Lawfare Daily: Elle Reeve on "Black Pill" and Alt-Right Internet Culture

[Intro]

Elle Reeve: So we go out through this field, and I'm standing kind of on a road above it a little bit. I'm looking out on this field, and they start lining up and handing out tiki torches. And then they light them all in unison, and suddenly you can see, it's a massive line of white nationalists like, with lit torches, it's all sneaking through this field.

Katherine Pompilio: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Katherine Pompilio, associate editor of Lawfare, with Elle Reeve, correspondent at CNN, who covers right wing extremism and the alt-right.

Elle Reeve: But January 6th was like grownups, elders, people who clearly had jobs, like people who were wearing nice winter coats, people who could be, like, my aunt, you know? And just seeing them so possessed by these ideas that, again, that I didn't feel like they even understood the origins of.

Katherine Pompilio: Today, we're talking about Reeve's book entitled “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics."

[Main Podcast]

To get us situated, what is your elevator pitch for this book? What is it about?

Elle Reeve: I mean, originally I was like, I want the subtitle to be, “why did all this crazy stuff happen?” The elevator pitch is how, like, a very obscure, small part of the internet created a very powerful culture that eventually took over all of politics. It spiraled up, and up, and up, and stepped out of just the internet world into the real world repeatedly. Charlottesville, January 6th, two events I was at.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah. What made you want to write the book?

Elle Reeve: It was after Jan 6th. I had been standing by the White House watching Rudy Giuliani give a speech about how we're going to have a trial by combat. And there was a man in front of me, you know, in his 50s, wearing chainmail. And he's so thrilled by what Giuliani was saying. He's like, yeah, trial by combat. I'm ready.

And he was wearing a Pepe the Frog shirt. And Pepe the Frog had been this alt-right symbol that was like a huge part of my reporting life, like, in 2016 and 2017, and I was like, do you know where that comes from? He says, oh, well, it was made by someone back in the day. And it was just like so much of what had brought people to January 6 was created by these guys I had been following for 10 years, and they had no idea.

Katherine Pompilio: That's absolutely wild, and I cannot wait to dive into that.

So, also just super broadly, the book builds off of your really personal interactions with various alt-right figures. Can you talk a little bit about your research, how you turned that into writing, and what is it like building relationships with these people, and frankly how do you do it?

Elle Reeve: Yeah, I started covering the alt-right really in 2016, and it was very difficult because it is a very hostile movement to reporters. It is a movement that thinks lying is an acceptable tool for their activism. And it is extremely misogynistic because it was very heavily influenced by incel culture.

So, at the beginning it was extremely hard. I mean I often, I had a lot of false starts. I mean, I would just call people and they would scream racial slurs at me, and that's it, and I wouldn't get anything out of them. But sometimes, you know, I'd let them yell at me for 10 minutes or 30 minutes, and then they'd start telling me their life story. Because no matter how extreme someone is, almost everyone I've ever met wants to tell their story.

They want it to be recorded for history. They want their lives to be meaningful. And even someone calling for peaceful ethnic cleansing, like something that hateful, they still think what they're doing is good and that they're affecting history. So, you know, just having incredible patience and sticking around for a long time until I became an accepted part of the surroundings in that world.

In 2021, like the main figures of the alt-right went on trial for their role in Charlottesville, and it was like a four week trial. And they were really forced to confront what they'd done, they had to look at all the evidence, the communications. They had to go through and defend everything that built up to that day. And it put them in a very reflective mood, and I was able to talk to them and after that, talk to them for hours and hours about what they'd done.

Over time, again, they like, there's a mutual respect that develops, like, obviously, what I think they're doing is very bad for the world and bad for their own families, and I say that to them, but the hostility melts away.

Katherine Pompilio: Wow. It's, yeah, I guess a person-to-person connection, even though, under all of that.

Elle Reeve: Yeah, you know, it can be a little thing, like, oh, we're both left handed? How ‘bout that?

Katherine Pompilio: So, throughout the book, one central figure is Fred. We keep coming back to Fred. Who is Fred, and why do we keep coming back to him to tell his story?

Elle Reeve: Frederick Brennan was a brilliant teenager who had a very difficult disability: osteogenesis imperfecta. It means his bones are very brittle, so he can't, like, a very small amount of movement can cause them to break. He's said that he's had more than a hundred breaks in his life, and there's some bones that are never going to heal.

So he had a very difficult situation. He was taken from his parents. He was in foster care. He was very angry at the world, but he was really good at computers. His dad had given him a computer when he was a little kid. So he had this feeling that like words were this ultimate weapon he could use against other people.

Like he realized he could say, there was nothing he couldn't say. He could say the meanest possible things to infuriate or insult his caregivers, because if they struck him, they could kill him maybe, or hurt him very badly. They would go to jail. So it was almost like his total vulnerability was an invincibility shield.

So he's a very angry young man, and he's in foster care, and he gets on 4chan, and he starts asking why? Why is my life like this? Why was this allowed to happen? Why am I this kid who can't play outside, trapped in foster care? Like, why is it like this? And the people he's asking that question to are already, often, neo-Nazis on 4chan. And their answer is, because your mother was allowed to breed. That people with disabilities should not be allowed to breed. And now, of course, he knows that's wrong, but at the time, that was compelling to him.

So eventually he started this website 8chan, a more wild version of 4chan. And that became a platform where for a lot of the alt-right, wild anti-Semitism and hateful harassment campaigns, Gamergate, QAnon, mass shooters posted their manifestos there. Eventually he realized he'd created a monster and did take active steps to try to kill that monster.

Katherine Pompilio: That's wild.

Elle Reeve: He's just like a very, he has a very distinct view of the world. He's a very deep thinker. He's like an incredible person to talk to, you know. Like, I've always enjoyed talking to people like that more than a politician. A politician comes there in his suit and they say a banality and expect you to almost applaud for them.

Well, this guy has this very unique perspective on life and he did things that were wrong and he knows that were wrong. But also, his view is very illuminating for us living in a more, in the normal world.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah, absolutely. And before we really dive in, I want to get some terminology straight because I consider myself to be chronically online and even sometimes I had to find myself go back and rereading.

So what are the pills? It's red pill, black pill, yeah, the pills. What do they mean?

Elle Reeve: Yeah. Redpilled, I think a lot of people know redpilled by now. I mean, this really got going around the first Trump campaign, but the idea comes from “The Matrix.” So Keanu Reeves is presented the red pill and the blue pill. The blue pill, he lives in the pleasant illusion created by the machines. The red pill, he learns the truth. He's stripped of his illusions and he sees that humanity, humans are slaves to the machines.

So that idea has taken off, especially on the right wing internet to take the red pill. Like it's not to take on a different ideology, like in this way of thinking, the idea is that you're being stripped of your illusions. Like you're just seeing the truth. Which is of course not true, it's its own set of ideas, but that's not the way they see it.

And then from that became all these other pills, like pill becomes slang. Like, are you crypto-pilled? Are you Russia-pilled? It can be a term of derision, a term of pride, somewhere in between. Greenpilled, whatever. There's a wild comic called Ironpill, but I think blackpilled is the most important one because it's not even about ideas.

It's about a feeling of gleeful nihilism. That all of this is corrupt. It's hopeless. Like society is irredeemable. And so the best thing you can possibly do is accelerate towards its destruction, because what comes after will be a golden era. You can remake the world the way it ought to be. And with blackpill thinking, you can rationalize a lot of immoral and unethical actions because the morals and ethics created by this society are totally bankrupt. Like, why should you have to follow them?

Katherine Pompilio: Scary. So you begin chapter two with the discussion of what you say is the loosely connected group of people working to make America more racist.

And you explained that you like to use the term “nazis” lowercase and to define this group. Why do you use this term specifically as compared to white supremacists or white nationalists?

Elle Reeve: White nationalist, that was actually a PR term that they came up with, like, in the 90s, because they didn't want to be called white supremacists anymore.

Now, so, like, whatever is associated with him, eventually that word becomes toxic, no matter how they try to shape the PR around it. But nazi to me just is like the generic drug, right? It's not neo-Nazis of the 90s. It's not the German Nazis of the 30s. It's like, and the reality is this is also what they sometimes refer to themselves as, like in their texts between each other, in their sexts, which became public as part of that federal civil trial, you know. Richard Spencer texted a woman saying, when you're America's number one Nazi, there's nothing more alpha than that. Like, they really reveled in it.

This is like, really interesting and difficult to like, as a journalist, I'm reporting on it, but I'm talking to people who are, you know, my editors, etc. They're disconnected from it. So they're nervous about calling them racist, calling them Nazis, whatever. And I have to be like no, no, they call themselves racist.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah.

Elle Reeve: They call themselves Nazis. Like, they embrace it.

Katherine Pompilio: It's a badge of honor.

Elle Reeve: Yeah.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah. It's, yeah, it's just weird to think about. And those inside this camp call it a movement. Who's at the center of this movement? I know you mentioned Richard Spencer. And who are the vampires as you describe in the book?

Elle Reeve: So, the white power movement, we can call it that. The white power movement has been around a long time. Sort of modern era is dated to the 60s. George Lincoln Rockwell would give these campus speeches where he would be heckled, and like the more wild the students got, the more he liked it because eventually he could get them to listen.

And I think that was very influential on this movement going all the way forward. And you see the trolling potential back in these grainy audio recordings from the 60s. But starting in about the 2000s, they felt like their movement was dead in the Bush era. Most of the people involved were really old, or they were skinheads who seemed cartoonish. They were called Hollywood Nazis.

So this guy Bill Regnery created the Charles Martel Society. And it was a secret society that was meant to sort of cultivate the white nationalist movement and help bring forward new, younger leaders. They had a really hard time up into the Bush era recruiting young people. So most people involved were like super old. Like Matt Heimbach told me the story about joining a concerned citizens council and people saying like, oh, is your grandpa involved in this? Like, why are you doing this?

But around the Obama, mid-Obama era, all of that changed. That's when the alt-right came online. And that was a very different thing born on 4chan and anonymous message boards, where making ironic racist jokes kind of shifted into making sincere racist jokes into it being like a full-on ideology.

Richard Spencer, he'd been cultivated by the Charles Martel Society. His patron was Bill Regnery, who he called vampires. He calls all these men vampires now. He says they try to suck the blood and the life out of anything that is alive and vital. So Spencer had created this term alt-right, then kind of abandoned it because he's always beefing with people.

But 4chan, like the little anonymous trolls on 4chan, often, truly, teenagers, they adopted the term. They created their culture and their whole ideology around it. They created all of these, this slang. And as it started to rise in 2014, 2015, Spencer saw that and tried to sort of surf on top of it. Because Spencer was willing to use his real name, and his real face like reporters could talk to him, the way they couldn't talk to, to an anonymous troll. So he became the face of the movement, even though he didn't actually have control of it.

Katherine Pompilio: And did he understand it or was he just kind of riding a wave?

Elle Reeve: In retrospect, he says he just did not understand it, as do the other younger leaders of his generation.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah.

Elle Reeve: That they thought they had this massive populist movement swelling behind them, but really it was an entirely different animal.

Katherine Pompilio: All of a sudden this cartoon frog appears and it's your symbol. Can you talk a little bit about that? What did this new influx of alt-right people bring to the movement? You meant, like, new memes?

Elle Reeve: Youth, vitality, a punk rock sensibility, a feeling of being countercultural. I mean, you see this even now, like, so many of the comedians are sort of right-coded.

Maybe they're not explicitly Trump supporters, but, like Joe Rogan. But they made, or they were trying to make racism cool and bigotry and misogyny, like, and Trump was a really great, like, icon of that. Like he didn't, they didn't think that Trump was one of them, but he had this like swaggering macho sensibility.

Within the troll world, like, if you complain about your mistreatment, you're a loser. And like the most epic troll is like, you know, the meanest person online is the coolest guy in these communities, right? And Trump is like an excellent shit talker. Like he's a master shit talker, you know, he's almost like an insult comic. So he was a perfect icon for that.

Katherine Pompilio: Ugh, yeah. Even though he didn't fit, I guess exactly the way they wanted him to, or just?

Elle Reeve: They thought of him as a useful tool. And that it was, like, kind of funny and ironic to be for him because he made all the people that they didn't like angry. So Matt Heimbach described to me, like, on election night when Trump won, that the feeling was better than sex. Not because Trump won, but because all the people he hated were so upset about it.

Katherine Pompilio: Wow. So you keep mentioning Matt Heimbach and who's Matt Heimbach and who's Matt Parrott? You talk a lot about them throughout the book as well. Why are they important?

Elle Reeve: Matt Heimbach and Matt Parrott, two friends or frenemies who were a big part of the white nationalist movement for 10 years. Parrott was 10 years older than him. Matt Heimbach was like, in like 2013, he was like a young hotshot of being racist. He got a lot of attention creating a white students’ council on campus at Towson University.

So they met at these white nationalist conferences, and they were very frustrated with the white nationalist movement, because they thought it was basically, you know, say, get together, have your conference, say racist stuff, but then just vote Republican.

And they thought that they wanted a more, a broader welfare state. They wanted more support for white families. Like, you can really see the influence of this today. Their slogan was faith, family, and folk. Folk being white people. And their idea is they wanted to create like, a stronger community of white people working together, more socialist in that way. I mean, they were truly fascists. And instead of providing a little bit of support for, you know, Republican tax cuts or war in Iraq, or that kind of thing.

Heimbach comes to live with Parrott, who, Parrott had married a much older woman. And so he became a stepfather at 21, of a 10-year old and a 12-year old girl. So by the time he's 30, Heimbach is in his early twenties, as are these stepdaughters. So Heimbach marries one of them. So they become not just partners in racism. They also become in-laws.

And they have this, like, very difficult, like push and pull, like almost like, it's like a Shakespearean relationship. Eventually Heimbach has an affair with Parrott’s, one of his wives. So he's having, like, technically having an affair with his stepmother-in-law. They get caught. They get, there's a fistfight that breaks out. He's arrested. And that was the end of their Traditionalist Workers’ Party. That was in 2018.

And, but eventually, they came together again. It's like they, it's like some of their only friends in the world. Like once you join this movement, like, you're poison to the outside world. And it's very hostile inside, like, there's a lot of people with mental illness. It's like, it's kind of a terrible place to live, but you can't leave. It just traps you forever.

So these guys like they had this horrible affair. It became news. Like, they're humiliated in public, but they have to get back together to defend themselves against this lawsuit and that it's just their lives are bound forever.

Katherine Pompilio: That is so Shakespearean.

Elle Reeve: It's just wild in there. So those were two of the younger leaders who were around before this like online alt-right wave. And they were rivals of Spencer, who they thought was like a snooty, fancy boy. They were considered more like working class, low class. They were trashy. This is called bad optics within the white nationalist movement. While Spencer was considered good optics because he's like fancy, like wore three-piece suits, he seems like an intellectual.

Really all of them are middle class, all of them. But there's like a lot of shame about being middle class. So you either pretend to be an aristocrat or you pretend to be working class. They all, Heimbach and Parrott, wore Dickies. The symbol of their movement was like a gear and like a plow. Like they pretended to be workers and farmers. You, kind of see this now on the left, right? There's like this working class face. But in reality, yeah, they're just, he's just a guy from the suburbs,

Katherine Pompilio: With the brother who makes Disney videos.

Elle Reeve: That's right. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Katherine Pompilio: On YouTube. Yeah.

Elle Reeve: Yeah. Matt Heimbach, his brother makes, reviews Disney theme parks for a living. Heimbach sent me a video of it, which he sees as like the pinnacle of capitalist, like, slop, like, the meagreness of American culture when it's driven by corporate capitalism, right?

So he sends me a link to one of those videos and he's like, I can't tell if he's the evil one or I'm the evil one. It's like, oh you did fascism, you’re the evil one. You’re the evil one.

Katherine Pompilio: You're the evil one, Matt.

And then in your discussion of these two and the larger movement, you say that Parrott and Heimbach refer to themselves and one another as autists. And I know you offer many qualifiers throughout the book, like, you know, autism does not mean that you are more likely to, you know, commit violence or be in these groups. But why do they refer to themselves as autistic? Are they actually autistic or do they just call themselves this to categorize themselves as an other or not a normie as they would say?

Elle Reeve: So with Heimbach Parrott, they both were diagnosed with Asperger's in the 90s, as children. That's no longer in the DSM. It's just all considered part of Autism Spectrum Disorder. So Heimbach, though, his mom was a teacher. He took a lot of behavioral training, like he basically had remedial social skills classes. So he learned how to have conversations, how to be charming, how a conversation was like a tennis game where you lob the ball back and forth, even if you think the other person is kind of boring.

And so, Parrott saw him as like the perfect face of the movement because Parrott described him as autistically social, that he approached socialization with an autistic obsessiveness in order to sort of perfect his performance, even if you're looking at his hands, he's like, fidgeting and tearing up a little napkin because he has so much social anxiety.

Within 4chan, like, this is a, this was one of the first things I noticed about the alt-right movement was how often this term came up, autist, A-U-T-I-S-T. In those anonymous spaces, I can't actually find out, like, were you diagnosed? So it's not clear. A lot of them talk about being diagnosed.

But in general, they, what appeals to them is this idea that they're highly intelligent, but they lack the social skills to operate normally in society. And especially they lack the skills to get a girlfriend. That one of the older, more less offensive pieces of slang that came out of this was to have spaghetti fall out of your pockets. Meaning like you go and you try to have a social interaction and you humiliate yourself so badly, it feels as though spaghetti has fallen out of your pockets.

This is, again, like, heavily influenced by incel culture, the idea. So incels, a lot of people have heard by now about Chad. He's this sort of mythical, handsome man who gets all the girls. Chad tells you to just be yourself because Chad being himself has worked so well with women, but the incels and the autists, they feel like if they are themselves, they will turn off anyone they talk to.

I did speak to Rachel Lofton. She examined Dylan Roof in his sentencing and diagnosed him as autistic. She said that he had approached racism with an autistic intensity and she couldn't talk to me about him specifically. But she said that people, she advised parents of autistic children to severely limit internet time because extremist communities can be very appealing to them because one, they offer a rigid, clear view of the world and how it operates. It's rules that are understandable.

Two, they can communicate with other people without social anxiety because they're doing it through the screen. And three, because there's archives of these message boards, they can go back and see how people interacted and mimic those interactions, you know? If someone says, how was your weekend? You say it was great. You know, like the small talk that most people do naturally, like, they could learn through these archives.

So I don't know what percent is actually autistic, but a massive percent of them identify in that way.

Katherine Pompilio: Got it. Okay, kind of switching gears a little bit. What is Gamergate? And why is it significant?

Elle Reeve: Gamergate. Gamergate always, like, gives me a headache when I have to talk about it.

Katherine Pompilio: Sorry.

Elle Reeve: No, it's okay. Gamergate started with a guy claiming, falsely, that his ex-girlfriend had traded sex for a positive review of her video game,. Like, the review was never even published like this didn't happen. But that sparked this kind of online movement of people who were obsessed with video games and they were coordinated on 4chan and then later 8chan.

And these were white guys who felt like they had made the video game industry what it was, and they didn't like having diversity and, like, women's rights forced down their throat. They didn't want to be scolded about, that the video game girls had, their boobs were too big, like, they didn't want to be yelled at about that. They wanted their video games to be the way they were.

So they harassed a lot of people, women involved in the video game industry who protested about this. They coordinated, like, advertiser boycotts of Gawker and for the way that they covered Gamergate and it was quite effective. The movement was kicked off 4chan and Fred Brennan then marketed his website, 8chan, to the Gamergaters.

He was like, you can come in. He did this through a man who, named Mark Mann, who lives in Brooklyn in a home for autistic adults. So Mark Mann marketed all these like video game influencers. He's like, come over to 8chan. You can harass whoever you want to, here. And that's what grew 8chan into a huge site. And so Fred sort of lorded over this. He wasn't really into video games at all, or the movement, but he took the opportunity to create this persona for himself as this internet supervillain.

Katherine Pompilio: And can you talk a bit about, like, the behavior culture on 8chan or other extremist forums? Why is the general idea be more cruel than the next guy and how does that contribute to that?

Elle Reeve: So, I think the people who have the best insight into this are the few ex-girlfriends or women who are in that world. One woman I spoke to, I call her Anna in the book, she said that these spaces reward cruelty, that a lot of times these are guys who are bullied or even abused. And they are replicating that mistreatment, that they are trying to mimic men that they've seen dominate women.

There's also this phenomenon, Natalie Wynn, she goes by ContraPoints on YouTube, has talked about. It's like, within digital self harm, the idea that whatever hurts is true. And people will kind of seek out the most painful comments, and like, the more painful they are to read, the more you want to believe them.

In incel forums, these guys would post videos of their faces, you know, and they believe, of course, that they're too ugly to ever, ever have a relationship. And the other incels will come in and just brutally criticize what they look like and make fun of them and the original poster will just like eat this up. Like, it's actually like a really, it's a really dark, sick place. And people involved in it, they harass other people like they do bad actions. I'm not saying they're like innocent victims here, but they are trapped in a very toxic world that is very painful to leave.

You know, one guy I talked to who had been in an incel discord for a decade was like, he said that, you know, you're chatting in these rooms for a long time, you'll eventually let like little secrets about your life slip out. And collectively, collectively, the group, the room will remember that. And then whenever you piss someone off, disagreeing with them about politics or whatever, someone will say hey, but like, didn't your girlfriend break up with you? Aren't you really fat? Weren't you molested as a child? Nothing is off limits. Didn't your parents die in a fire? Like it doesn't matter.

Like, and so the result is that all day long, it's like having a speaker next to your ear, replaying the worst moments of your life. And yet they're addicted to it. They can't leave. They spend, I mean, one guy I talked to would go like a full day without sleeping. You just live inside these chat rooms.

Katherine Pompilio: Wow.

Elle Reeve: It just really warps their idea of what's normal in the world, how normal people relate to each other. I mean, they're extremely cruel to the people that they, sort of, consider friends.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah, and how are you supposed to get out of that if it's all you hear all the time?

Elle Reeve: Yeah, it's all you know, and then you try to interact in the normal world and you come across as a huge asshole.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah, and it's confirmation. It's like, okay, well, everybody's right, online.

Elle Reeve: And then people reject you. Right, because you're such an asshole. And so you just keep going back into your digital world.

Katherine Pompilio: One of the chapters that I found to be the most compelling, especially given, you know, everything we've talked about now and everything you've written about in terms of the hatred of women and talk about women specifically on these forums and in these movements. Why do women join these movements? How do they get involved? And what's their reasoning? 

Elle Reeve: Yeah, it's like super dark. So one woman I spoke to, I mean, almost all of the ones that I spoke to had some kind of trauma in their past. Some much worse than others.

One woman I spoke to, she started on incel forums because she really liked the idea of ugliness. She said that she had been sexually abused and she started to feel like if she had been ugly, it wouldn't have happened to her. And she said that she could almost depersonalize and not think of herself as a woman when they were saying these horrible things.

Or, alternatively, like, there was almost like a freedom or a release in believing that as a woman, like, you're stupid, you exist for sex. Like you're sort of like a lower life form. Like, it's easier to believe that, she said, than to believe that someone that you like or love or respect is mistreating you.

Other women, they came to the alt-right through YouTube, usually. Several came in because they liked Richard Spencer and not 'cause of the racist stuff he said. They liked the way he talked about protecting families. They were, they found it very appealing this idea of women being protected, and respected for, like for doing feminine things, right? Instead of thinking like cooking and cleaning and just being beautiful and raising children, that's lesser or stupid or unintellectual, that in a way, that that's venerated, at least that's the pitch. Now, that's not the reality once you're inside.

Once you're inside, these women were treated terribly and with awful disrespect. And, you know, one woman, it became a meme in 2017, the concept of white sharia. It was their idea of sharia law, that like, women were, would be second class citizens, no divorce, no jobs, no voting. Child marriages, right? Rape being okay. That the only way to create the world they wanted in America was to strip women of the right to vote. So they called this white sharia. And it started as a joke, and as with so much of this stuff, it started to become real.

They started to live that way. This woman started showing up in a hijab at alt-right parties. Her boyfriend treated her terribly, spit on her in front of other people. Just, she would be, I should just to back up for a second.

I got my hands on a woman's phone that she'd used when she was a white nationalist, Samantha Froelich. She quit and that phone remained offline, unspoiled by Wi-Fi. And so I like, I got the screen fixed. I go into it and I'm reading all these different chat threads. I'm living her life through these, like, the many different Samanthas that exist in all these different relationships.

And one of them is with that woman who wore the burqa. And that woman would tell her like how much she loved her boyfriend, how much fun they were having. What a cool, fun guy he sounded like on his podcast. He was such a stud, the way he talked about rape and impregnating women.

And then late at night, the texts return and she would say like, I've been dehumanized enough for one weekend. Like I've been crying in the car for two hours. These men are so horrible. Do not trust these men. I'll never respect myself again. I can't be around other men who know how I'd let my boyfriend treat me, you know, and that would go late into the night.

And then the next morning she'd be sending a link to a burqa on Amazon. And like, I mean, it, I had read about how women in abusive relationships, how it takes many, many times to actually leave your abuser, how difficult it is to get out of the mental head space that you deserve this treatment. And that he's a really a good man, you know. But I saw it play out in these text messages. And that woman left when she got pregnant. She didn't want, I'm told, her kid to be treated that way.

Katherine Pompilio: That's really sad and dark.

Elle Reeve: But like all these women, like, even in front of other women in a group chat, they would say like, oh, I didn't, you know, these guys, like, I didn't get the jokes at first. They were like meme-ing so hard. I thought it was kind of offensive. But then I've learned that they're just joking and this is how they're going to grow the movement. And I don't take it so personally. But then privately, one on one, they're like, I am afraid of this man. Like, I can't, like one texted Samantha saying, like, I cannot, in good conscience, make any more propaganda to lure in women to a movement that hates them.

Katherine Pompilio: Wow.

Elle Reeve: And I just want to say like the old school white nationalist, it was like full-on neo-Nazi I interviewed, Jeff Scoop, like full on wearing like reinforced knuckles. Like he has a huge scar on the back of his head from getting hit with a tire iron, like, like tough guy, we'll just put it that way.

Like he had done this for 30 years. He'd known people who'd killed people. He'd known a family annihilator. But when the alt-right came online and it was so misogynistic, he's like, whoa, okay. Like this is too weird.

Katherine Pompilio: That's where I draw the line.

Elle Reeve: I can't deal with these guys. Like this shit's too weird for me.

Katherine Pompilio: Oh my God. Yeah. I remember that in your book and I have it highlighted.

I wanna, I would, I could talk about this forever, but to cover all the bases, the book also details your experience at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Could you just talk about, you know, your experience there? When did you realize what was happening and what were you thinking?

Elle Reeve: Yeah, I knew it was going to be big going into it, because every single white nationalist I interviewed, like I reached out to, like even trolls, they all knew about it and thought it was really cool. It was supposed to be the climax of what they called the summer of hate.

There'd been these like street brawls that were escalating in size and violence between leftists and the alt-right all that year. And this was supposed to be the big one. And so, I just knew I had to go. And my bosses are, correctly, my bosses are like, you have to get an interview if you want to, you have to interview someone.

So, I reached out and this guy called me, Chris Cantwell. He later became known as the ‘Crying Nazi.’ And so we arranged to have an interview there. And we met in a park, in a public park, and he had about two dozen of his little fans around him. And immediately, like, immediately, like, you could feel the, they had confidence, but also it was very menacing. You know, like, even I, even I, I have been studying these guys for a while, like, even I am swayed by the feeling of like, I don't want to admit that I've been quote trolled, or that I am feeling any feelings, but it was crazy.

I am trying to interview this guy and he's trying to provoke me and repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that I am female. And all these guys around him are like heckling and jeering. And, you know, my, one of the cameramen overheard a guy being like, she's doing all the stereotypical female stuff. You know, they were very obsessed with my voice being high, but I don't have that high of voice. I am a woman. Like, I just, I am a woman. My voice is not as deep as a man's, like, that's just reality.

So from that, I, like, the tension, the potential energy, right? That you knew was going to turn into kinetic energy. Like, you could feel that it was very thick with that. And one of my colleagues overheard them saying that there would be something at Nameless Field that night at 9:30. I knew something was happening at night, but I didn't know what.

And we were like, what's “Nameless Field”? Like, well, it must be some kind of code. No, there's a field at UVA called Nameless Field. We Google it and so we just go to it and there are all these vans, white vans, dropping these guys off at this field in white polos. Like you could tell immediately that it was very well organized. Like this wasn't just kind of thrown together, everyone just show up. Like there had been a lot of planning.

So, we go out through this field, and I'm standing kind of on a road above it a little bit looking out on this field and they start lining up and handing out tiki torches. And then they light them all in unison and suddenly you can see, it's a massive line of white nationalists, like, with lit torches all sneaking through this field.

And that was when I was like, oh my God, like, I mean, I would like, that was when you could see the size and seriousness of it as a movement. Like, this is a lot of people in a college town on a summer weekend. That was when I was like, oh my, are they going to win? That was the question that was in my head. Like, are they going to really seize the government with these ideas?

So then they start marching. They were only supposed to march for five minutes, but I found out later, they went the wrong way. Like, this wasn't planned. Like they went the opposite direction. So they're marching all through campus for like 45 minutes and amping themselves up. Like, in these, in covering this world, like, I've truly learned what mob mentality is, like, in a way that I didn't understand before. Like, you can feel the human emotion. It's like electric, moving through the crowd. They're like whooping and hollering.

And they got, they had a list of chants that they thought would be good PR: “You will not replace us.” But they got so excited, they said Jews will not replace us, which is what they really believed, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. And that was really important for us to capture, because before that it had been up for grabs what the alt-right was. Was it truly a racist movement or an antisemitic movement? Like, Steve Bannon had talked about it, you know, he's like, yeah, there's some antisemites in it, but you know, that's not what it is as a whole. Right? There were like regular conservatives who wanted a piece of it until Charlottesville.

So yeah, and like the cops didn't even show up. Like this like march ends in this massive melee, this enormous brawl. We lost our cameramen in it. Like I stood on top of this little column, like trying to find them. We've, like, lost them in the crowd until it all started to disperse. It was insane, and the cops didn't show up until it was over. Like it really was a feeling like they could do whatever they wanted. Like, this was going to be their town for the weekend.

Yeah. So, that night, I suppose, was when I realized it'd be big. It was the next day. The next day, that's the day of the march. It was Saturday, August 12th. I mean, again, all those guys know my name. They all were familiar with my coverage and had obsessively, like, researched my boyfriends. And all kinds of things about me like I have catchphrases to them. I mean, I'm a meme to them, so when I would walk through their crowd, they'd be like, oh, that's that bitch from VICE, or they'd be like, oh, hello, Elle, oh, like, that's interesting. That's what I say, you know, when I'm talking to them and I didn't want to say, oh, cool idea, dude. I say, oh, interesting.

So that, like, I experienced it a little differently than your average person because everywhere I walked I would be the focus of attention, at least for a moment. And that, like that day, was like insane chaos. There was a whole whirlpool of fights happening in the street, and again the police weren't stepping in to stop it, at all. Not until the governor declared it was a state emergency and then, and then they all dispersed and are just, like, marching through the streets to this other park. Like, it truly did feel lawless, and like they ran the town for that moment.

Katherine Pompilio: And you write, you, you hinted at this in your answer, but you write that Charlottesville was like a nuclear disaster for the alt-right. Why?

Elle Reeve: Right, so, I think radiation sickness is a good metaphor here, is that, like, when you are poisoned by radiation, at first you get really familiar symptoms like nausea, right, but they're pretty mild. And then you enter the latency phase, where it feels like you're getting better, but actually your cells are breaking down. And then after that you enter the manifest illness stage, which is gruesome, and your body falls apart.

And that is what happened to the alt-right. So they knew they'd taken some hits, some PR hits. They regrouped, they weren't quite sure what to do, and then they even got some more recruits for a while for a couple months after that like Identity Evropa, one of the white polo frat. They got a lot of new recruits after that.

But over time, the consequences started to build up to where it killed the movement. Like, they're kicked off social media. They were all named and shamed online. They were most importantly kicked off financial services companies online, so they couldn't raise money. There was a point where Spencer was, like, I can only take money through physical checks.

And then they got sued, right? And if you can't raise money or rally people to your cause and you can't afford a lawyer, like that's going to have very negative legal consequences for you.

And you know, they were, there's just infinite recriminations. That moment where Heimbach and Parrott fight each other over a woman. And there's an arrest, and that's becomes known as the night of the wrong wives in that world. That happens in the aftermath of Charlottesville. Spencer gives a speech on a college campus in Michigan that goes so poorly. He does a YouTube where he says Antifa is winning. Like, all of it breaks apart. They all run away with their tail between their legs.

Katherine Pompilio: I think you characterized it really well in the book as well, when you said Charlottesville was the first kind of step off the internet or this big step off the internet where like they could say whatever they wanted on these forums, be completely lawless. But as soon as you enter real life and reality, there are consequences for your actions.

Elle Reeve: Yeah. Once you enter physical space, there's a different set of rules that apply. Like, I don't like the idea that what happens on the internet isn't real. It is real, but it has a different law, different laws of physics than out here.

One of the ways I think about it sometimes is like this concept of tech disruption. Like, yeah, you can do all kinds of disruption or whatever when you're talking about sending ones and zeros over the internet through social media companies or apps or Uber, whatever.

But that submersible, the submarine company, like, they're trying to disrupt in the physical world, right? And they have to deal with the reality of like, what, you know, a mile of pressure of water will do to, like, a canister of steel, right? Like, boom, like you run into reality when you hit physical face, space. A different reality. And that's what it was for them.

Katherine Pompilio: Moving on to another lighthearted topic. You were there on January 6th. What the heck was that like? And what were you thinking?

Elle Reeve: It was the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life!

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah.

Elle Reeve: It was even crazier than Charlottesville because, like, in high school I had gone to like all-ages punk shows, I'd seen mosh pits. I didn't like it. Okay, I wasn't cool. I don't want to portray myself in that way. But like I'm used to seeing young men on the margins of society act a little crazy.

But January 6th was like grownups, elders, people who clearly had jobs, like people who were wearing nice winter coats. People who could be, like, my aunt, you know? And just seeing them so possessed by these ideas that, again, that I didn't feel like they even understood the origins of. Like, it's like they were just, I mean, mob mentality, again, they were just like wild, like, captive by this belief.

I mean, I, you know, CNN isn't thought of too well in that community, you know. But I don't hide where I report for because if they just find out later, then you're really in trouble. But I just, I remember telling this one I worked for CNN. She's this kind of like physically fit, I'd say like about 60 years old, wiry hair, cropped. I mean, she looked very nice. And just the way her face twisted up with rage, like, I will just never forget it. It was so shocking in the moment. Like, I wasn't feeling, like, corresponding anger or upset at her being mad at me, but just, but horror at how the rage twisted up her face.

So, we heard they were, like, trying to break into the Capitol. We raced down Pennsylvania Avenue. We get to the Capitol and, again, you can feel the intention of the whole crowd goes to this one staircase, because it looks like that's the one way, the only way into the Capitol. And everyone starts pushing that way, stomping over bushes, whatever, climbing over retaining walls.

So my crew and I, like, go over there, and there's just this push. We're standing on top of the wall. Some guy screams at us, you know, either get over the wall or get out of the way. Like, these elderly couple are scrambling over it. This woman says of her husband, like, watch the cane. Like, huh? This is like, so crazy.

And my producer, Sam Guff, she's very petite. You know, I started to get scared, I was like, Sam, okay, if there is a stampede, no matter what, don't fall on the ground. Like, you must stay standing no matter what. She's like, I know. I know what happened to Mufasa.

So we, like, go over to this other wall and a lot of people, you've probably seen this footage of people like madly scramble, climbing up a wall to get into the Capitol. Okay, so that's our footage. Completely unnecessary. Like, I'm actually standing there thinking, like, do I need to climb this wall? And then I hear some guy shout at this top, just go around, there's stairs!

So, like, leisurely, we walk around the corner of the Capitol and just cruise up the stairs, cruise past a couple cops and walk on. But, like, that's how crazy people are. That's how crazy they're like, there's like, I thought they were going to fall down and hurt themselves. They're scaling this like two-story wall. It was so insane. It was so insane.

Katherine Pompilio: That's wild.

Elle Reeve: People were streaming out because they'd been tear gassed or maced by the cops. And they're like, genuinely upset the cops weren't on their side. Like they didn't understand it.

Katherine Pompilio: In your description in the, I think in the, talking to specifically Richard Spencer after January 6th, he was talking about how he was, and also Parrot, and I think Heimbach as well, that they were appalled that, you know, like the normal people were now redpilled and you don't want too many normies or the masses to become redpilled. You know, they said we did Charlottesville, but they did January 6th.

If this is a movement that they're trying to spread, why don't they want the masses to be redpilled? Then why are they distancing themselves from this used to, if this is what they started? 

Elle Reeve: They used to think that, they used to think the masses should be red pilled, but then they saw the products of that. So, they had talked quite glibly about fascism, about, like, changing the way our government is, about how they would exploit the First Amendment for now, but there wouldn't be a First Amendment when they were in power.

Like they had spoken about that very openly, but once they see this slightly different movement that has so many of the same characteristics actually do something much more radical than they had considered, they're appalled by it. I think there's a little bit of jealousy.

I've listened to podcasts where ex alt-right guys are like, why wasn't it us? They're, like, upset that the movement, the online social movement behind Trump are what they call the alt-lite. So, like, your Tim Pools, you know, like your Benny Johnsons, your Ben Shapiros, like Charlie Kirk. Like, guys who are conservative, but they're not explicitly racist.

And the alt-right guys, like Spencer, they consider those people, their intellectual inferiors. And they're like, so why was it them and not us? Like we could have protected society. Like, we could have protected the Western empire and instead it's in the hands of these idiots who are just stealing our memes from 10 years ago. And so, I think it held up a mirror a little bit to what they had advocated for.

Again, like a lot of that world started, it all started off as a joke. And it becomes more, a more sincere belief. But then when you see it in real life, you're really confronted with what you've been talking about. You tend to see it in a whole new way.

So, I mean, when, what Parrott would say to me was like, I actually respect the rule of law. Like, I actually think that's a good thing. I think the Constitution is a good thing. He said that he thought now normie conservatives were not as ideologically radical as he was, but much more tactically radical. And that he was afraid that they would win.

Spencer said, like, when you redpill the masses, like, you don't get, you know, this, like, white race that he had once talked about, like, you know, an army of chads, like a new age of, like, Western civilization. Like, what you get is Ashley Babbitt being shot in the neck. You get QAnon. Yeah.

They think they are much better than QAnon, even though, so, like they believed, okay, so they believed Jews were convincing women to have babies with people of color in order to suppress the white race. That's their Great Replacement, right?

QAnon believes a cabal of pedophiles is, like, doing mind control in order to have child-like slaves and cannibalism and that kind of thing, as well as import voters for the Democratic Party. Like the structures of these conspiracy theories are very, very similar, but the alt-Nazi guys, they think they're much better. They're a lot smarter than QAnon. They think QAnon is stupid boomerism.

I mean, one of the crazy things is like going into January 6th, I got inside this Telegram channel where they were planning, they were organizing going to Jan. 6th. And the people in there were talking about the normies getting redpilled. I was just like watching this like, you are the normie. That’s you.

Katherine Pompilio: Oh gosh. Big question, broadly: how is blackpilled culture seeping into the mainstream?

Elle Reeve: Oh, I mean, I think, oh my god, like, it's scary to me. I mean, yeah the idea of burn it all down, I mean. So there's been all this discourse about podcasts, right? And I love podcasts. I listen to them a lot. So, I kind of love this discourse. But like, why aren't there big liberal podcasts the way there is Joe Rogan or Theo Von who had Trump on to talk about cooking.

And I was listening to Theo Von recently and at the very end of, you know, like a normal, just like two-hour podcast about not being able to get girls or using dick pills. He's, like, talking about how the number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and how fucked up the system is, how terrible it is. And why hasn't there been any change? It's been so long and there's no change. And he's like, you know, people are so sick of the system. You almost want a war to end it all or whatever, right? Like, that kind of thinking, that's blackpilled thinking. And like, it's everywhere.

I mean, I interviewed these women who'd been radicalized during COVID because they thought schools should be open. Like they were living in blue states, and there were very strict controls on when kids could go back to school. And to be fair, like in hindsight, they were right, broadly, right? Like kids probably should have gone back to school. It was very bad for kids to go back to school and they didn't spread COVID as much as adults. But like that, that really changed her. It had turned her from a liberal to a hardcore DeSantis supporter. And she called herself blackpilled.

Like it's just like, this idea of everything is corrupt, burn it all down. Like when you'd interview people, like I interviewed normal people, who were excited about Donald Trump. Or like they thought he said crazy stuff, or they thought Jan. 6 was crazy, but you know, they were desperate for some kind of change. They just want to like burn it all down.

They don't want to defend institutions, right? The way like Democrats and moderate Republicans talked about this election. They want a huge shakeup. They want change. Maybe they're not able to find it in the best, healthiest places, but I mean, that's how desperate they are for it, I think.

Katherine Pompilio: Better than nothing, right?

Elle Reeve: Yeah.

Katherine Pompilio: What would you have written, if you wanted to, as an update to the book, if you had finished it after the 2024 election?

Elle Reeve: I'm working on that now.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah. Amazing.

Elle Reeve: The themes that I'm interested in is, one, has how this election was framed as a boys versus girls election. The massive, massive gender gap and what, where that comes from. And two, just the pervasiveness of this culture that I wrote about that was once so obscure and how it is just, it is the foundation that, like, online political culture is built on now and people will repeat ideas taken from there without even realizing it.

So, I was listening to Joe Rogan, right after the election. And he was talking about how he'd been walking down the street with a guy, he, who was a liberal that he called a cuck, okay? So that was an alt-right term, like, that meant from cuckold, the idea, you know, men who have, women have sex with other men, right? That was their term for conservatives, that conservatives were letting in immigrants to have their way with America, right?

So in that moment, is Joe Rogan thinking I'm going to reference the alt-right now in this weird sexual explanation for immigration? Like, no, of course not. Of course he wasn't thinking that way. It's just like how like deeply embedded these ideas are. And how, like, this way of looking at politics through this lens of masculinity, and, like, defending your masculinity and whatever policies you want are not about, like, how to make the world like marginally better year over year. Like, they're about projecting strength and power and your identity as a man.

Katherine Pompilio: And finally, what message would you like readers to take away after reading “Black Pill”?

Elle Reeve: I want people to take away that for good and for ill, like, little actions can have big effects down the road, small movements, small changes in the culture can have a massive impact on society down the road.

So when I was at Jan. 6, again, people were extremely hostile to CNN, but if I wanted them to talk to me, I'd say, “tell me what happened for history,” right? Like, we just got to get it all down, like, say what happened. Because these guys wanted to be part of history and they wanted to step forward and take their place in history. And they did, for the worse, right? But like they were willing to go for it and take that action.

And I think I want regular people to understand, like, the danger of some of these ideas, but also that like you don't have to wait for your member of Congress to do something. Like, you can take an action to change society for the better, right? Like, stop just waiting around for Kamala Harris to rescue you. Like, politics happens at your, on your school board.

And, but, and one last thing. If your little cousin, your nephew, your son, especially women as well, but particularly the boys, spending a lot of time on the internet, like you need to make them go outside and literally touch grass and like have conversations with those guys. So they don't get lost in a very dark world. That is bad for society, but also bad for them personally.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah, absolutely. Recognizing the alt-right internet slang creep, too, I think is a big part of that. 

Elle Reeve: Yeah. Listen, like, when they get that little smirk on their face, and like, they say some slang you haven't heard of, like, go ahead and go Google that. Don't just let it go. Like, you know, screaming and yelling and like a moralizing speech doesn't change minds, but don't just let it go either. Don't just play ignorant.

You know, there's actually phone calls with the guy who murdered a woman, James Alex Fields, at Charlottesville, between him and his mother, that were made public in this trial.

And in the phone call, he's telling his mom how he wants Richard Spencer to be president. Like, don't be that mom.

Katherine Pompilio: Yeah. Say something, mom. Yeah.

Elle Reeve: Yeah. Like, say something before it's too late.

Katherine Pompilio: Elle, thank you so much. This, I learned so much and this was awesome.

Elle Reeve: Oh, it was really fun talking to you. I really appreciate it. I had a good time.

Katherine Pompilio:The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter through our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts including Rational Security, Chatter, Allies, and the Aftermath, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series on the government's response to January 6th. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja, and your audio engineer this episode was Cara Schillen of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. And as always, thank you for listening.