Jon Ronson: ‘A society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen’

Just turned 57, Jon Ronson has had a number of successes in his multi-platform career, with books such as 2011’s The Psychopath Test and documentaries such as Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. But perhaps none of his works has resonated quite so powerfully with audiences as the podcast Things Fell Apart – in particular the second series released by the BBC in January. Later this month he is due to discuss the show as a star guest at Sheffield’s podcast festival.

Like the first series, it traces the origins of a number of conflagrations in the so-called culture wars, but it ingeniously sews together these disparate events and disagreements, tying them all to the early days of lockdown, so that listeners don’t so much hear about, as be transported into, a complex world of outrageous claims and counter-claims.

Among other stories, he looks at how a bogus medical syndrome known as “excited delirium” was instrumental in guiding the Minneapolis police’s lethal treatment of George Floyd; the way that an Oxford traffic filter scheme and a futuristic think piece published by the World Economic Forum were falsely presented as a global conspiracy to control human movement and rob people of their property; and the dissemination of the idea that Covid-19 was created for big pharma profits.

The eight episodes are characterised by compelling interviews with culture warriors, conspiracy theorists and their targets, which were notable for their curiosity, restraint and understanding. Given that some of the people Ronson speaks to seem to have lost all contact with objective reality, his questioning comes across as an impressive feat of empathy and toleration.

Ronson, who grew up in Cardiff, now lives with his wife between a small apartment in Manhattan and a house in upstate New York. In a Zoom conversation, I ask him if it was difficult to withhold derision when dealing with people who spoke demonstrable untruths.

“I think it comes with maturity and realising your own biases and stupidities,” he says. “I’m not very confrontational and sometimes you do need to be if someone is behaving in a way that is hurting people or doing something dangerous, like spreading medical misinformation. But in general, when does confrontation work?”

One reason his technique is so effective is that the interviews are contextualised with Ronson’s reassuring, though often wry, factual commentary, which sounds like the fruit of deep research – unlike, it must be said, the vast majority of podcasts. How long did he spend on it?

“The series took me 10 months,” he says.

He’s aware that this kind of highly produced documentary approach is increasingly crowded out by cheaper, more personality-driven productions, but he remains a fan of both genres. “I like both sorts,” he says. “I like just two people chatting to each other, as long as they’re good. Most are terrible and responsible for the podcast glut, which means it’s impossible to know what to listen to. But when that chat between two people is good, it can be really good.”

It was not until towards the end of the Things Fell Apart production schedule that he came up with the idea of the concluding episode, Mikki’s Hero’s Journey, which brings together many of the themes and events of the previous seven. It focuses on Mikki Willis, a former model and failed Hollywood actor who turns to producing conspiracy theory videos with ever more extreme and unfounded assertions.

Willis’s launch success was the first video in his “Plandemic” trilogy, a May 2020 viral shock-doc that promoted the idea that vaccines are a profit-making enterprise that cause medical harm. From there his conspiracies expanded to include everything from Black Lives Matter to the World Economic Forum and antifa.

“It was a eureka moment late on,” says Ronson, of his realisation that Willis was the unifying factor. “I thought it would make a nice bookend, because we hear Willis in an early episode interviewing Judy Mikovits for Plandemic, but he’s just a voice.” He decided to focus on him: “I wandered around for days listening to every interview he ever gave. When he mentioned being inspired by Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, I kind of stopped in my tracks, because that felt so intriguing and unexpected – and very illuminating. And then, when I watched all his documentaries, I noticed that he had turned everything we covered through the series into one uber-conspiracy.”

It’s an utterly absorbing conclusion, both in terms of psychological insight and narrative satisfaction, and it also features a rare moment of confrontation, when Ronson tells Willis that he doesn’t think his claim about millions dying from the Covid vaccine is true. It’s not angry or aggressive, and Willis barely responds, but the effect is a refreshing raindrop of sanity in a desert of falsification.

Paradoxically, though, in tying so many of the strands of the story to Willis, Ronson mirrors the join-the-dots approach of the conspiracy theorists, albeit with a far more painstaking and rational thesis. This is the occupational hazard of wading into these muddied and heavily disputed waters. Whatever you do, and however carefully you do it, you can lay yourself open to accusations of demonising one side, and supporting the other.

Ronson is ever vigilant to this danger, and goes out of his way to balance competing voices, showing the flaws of rightwing anti-antifa protesters, but also of antifa supporters themselves; or the false allegations about encouraging transgender children in Florida schools, but also the blinkered dogmatism of some trans activists.

None of that has prevented him from being subject to claims of bias. A number of prominent online activists have taken him to task for an episode in the BBC’s first series of Things Fell Apart, in 2021, that looked at the rise of third-wave feminism and the plight of Camp Trans, a protest against the exclusion of trans women from the all-female musical festival Michfest that ran in Michigan from 1976 to 2015.

His critics accuse him of ignoring the murder by Dana Rivers, a Camp Trans participant, of a lesbian couple and their son in 2016. He points out that he was interested in Camp Trans’s formation in the 1990s, and that the murder took place two decades later and more than 2,000 miles away. “The reason I didn’t mention the murders is that Dana Rivers hadn’t gone to trial by the time my programme went out. And when she did go to trial, Michfest and Camp Trans were not brought up at all in court by either the defence or the prosecution. So I don’t think that criticism was fair.”

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The polarising effects of these weaponised debates appears to be spreading through political systems and cultural institutions across the world. Is there a way out of such an antagonistic discourse?

“It feels to me that for great numbers of people – journalists, documentary-makers, social media users – ideology and activism have started to matter more than facts and evidence,” he says. “And that’s happening in different ways across the spectrum. The right tell these big, baroque, almost mythological lies, like QAnon or pizzagate. With the left it’s more subtle, like labelling gun-loving anti-government militia people as dangerous white supremacists actively conspiring to kickstart an ethnic-based civil war.”

His remedy may sound a bit old-fashioned to some, but it involves reasserting the importance of some reportorial values that are under threat. “The fact that ideology-led nonfiction storytelling is happening everywhere feels worrying, because a society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen. I think the way out of it is to treat people as complicated grey areas, rather than magnificent heroes or sickening villains. And to stick to the nuanced truth, rather than flattening it to make ideological points.”

He’s quick to add a qualification: “That doesn’t mean I’m against activist journalism – it’s obviously done a lot of good. But the old rules of journalism – evidence, fairness – still need to apply.”

Although he’s now known for his in-depth investigative pieces, Ronson originally started out as more of a comic writer. Initially working with bands in Manchester, he began contributing to the city’s listings magazine, then moved to London’s Time Out, and on to the Guardian, while building up a reputation for his humorously deadpan documentaries and books.

Not untypical was the film Tottenham Ayatollah in 1997, whose story also featured in his 2001 book Them: Adventures With Extremists. Influenced, he acknowledges, by The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, Nick Broomfield’s film about the white nationalist Afrikaner leader Eugène Terre’Blanche, it focused on Omar Bakri Mohammed, a rotund Islamist cleric portrayed as a slightly hapless figure given to absurd pronouncements. Yet it would later emerge that he would inspire terrorists. Was that a salutary experience?

He says he was warned at the time by someone from the Board of Deputies of British Jews that the world hadn’t woken up to the fact that militant Islam was not a joke. “He was clearly proven right about that,” he says. “But I do think the comic absurdity of Omar Bakri’s story was valid because it’s the truth. Both things can be true: you can be absurd and also capable of inspiring terrorism.”

His work, he agrees, has matured, as his style has become less overtly comic and more concerned with the most effective way to tell a story. With Things Fell Apart his storytelling succeeded in marrying gripping narrative to moral and psychological nuance. Who knows, he might even have helped bring a much-needed interest in unaligned reporting back into fashion.

• Things Fell Apart is available on BBC Sounds. Jon Ronson is speaking at Crossed Wires festival, Sheffield, 31 May and Union Chapel, London N1, 3 June