Behind the Scenes With the Alt-Right

In August 2017, Elle Reeve, then a correspondent with Vice News, reported on the white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her documentary put the lie to then-President Trump’s notorious press conference claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violent conflict. As Reeve’s coverage demonstrated, armed right-wing extremists arrived in Charlottesville looking for bloodshed and took the initiative in attacking counterprotesters, one of whom died when a white supremacist intentionally drove his car into a crowd. 

Now, Reeve has written “Black Pill,” a compelling and highly personal account of her reporting on the alt-right movement in the years leading up to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” demonstration. The book offers timely insight into one important strand of support for Trump and the role of social networking technology in spreading some of the more extreme ideas that helped propel the former president back to the White House. 

The author, who now covers the right-wing extremism beat for CNN, does not focus on analysis of larger political trends. Instead, she provides unusually detailed portraits of a number of the bigots and trolls she persuaded to tell their stories. Her persistence in cultivating this unsavory crew, and her willingness to take real risks to interview them in isolated, private spaces, allow her to provide fresh illumination of the personalities and ideas she encountered.

Reeve’s self-aggrandizing writing style will not appeal to all readers. After 30 pages, I wanted to dislike this book. Her gratuitous F-bombs, ironic tone, and incessant insertion of herself into scenes suggest an author seeking but not achieving Hunter S. Thompson’s first-person flair. But as her trenchant observations accumulate, the book’s value becomes clear, as does Reeve’s willingness to put herself in harm’s way to chronicle the alienation and hatred animating her subjects.

“Alt-Right” and “Black Pill”

Before getting to some of those observations, a few words on terminology are in order. Reeve defines her topic, the alt-right, narrowly. She refers to a generation of white supremacists who came of age in the late aughts and 2010s. They achieved a degree of influence on the political right via online message boards such as 4chan and 8chan, as well as on more mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter (now X). 

In contrast to Reeve, other journalists, academics, and policy analysts (I am one of them) have used “alt-right” to designate a broader swath of online hateful and conspiratorial belief, activity, and personnel still very much alive on sites such as Gab, Rumble, Trump’s Truth Social, and Telegram. The Proud Boys, a violent meme-spewing fraternity that helped spearhead the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, are part of the alt-right.

Reeve’s subjects formed a particularly pernicious hard core of racists who decided to test their real-world viability in Charlottesville. They encountered a sharp backlash—notwithstanding Trump’s attempt at whitewashing—and then faded from prominence in the face of criminal prosecutions and civil litigation. The ideas they promoted—such as “the great replacement,” a conspiracy theory holding that Jews are engineering a “white genocide” by encouraging immigration of easily manipulated black- and brown-skinned people—live on and have gained wider currency by means of social media, Fox News, and pro-Trump influencers like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. 

Alt-right participants use the phrase “swallowing the red pill,” derived from the “Matrix” movies, to refer to a revelation—that, for example, people of color are intellectually inferior and more prone to violence than people of European descent or that feminism has destroyed family and societal structure to the detriment of men or that Jews are “replacing” whites with people of color. (“The Jews will not replace us!” torch-carrying neo-Nazis chanted in Charlottesville.) As Reeve explains, ingesting the “black pill” of her book title refers to a more encompassing embrace of “gleeful nihilism: the system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable.” Better to burn it all down now.

“Incels” and “Autists”

Many books have examined the alt-right, including “Alt America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,” “Kill All the Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right,” and “Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House.” Reeve adds to the existing literature with her closely observed dissection of the psyches of the members of the particular loose brotherhood that assembled in Charlottesville. She offers detailed, interwoven biographies of her central players, which at first struck me as excessively comprehensive—Who cares about their childhoods?—but eventually cohere as certain traits emerge over and over again. 

A significant percentage of the most vehement of these alt-right actors, in Reeve’s telling, are “incels”: involuntarily celibate young men whose combination of childhood trauma and sundry other inner troubles lead them to the conclusion that they are incapable of healthy sexual relationships with women—and that this justifies hatred of women and just about everyone else other than other radical misogynists. 

Incels swallow the red pill, which reveals that some men are simply too unappealing to have an opportunity to have sex, and the black pill, which leads to the epiphany that destroying society is an answer to their pain. 

Much of this dark thinking spread on a 4chan board called /r9k/, a morass of humiliation and anger that brought its participants into contact with neo-Nazis whose racism and anti-semitism fit comfortably with the ambient self-pity. The most deranged incels worship those of their mindset who turn to mass murder: Elliot Rodger, who shot and killed six people at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014, or Alek Minassian, who drove a van into pedestrians in Toronto in 2018, killing 10.

One of Reeve’s most fascinating characters is Fred Brennan, the founder of the 4chan spinoff 8chan, another cesspool of conspiracies, fear, and loathing, whose severe physical disability exacerbated his incel outlook. Brennan ultimately grew out of his virginal obsessions, quit the alt-right, and became something of a Virgil for Reeve, guiding her through the descending circles of extremist Hell. 

Another quirk that Reeve noticed is that many of her subjects referred to themselves or their troll buddies as “autists,” a label that could suggest endearment or derision, depending on the context. It turned out that the term derived from “autism.” “You’ve cracked the code,” one of her sources told her. “The secret of the alt-right is that it’s actually a movement of autistic guys with internet access.” The same source estimated that one-quarter of the most active alt-righters are on the autism spectrum—obviously not a scientific estimate but one that the author finds plausible. 

Reeve hastens to qualify this observation. Alt-right people toss around “autist” loosely. There is no evidence that autism systematically inclines people toward extreme ideology, let alone violence. But citing the opinions of several experts, including court-appointed consultants, Reeve suggests that autistic individuals are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the alt-right. The obsessive communication of extreme online platforms provides an environment where they can socialize without the anxiety they experience in in-person settings. The rigid worldview they encounter provides an easier way to understand complicated social relations. And the online forums have archives that allow users to go back and study how participants interact, and then mimic that behavior. 

“The Bell Curve” and Alt-Right Women

Other findings that struck me as illuminating: “The Bell Curve” lives on as a beacon for alt-right racists, and some women find the movement appealing, despite its rampant misogyny. 

Written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life” galvanized another round of debate about race and IQ when it was published in 1994. As had a considerable literature during the heyday of the eugenics movement in first decades of the 20th century, Herrnstein and Murray argued, among other things, that IQ is substantially hereditary, that people of Asian and European descent have higher IQ levels than African Americans, and that many social ills are traceable to low IQ levels. The Herrnstein-Murray thesis that we are not all created equal and that public policies should not encourage the growth of low-IQ populations has become a source of passionate inspiration within the alt-right, whose adherents traffic in memes made from the book’s dubious charts and graphs.

Reeve’s most baffling vignettes involve the women of the alt-right. Some of the girlfriends and wives of her main characters find the men appealing because they purport to care about ideas, even if the ideas seem repellant at first. One woman told Reeve that a server, or discussion group, on the Discord platform served as her conduit: “Once in, she got used to the ‘jokes,’ even the ones about the Holocaust. ‘It starts as a joke where you laugh nervously,’ she said. ‘Then you kind of stop laughing, because you’re used to it. And then you start to post it yourself, because you want to be part of it.’” 

The transition from ironic repetition of online racial, gender-based, and religious “jokes” to unironic acceptance of hatred as a way of life is one of the consistent themes throughout “Black Pill” (and rings true with my own observation of how many Americans make the transition from casual online trolling to hard-core bigotry). Most of the women Reeve portrays, like Fred Brennan, the repentant founder of 8chan, eventually had enough and stepped away from the alt-right. This almost certainly reflects an understandable methodological bias common among journalists focusing on extremism: Their best sources are people who have themselves emerged from the darkness and are willing to recount their experiences, often with a degree of regret. Many others, of course, have not seen the light.

Trump, the “God-Emperor”

Reeve’s narrative jumps forward awkwardly and without much serious analysis from Charlottesville in 2017 to the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021. She observes that members of the narrow slice of the alt-right she portrays—like the broader movement—admired and were amused by Trump immediately upon his famous ride down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. They enjoyed his schtick and the cruelty it didn’t bother to conceal. Her subjects joked that he was their “god-emperor.” 

Discussing Jan. 6, which she covered for CNN with the same boldness that she displayed in Charlottesville, Reeve writes: “The pro-Trump movement took the alt-right’s frenetic pace of internet content, a bit of swaggering misogyny, the joking-not-joking pose, and threw out its swastikas and creepy virgin loser stuff. And with that magic recipe, it attempted to stage a coup against the United States.”

Other journalists and historians will have to flesh out Reeve’s reporting and connect the proverbial dots between her subjects and the broader Trump movement. How the once and future president recovered from bipartisan condemnation in the wake of Jan. 6 to win back the White House on Nov. 5, 2024, will generate many volumes to come. In the meantime, Reeve has made a worthy contribution by putting readers on the ground next to an earlier cadre of the alt-right, as well as in the back of a dank panel truck with them, and in a hotel room with guns tossed casually on the bed. Elle Reeve has guts, and she has written a gutsy book.