Q&A: Journalist Elle Reeve Explains How the Online Right Turned Violent and Captured American Politics
A witness to Charlottesville and January 6 investigates how online forums for sexless men have spurred violent white nationalism
Elle Reeve is a correspondent for CNN living in New York. As a correspondent for Vice and CNN, she has made award-winning video reports on the front lines of Charlottesville and January 6. She is the author of a new book, Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. In the book, Reeve reports how many right-wing extremists begin their radicalization on Internet forums for men who cannot attract women. These online forums, filled with memes, jokes, and Nazi symbols, became the breeding grounds for the extremists who took part in the real and violent events in Charlottesville and the U.S. Capitol. Reeve has won two Emmys and the Peabody for her work. We spoke last week over Zoom. Our conversation follows, condensed and edited for clarity.
Luke Johnson: What do you mean by taking the black pill?
Elle Reeve: The red pill analogy comes from The Matrix where Keanu Reeves is presented with a blue pill and a red pill. The choices are to take the red pill and learn about the reality of being enslaved by machines, or take the blue pill and go back to a pleasant fantasy. In right-wing politics, the red pill has become synonymous with removing your ideology to see the "truth" that equality is bad and fascism is good.
Black pill is much deeper than ideology. It's a nihilistic glee that a morally bankrupt society is collapsing. Therefore, you are liberated to take whatever action you want to hasten its demise, because what comes after the downfall will be a new golden age. The black pill helps explain why people permit themselves to do immoral or unethical things that they wouldn't have done before they got into extremist politics.
LJ: You write about how many right wing extremists begin their radicalization in Internet forums. Can you describe these places?
ER: The most famous is 4chan, an anonymous image board. For a long time, it was wiped every few days. Therefore, users had to stay plugged into it to be able to understand the jokes because the memes couldn't be Googled. It rewarded obsessive consumption. There was a news section of 4chan called /pol/, but it quickly became overrun by Nazis. The Nazi jokes were supposedly ironic. But what one generation of users of an internet community do ironically, the next generation will do sincerely; they will not pick up on the cues of sarcasm and irony. By the time the Trump campaign rolled around, these guys were itching to start affecting the real world.
LJ: When you met these men, what were they like in person versus their online persona?
ER: Let's start with the involuntarily celibate (incel) guys. They're much nicer than online, and nicer because I'm a woman. Their ideology holds that I'm intellectually inferior and prone to groupthink. If I challenge them, they just take that as an example of my feminine frailty. If I were to say something like race is a social construct, they don't see that as a challenge to their beliefs, they just see me as repeating what's popular. They can be very unpleasant and dismissive, but in person, often they're a lot softer. It doesn't take that long for these conversations to turn confessional, in part because I'm informed enough that some of these people almost treat me as a therapist. They're living in this very horrible, rigid world that rewards cruelty -- I can't emphasize enough how mean they are to each other.
I interviewed an incel in his very sparse studio apartment in Florida. He was nice to me. He confessed his suicidal ideation. Then, we went on to his incel forum. It was a video chat; those guys were screaming at me. One of them screamed a bomb threat at me and dared me to call the police; another defecated in his pants on camera to offend me. As for white nationalists, it's often the same: they will start out very angry, but it doesn't take that long before they're confessing their troubles with women, family problems, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
LJ: How do the incels move into white nationalism?
ER: There is a lot of cross mingling of these two things. Sex is at the heart of both: the idea is that someone else is getting all the women. In the incel world, all humans are ranked on a scale of attractiveness, one to 10. Because of the sexual revolution, the eights, nines, and 10s are getting all of the women and the men who are twos and threes are left sexless.
In the white nationalist world, there is the idea of the great replacement or white genocide. The idea is that the white race is being intentionally diluted in many ways. For example, encouraging white men to be transgender or white women to have babies with people of color.
LJ: How do they react to Donald Trump, who has cheated on his wives numerous times and has had numerous sex scandals?
ER: They can always make allowances for their idols. The thing they love about Donald Trump is that he makes the people whom they hate very, very angry. One white nationalist, Matt Heimbach, described to me the feeling of the night of the 2016 election, as not caring so much about Trump himself winning, but that all the people who hated and all the people who made his life difficult were so furious. He described [the feeling] as better than sex. They see him as an alpha; someone who won't be cowed by social pressure. Meanwhile, they feel very susceptible to social pressure. That's what they're rebelling against. In the real world, maybe they are nicely behaved, but online, they get to be the monsters they want to be.
LJ: These online worlds converged in Charlottesville in 2017. What was going through your mind leading up to that event?
ER: I just knew it would be big. The only time I've ever been able to predict anything in the news is when I talk to a lot of people about an event and they all are going or want to go. That happened in Charlottesville and on January 6; these disparate sources that didn't know each other were thrilled. Leading up to Charlottesville, there had been several brawls between white nationalists and antifascists. The Police hadn't cracked down on them much. They described it almost like camp, like you would dress up and fight. It had almost a consequence-free feeling.
LJ: Your Vice documentary from the weekend went viral because you're so well-sourced among right-wing extremists. What's lodged in your memory seven years later?
ER: Friday night was an unannounced torch march. White nationalists were carrying tiki torches and shouting, "Jews will not replace us." I didn't know what they were going to do. I just knew there would be something that Friday night. When I found out where they were gathering, [I saw] all of these guys were being dropped off by white vans and lining up. I stood on a little hill looking out over this field and they all lit their torches in unison. Only then could you see that there were hundreds of them; this line was snaking across a field. I viscerally felt the anticipation of what was to come. I wondered, "Are these guys going to win?" I didn't have a definition of winning in my head. But this was not just an Internet movement, there was a mass of people who believed in this. And were willing to take action in public to advance it. [That was the image] for me, even more than the violence.
LJ: What do you remember vividly from January 6?
ER: When we heard they were about to break into the Capitol, we rushed to the West side of the Capitol. There was a huge crowd. There is a long staircase to get into the Capitol. You could feel how information moves through the crowds, it truly was electric. I didn't understand the phrase mob mentality until I was there. You could physically feel the feelings of the mob; I could feel this thrill even though I knew intellectually how horrible it was.
They were pushing to get into the Capitol, and they were so happy. It was a rage thrill. It was contagious. I could feel the pull of that as a human being even though I knew intellectually that this was the humiliation of our democracy.
These weren't marginal, unemployed white males. These were people who were wearing expensive outdoor gear. These were people who were in Patagonia. They had expensive military kits. They looked like they could be your aunts or your neighbors. Yet, they had these faces twisted up with rage. This woman started shouting, "Watch the cane!" as her husband scrambles over a wall [to get in]. That was just the moment for me when it hit home. I did tear up a little in the moment. Then I thought: I have to push down all of these feelings and just do my job.
LJ: Where are the extremists whom you covered in the book now?
ER: Most of the folks who were in Charlottesville are mostly washed up. They faced serious consequences. They thought they would get more recruits out of this, but over time, they realized that this was a total disaster for them.
LJ: A total disaster because?
ER: Most of the world recoiled in horror. Leading up to that event, the term alt-right was in dispute. It wasn't clear whether alt-right meant people who liked Trump, Nazis, or people who were more protectionist and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. After Charlottesville, [alt-right meant] Hitler.
The social media companies kicked them off. More importantly, financial services companies kicked them off. They were not able to raise money online, because they needed an American company to process credit cards. There were legal consequences. Though there were not a lot of criminal legal consequences, there was a federal civil lawsuit against two dozen defendants from the most prominent people in the white nationalist movement. The legal bills were very expensive. But, the discovery process revealed all of their internal communications. As for the white nationalists who were active before Charlottesville, the only ones that are still active are the ones that escaped that lawsuit. Otherwise, you saw Nick Fuentes, he was in Charlottesville on January 6. He's still in the game.
LJ: And had dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West.
ER: One white nationalist observed to me is that ones that have remained successful since Charlottesville are not the ones who put swastikas. His term was that they don't "self-villainize." They don't adopt anti-American symbols. Further, I think that they downplay racism and play up misogyny; the idea of reclaiming lost masculinity. The alt-right was much more atheist, while [these successful activists] play up religion and patriotism.
LJ: What role do you think these white nationalists will play in mobilizing support for Donald Trump?
ER: I don't know. A mass movement doesn't need them anymore. They've captured a huge portion of the mainstream. A huge portion of mainstream Americans are much more open to radical tactics. They're not as open to as radical ideology as those white nationalists: they're not calling for peaceful ethnic cleansing. But they're willing to storm the Capitol and challenge elections. They're willing to challenge votes in predominantly black cities. The alt-right doesn't really exist anymore; it's outlived its usefulness. But they injected their ideas into the mainstream.