Jon Ronson revisits the dubious conspiracy linking Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to Elohim City, a white supremacist compound near Tulsa, where Carol Howe—a former debutante turned informant—claimed McVeigh received support from Andy "the German" Strasmeier and Dennis Mahan. Ronson exposes Howe’s shifting, unreliable testimony, including her bizarre claims of being pushed by black men off an Easter monument, and her later acquittal in the Dialeracist case despite no active role as an informant. Journalists like J.D. Cash sensationalized flimsy leads, such as a Lady Godiva strip club CCTV tape, while far-right networks like The Turner Diaries inspired McVeigh’s violence. The episode argues that government overreach—like Waco—fueled extremism more than organized support, debunking Howe’s narrative as self-serving and echoing patterns seen in figures like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.