if you believe Cowell's story, then what you're also believing is that McVeigh had much more specific help from other Nazis, which proves that they're much more unified than they would like us to believe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But as you say, and I say, I think Carol's story crumbles when you dig into it. | ||
| So to believe that kind of means that you're believing in a conspiracy theory. | ||
| No, it doesn't kind of. | ||
| It does. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Here's what's fascinating about that is you don't get to talk to Carol, despite the fact that she does agree to speak to you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so much when I got to the end of the story and she agreed to speak to you and then she doesn't show up and goes completely dark. | ||
| I'm like, there's no point. | ||
| There's no point. | ||
| If she talks to you, she is going to tell you a completely different story than she tells the person that she talks to 20 minutes after you than you. | ||
| 20 minutes after than you, that person gets it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| And even if they're the same story, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. | ||
| It's for her. | ||
| It's for her benefit. | ||
| I gotta say, I came to the same conclusion. | ||
| Like, I was disappointed that she wouldn't talk to me. | ||
| And if she ever changes her mind and wants to talk to me, I'm down. | ||
| Oh, of course you are. | ||
| Of course you are. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I'll listen to whatever she wants to say. | ||
| But I did come to that conclusion. | ||
| Like, if you start to not believe Carol, then interviewing her is no longer essential. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, the person that I want to interview the most is her dad. | ||
| I think there's a good chance that her dad is probably the key to understanding her far better than anybody on this fucking planet. | ||
| I'll say that. | ||
| Well, maybe I should try her dad again. | ||
| I think you absolutely should. | ||
| That, to me, everything probably starts there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, she was... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, her relationship with men is great, though. | ||
| She definitely doesn't gravitate to older men. | ||
| Yeah, Dennis Mahan's 20 years her senior. | ||
| Greg, I think, was roughly the same age. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| But that was to piss off her dad. | ||
| That was dad-centric. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Dennis May had, I mean, Jesus, I mean, he definitely had some charisma. | ||
| But my God, is that man insane. | ||
| I mean, he's now doing 40 years for mail bombing. | ||
| So he turned out to be just as dangerous as people thought he was. | ||
| But the one thing I want to add, like, the academics and so on who believe Carol's story, they're definitely right about some things. | ||
| They're right that the Turner Diaries is a unifying thing. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So the far right are more aligned in some ways than history would have us believe. | ||
| I think that's definitely true. | ||
| But it's a real reach to then decide that they believe character. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think what is so striking to me about the points of view presented is that no one, I feel, has the... | ||
| Well... | ||
| I'll say this. | ||
| If you wanted to stop the OKC bombing, I don't think you would have been able to stop somebody from bombing the Murrah building. | ||
| But if you wanted to stop Timothy McVeigh from bombing the Murrah building, then after Waco, you disband the ATF and hold the leadership accountable for it. | ||
| No amount of raiding anyone. | ||
| Of any kind of force applied by the law is going to stop. | ||
| It's only going to increase the likelihood of another OKC bombing. | ||
| So that's what I find so interesting about your story is that I don't think anybody has any idea what they're talking about in regards to why shit is taking place, because what they want to believe is something completely different from reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| And of course, that's the thing that makes the story very current, because there's still people out there, you know, who are saying that, you know, I understand why the argument is being had, that, you know, look at Charlottesville, look at January the 6th, you know, these genuinely scary, dangerous things are happening. | ||
| So I understand why, then it's like a lot of, you know... | ||
| Fear and anxiety and paranoia. | ||
| You know, these things aren't disparate things. | ||
| These are all connected and we have to do something about it before they get us and start a civil war. | ||
| But it's also, you know, you have to be really fucking careful, you know, because what it leads to is Wacos. | ||
| Well, I mean, it is no coincidence to me, one, that Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden come from the same war. | ||
| In terms of why they blew up America. | ||
| And two, that people don't want to believe the people who said why. | ||
| You know, Timothy said why. | ||
| Osama said why. | ||
| And instead we hear that they hate our freedoms. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So to me, a lot of this comes again straight from this place of, do you know why January 6th happened? | ||
| Because of the Iraq War. | ||
| Because of the Gulf War, because of the Vietnam War, because we are... | ||
| I mean, if you want to say that we are a country that is governing itself, the people are involved in the government, then we also have to accept responsibility for what the government does. | ||
| Or we say that the government is out of fucking control and they are crazy. | ||
| And the problem is... | ||
| Both are true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, the whole Vietnam connection is really interesting, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But think about that. | ||
| Think about the Vietnam connection. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry for screaming at you. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But when you think about this, right? | ||
| You think about somebody in Vietnam watching the United States government burn a village alive. | ||
| Burn those children alive. | ||
| And they say, no, this is fine because we're the good guys. | ||
| And then you come home and you watch the United States government burn children alive. | ||
| I mean, what are you going to say? | ||
| There's no good guy here. | ||
| The problem is that we're not dealing with the reason that these things are happening. | ||
| And in fact, you could argue quite the opposite. | ||
| I don't want to oversell this because this is slightly... | ||
| Going beyond my sphere of knowledge. | ||
| Oh, I'm in. | ||
| Speculate. | ||
| That's my job. | ||
| I'm a clown. | ||
| Everything I say is beyond my sphere of knowledge. | ||
| I was a professional comedian, and now I talk louder than people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| Well, okay. | ||
| So, you know, the message of Waker, and, you know, I was talking, I don't know if you know Michael Moynihan, who presents the Fifth Column podcast. | ||
| Okay, he's really interesting. | ||
| And he said this to me, and we kind of agreed, that basically... | ||
| After Waco, there was this big documentary, Waco Rules of Engagement, and it was nominated for an Oscar and, you know, beloved documentary. | ||
| And the message of Waco Rules of Engagement is we don't want, we want to try everything we can to avoid more Wacos. | ||
| It was a total mess. | ||
| It was a fuck-up. | ||
| It was used as like an experimental, you know, I mean, Jesus, the shit they got up to at Waco. | ||
| I mean, I read about this in The Men's Steric Goats a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| You know, they're trying all of these like, you know, exotic, Torture techniques, blasting sounds of dying rabbits. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| They wanted to play with their new toys. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| They were grown-ups who wanted to play with their new toys. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons that I say, like, when Waco happened and no one was held accountable for it, you guaranteed OKC was going to happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think, and this is where I'm slightly out of my sphere of knowledge, but it feels to me, and tell me if I'm wrong, that the message of Waco has kind of changed over the decades. | ||
| And it's no longer, this is a cautionary tale, let's not do this shit anymore. | ||
| Let's not have this kind of government overreach. | ||
| Two, maybe we should be doing more Wacos, you know. | ||
| Things are such a, you know, things are at such fever pitch. | ||
| Maybe we need to stop them before they stop us. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, here's what I'll say about that. | ||
| So when I read, I think the book was... | ||
| Oh, no, I have it here. | ||
| Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters by, I gotta cite them, Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles. | ||
| Right, yes. | ||
| So Timothy McVeigh's last words before execution were the... | ||
| Unfortunately, very apt Louis Brandeis quotes. | ||
| Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. | ||
| That quote. | ||
| And it is very much like... | ||
| If you want to get to the heart of where these things are coming from, you have to point at the people with agency. | ||
| And that is the people in the FBI and the ATF and the government. | ||
| The law enforcement. | ||
| Like, ACAB is not specific to cops. | ||
| It's ATF, it's FBI, it's the Border Patrol. | ||
| All of these people are creating the violence that they pretend to stop. | ||
| And I think if we didn't have movies, if it weren't so attractive to have an FBI agent in a movie, and we knew what the FBI and ATF and all those people actually do... | ||
| We would be like, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We got to get rid of these assholes as soon as fucking possible. | ||
| Are you shitting me? | ||
| These are evil people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm so glad that you're saying this because I think this viewpoint on the left is starting to diminish a little, I think. | ||
| You know, everyone's so nervous about, you know, the idea of like impending civil war and so on that, you know. | ||
| People are escalating things all over the place. | ||
| So I'm so pleased that you said all of that because I agree entirely with that. | ||
| And more people should be thinking that, frankly. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| I mean, unfortunately, I think people assume that if I am talking about the OKC bombing, I'm going to wind up on a watch list. | ||
| So it's delightful to disappoint. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But no, it worries me to see conspiracy theories. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| It is our stated, like, we don't have a team. | ||
| I mean, that's just the reality for the two of us. | ||
| And so, it doesn't, like, if people want to believe something, that's my first, like, oh, you're, stop it. | ||
| If something is true that you want to be true, you really need to dig as deep as you can into whether or not it is, because it's probably not. | ||
| The world we live in is garbage sauce. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, yeah, and obviously, you know... | ||
| I think it's a great, exciting climax of the debutante for me to come to a conclusion that there's no conspiracy. | ||
| But obviously some people... | ||
| I do too! | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| That's what was so interesting to me, the experience of listening to it, is because as you're bringing up the evidence throughout it, you know, in that kind of true crime way of like, oh, the people say that the cops were, and then there was this clue, and all of that stuff. | ||
| And it was so much me being like, well, that's bullshit. | ||
| Well, that's dumb. | ||
| Well, that's nothing. | ||
| So you must have been pleased. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, no. | ||
| At the end, whenever you went through it, I was like, oh, thank God. | ||
| I was worried that I was going to scream at John Ronson for two hours. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Thankfully, I only screamed at you for two hours. | ||
| Yeah, and it's so important. | ||
| So for me, that's a great, you know, sort of disproving it as much as I possibly can with the evidence that I had. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Just became such a kind of important thing. | ||
| So in the end, I think what The Debutant is, it starts as, I think, a really fun way of telling the story of this really unusual woman. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And then it ends as a sort of tribute to the old values of evidence-gathering journalism as opposed to ideological journalism, which is something, yeah. | ||
| Oh, no, you're talking to, you know, Dan is, Dan has been, like, the very first, from the moment we started, it was assume nothing. | ||
| Don't assume that he's a bad guy. | ||
| Don't assume he's a good guy. | ||
| Don't assume he's wrong. | ||
| Don't assume he's right. | ||
| Take every claim individually and go from there. | ||
| You know, and now we've come to the conclusion that he's lied about everything. | ||
| And I feel like, again, that's why Carol's so familiar to me, is because it is just like that. | ||
| Sell my Tech 9 for $650. | ||
| That's a person who fucking loves their guns and is proud of the fact that they own that gun. | ||
| Why would you tell your insanely rich parents to sell your guns for only $650? | ||
| That guy was an oil baron. | ||
| The only reason you do that is because you love them. | ||
| It's so interesting to me. | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| Oh, well, good. | ||
| By the way, this has been a great interview. | ||
| Oh, I'm better than Rogan? | ||
| Well, I did Rogan twice. | ||
| The first time I did him was before. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| You've done us twice, all right? | ||
| This is the second time for us, too. | ||
| Well, let's see who gets the third run. | ||
| The first time I did Joe Rogan was like way before, you know, he was the phenomenon that he became. | ||
| I think I was like in maybe the 600s. | ||
| I don't know what he's up to now, maybe like 2000 or something. | ||
| Lord knows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was interesting because, you know, it was before any of this stuff happened, before he became such a sort of superstar. | ||
| And I just really noticed. | ||
| In fact, I did these two podcasts at the same time. | ||
| Rogan and this show called Guys We Fucked, which is these two sex-positive women, Kareem and Christian. | ||
| And I just noticed for like the next year, everywhere I went, I was in like... | ||
| Canberra, and I was in Dubai, and people were coming up to me in the signing queue saying, oh, I loved you on Joe Rogan, or I loved you on Guys We Fucked. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I remember thinking, my God, I had no idea the reach of this guy. | ||
| And yeah, and then he subsequently kind of exploded a couple of years later. | ||
| Yeah, that's such a funny... | ||
| I mean, in the context of this entire conversation, you know, like that... | ||
| That realization of Joe Rogan's, quote, journey, you know, like that idea of he was ostensibly just a stoner guy who didn't care too much to now being an alt-right figurehead, you know, hanging out with Elon Musk and convincing people that vaccines are evil. | ||
| You know, like that is the same trajectory of somebody with, I mean, it's a trajectory of somebody with too much money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the trajectory of people with money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I did an interview quite recently with this British guy, a rapper called Scroobius Pip, and he's, who does a podcast called Distraction Pieces, and he's been on Rogan too. | ||
| And during the interview, he kind of asked me, like, what do I think of Rogan, you know, post, you know, because he says he feels conflicted now that Rogan's, you know, saying all this sort of VAC stuff and so on. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| So we had a conversation about it. | ||
| And one thing that... | ||
| You know, I sort of ruefully pointed out is that, you know, Joe Rogan does about three hours of audio a day. | ||
| I do about three hours of audio a year. | ||
| So, A, that means I'm a lot less... | ||
| Wealthy than he is. | ||
| And it means that, you know, I have a massive amount of time to go home and think about every single thing that I say in the show. | ||
| And so every split second of my shows or books, whatever they are, have been like thought over, mulled over like a million times. | ||
| And, you know, I guess the problem with doing three hours of broadcast a day is that you don't do that. | ||
| You just splurge it all out. | ||
| And that becomes the thing. | ||
| And then you surround yourself with yes-men who will just agree with whatever you say. | ||
| So all of a sudden you think the things that you splurge out are correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the trajectory of being rich! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It's dispiriting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But I really enjoyed this, and I particularly enjoyed what you said about Snell and Malar, and that there's a world in which... | ||
| Snell and Millar could have known that this was going to happen that day, but that doesn't mean that the other stuff is true. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, let me put it to... | ||
| I think I would put it better this way, right? | ||
| They didn't know it was going to happen. | ||
| They didn't know it was going to happen because everybody in that world talk shit nonstop. | ||
| They knew that this guy, Timothy McVeigh, was talking shit about doing it on this day. | ||
| So when they turned the TV on, they had no idea if anything was actually going to happen. | ||
| And in fact, I would bet $99 million on them thinking, I bet this guy's full of shit. | ||
| And nothing is going to happen. | ||
| And then it did. | ||
| That is, to me, the only reasonable explanation. | ||
| That handles things, that makes sense of all of the disparate facts that actually exist. | ||
| Yeah, because, you know, even if McVeigh never went to Elohim City, and there's no evidence that he did, there's no good evidence that he ever did go to Elohim City. | ||
| What I know for sure was that he was setting up at gun shows in Tulsa, and the gun shows in Tulsa were full of people who went to Elohim City. | ||
| Totally! | ||
| Everybody talked shit all the time. | ||
| Like Alex. | ||
| Alex doesn't actually want to overthrow the government. | ||
| He was at J6 telling people, hey, we need to calm the fuck down. | ||
| What are we all doing here? | ||
| Everybody, stop! | ||
| Run away! | ||
| You know, that kind of thing. | ||
| Because he's a shit talker. | ||
| You know, Carol's a shit talker. | ||
| These are shit talkers. | ||
| And for their faults, Timothy McVeigh is a believer. | ||
| And so it is the shit talk universe that catches hold of a believer and then the believer does shit. | ||
| So to me, whenever people talk about how do you want to stop an OKC, I don't care about the shit talkers. | ||
| The shit talkers are everywhere. | ||
| I mean, the thing about that strip club tape, right? | ||
| If you got a tape from every strip club in this country... | ||
| From that night, there was at least 20 stories of people going, you're going to remember me in April 1995. | ||
| I'm the number one salesman for blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That is a guaranteed truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I should say, you know, if people listen to The Debutant, which they still should, even though we've really unpicked, you know, so much of the story. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| I really, really enjoyed it. | ||
| But you'll see that, you know, we don't get to meet Pam, the woman who said that, but we did find an interview that she gave the FBI at the time where she tells a different story and a more plausible story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she says that she didn't actually identify McVeigh or Strassmeyer or anyone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think you said there's nobody in the story that you believe. | ||
| I agree with you that it feels that McVeigh is telling the truth. | ||
| But also the FBI agent who arrested Carol, I think he was telling me the truth. | ||
| And in fact, when I read his report, finally, that, you know, he wrote this sort of six or seven page report where he interviews Carol's first husband, Greg. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| I read his report right at the end of the process. | ||
| Like, he gave it to me, but I didn't read it until I was, you know, almost finished with the show. | ||
| And what really surprised me and made me sort of smile ruefully, because I'd spent, like, so much time trying to figure out what to make of the story. | ||
| And his report is pretty much identical to how I ended up telling my story. | ||
| And so I think the journey that he went on at the time in the 90s to try and figure out Carol and Greg and May had an edit from City, he seems to have... | ||
| Come to pretty much exactly the same conclusions that I came to. | ||
| 30 years later. | ||
| So I think he's somebody. | ||
| So there is one person to believe in this story. | ||
| And in fact, I would say that I probably agree almost certainly with you. | ||
| despite my protestations, one of the biggest problems with the ATNF and the FBI at this time has nothing to do with the individual agents who are almost all, like, oh, so frequently, I mean, besides the people who handle the confidential informants being giant pieces of shit who should be tossed into the sun, Most of the people on the ground are giving accurate information, giving good advice. | ||
| And it is the leadership of like Louis Free and those fuckwads who are saying, nah, nah, we want to try out our new toys. | ||
| And when they didn't receive any, they didn't even receive a reprimand. | ||
| Everybody was like, yeah, of course we murdered those people at Waco. | ||
| They were evil. | ||
| You know, that was the point. | ||
| That was the point where it is like, if we do not hold ourselves accountable for... | ||
| Then somebody who we sent to a fucking war and taught how to kill people is going to. | ||
| That is the fucking crux of the Waco-OKC connection. | ||
| And the fact that so many people are like, hey, what we should have done is do more raids. | ||
| We should be more aggressive with law enforcement. | ||
| Boggles my mind. | ||
| Well, it reminds me of something. | ||
| I'm making season two of Things Fell Apart at the moment. | ||
| Apologies for the joke. | ||
| And it's proven to be just as... | ||
| Good, I think. | ||
| We found some more great stories. | ||
| But anyway, in the research for that, I came across a quote from a conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever come across him. | ||
| Oh, I know who Ross fucking Douthat is. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Okay, but he said this one line, though, which I agree with, and I think you'll agree with, because it's basically echoing what we're saying to each other, which is like, you know... | ||
| People who see conspiracies everywhere have to make sure that in their sort of zeal to stamp them out, they're not inadvertently creating insurrection. | ||
| Or those people who see insurrection everywhere need to make sure that they're not creating the insurrection. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, that makes sense. | ||
| We create the enemies we fear. | ||
| And it's so frustrating because... | ||
| To see somebody like Timothy McVeigh execute a horrific terrorist act, murdering so many people and children and all of this stuff for the express reason that the government is doing evil shit, right? | ||
| To then, in response to that, see the government do nothing but evil shit kind of makes it difficult to be like, oh, no, no, no, we need more law enforcement to solve this problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it happens over and over again. | ||
| And we never learn from the mistakes. | ||
| And in fact, we forget what we learned. | ||
| After 9-11, we need to go to war in Iraq for 20 more years. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| We're not evil. | ||
| We're the good guys. | ||
| We slaughter millions of civilians. | ||
| And then we're shocked when people hate us. | ||
| It's because of our freedoms! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there you go. | |
| I suppose that's where you want to end it. | ||
| Did that sound like I'm trying to end the interview? | ||
| What I was going to say was, as always, when I kind of dig into your stuff, I'm really impressed by the thought that you put into it. | ||
| I know you don't like to be praised. | ||
| Also, I'm looking at two birds having sex on my bird table. | ||
| That's what I like to hear! | ||
| That's my shit right there. | ||
| Now you're speaking my language. | ||
| None of this compliment garbage. | ||
| Yeah, there's some pretty hot bird-on-bird action happening out of my window right now. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| Life finds a way. | ||
| I think that's the real lesson from this conversation that we're taking away. | ||
| Ah, well, good! | ||
| Well, John, thank you so much for joining me. | ||
| I think we're at, like, seven and a half hours now. | ||
| I apologize for monopolizing your time to this extent. | ||
| No, no, no, it's totally fine. | ||
| It means I can legitimately, like, finish work now and just slump onto the sofa. | ||
| All right, excellent. | ||
| But, no, Jordan, I really enjoyed that, and I'm looking forward to, you know, people hearing it. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining me again. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |
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