Jon Ronson on the Allure of Conspiracies and the Culture War
Welcome to an exclusive episode of 'Some Dare Call It Conspiracy,' where hosts Neil Sanders and Brent Lee navigate the murky waters of conspiracy theories with guest Jon Ronson, an accomplished author and documentarian. This discussion delved into Ronson's firsthand experiences with the controversial figure Alex Jones, the shifting landscape of the truth movement, and the thin line between skepticism and belief.
Covid, Clots, and Conspiracy Theories
Ronson's personal health scare, contracting Covid-19 and later developing a blood clot, brings a sobering reality to the conversation. It highlights the tangible consequences of the pandemic, contrasting with the rampant Covid denial and misinformation that has infiltrated conspiracy circles. The discussion pivots to the pathological persistence of some conspiracy theorists who refuse to acknowledge their role in spreading harmful misinformation.
Examining Alex Jones: A Turn of Perspective
Ronson provides a unique perspective on Alex Jones, painting a picture of a man who consistently doubles down on conspiracy theories, potentially for personal gain rather than seeking truth. His recount of the infamous Bohemian Grove event illustrates the complexities and the theatrics of conspiracy narratives. This segues into a discussion of how some figures within the conspiracy community, including Jones, monetize and weaponize uncertainty to their advantage.
Cultural Wars and Class Struggles: The Role of Identity Politics
The podcast also touches on the cultural wars that are fueled by identity politics and class struggles. The hosts and Ronson debate how these divisive issues distract from the underlying socioeconomic inequalities that benefit the wealthy. They discuss the often-misunderstood or overstated elements of the culture war, designed to generate conflict and division.
The Hero's Journey of Conspiracy Theorists
Joseph Campbell's hero's journey is a concept that resonates deeply with conspiracy theorists. Ronson's exploration of this narrative shows that many within the conspiracy community view themselves as reluctant heroes, engaged in an epic struggle against the perceived dragons of society, such as government overreach and hidden crimes.
The Skeptic's Path: From Belief to Disillusionment
Sanders and Lee, formerly firm believers in conspiracy theories, share their journeys towards skepticism. They explore the pivotal moments that altered their views, shedding light on the internal conflicts that challenge staunch conspiracy theorists. This transformation from believer to skeptic is rare in a community where doubling down is the norm, providing valuable insights into the psychology of belief systems.
In the end, the conversation with Jon Ronson throws a spotlight on the complex, and often contradictory, world of conspiracy theories. Whether as pronounced heroes on a valiant quest or vilified purveyors of falsehoods, conspiracy theorists occupy a controversial space in the collective consciousness. 'Some Dare Call It Conspiracy' invites listeners to critically engage with these narratives and consider their profound impact on society.
TRANSCRIPT
Brent Lee:
Hello, initiates of the Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed and learned a lot over the last seven weeks digging into our Chemtrails On Trial series. Today, though, we have a special treat. And not only for you, but for us, too. In fact, when we confirmed this interview, my message to Neil was, I got the holy Grail, and he knew exactly what I meant. Now, full disclosure before we start. Now, you all know my past, so it should be no shock to you that I once believed this guest was what I considered an enemy. I thought his job was to make me and the truth movement look stupid. But in all fairness, I was probably doing a good enough job of that myself. I have since come to admire him, and I'm consistently impressed with his books, documentaries, films, and now his podcast. Things fell apart. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome, Jon Ronson.
Jon Ronson:
Hey, you guys. Thank you for having me. It's going to be fascinating talking to you, in part because the journey you've been on, the trajectory from believer to skeptic, is pretty rare. Like, I've met a few people who've had that arc. Not many. Most people double down and triple down and get. So I'd be curious at some point during this conversation to talk to you about the moment everything changed.
Brent Lee:
Yeah, absolutely.
Neil Sanders:
How are you feeling?
Jon Ronson:
Well, I'm okay. I got Covid about three weeks ago, and it wasn't that bad, but just as it was leaving my body, like, two weeks later, I got a blood clot in my lungs.
Brent Lee:
Oh, God.
Jon Ronson:
And I was at hospital in an ambulance. I'm okay now, but it's taking a little while to get completely better.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, dear. Well, if you need a break or anything like that, please do let us like. But where are you living at the moment? You're in upstate new York, aren't you?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, right now, I'm in upstate New York. We've also got a little place in the city, so I kind of bounce between one and the other, which is delightful. So, yeah, all is good. Where are you two? Are you in London or where.
Neil Sanders:
Brent's in Bristol. I'm in Nottingham.
Jon Ronson:
Okay.
Neil Sanders:
Right in the middle, basically. But I've been to New York. But it was years ago. It was absolutely years ago. I was about 15 at the time, so I actually got to go up the Twin Towers. So that gives you an idea of how long ago it was. It's crackers, though. New York.
Neil Sanders:
It's such a vibrant city. It just doesn't stop, does it?
Jon Ronson:
It's just wonderful. Yeah. The weekend before 911 was my first trip to do the project, which had actually turned into the men who stare at goats. Although at the time, we really didn't know quite what. Cool. We didn't really know what we were doing. It was very speculative. But I remember so clearly, like, I was at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and my view was just panoramia of the twin Towers.
Jon Ronson:
And I remember phoning my wife and saying, God you wouldn't believe, I've got this amazing view of the twin Towers. And then I got out of the elevator and Graham Norton was there, and who I knew a little bit.
Neil Sanders:
Well, there's no coincidences.
Jon Ronson:
And so we went out for a drink, and what I remember more than anything of that night was Graham Norton kind of whispering to me. We live charmed lives. And then three days later, 911 happened and everything changed. Yeah.
Neil Sanders:
At that point, were you still in touch with Alex Jones?
Jon Ronson:
Sort of. He didn't like Them.
Neil Sanders:
Did he not?
Jon Ronson:
I don't think he hated it. I don't think he loved it. I mean, basically, I was challenging him because we both went into Bohemian Grove together. We came out and Alex points out in his documentary dark secrets inside Bohemian Grove, where he said that what we'd witnessed was quite possibly an actual human sacrifice, which put me in this very awkward position of having to go around answering that by kind of basically defending the Bush family's right to have to mock human sacrifice, which put me in a sort of strange situation. But I'd say to Alex. You know, there's a phrase in Judaism, dayenu, which means, isn't that sufficient? Or that is sufficient. And when I said to Alex, it's like what we really saw at Bohemian Grove was so nuts, so interesting, like, so complicated, so mysterious. Why do you want to add a layer of fiction to it? Why do you want to pretend that we saw something that we didn't.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. Yeah. Which is so frustrating to, you know, what actually goes on at Bohemian Grove is fascinating. So why Alex wanted to say, well, maybe we witnessed an actual human sacrifice, too. What's the point of. Anyway? Yeah. So I think at that point, we'd kind of fallen out. But then when The Men Who Stare At Goats came out, Alex liked that more.
Jon Ronson:
Oh, did he? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that I've done that's most attractive to conspiracy theorists, I'd say. Because it is about true odd secret goings on in high places. So then after The Men Who Stare At Goats goats came out, Alex had me on Infowars. So I was on Infowars in about 2004 in a kind of positive way. And then I lost touch with Alex for years and years and years right through till 2016.
Neil Sanders:
Were you in touch with him when obviously, you kind of exposed his origin story? Because Alex had obviously told everybody that he was trying to be recruited into the Illuminati and exposed this drug ring at the school that was being perpetuated by the local police and that he had to move away because all these hot women just kept throwing themselves at him and he was going to become turned to Satanism. That wasn't strictly accurate, was it, Jon?
Jon Ronson:
No, it wasn't. Okay, so this is what happened. So in the intervening years, especially when Alex got more nefarious around, I guess, 2016, 2017, with all the Sandy hook stuff, and people started criticizing me for, you know, kind of being his Simon Cowell, you know, kind of discovering him in a way. When we snuck into Bohemian Grove together, that was the first big story about him. So I would push back against that a little bit. At the same time, it sort of crossed my mind, you know, my one Alex Jones story out there is a story that's pretty gentle about him, really. So that was on my mind. Like, is the karmic balance slightly off? So then what happened was, cut to 2016.
Jon Ronson:
Well, cut to 2015. And I'm at the gym and Trump's on the tv, and somebody shouts out to Trump, are you going back on the Alex Jones show? And Trump said, Alex Jones great guy. And I just honestly, I nearly fell off the elliptical. I had no idea that Alex had reached a place in life where Trump might go on his show. I just didn't realize I lost touch. So then in 2016, I went to the republican convention, really to kind of try and rekindle my relationship with Alex because suddenly Alex was involved in serious politics.
Neil Sanders:
Absolutely.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. So when I was there, this guy called Josh came up to me, and Josh was one of Alex's camera team. I could tell that things were on Josh's mind and that he kind of wanted to spend more time with me than with Alex. You know, Josh had gone through a similar trajectory to you guys, and I'd be curious to talk to you at some point during this conversation about that. Yeah. So Josh had been a big Alex Jones fan, had worked for wars for about four years, and then became disenchanted by what he's saying and wanted to be a kind of whistleblower. So me and Josh then met, I think it was the day of the inauguration at a hotel in Washington, DC. And I didn't know what it was that Josh wanted to tell me, and it was nothing huge.
Jon Ronson:
But what he did end up telling me was this story. He said that people around the office know this, but nobody else knows this. And it's that when Alex was child, he was a bully. He was the worst bully at school. And eventually the kids he bullied all got together and lured him for a party in a band where they beat him almost to death. And that's the real reason why he left Dallas and moved to Austin, nothing to do with exposing police corruption, anything like that. It was really because he'd been pushed out of town by kids that were just sick of his bullying behavior. So that's why I then did that story.
Jon Ronson:
It was a kind of combination of wanting to do another story about Alex and then this extraordinary story that Josh told me that was so counter to Alex's own origin story
Neil Sanders:
Mythology, yeah
Jon Ronson:
yeah, exactly.
Neil Sanders:
Did Alex ever tell you his story about how he's on a mission from God?
Jon Ronson:
No, he never really mentioned God to me that much.
Neil Sanders:
Have you not heard this one?
Jon Ronson:
No.
Neil Sanders:
Apparently, he was eating chicken fried steak in a restaurant about 09:00 at night, and all of a sudden, everything started vibrating. Now, in some versions of it, he doesn't see a figure. In other versions of it, I think he sees a giant golden eagle, which he takes to be God. Now, apparently, God told him that you're going to have this mission and you're going to suffer. Basically, you're going to be sort of persecuted for this, but your job is to bring the truth to the world. And in exchange for this, God downloaded all the knowledge of the world into Alex's head, including the instructions on how a nuclear fission reactor works, whether he's ever had the chance...
Jon Ronson:
...To do anything with that.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, that's why he's trying to get in with Trump, I think. But anyway. But, yeah, this was his origin story. So apparently he equates himself with a prophet like Jesus essentialy.
Jon Ronson:
Wow.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah.
Jon Ronson:
I mean, the thing about police corruption at school, I'm sure there was some element of truth to that. We did a really big deep dive into Alex's school days, and I'm sure some of the police were kind of sketchy and so on. But far from Alex being a God person, he was a Satan person. He was constantly running up and down the school corridors yelling, hail Satan. And smashing his head into lockers. This was disturbed behavior?
Neil Sanders:
Really?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah
Brent Lee:
Wow.
Jon Ronson:
Which gave me a sort of moral problem. Like, I wouldn't want anyone to be digging around my life at Cardiff High school. So was it fair for me to dig around his life at Rockwell High School? And I almost didn't do it. And in fact, the sort of moral judgment I came to was if Alex was willing to talk to me as part of the story, then it seemed fair. But also, I kind of know Alex is a public figure now. Like, if Alex hadn't become so big and so rich with such proximity to power and then all of the Sandy Hook stuff that was going on, I don't think I would have gone back to his childhood. But all of those things kind of justified it.
Neil Sanders:
Well, his style's very much changed, hasn't it? He's become far more sort of right wing, or far more overtly right wing and far more aggressive and far more sort of angry and nasty towards people. Do you know what I mean? It used to be sort of rallying against the police state. Now somehow it's shifted to rallying against immigrants and trans people and stuff.
Jon Ronson:
Absolutely, you know, when I went to Bohemian Grove with Alex, at the same time I went to aryan nations and I went to then Klu Klux Klan. And I, you know, firmly put Alex into a different camp to those people. I mean, his concerns back then, I can't say I'm encyclopedic. I'm not like, the knowledge fight guys who know, like, everything,
Neil Sanders:
They're so good, yeah.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, yeah. But as far as I could tell, most of the things he was going on about back then were things like Waco and Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing and frankly, government overreach at Waco and Ruby Ridge are things worthy of scrutiny. So I wasn't really particularly opposed to Alex
Jon Ronson:
Particularly opposed to.
Neil Sanders:
Know. There's no denying that Alex Jones has got a certain rugged charisma. And I think that's what attracted people to him, particularly us, at the start, was that he was highlighting with his World Trade Organization and showing sort of infiltrators and the use of blackblock and stuff like that. It was fascinating. And then he had a shift, didn't he? I don't know about you, but I sort of thought that his shift seemed to coincide with his very expensive divorce.
Jon Ronson:
Right.
Neil Sanders:
Do you think maybe that might have had a play in it?
Jon Ronson:
Well, somebody told me, this is secondhand information, that I was told that possibly around the time of this divorce. I'm not sure the exact timeline. Somebody went up to him, and I can't remember who it was, but it might have been somebody who was related to Superman. Christopher Reeves.
Neil Sanders:
All right.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. Who said, you know, what I'm about to say might be partially incorrect, so I apologize. But, you know, somebody said to him, I can make you rich. And Alex wasn't particularly rich at that point. And he said, the way I could make you rich is sell these supplements, these male vitality. And those things made him incredibly rich, almost overnight He went from somebody without much money to somebody with a vast amount of money.
Jon Ronson:
At the same time, Trump is paying interest. Roger Stone is paying him interested. And so suddenly he has money and power. And I think his shifts might have happened, didn't he? Obviously, I was saying.
Neil Sanders:
There'S a guy whose name escapes me. I think it's Morrison. But anyway, he talks about sort of like, the sort of manifestations of cults and how this is sort of used in advertising, really. And he says that essentially what a cult offers you is they tell you exactly what the world is like. They tell you what your position in the world is. And they surround you with like minded people, say, if you're into, know, Mercedes cars or whatever, by the nature of your car, you know that you're better than this person, not as good as this person, but you're on that sort of path. And you're surrounded by loads of other people who also think, yeah, you're a tip because you've got a Mercedes car. And that can be applied to hundreds of things, football teams, sports teams, products, political manifestations.
Neil Sanders:
But you do see that within conspiracies, like, conspiracies don't just offer. They don't just offer the sort of fun of the conspiracy or the puzzle aspect of it. They offer you a community. They offer you a role as well. Do you know what I mean? It's very interesting, actually. We're bouncing over all over the place. But particularly in your excellent series, things fall apart. And the idea of the hero's journey, that really resonated with me.
Neil Sanders:
Same, because that's how you position yourself as a conspiracy theorist. Nobody tends to get into these things for bad reasons. They get into it because they want to fight the lizards or they want to affect change or they want to point out government overreach or expose a crime. Yeah, exactly. This is the thing. And so that aspect of it is vitally, vitally important to the sort of the construction.
Jon Ronson:
Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. I think to people who, I think there's all sorts of reasons why people become leaders in the conspiracy, think, you know, narcissism is one, addiction is one. But, yeah, the hero's journey, which I actually had never heard of. I think I'm one of the only people in the world who'd never heard of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey.
Brent Lee:
Really?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. And I just came across it. I was listening to a bunch of podcasting to James walking through New York with Mickey Willis. Because Mickey Willis is the star. Yeah. He's the man who gave the world pandemic one, two, and three at the beginning of season two. As things fell apart. I do a show about Judy Mkavitz, who's, like, the star of clandemic.
Jon Ronson:
So I had a brainwave. Why don't I do a final episode about the man who interviewed Judy Mikovitz, mickey Willis. So I listened to a million Mickey Willis interviews, and in one of them, he starts talking about his love of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. And I sort of stopped rewound and listened to it a few times because, yeah, just like you, it seemed really interesting and answered a lot of questions. So basically, Joseph Campbell comes up with this idea, and I can't remember when, like, the whatever that. From the cave drawings through to the present day, this particular narrative structure is dominant, and it's the hero's journey. And he wasn't a lifestyle guru or anything like that. He was just somebody who was interested in narrative structure.
Jon Ronson:
And the hero's journey is a reluctant hero. He's thrust out of his world into another world. It's mainly men. Sometimes it's women. They fight the dragons. The threshold guardians try and stop them from moving forward. The mentors help them move forward. Finally, there's a big battle with the dragon that looks like the dragon's going to win.
Jon Ronson:
The hero's on the ground. The hero rises up and slays the dragon. And the reason why Joseph Campbell got so popular in recent times is because of George Lucas, because George Lucas said that he based Star wars on the hero's journey. But it turns out that even though Joseph Campbell never intended this to be a way that people should live their lives, just a way that people should understand, these people, like Mickey Willis, became, like a theft of an hero's journey, and they're living their life that way. Yeah. And so Mickey Willis, Anthony Fauci is a dragon and Faison's a dragon. But the thing is, if you're a documentarian, thinking of the world in terms of heroes and dragons is a terrible idea. That's something that I talk about and say.
Jon Ronson:
You can be cliched because that's what we do on Twitter. Too. On Twitter, everyone's a hero or a dragon. In the psychopath test. My book, the psychopath test, I kind of look at it as well. The downside of mental health labeling is that we're defined by our most extreme edges. So all of these things in mental health on Twitter, Mickey Willis. It's all about robbing the world of its nuance and instead thinking of everything in terms of heroes.
Jon Ronson:
And, yeah, when I discovered Mickey Willis's love of the heroes journey, that felt really relevant to trying to solve mysteries of why people have become the way that we've become.
Neil Sanders:
It's interesting, there was a theme that was running through the series, which is an excellent series. Both series are fantastic, by the way. And also you've got the psychopath tour coming up, which we want to promote as.
Jon Ronson:
Yes, yeah, I'm doing a major psychopath tour in October, November, including in towns I've never spoken before, like switch steady. Fair enough.
Brent Lee:
Coming to Bristol.
Jon Ronson:
I might come into Bristol, yes, but I've completely forgotten. Completely forgot a word. But if people are interested, if they google the promoters, fame, F-A-M-A. It's very easy to find the tour dates. Germans, Psychopath Mat 2024. You'll find the tour dates, but, yeah, I'll be on within 10 miles of everybody's home.
Brent Lee:
Excellent.
Neil Sanders:
Well, fantastic. So one of the themes that, basically, just going back to your previous point, was this kind of thing about our identity, for example, one of the things was the trauma, the sort of hierarchies of trauma. Other things were about people's identity, be it sort of not wanting kids to learn Thursdays and things at school or being confused about trans identity, the cat litter tray and stuff like that. Do you think that basically this is sort of kind of the problem that sort of fuels the culture warriors, that everybody's kind of their own main character and everybody's struggling to define themselves. And when other people seem to define themselves in sort of very concrete ways, that annoys people because they're like, I can't get a grasp on this life. Why are you so seemingly satisfied and secure and whatnot? What do you think about that?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, I don't know if I'm answering the question directly or not, but when I first learned about identity politics, it seemed like a really good. There's loads I don't know about black culture and stuff. So I thought, okay, this is an opportunity to learn loads of things that I didn't know. And so when I first learned about identity politics, I thought it seemed like pretty good stuff. And then people on Twitter were like, warning, no, no. This is what you're writing about until you've been publicly know. Identity politics is all about dividing people. It's all about creating hierarchies.
Jon Ronson:
And now where I am, I suppose, is there's a line I really like in season two as things fell apart, where Lee Fung, who's a former reporter for the Intercept, there's America. But I think you can probably say the same thing about Britain. Well, definitely America. He says, america is a class based society that pretends that it's an identity based society. And that really resonates with me. And for some reason, that's an unpopular thing to say. People don't like it when you say that, which I don't really. Yeah.
Jon Ronson:
This is sort of maybe what was being played out when it was Bernie versus Hillary in 2016, Bernie was the class person and Hillary was the identity person. But for me, it makes total sense. Like, what's wrong with seeing the world in terms of class instead of identity, or class alongside identity, at least.
Neil Sanders:
Well, I suppose that class is sort of imposed on you, whereas identity, you can sort of pick your own. So people don't tend to like to think of themselves. You know, this is always sort of fascinating why people vote for, know, Boris Jonson or Donald Trump or something like that, because essentially it's going to end up bad for everybody. But I think that's the point. People identify and go, oh, that's not me. That isn't me. I don't identify as that. Whereas if you thought of yourself as the proletariat or mean, then it's very difficult to avoid that.
Neil Sanders:
So I wonder if that's got something.
Jon Ronson:
To do with it. Yeah, I agree. Maybe. And of course, the rich, if we don't think of the world as class based, then you know what happens? The rich get richer. Yes. While we're all scrabbling around attacking each other's identities.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, I think that's very much the case. This was one of the things that I took from the first series of the podcast was that a lot of these issues that could be considered the culture war, they're either incorrect misunderstandings, vastly overstated, or just completely fabricated, like wedge issues created simply to cause that division. The first episode where you were talking about what's his name? Schaeffer, and the introduction of abortion as a wedge issue was mind blowing.
Jon Ronson:
It's extraordinary. Yeah, I'll recount it very quickly. As much as, like, five years after Roe v. Wade, the only people protesting abortion in America were Roman Catholics. Now, lastly, people have said, no, no, Presbyterians were too. And I haven't done research on that, so I don't know. But one thing's for certain, which is that the Baptist, the Southern Baptist convention, which is, as far as I understand, the second biggest christian denomination in know, out of know people like Billy Graham came.
Neil Sanders:
Oh, that's the evangelical sort of aspect of.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, I didn't really know the very Southern Baptist convention. But yeah, it's like evangelical Protestants and they would pray choice or ambivalent at best. And then this kid comes along called Bug Schaefer, like 19 year old kid living in the Swiss Alps with his father, who was an evangelical art historian, Francis Schaefer. And Frank wanted to be a Hollywood director and he wanted a show reel to show Hollywood producers. And so him and his father made this documentary series where he convinced his father to put abortion in it because it was just a personal bugbear of Frank's because he'd become like a father at 19. So he makes these documentaries with incredibly arresting visual images of like 1000 dolls spread out on the Dead Sea, baking in the heat. These, like, metaphors for abortion that was so powerful, kind of galvanized christian evangelist into becoming anti abortion. So all of the murders that happened in the abortion doctors, you can trace back to Frank Schaefer and his desire to become director.
Jon Ronson:
Frank's now horrified by it and to make amends. Yeah, sorry, Jon, did you just say.
Neil Sanders:
That he was driven to sort of be very sort of anti abortion? Sorry, he was anti abortion because he had a kid when he was 19.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. So it was like a personal bugfar for him. He'd had a kid at 19.
Neil Sanders:
I'd misinterpret that. I thought you'd said that, like, if I can't have an abortion, why should anyone else?
Jon Ronson:
No, he'd had a kid at 19 and he loved his kid. And so he was against abortion personally for that reason. But protestant evangelists weren't against abortion until their documentary came along. And then Planned Parenthood were protesting the documentary and then evangelists were protesting and boom, it exploded.
Neil Sanders:
You mentioned, like Jerry Falwell, the moral majority, Billy Graham and such like that. Has your research ever sort of crossed paths with the Citrus street group or Douglas Co. Or the family or any of those, the people that run the.
Jon Ronson:
No, out of those three, the only one I've even heard of is the family.
Neil Sanders:
Essentially, they come out of the Heritage foundation. So they're all connected to. And the Jon Burch society. So they're all sort of in the same sort of ballpark arena. But they seem to be. They're almost like, for example, it's slightly tangential, but the phrase cultural Marxism came out from a book called the Paul Weirich out of the Heritage foundation, and they're very much connected to Billy Graham and Douglas Co. And that sort of thing. And it's just that there was, particularly in the first series of things by the fart, there was a very definite streak of evangelical influence, particularly in America.
Neil Sanders:
Is that still prevalent, having.
Jon Ronson:
Yes, I'm sure it is. And I'm sure that's to a great extent the reason why Rosalie's Wade ended up getting repealed. Yeah. Jerry Falwell, who was the head of moral majority, said that it was Francis Schaeffer who convinced him to become radical. So he. Falwell himself cited Schaeffer as his reason for, I think he know, putting on the gloves and getting in the ring. He said. Otherwise he would have just been.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. So it all goes back to this little copying in the Swiss Alps with Brad system fragrance, and Eric Clapton would turn up and listen to his speeches and so on. And, yeah, this chalet in the Swiss Alps is where it all started.
Neil Sanders:
That's what's great about the series, though, is that basically, as you describe it, the ripples that come out and the start of effects and stuff, like mean. For example, your Judy Mikovitz episode was fascinating, I have to admit. When it started, and you're chatting to Judy, I was like, oh, no. Oh, good. Oh, he's fallen for it.
Brent Lee:
Well, I hadn't heard of either. And I started getting excited because she was talking about me CFS, because my partner has me CFS. So I was like, is there something hidden? Is there a cure? Or.
Jon Ronson:
I mean, again, extraordinary. So Judy was working through this institute called the institute. I mean, for me, the Judy McIntyre episode is the reason why I wanted to make things fell apart even before I'd ever heard of Judy. But her story is so resonant, why I wanted to make the show to begin with. Judy. Yeah. To cut a very long story short, and I recommend people listen to the story. The story takes 35 minutes to tell.
Jon Ronson:
That's how long the episode is. But to cut it very, very short, Judy was working for this institute. He thought that they'd come up with a cure for. A cure for chronic fatigue syndrome. And the cause of it. Yeah, XMRV, which was a little known mouse virus, and the theory they came up with, which was published in Science, which is a huge, huge place to publish a scientific finding was that millions of people were walking around with this mouse virus, most of them asymptomatic, giving each other chronic fatigue syndrome. So this was, like, a huge thought. And so scientists all over America tried to replicate Judy's findings and couldn't.
Jon Ronson:
And so Judy doubled down and refused to hand over her research materials and ended up going on the run and hiding out on a boat. And the police were after her. She ended up going to jail. I mean, this terrible, spiling employment conflict. But I think Judy was so burnt by this, was so wounded by this. And I'm on Judy's side regarding how terrible events spiraled.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, it fleshed it out. It turned her from a pantomime villain, because obviously, the things that she's saying in pandemic are ridiculous and dangerous. But it gave an understanding, and I actually felt quite sympathetic for her in the end. Like, not for actions, but for the sort of circumstance that she's been in.
Jon Ronson:
Absolutely. And I think you'll find that a. I mean, I'm not going to armchair diagnose Judy or anyone, but what it is narcissistically inclined. I think one aspect of narcissism is that if you're wounded, it's very hard for you to get over it. And I don't think that's true of all narcissists. In fact, I know some narcissists who are very nice.
Neil Sanders:
In television.
Jon Ronson:
Haven't you? Yeah. This isn't something that's endemic amongst narcissists, but I think there's certain people who are that way inclined who, if they're wounded, can't get over it. And so they get trapped in this, know, like in Poltergeist, with everything spinning around, and they can't get out until they lash out and lash out and lash out. And I'm sure we've all seen. I don't want to name them because I don't want to plot hornets nest, but we've all seen people on Twitter who all they do is lash out and lash out and escalate and escalate and escalate because they feel wounded. And I wonder whether Judy's involvement in pandemic is at least. Yeah.
Neil Sanders:
Had you seen pandemic before you spoke to her?
Jon Ronson:
I mean, I watched it when I was researched it, but the way I first heard of plandemic was up here in upstate New York, six weeks into lockdown, a good friend of mine who lives in a farmhouse about a mile from me said to me, be it about pandemic like one of the world's most eminent scientists? Yes. And it was saying that everything we're looking through isn't what you say. So that's how I first heard of pandemic. And then when I was starting to make season two, as things fell apart and I decided I wanted to make it about the lockdown years, I remembered my friend saying that to me. So that's why I watched pandemic. And then I learned about Judy's backstory about the medical scandal and so on.
Neil Sanders:
Have you kept in touch with her or have you followed her since pandemic at all?
Jon Ronson:
Not really, no. I mean, in the documentary. In our documentary, things fell apart. We traced Judy in the years after pandemic to an extent, but, no, I haven't heard from her since the documentary.
Neil Sanders:
Came out, because it's interesting what you said, because she's kind of doubled down even further. She's now of the opinion that XMRV is the cause of pretty much everything, right? Yeah, absolutely. But she sort of had a bit of a falling out with the COVID denial sort of lot, because she thinks that a virus does exist. And a lot of people, David Icke, chap called Andrew Kaufman and various other people who basically out to grift have gone down the route that Covid just simply doesn't exist. And so she became somewhat Persona non grata in that particular thing, which is.
Brent Lee:
Well, they also don't think viruses exist either, do they?
Jon Ronson:
Right.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, this is it.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. They should have been in the emergency room with me two weeks ago when I was nearly dying of a pulmonary embolism, and then tell me that Covid doesn't exist.
Brent Lee:
But would they say you were.
Jon Ronson:
Was into? That's been on my mind slightly. So I got Covid for the first time months ago. And then two weeks after that, I rushed to hospital with a blood clot in my lungs. And the last time I got vaxxed was last September. Now, there's an argument that was the .1 could argue like, a damn lot of good about dooster, didn't we? Given that I went hospitalized with COVID four months later. But a couple of people did say to me, and by the way, to counter that, who knows how much worse it might have been if I hadn't been boosted. Yeah, but a couple of people did say to me, like, maybe it was the vaccination that gave you the blood clot. And I was like, I got the vaccination in September.
Jon Ronson:
I got Covid that now. So what's more likely. Like if one of those things gave you a blood clot, what's more likely?
Brent Lee:
Yeah, exactly. But you know, that's what they say.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah.
Neil Sanders:
David Ike has recently gone down the whole HIV isn't real route for some strange reason as well. Now obviously you spent some time with David just prior to him becoming like a sort of superstar really as well, didn't you?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, I was with David because I was spend time to bohemian girls with Alex Jones. It was all around the same period.
Brent Lee:
It was for your secret rulers of the world documentary, wasn't it?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, secret rulers of the world. And eventually it became my book then. So all the adventures exist both in sort of written form and then. And documentary form and secret rulers. Yeah. David. I could just come out with his theory about lizards. The know that we were being ruled by giant lizards.
Jon Ronson:
So I went to van, I followed him around, know, weeks, maybe a couple of months, but mainly in vancouver when local activists were trying to stop him every step of the way. Stopping from going on the radio, stopping from giving talks at bookstores. Of course all of that mastered him further. And yeah, he ended up in a sellout talk at a huge theater, know, in part because he'd been banned because the activists had stopped him.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, it makes it notorious, doesn't it? It makes it forbidden and what's the word? Like a pandora's box sort of thing, doesn't it? Really?
Jon Ronson:
Totally, yeah.
Neil Sanders:
Hello, initiates of the some dare call it Conspiracy podcast. Dom jolly here.
Jon Ronson:
How are you?
Neil Sanders:
Sorry to butt in, but I just wanted to let you know that I've written, well, a book that I'm very very proud of called the Conspiracy tourist, in which I travel around the world taking a look at the weird world of conspiracies. And I think you might like it. Not only that, but I'm touring the book and doing live shows all around England from the 20 eigth of Feb to the end of March. And it would be smashing to see you there. I think you'd like it. If you are interested, go to my website, www. Domjoly TV. And now on with the podcast.
Jon Ronson:
Thanks.
Brent Lee:
Yes, secret Rulers of the world was the first thing that I saw you in because I had watched obviously dark secrets inside Bohemian Grove. And then I found your secret rulers of the world episode on it and the David Icke episode. So I downloaded those and I was like, yeah, this guy's trying to make us look stupid. I rewatched it like last week and you're not at all, you're just literally just showing what's happening?
Jon Ronson:
Totally. Yeah.
Brent Lee:
You're giving everyone a very fair time. And it kind of proved to me, like, so we see what we want to see.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah.
Brent Lee:
And that's what I was feeling at the time. I just felt like, oh, anyone else covering this is trying to cover it up.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, absolutely. My tag, bohemian Grove with Alex Jones. The honest truth is, I was so excited to be on such a crazy, mysterious adventure. I felt so much like Stevie Doom adventure. Like, trying to make Alec stupid was, like, the last thing on my mind. I was just having the time of my life. It was about sneaking. As baby Grove was a very, very stressful night.
Jon Ronson:
But it was also one of the best nights of my life. I mean, my God, I kept on being reminded of that movie the perfect storm, that George Clooney movie. I was thinking, this is my perfect storm. I'm sneaking into the secret club with Alex Jones, where we're going to try and find out if Henry Kissinger, my joy. Henry Kissinger takes part in a mock human sacrifice. My joy of being on that adventure was way shallower. I think I'm out to make Alex joke look ridiculous. I was just loving that.
Jon Ronson:
I was loving it.
Brent Lee:
Something I noticed from watching it the second time around is how much I don't believe Alex thought something really evil was going on there. It felt more like he was playing into it. But Mike Hansen really did believe it. You could see in his face, he was like, no, there's something really bad going on there. Like, they call the Davidians the cult, but these people are the cult. And I thought that was really, actually very powerful, because that's really how I saw it, too, that there is something really going on.
Jon Ronson:
I totally agree with you. I don't doubt Mike Hansen's insanity at all when it comes to the way he was interpreting what happened that night. Whereas Alex. Yeah, there was this moment. I've told this story a bunch of times, but there was this moment when I was back. I mean, this is 20 something years ago now, so forgive me if I get it slightly wrong, but I was back in London, and Alex had given an interview where he said to be overheard, like, when we were at Bohemian Groves, he overheard these two old men whisper to each other, like, yeah, we're going to get him elected. And I phoned Alex, and I said, alex. I wasn't with Alex that much when we were inside Bohemian Grove, because I was with Nick the lawyer and Jon Sargent, producer at the time, and Alex was with my council, so we barely saw each other.
Jon Ronson:
So I can't say for sure that Alex didn't overhear that, but tried to say to Alex, come on, like, just exactly the kind of thing you would have liked to have overheard. My memory is Alex saying something that you know, that, but I'm not going to tell my listeners that.
Neil Sanders:
Interesting.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. So for years, I judged Alex entirely on that, that he was a showman, he was opportunistic. And right up until I met Josh, his cameraman, in 2016 at this hotel in DC, and I told him what I just told you. And Josh said, oh, no, I've been with Alex every day for the last four years. The way he is off camera is exactly the way he is on. Yeah. So Josh sort of shook my theory a little.
Brent Lee:
Did you also meet Rob Jacobson, who was his editor and cameraman for a while?
Jon Ronson:
I think so, yeah.
Brent Lee:
He's also left. He gave evidence at the deposition for Sandy Hook, which we interviewed him on here.
Jon Ronson:
Oh, wow. Yeah. You know, I'm pretty sure I did. If I didn't meet him, I think I definitely had some text exchanges with him at the same time. I'll tell you who I did meet in 2016, though. So this guy, and I actually can't remember being Josh. Or it could have been this guy, Morgan Hemmy, who made the documentary get me Richard Stone. Oh, yeah.
Jon Ronson:
Because he was there, too. And somebody said to me, if you're on this street corner at this particular hour, Alex is going to be there with Roger Stone, and you can maybe sneak in and he's going to be in this sort of Airbnb, and that's where they're doing insol wars. So that's exactly what I did. I kind of stood there and I.
Brent Lee:
Was like, oh, Alex, fancy seeing you here.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. So I went in with them. I just, like, went in with them into this Airbnb, and there they were making infowars and there was Roger Stone and there was Alex and I think Morgan Femi, but I can't remember. I don't think I've ever told anyone's story before. But there was somebody else in that room. There was maybe ten or 15 people in that room altogether. And one of the people in that room was glaring at me like he wanted to kill me. Like happened a couple of times in my life that somebody ate me and was giving me a death Star.
Jon Ronson:
And then this guy went up to annex and know, pointed at me and whispered, like, something along the line, know, that's Jon Ronson over there. Do you want me to kick him? No, no, he signed it. Let him say he signed. He signed the custard. And guess who that guy was.
Brent Lee:
My guess is going to be like David Duke or someone like that.
Jon Ronson:
No. Joe Bix.
Neil Sanders:
Oh, proud boys.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. He's now in jail for decades for being one of the architects of January the 6th. Wow.
Neil Sanders:
Was he there with Roger Stone?
Jon Ronson:
Well, he was in the room. I think he was there with Alex, actually.
Neil Sanders:
Wow.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. There's been a couple of times in my life when somebody has looked at me like they wanted to kill me. And that was one of those times.
Neil Sanders:
What was the other time, if you don't mind?
Jon Ronson:
Oh, the other time was actually. They later apologized. The other time was this documentary I made called Kidneys for Jesus, which is about a religious group that was giving all their spare kidneys to strangers. And there was a woman in the group called, you know, this group eventually hated, like, really hated me. But I had an agreement with Susan. Susan was giving up her kidney. So we filmed her operation. We filmed the kidney being, like, taken out of her and put into somebody else.
Jon Ronson:
So at some point we agreed to show Susan the footage in the documentary that involved her. We wouldn't show her the whole documentary, but we'd show her scenes. So she came to channel four and we showed her her scenes and it was the same stare. Susan looked at me like she wanted to kill me. This is before she saw the scenes, by the way. And then a couple of years later, she emailed me to say that she'd left the group and I was right. And she kind of apologized and I was like, all right. Yeah, these were the two times I remember somebody really giving me a death star.
Neil Sanders:
You see, I thought you were going to say when you were chased by the Bilderberg group.
Jon Ronson:
I mean, I was scared. Nobody looked like they wanted to kill me.
Neil Sanders:
I love that bit in the book where you explain if they can see you, you're probably in no danger. And you say something along the lines of, what if? I'm just particularly good at spotting.
Jon Ronson:
Spotting them? Yeah. Somebody with an anxiety disorder, you'd think you would be especially good. Yeah, the woman from good Shempus. He said, this is after I've been chased by the Bilderberg group. If you know you're being followed, they're probably just trying to intimidate you. And the dangerous ones are those that you don't know are following. I said, yeah, what if they are the dangerous ones? I just happen to be naturally good at spotting.
Neil Sanders:
So the Bilderberg group, that's a bit sort of passe nowadays in the conspiracy world. We've got the World Economic Forum now, right?
Jon Ronson:
The great resets.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, absolutely, the great reset. And we've done a bit of looking into that and stuff like that. We found, actually, interestingly, that the first people that put forward the theory that these guys were the illuminati, whatever, was the Heartlands Institute, which is a massive fossil fuel think tank conglomerate. Yeah. Now here's the thing, right?
Jon Ronson:
Okay.
Neil Sanders:
As far as we can tell, what the great reset is offering or the World Economic Forum is offering is stakeholder capitalism, where basically they give the impression of giving a shit. They don't, but it's fluffy and whatnot. Whereas the Heartland's institute, oil industry, is pure capitalism. It's shareholder capitalism. So they don't want to be responsible for anybody. Now, to our mind, the entire creation of the theory came from this one group going, could you not do that? You're ruining it. Do you know what I mean? Because their form of capitalism is far more attractive to, say, mps, lobbyists and stuff like that than shareholder capitalism. And so that was where it was to our mind, there were just cross that they were being exposed and made to look worse than this other group.
Jon Ronson:
Right. Well, that's fascinating. That's a great find. That's really interesting.
Neil Sanders:
The first instance of talking about the graveyard sect definitely came from them. And then after that it was Laura Ingraham and then Candice Owens and then various people who were also sort of in that sort of.
Brent Lee:
And Glenn Beck.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, and obviously you spoke to Glenn Beck.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, I did. Glenn Beck's interesting, you know, he went through a real sort of evolution around 2016 where he became very anti Trump. And in fact, I met him back around then too. He wanted to be the kind of conciliatory person, but then he changed back again.
Neil Sanders:
Well, sadly, that's where the audience is. Isn't know. I wonder if that sort of thing, talking about people like Glenn Beck, do you think Joe Rogan and the influence that people like Joe Rogan have can be potentially harmful? Specifically because he jumped all over several things like ivamectin and certain COVID vaccine sort of silliness and then he got all bent out of shape out of the people identifying as cats at.
Jon Ronson:
Right. Yeah, I think quite a lot about Joe Rogan. So I went on Joe Rogan's show two or three times, definitely twice, possibly three times. And it know, positive experience. I felt like he was know, particularly the first time I went on a show before when he was really, really successful but not the know powerhouse he is now. And it felt, he felt, he reminded me a little bit of like Robbie Williams and he had a foot in both counts. He's willing to go from one to the other like a classical liberal kind of thing. And so I felt my first experience with Joe Rogan was really positive.
Jon Ronson:
But yeah, like so many other Peterson, you know, it felt like he doubled down and just became the thing that now I don't want to be too unfair because obviously with Joe Rogan, I don't listen to him 3 hours a day. And on the rare occasion I do dip into a thing, you know, very often he's being kind of pretty reasonable. So there's a part of me that, you know, the stuff that the world knows about Joe Rogan is just these sort know, the handpicked worst bits of the bits go the clips. Yeah, yeah. Which is quite possible, but absolutely true that say, the, you know, he was promoting that moral panic. He did go back on it when he realized that it was a hoax.
Neil Sanders:
Oh, did he?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah.
Neil Sanders:
That kind of proves your point that it's the clips thing really then, isn't it?
Jon Ronson:
In a way. But at the same time, I don't want to like, well, the clips are still there.
Neil Sanders:
Aren't mean clips are still there.
Jon Ronson:
And so he does know there was this thing where he was accusing Biden of that. It turned out that it was Trump.
Neil Sanders:
It was Trump that actually said it. Yeah, absolutely.
Jon Ronson:
And again, they recanted on the air. But I don't want to be like a Joe Rogan apologist just here, because the fact know, he does 3 hours a day and he does say these know, I think a lot of the stuff that he says does cause real genuine problems in the world. But I would say, I suppose what I'm saying is that I wish I listened to Joe Rogan 3 hours a day so I could do a very proper, full, holistic analysis of him. But I also wish that the Joe Rogan who first interviewed me back whenever it was 2015, 2016, whatever was the Joe Rogan that was dominant today, the Joe Rogan who would have on all sorts of people from across the spectrum and listen to all sorts of points of view, like, I wonder whether that Joe Rogan is a little bit less now.
Neil Sanders:
This is the thing. He's kind of bounced all over the place. I mean, there was famously, he know, really making a fall of Candice Owens and stuff like that, but then laterally he sort of entertained some very, very right wing silly positions and stuff like that.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. And he shouldn't. It's kind of know, having all sorts of viewpoints doesn't mean giving easy rides to people who do bad things.
Neil Sanders:
That's something that is done throughout the conspiracy world. They'll interview somebody like a Tommy Robinson or a Katie Hopkins or something, and there's absolutely no merit to it other than to hopefully pilfer some of their fans. And it will be done under the banner of, we're just asking questions. We're going where the mainstream fears to tread.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. And that stuff is nonsense. Yeah. I can think of other people, I've seen people who I've admired, and I won't know names because I, as I said, all the sort of the hornets nest, but I've seen people who I admire giving really free reign to people who do really bad things in the world. And for me, that isn't what looking to all points of view, you have to still challenge people. You can't just be a dude.
Neil Sanders:
No. I heard you say on another interview that you did recently that you think that generally people are getting bored of the culture war. And I wonder if you still agree with that because we're seeing the burgeoning of Trump for the next election, this ridiculousness at the Texas border and stuff like that. Maybe that's just me seeing it through the echo chamber of Twitter or mean, obviously, you live in America. What do you mean? Is it dying a death or is it still strong?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, I could be wrong. When I'm optimistic, I always think maybe I was too optimistic. And the reasons why I said that first was because Rod DeSantis was doing so badly and he really was this sort of anti woke candidate, more so than Trump. And so that gave me some kind of hope that his stuff wasn't really working. There's certain culture wars, I think, are burning themselves out and people are getting sick of. And in season one, as things fell apart, the episode that's most popular is an episode called a Miracle, which is things coming together. So I took all of this sort of anecdotal stuff and thought, oh, maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel, and maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel. But, yeah, we still got a ton of way to go.
Neil Sanders:
Was that the episode?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah.
Neil Sanders:
I thought that was incredibly moving, and I thought it was interesting as well, and vital that you put that in because it showed that it's not all one side politically or it's not all evangelical or whatever. Do you know what I mean? There is sort of like voices in the wilderness or what? Right, going back to. You've got this upcoming tour, the psychopath tour.
Jon Ronson:
Yes.
Neil Sanders:
Here's a question. Do you think Alex Jones might be a psychopath?
Jon Ronson:
No, I think Alex Jones was actually diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder during his custody hearing.
Neil Sanders:
Really?
Jon Ronson:
Yes. I was actually in court when it happened. And I think there's a big. From what I understand, I'm not a psychologist, but from what I understand, there's significant difference between narcissism and psychopathy is that the outward manifestations can seem quite similar.
Neil Sanders:
Right.
Jon Ronson:
Manipulative, lack of empathy and that kind of stuff. But what's going on underneath the surface is very different. So with a narcissist, there's a whole lot of shit going on underneath the surface. There's turmoil, there's fires, there's raves, there's wounds that won't heal and so on. Whereas with bike paths, they say what's going on under the surface is nothing.
Neil Sanders:
Oh, they're norm, are they emptiness?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah.
Brent Lee:
That does define Alex, doesn't it?
Jon Ronson:
I kind of think so, yeah. Alex is emotional. Psychopaths are emotionless.
Neil Sanders:
I did notice when I was looking at the psychopath test that basically, I think you need a score of 30 in America to be considered a psychopath, and 25 in the UK. So what does that say about America?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, actually, I think it's not quite as broad as the last. Think it's 25 in Britain and 26 or 27 in America. But there's still that different. America is a little bit more psychopath happy than Britain.
Neil Sanders:
There's the gag about psychopath test. Did you take the psychopath test? Yeah, I did, but I didn't finish it. Halfway through, I felt compelled to start torturing other tests and make younger tests watch. So it was inconclusive at best.
Jon Ronson:
Well, one of the items bored easily. I can't remember what the actual type of heading is, but, yeah, they get bored easily, so that's maybe why they don't complete the test. In psychiatry, if you've got OCD, let's say, or bipolar disorder or whatever, most often you're invited to take part in your own diagnosis. But with psychopathy you're not, because psychiatrists don't trust psychopaths, so they don't trust them to take part in their own diagnosis. So that's a kind of interesting thing about the test that it's done on them as opposed to with them.
Neil Sanders:
Right, okay. So when you were doing the psychopath test, because obviously you've got the tour coming up and whatnot. Is that going to be a sort of a retelling of the book or stories that didn't make the book?
Jon Ronson:
Nearly going to stories that didn't make the book. Lots. Mystery guests. Oh, yeah, I'm going to have lots of guests appearing via Zoom and weird, I would say the way I try and structure that particular talk, and in fact, all my talks, is for them to work for people who've read the book and work for people who haven't. So ultimately, that means it's maybe 40, 50% of the show will be stuff from the book, and then the rest of it will be. Will be new stuff. But I haven't quite figured out the tour yet what I'm going to do. I did it before, but I sort of want to make it slightly different to last.
Jon Ronson:
So I don't quite know what I'm going to take out and what new stuff I'm going to put in.
Neil Sanders:
When you were doing the original book, was there anyone that you met that actually scared you?
Jon Ronson:
Koto Constance, the haitian death squad leader.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah. Well, this is what I was thinking for tentier.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, I mean, he did some terrible. Also, he was in prison in upstate New York.
Neil Sanders:
Oh, right, yeah, for the fraud. Was.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, for mortgage fraud. That's why I interviewed him. And I'd never been to upstate New York before. It was so bleak. It was like April with hailstones. It was freezing through this hail. And I ended up at this maximum security prison that looked like the shoreshank redemption. And I got out of my car, like, fought my way through the hailstones and walked into the prison.
Jon Ronson:
And the first thing that the prison guards all looked up at me, I said, hi, I'm here to see Toto Constant. And all the prison guards went, it's Harry Potter. Potter. But I remember leaving thinking, my God, that was bleak. Like, upstate New York is so bleak. And Dave was like, my bleakest day. I'm never coming here again. And then I got really scared, like, tota constant might find me and kill me because he won't like what I motivated him in the book.
Jon Ronson:
Anyway, cut to ten years later. Well, 15 years later, and I now live about 8 miles, and it's left Nate, by the way.
Neil Sanders:
That's just about the distance that they'll get before they'll get caught, isn't it?
Jon Ronson:
Well, luckily, Toto got deported back to Haiti after he got kicked. I know I was a kick ass. Yeah.
Neil Sanders:
David Shayler's in the psychopath test. Brent has had some interactions with David over the years. Okay, what was David, in the book for.
Jon Ronson:
Well, I've got to say, if there was one chapter would take out of the book, it would be that one, because I was looking at, at that point in the book, it becomes like a sort of broader look at. I think the chapter is called the rat sort of madness, or the rat kind of madness, because it becomes a broader look at our reality tv. Well, okay. I met this researcher for shows like Jerry Springer, who told me that she had a secret trick that she would use to decide which guests to book. And the secret trick was that she would ask them what medication they were on, and if it was something like lithium, she'd be like, whoa, you're like, I'm not going to go there. But if it was bronzac, it's like, perfect.
Neil Sanders:
Happy day.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. So my David Shaler interaction was really part of that. It was a kind of broader look at which magnuses are kind of entertaining to people and which magnuses. You want to kind of leave the name because we want to be too explosive. And so David Shayler made it into that part of the book.
Neil Sanders:
Was it before he became Christ? Because he's now convinced that he's Christ and that David icke is his Jon the Baptist.
Jon Ronson:
Oh, really?
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, and also he transitioned. I think his name is Dolores. Her name is Dolores.
Jon Ronson:
Dolores, yeah. I think the Dolores stuff had happened by then, but I don't think the Christ stuff had. Yeah. I was about to do a whole big self analysis about my David Dynam, but instead I'm going to ask you a know, we talked about Josh having a crisis of conscience, working to Alex Jones. Was there like a moment with you guys? Was there like a pebble thrown in the pond? And he thought, I don't believe anymore.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, totally, absolutely. And he came from different sides. Brent basically came from sort of examining theories and noticing discrepancies and things that didn't add up and things that totally just contradicted the whole sort of purpose of it. And I came from the industry, so to speak. I was actually working with David Ick and some other people at the start of COVID and I literally watched them lie about COVID because the lie was more lucrative. Yeah, well, yes, but I think it was also a better story for their audience. Their audience didn't want to hear that there was a virus going around. Their audience wanted to hear that it was five g or something like that.
Neil Sanders:
And I genuinely don't think that they thought it was going to get as serious as it did. But no, it doesn't exist. You don't want to take the vaccine, all of this sort of stuff. And I was like, I don't want to be involved in this anymore because I knew people who were huge fans of David's who got ill because they listened to him. There's no virus. You don't need masks. You don't need to do this. Don't be a sheeple.
Neil Sanders:
Don't be all mean. There's people that died that were fans of David that I know, like, friends of mine that died from COVID that were in the sort of industry as well, and the pressure not to wear masks, not to have a vaccine and stuff like that from your peers. And as we were saying before, the conspiracy gives you a community and a whole sort of network of allies and friends, and you're all in this together and whatnot. And all of a sudden to be told they're basically like, you can't be trusted because you believe what's on the news. And it was ridiculous because it was like one of these things was like, this isn't worth it. Tell people the queen's a lizard. Right? Okay. Tell them that the moon is a spaceship broadcasting reality.
Neil Sanders:
Don't tell people not to pretend that a virus that could possibly kill you or hurt you very badly doesn't exist.
Jon Ronson:
Totally.
Neil Sanders:
And at that point, I just went, I'm done. I don't want to be involved in this anymore. And it really upset me as well, because even though I didn't believe all the crap, the lizards and stuff like that, I still thought that there was integrity there. Do you know what I mean? That maybe they're not correct, but they genuinely believe what they believe and stuff, and the drive and the need for content and the need to be contrary to the news and the need to be sensational to get that audience share and stuff like that. It got ugly, to be quite honest. And it wasn't just David. There was various other people within the industry that I saw do the same thing, pander to nonsense in order to get lionized by an audience. And I was like, that's not what this is about.
Neil Sanders:
This is not the point of it. And it just goes against everything that is the reason I got involved in this stuff in the first place. So I just went, I'm done.
Jon Ronson:
So your trajectory sounds very similar to Josh from mental wars.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah.
Jon Ronson:
But yours was slightly different. Yours was more kind of coming from just research and just from the inside.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah.
Brent Lee:
From being, like, a true believer. I was super deep. I was into the whole all of these attacks, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, all of that kind of stuff was rituals. This is all before QAnon was even around. But that's how I looked at all of it. And the events of Sandy Hook, basically, when Alex started pushing the hoax narrative and the crisis actor narrative in, like, early 2013, because obviously the shooting happens in December 2012, and then the theories start going around in 2013. All the truth or community was talking about that, and I just couldn't get behind it. At the end of the day, I thought these things were real.
Brent Lee:
These children needed to die to be sacrificed for the rituals. And if you're telling me that that didn't happen, well, I can't believe you.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah.
Brent Lee:
And it continued all the way up till 2015, 2016, all through Boston bombing, Boston marathon bombing, Pulse nightclub shooting, the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the batter clan shooting, all of this stuff. Everyone was denying that it was real.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah.
Brent Lee:
And Levy Rigby. Everyone's denying that it was real. Denying my ritual, essentially. So I kind of start pulling myself away from a lot of the community at that time. I just didn't want to speak to anyone about it or listen to them, didn't listen to Ike or Jordan Maxwell was another person I used to listen to a lot, and Alex Jones and everyone just. I couldn't deal with listening to their stuff. So I kind of went on my own path. And there was other stuff that started to happen, like, between 2015 and 2018, that really didn't gel with my idea of a new world order, of this one world government that was coming, the police state that would take over the entire world.
Brent Lee:
And that was basically the election of Trump, the Brexit vote. And also, funnily enough, the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the party. Like, all of this just really didn't suit the one world government, the new world order, obviously. So to break it down, Trump, it was supposed to be Hillary. Like, if the new world order was around, Hillary was going to be the one in charge. Because I'm sure, you know, the narrative of leaders are selected, not community. In the conspiracy community. That's exactly what I thought.
Brent Lee:
So how the hell did this guy get elected like that? This doesn't make sense. And then the Brexit vote happened, which also know, brought about by democracy. And then Corbin, I'd always seen this guy as an anti war kind of thorn in Tony Blair's side. Not anyone, not any major player or anything like that. Somehow he took control of the establishment labor party. And all through this, what I had noticed was that votes were actually working. People was actually doing this. There was no hidden hand behind.
Brent Lee:
Not an overarching hidden hand. Of course, people are trying to game the voters, but not in that sort of way. I didn't think votes counted. So all of that started to really make the whole thing shatter. To me. I always compare my belief system at that time to a Jenga tower, and just more and more these blocks started coming out, and those three were the ones that just made the whole thing collapse. And I just had to start trying to figure it out from 2018 to 2021. When I started talking about talking out about it, it was just I had to rebuild everything after 2018 to try and figure out exactly what the hell's going on here.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah. The story that I think Morgan, who made get me Roger Stone, because he was there on election night at Infowars, and he says that Alex just looked just completely bewildered for their narrative to work. Trump would lose. And then when Trump won it, just bewildered, and he looks almost upset. Morgan said, what the fuck do we do now?
Neil Sanders:
It's life altering, isn't it? Because basically everything that you've sort of expected and knew was going to happen. The complete opposite, basically. So this is the thing. And we took quite a lot of influence from yourself, actually, because we still yearn that fix. Do you know what I mean? But what we've discovered is that if you find the origin of conspiracy theories, that's almost as good as finding out the conspiracy theory yourself, because you're going the next level deep. We're going even deeper into the rabbit hole.
Brent Lee:
We're doing our research.
Jon Ronson:
Absolutely. You do what the conspiracy leaders always say that you should do. Do your research. Absolutely. I sort of equated to, if you turn up at a party, it's quite late, and everybody's yelling at each other. Impossible to know how it all started. So sometimes it's just really interesting to just go back and try and find the pebble, being it could just make things make a lot of sense and.
Neil Sanders:
Unpicking some of the things like Vahiman Grove and stuff like that, we didn't realize, I mean, obviously what you did was incredible and stuff like that, but what we didn't realize was it had been on the news. It's been on the news before.
Jon Ronson:
Been someone else had tried to infiltrate and I think got arrested. And there was this woman there called Mary who would protest every year. Left. The left wing activist.
Neil Sanders:
Exactly. She was coming from it from a sensible position, which is essentially, look, they're lobbying and they shouldn't be lobbying out the site. Of people and stuff.
Jon Ronson:
Which is 100% true. Yeah, absolutely. Self selecting, secretive emotes.
Brent Lee:
That's the real conspiracy behind it.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah.
Jon Ronson:
People say that the Manhattan project got a big. Got a lot of backing for beaming grails. I've never done my own research.
Neil Sanders:
It did. But basically what happens is that Bohemian Grove is almost like a sort of function centre, so when they're not having their parties, they hire out facilities in the same way that basically we need to go for a meeting. So we're going to this premier inn.
Brent Lee:
In Liverpool or whatever, to center parks or.
Neil Sanders:
It's that. So it is true. But the reason that it was done there was simply because it was just an area where all these people could meet. It's nothing significant or sinister about the place itself. Didn't they go there to get the energies or anything like that? They just did it because it was a place where they had enough seats.
Brent Lee:
It wasn't in the two weeks of hijinks either. It was a completely different time because they just sent everyone for a holiday, right?
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, exactly, yeah. They've got their club in San Francisco. I got to say, the one thing I feel really pleased about is I saw my cameraman, David Barker, from back in those days. Quite recently, I was given a talk in Belfast, that's where he lives. And I said to him, David didn't go into too. He was like, look, I'm not going to be filming in there, so I don't want to put myself at any risk. So he stayed outside while the rest of us went in. And I said to David, of all the adventures we did back then, the menace goat, the clan, all of these kind of crazy adventures that we did together back then, the one that's almost entered like the realms of mythology is sneaking into bohemian girls with Anistons.
Jon Ronson:
And I've got to say, I'm personally just very proud of the fact that that particular adventure and to talk about that has become almost like Joseph Campbell's heroes. Joke.
Brent Lee:
I was going to say lore.
Jon Ronson:
Yeah, it's lore. And I feel very. Yeah, I'm so glad that one of my stories became law like that.
Neil Sanders:
No, fantastic. Well, not just that, the many stoic goats as well. That's a fascinating story.
Jon Ronson:
I think so. That was so much harder to make work with secret rulers. And then it felt like everything we did was golden. We didn't have to work that hard to make it great. Whereas the mediterranean goats, it felt like the opposite was the case. We travel 12 hours on a plane to get minutes of usable material. We sound like a completely different experience. My memories of doing mediterranean goats are a lot worse than my memories of doing secret rollers.
Neil Sanders:
With regards to like, do you think Albert Stubblemine did actually walk through walls? Do you think the guy Savelli did actually kill a.
Jon Ronson:
Fairly conclusive know. The reason why he thought he could walk through his wall is because the atom had made up mostly of space and the wall and the human body made up mostly of atoms. But for me, the key word in that is mostly.
Neil Sanders:
Mostly.
Jon Ronson:
And in fact, in a way, that's a kind of disappointment for me, that I never really sort of believed that those paranormal powers could be real because in the psychopath test, I got drunk with my psychopath spotting powers. I went through a change, same thing with them. When I'm getting chased by build a good group, I get paranoid. I become, like, a conspiracy theorist. So I go through a sort of arc in those two books. But in the minister of goats, I never really went through an arc because I never really believed it would be possible to kill a goat just by staring into it.
Neil Sanders:
What about the remote viewing aspect of it? Do you think there's anything to that?
Jon Ronson:
Well, people say, look, there's a lot of people out there who absolutely swear that there's something in it, and then there's a lot of other people who furiously reject the idea. I can't say I've ever done enough of my own personal research to come up with. The skeptical side of me tends to believe the skeptics.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah. Do you think it's more of like a cold reading type thing or something? Perhaps.
Jon Ronson:
Well, I mean, I'm sure there's an element to that, but also, I don't want to completely reject it because we've all had that experience. You turn around and someone's staring at you. We've all got that experience of that kind of. The kind of stuff that Rupert Sheldrake writes about.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah.
Jon Ronson:
So I can't say that I'm so certain in my skepticism that there isn't something going on. Know, maybe.
Neil Sanders:
Did you ever hear the remote viewing explanation for the Loch Ness monster?
Jon Ronson:
No. I know. It was Ed Danes, right?
Neil Sanders:
Yeah, it was Ed Danes. Yeah. He says that it's the ghost.
Jon Ronson:
A dinosaur's ghost. Yeah, that's right. The ghost of the dinosaur.
Neil Sanders:
Yeah. The conspiracy theorists know that that is not true because dinosaurs are not real, apparently.
Jon Ronson:
Well, lucky, because I think I need to go, partly because I need to retain enough energy to do a bit more work before I collapse.
Neil Sanders:
No, that's been fantastic. That was actually our final question, so thank you so much, Jon. This is incredible. As we say, huge fans. Everybody go and listen to the two series of thing fell apart. Look out for the tour, the psychopath tour. It sounds like it's going to be fantastic and very glad that you're feeling better and just thank you so much for this. It's been incredible.
Jon Ronson:
Thank you, guys. I thought that was really fun. It's always been like when I talk to knowledge fights, it's always really fun to talk about people who are so knowledgeable about this area, because I'm so interested in this area, too. So, yeah, it was an absolute delight. Thank you both.
Neil Sanders:
And please check out our podcast as well. I think you might like the Bohemian Grove episode. Certainly.
Jon Ronson:
Oh, I will. And I also am interested in your great resets episode, so I'm going to dig that out, too.
Neil Sanders:
Oh, please do. Yeah. And we've done pizzagate and we've recently done chemtrails. We've got one that's coming out that we're particularly proud of. There was the UK's sort of Sandy Hook. I don't know whether you're aware of a chap called Richard d Hall, and he claimed that the Manchester bombing was fake. He's currently going through a court.
Jon Ronson:
No, I didn't know about that, son. Dare call it conspiracy.
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