Episode 68: The Alt-Right Was Once Just on the Fringes. Here’s How it Went Mainstream.
After instigating violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the alt-right movement seemed to crumble — but journalist Elle Reeve, who’s been talking with them for years, says that doesn’t mean their ideas have gone away. She says that their extremist ideology is actually on the rise — and has spread from the darkest corners of the internet to the heart of American politics.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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There’s this idea that comes up from time to time in journalism — especially around very controversial topics or individuals. It got really popular in the age of the Internet, but it actually predates the World Wide Web. These days, in the online world, where anyone can say almost anything, it’s about who does and does not get the spotlight, and making sure that by giving something — or someone — attention, you’re not fueling them. In the Trump era, the idea got really popular. People call it “no-platforming.”
Elle Reeve: The idea that journalists should never speak to bad guys, whatever form they might be, that they should never speak to the white nationalists. Because it only serves to elevate them.
Elle Reeve is a journalist who has reported on “bad guys” for a while now.
Elle Reeve: I am able to speak to some of these guys in a language, I don't even know if they're aware of it. Like I'm always appealing to their sense of honor and decorum.
And over the years she’s become something of an expert on her very particular beat: the new white nationalism, what became known as the alt-right. Her new book, Black Pill, details years of reporting on the rise of the alt-right movement, and the threat it poses today. But back in the spring of 2017, Reeve says she had a hard time convincing her editors that the alt-right beat was something to take seriously — or at least to keep covering with any kind of intensity.
Elle Reeve: You know, it was very popular to believe at the time that these guys were all just being ironic. They didn't really mean what they said. They lived in their mom's basements. And they were never going to do anything about the things they claimed that they wanted to do, that these guys were just joking. And that it was like helping them to talk about it.
I’m pretty familiar with this line of argument. Most Americans had never heard of this militant living in the wilds of Afghanistan that I wanted to interview, even though his views about the United States were extreme and alarming. I even asked myself: are we just giving a platform to someone who shouldn’t get one? In the end, I thought running the story and exposing his fringe ideas was a public service.
The interview ultimately aired on CNN. That guy looked right at the camera and declared war on the United States. For many Americans, it was their first introduction to Osama bin Laden.
ARCHIVAL Peter Arnett: What are your future plans? [ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF BIN LADEN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
ARCHIVAL Osama bin Laden: [PETER BERGEN TRANSLATING:] You'll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.
That was four years before 9/11. It isn’t always easy to tell which voices on the fringe will make their way into the mainstream — who’s dangerous, and who’s just loud and weird. Sometimes you can only see clearly who the big threats are in hindsight.
I’ve done my best to decipher the signals from the noise when it comes to terrorism and extremism over the course of my career. And I wanted to talk to Reeve because she’s been reporting about a newer threat — one that’s a lot more homegrown than bin Laden.
ARCHIVAL Rally Attendees: [YELLING] White lives matter! White lives matter! White lives matter! [SOUNDS OF A SCUFFLE, WHOOPING]
ARCHIVAL Attendee: We need medics right now!
Today, a conversation with Elle Reeve about those “bad guys” that people said she shouldn’t platform. She’ll explain how a bunch of self-described losers, hanging out on the digital fringe, turned out to be the burning hot center of the modern radical American Right.
Elle Reeve: I just realized that at that moment that there were a lot of them, that they were powerful, that it was a movement, that they were smart, that they were not just uneducated people and somewhere far away in Alabama.
You’ll hear about how their ideas became a new kind of online poison — and how they spread from the most toxic corners of the internet to explode violently, into the real world.
Elle Reeve: I thought I was like ahead of everyone else in understanding how big this was, but even I had underestimated it.
You'll also hear about how their ideology, steeped in racism, anti-semitism, and misogyny, found its way into the mainstream.
Elle Reeve: A lot of their ideas are now allowed to be debated by people in the public sphere without social consequences. And you don't really need to be anonymous anymore to engage with this stuff.
I’m Peter Bergen. Welcome to In the Room.
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
If you’ve heard of Elle Reeve before, it might be because of her reporting for Vice News in Charlottesville, Virginia when violence erupted there at a far-right demonstration in 2017.
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHAOS, RUBBER SCREECHING, PEOPLE SCREAMING]
The short documentary that Vice released of Reeve’s reporting that day gave an up-close look at the lead-up to the violence. And it went viral.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: The alt right is very organized. They have a lot of numbers.They have shields.They have protective gear like helmets. We've seen tear gas, water bottles, eggs thrown.
It later won a prestigious Peabody Award.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: I don't know how many people are hurt, but there are people on the ground being treated by the medics. Um, there were people running up the street screaming and crying. There's many people on the side, um, injured too.
What you might not know is that wasn’t actually the first time that a lot of those very same guys came to town.
Elle Reeve: Before the Charlottesville that we all know, there was a little unannounced Charlottesville three months earlier. It became known as Charlottesville 1.0, this sort of dry run.
Reeve was one of the few reporters who was paying attention to this “dry run” they were planning. She’d been talking to her sources in the far-right online world who were zeroing in on a controversy brewing in Charlottesville over a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. They were enraged about a plan to take that statue down. The fight over this particular statue’s fate had attracted the attention of the typical neo-Nazis and white supremacists you’d expect to see at a protest like this. The sort of Old Guard of American racism.
But it had also attracted the attention of some newer, younger, far right leaders active on the internet — people Reeve had been monitoring and talking to for a while.
Elle Reeve: So they decided to, unannounced, do a flash mob there with torches at night.
One of these new leaders was Richard Spencer, a guy who’d joined up with the old guard but saw a different future for the far right movement. Reeve was struck by the sort of men that Spencer was gathering together ahead of the event.
Elle Reeve: These like ex-military guys who are creating a kind of like paramilitary force around him. They were creating a protective circle around him of people who had actually had training.
They were doing things like going in advance to scope out the marching routes, plotting things out tactically, as though they anticipated getting attacked. It was like they were gearing up for battle.
Elle Reeve: What I understood later was that this was the way they were sort of preparing themselves for violence.
Reeve felt like this could be important, the start of something bigger. She tried to convince her bosses to let her go to Virginia and cover the story. But they weren’t having it.
Elle Reeve: I was not allowed to go. It just wasn't important enough. I had like done too much reporting on these guys, I was told. I couldn't really articulate why I thought this was so important, but anyway, I couldn't get that story approved.
Charlottesville 1.0 went on without Reeve there to cover it. And in some sense, it might have seemed like her editors were right. There was a small flurry of headlines about a bunch of guys with tiki torches marching around the statue, chanting “You will not replace us.”
ARCHIVAL Rally Attendees: You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us!
And commentators and journalists noted the chilling Ku Klux Klan imagery that the protest evoked. Still, the event wasn’t all that big, and there wasn’t any major violence, just a small scuffle, a couple of arrests. But Reeve says that “flash mob” was just a dress rehearsal for something much darker — and much more violent — that would go down in the same city three months later. And that is the Charlottesville that we all know: the Unite the Right Rally of August, 2017.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: It was a weekend of street battles and stark displays of racism, exploding into a deadly act of domestic terror.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Chaos in the streets as a car plows into a crowd of people. One woman dead, others critically wounded.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.
This time, Reeve was there, on the ground, in the thick of it.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: These are some of the alt right groups lined up.
ARCHIVAL Counter-protestors: Fuck you, fascists! Fuck you, fascists!
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: They're supposedly here to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. But they're really here to show that they're more than an internet meme.
Elle Reeve: I knew it was going to be really big. I didn't know what was going to happen, but every single far-right source I had knew about it and was either going to it or wanted to. So I knew that there would be a ton of people there. I showed up where I heard it was going to be, and there were these white vans dropping people off onto this field. It became very clear that they had a lot of organization. And they've passed out tiki torches. And then they lit them in unison. And at that moment, it became clear that there was a line of hundreds of guys snaking across this field. There were so many of them. And in this moment, they felt like they were winning. I thought I was like ahead of everyone else in understanding how big this was, but even I had underestimated it when I was looking at that field. And I was afraid, like, are they going to win? Are they going to have mass, mass appeal in America?
In a way, that thought would prove prescient, although not exactly in the way you’d expect. More on that later. And for all their careful planning, they did fumble a few things — like when they marched through the local university campus.
Elle Reeve: They were supposed to only march for five minutes, but the guy in charge got lost. So they're parading around campus for like 45 minutes. [BOTH LAUGH]
But the other miscalculation was not funny, and more revealing. It had to do with the chant they took up as they marched. It started out the same way as the Charlottesville 1.0 chant.
ARCHIVAL Rally Attendees: You will not replace us!
Elle Reeve: They were supposed to say, you will not replace us. This was their pitch to middle America. Like they were white men and they didn't want to be replaced.
ARCHIVAL Rally Attendees: You will not replace us!
Elle Reeve: But they got too amped up and they started shouting, Jews will not replace us.
ARCHIVAL Rally Attendees: Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!
Elle Reeve: In that moment they showed who they really were. It truly was a mask-off moment.
Things came to a head when the marchers encountered a smaller group of students who were there counter-protesting. They were gathered around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, chanting “Black lives matter.”
ARCHIVAL Counter-protestors: Black lives matter! Black lives matter! ARCHIVAL Rally Attendees: White lives! [ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF SHOUTING, WHOOPING, CHAOS]
Elle Reeve: And the white nationalists tumble down these stairs and encircle these kids and start beating them up. It's a total melee. It was just like total chaos. I just felt like I wasn't in America anymore.
The violence in Charlottesville was far from Reeve’s first introduction to that world. By then, she’d already been reporting on these people for a while. And she kept at it long after the dust settled on the Unite the Right rally. Her years of reporting on this subculture led her to write her book, Black Pill. The title of the book is a term the group uses as shorthand to describe their worldview. It comes from a certain popular nineties sci-fi action movie.
Elle Reeve: If you are engaged in politics on the internet, you've probably heard the term red pill. It comes from The Matrix.
ARCHIVAL Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? [THUNDER CRACKLES]
Elle Reeve: That's where Neo, the hero — Keanu Reeves — is handed a blue pill and a red pill.
ARCHIVAL Morpheus: You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to
Elle Reeve: And the choice is to take the blue pill and go back to an illusion created by machines.
ARCHIVAL Morpheus: You take the red pill...
Elle Reeve: Or take the red pill.
ARCHIVAL Morpheus: ...you stay in Wonderland.
Elle Reeve: And enter reality, which is a horrible, painful experience, but you're able to see the truth.
ARCHIVAL Morpheus: And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. The idea being: if you take the red pill, you become “red-pilled” and you suddenly see the world as it really is. You’re enlightened.
Neo chooses the red pill_Matrix: All I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more. Elle Reeve: Now, from that metaphor, people started using pill to mean all kinds of different things
The metaphor became so popular online, it spawned endless colors and variations.
ARCHIVAL Voice 1: Because we are now, we're coconut-pilled. We're coconut-pilled. ARCHIVAL Voice 2: I think you're seeing Elon Musk become red-pilled. I really do. ARCHIVAL Voice 3: I got completely scaling pilled. ARCHIVAL Voice 4: I accidentally red-pilled myself.
ARCHIVAL Voice 5: The pizza pill!
ARCHIVAL Voice 6: I have been Lonesome-Dove-pilling many of my friends as the year has gone on.
But Reeve argues that there’s one kind of pill that’s the most important one, and it certainly isn’t something the creators of the Matrix ever envisioned. When it comes to modern American politics, the pill to pay attention to is the black pill.
Elle Reeve: The black pill is a gleeful nihilism that society is collapsing, that it's irredeemable and that you have permission to do whatever you want to maybe even hasten its collapse because what comes after will be a golden age.
Peter Bergen: And what does that golden age look like?
Elle Reeve: Well, for most of the people I interview, fascism.
And she's interviewed a lot of people in this black-pilled world — really gotten to know them. I had to wonder how she'd been able to get that level of access.
Elle Reeve: I'm very patient. Everyone wants to tell their story. Everyone wants to feel important and like they're part of history and that their perspective is the right one. So I will listen to a lot of stuff. I'm willing to have really long conversations with them. Often these conversations at least started off really hostile. But over time they would kind of... come around.
And once they came around, they’d tell her all kinds of things. Like in Charlottesville, when she interviewed one of the leaders of the march.
ARCHIVAL Chris Cantwell: I'm carrying a pistol, I go to the gym all the time, I'm trying to make myself more capable of violence. I'm here to spread ideas, talk, in the hopes that somebody more capable, uh, will, will come along and do that. Somebody like Donald Trump, who does not give his daughter to a Jew. [LAUGHTER FROM NEARBY]
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: So Donald Trump, but like, more racist.
ARCHIVAL Chris Cantwell: A lot more racist than Donald Trump.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: So you're the true, you're the true nonviolent protesters.
ARCHIVAL Chris Cantwell: We're not nonviolent. We'll fucking kill these people if we have to.
That last exchange happened right before Reeve and her camera crew jumped into a van full of various white supremacist leaders. She knew at least one of them, but not all of them, and they weren’t exactly happy to see her.
ARCHIVAL Chris Cantwell: We've got Vice in here.
ARCHIVAL Rally Attendee: Is this the fucking media right here?
ARCHIVAL Chris Cantwell: Yeah, exactly. Fucking Vice jumped in the fucking van. Open the door, let him out. If we gotta kick the media out, we do.
Reeve has said that this moment was really tense. She thought they might throw her and her team out of the van before driving off. So, to diffuse the situation, she turned to one man who seemed less openly hostile, one she recognized as a writer for the Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi website.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: Why don't you tell me what you think?
ARCHIVAL Daily Stormer writer: Huh?
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: Who, what do you do for the Daily Stormer?
ARCHIVAL Daily Stormer writer: I am a feature writer. I do the Crypto Report and uh, I'm generally...
And just like that, the tension diffused. They let Reeve and her crew ride with them to their next location. There are plenty of tense moments like this throughout Reeve’s reporting career — many of them caught on camera — and I wondered how exactly she pulls off relatively polite conversations with these kinds of dudes.
After all, how do you interview a hostile Nazi without losing your cool?
Elle Reeve: That was always my biggest fear, that I would lose my temper. Analyzing myself, like that is maybe one of my biggest flaws. I am quick to anger and self-righteous anger. In a confrontational interview, you know, like I feel like a full, like, fireball go up my spine. If you speak during that surge of adrenaline, then your voice will crack and you'll just like give it all away. The way I think of it is like, I think of like my face as like a dock that's floating on a lake. And there are these buoys that connect to the lake, but like the dock is floating on top of it. So when I would feel like emotion rising up inside of me I tried to make it feel like my face was not connected to it. Like I had somehow severed those nerves.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
In order to understand where all of this black-pilling came from, you have to go back over a decade: to a once obscure online movement of resentful, lonely young men, who called themselves “incels.”
Elle Reeve: That means involuntary celibate. Around the early 2010s, this movement developed online of men who believed that they were doomed by how ugly they were to be virgins forever. They would never, ever, ever find a woman who would love them. You know, a lot of people feel this way as teenagers, but it's usually a fleeting phase and then they go on, they become more confident, they find the right person. But these people believed that it was a permanent condition. And they thought this happened because of feminism.
Incels developed their own complex terminology to categorize the kinds of women and men they felt were robbing them of the sex, companionship, and status they deserved.
Elle Reeve: They've created a whole analysis based on baseless fake evolutionary psychology for why women are sort of morally corrupt, foolish, prone to going with the flow, to going with whatever the dominant beliefs are. They blame women for ruining society.
In Black Pill, Reeve details how the incels waded into more political waters — and transformed into a toxic and potent force on the American right. She says it all started when incels and fascists began talking to each other on the internet.
Elle Reeve: Around the time Donald Trump started running for president, those two groups started mixing online. They congregated on these anonymous message boards, particularly 4chan and 8chan.
Depending on how online you are, you may have heard of 4chan and 8chan, both internet forums where you can post images alongside text and discussion. But you probably haven’t actually spent much (or even any) time on these websites. Reeve, on the other hand, has been on them a lot.
Elle Reeve: When I first started going on 4chan and 8chan in 2015, 2016, it was, I mean, it was like being sucked into another dimension.
Reeve says the sheer volume of activity on these message boards back then was staggering.
Elle Reeve: There were just so many posts from so many people, and they just had this feeling like they were winning, that they were getting one over on the mainstream population.
Part of the appeal of these forums was that they were virtually a content free-for-all. You could say almost anything with no regulation. They encouraged over the top jokes, shock humor, and constant one-upmanship — basically, trolling. The forums would be wiped regularly, so if you stayed offline too long, you likely would miss something, and you wouldn’t understand the newest jokes when you returned.
Elle Reeve: It created this culture where these people were online all day on these forums, and they're completely anonymous.
Reeve says the tone on these message boards shifted when the very, very “online” denizens of these insular virtual communities noticed more web traffic from outsiders.
Elle Reeve: Normal people, they call them normies — us. They felt that normies were coming in and poking around 4chan and so they started posting gross memes, like not just Hitler stuff, but also like, scatological humor, right? But over time they stopped just posting Hitler stuff because they thought it was funny and started posting it because they believed it. What started as a joke started to become sincere. So that over time, these communities become the thing that they were satirizing.
Reeve says it worked like this: digital trolls in the Wild West of barely regulated internet forums needed to post content with a high shock value to get the reaction they craved. Nothing was better for that shock value than racist, antisemitic, and flat out fascist content. But in order to get better at posting offensive jokes, the trolls needed to really do their research. And that meant getting immersed in some pretty dark material, like studies that purported to justify eugenics, or “prove” that white people were smarter than other races.
And a certain kind of angry young man on the internet might start to find some of these arguments appealing. One of the alt-right leaders actually described the process pretty well to Reeve, after she asked him if all the jokes and satire meant the movement wasn’t really all that serious.
Elle Reeve: He said that he had met young men who came up to him and said they started researching eugenics, anti-semitism, racism, in order to become more effective trolls, in order to make people more upset — and in the process, started believing it.
That leader was Richard Spencer — the one who was gathering all the military-trained muscle around him ahead of Charlottesville 1.0. Here he is talking with Reeve in 2017 about this switch from satire to something much darker.
ARCHIVAL Richard Spencer: Do you know what's interesting is that there, I have actually met some kids from 4chan who started reading anything critical of race relations, immigration, uh, Jewish influence, so on. And they actually read this stuff so that they could troll people.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: Right.
ARCHIVAL Richard Spencer: But after reading it, they were actually convinced by it. But that, again, that demonstrates in a way the truth quality to it.
ARCHIVAL Elle Reeve: Doesn't it just mean they're too committed to a joke?
ARCHIVAL Richard Spencer: It started out as a joke, and then it became real. But that's magic. You can say, oh, it's all fake. It's not real. It's the realest thing there is.
Peter Bergen: So who is, who is Richard Spencer? And why, why is he important to this movement?
Elle Reeve: Richard Spencer has been a white nationalist since about 2008. He was part of the sort of old school movement that, they were trying to present themselves as intellectuals, just very concerned with the heritability of IQ and that, you know, white people are genetically smarter and more altruistic and people of color were more prone to crime and less intelligent. He coined the term alt right in 2010. He was angry at the Bush administration. He thought the Iraq war was absurd. And he wanted a new right wing that was right on social issues, but also... less interested in foreign wars, more protectionist, more isolationist.
Elle Reeve: Spencer has described himself as a narcissist and he's very prone to infighting, so he coined this term and then he had a falling out with people over it and kind of abandoned it. And while he wasn't looking, these young trolls on 4chan and 8chan started creating their own culture around the alt-right. Once Spencer sees the heat there, that there's a real constituency of young people, which they'd never had before in the white nationalist movement, he tries to climb back onto it. And because this movement was mostly anonymous trolls, and Spencer was willing to put his face and his name to it, he became the face of this movement. He was the person who was willing to answer reporters' calls, including mine.
Even if you think you’ve never heard of Richard Spencer, you’ve probably seen his face — a face that’s become synonymous with the alt right movement. It’s a pretty average face: a bit boyish, even now in his forties, and clean-shaven. It’s mostly unremarkable. But if you’re online at all, chances are you’ve seen video of that face getting punched.
Spencer was doing an interview during a protest in 2017...
ARCHIVAL Richard Spence: ...don’t like me, they kind of hate me, to be honest. ...when a masked bystander sucker-punched him live on camera.
ARCHIVAL Richard Spencer: I’m kind of a... [PUNCH] [JUMBLED YELLING]
For many on the center and left of the political spectrum, that punch was their first introduction to Spencer and his views. And the reaction in those circles was pretty gleeful.
ARCHIVAL Comedian: So he was trying to explain a meme. [CROWD LAUGHING] And then out of nowhere, a hero came along and punched him in the face instantly turning him into a meme. [CROWD LAUGHING]
That’s not the first or last time Spencer went viral. In 2016, a video of him leading a celebration of Donald Trump’s presidential victory made the rounds.
ARCHIVAL Richard Spencer: Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory [CROWD CHEERING] Those “hail Trump”s were accompanied by what appeared to be heil Hitler salutes from the audience.
Reeve says Spencer represented a new era for white nationalists in America. And he projected a certain kind of image. He wore suits. He was clean-cut. He had the “Hitler Youth” haircut that had gotten popular at the time: shaved on the sides, longer on top.
Elle Reeve: The white nationalist movement was always self conscious about looking poor and dumb. They didn't want to be seen as trashy. And so they're always trying to portray themselves as younger. But finally he was able to do it.
That image didn’t just appeal to the white nationalist old guard. It brought the younger crowd that they’d so longed to appeal to. Spencer, who was in his thirties at the time, and young himself in comparison to many white supremacist leaders, started to attract followers.
Elle Reeve: Instead of looking like skinheads or, you know, there's a stereotype about people in trailer parks in Alabama, which is not accurate, but it's the idea people have in their heads. He wanted to look aspirational, like he could be in GQ. You know, he got a haircut that was real close cropped on the sides and longer on top. And all these guys who started following him got the exact same haircut.
In her book, Reeve describes a sort of class tension dynamic within the larger American white supremacist movement: “boots vs. suits.” She says the “boots” were your stereotypical racist types: neo-Nazis, skinheads, KKK members. The suits, on the other hand, dressed preppy. They were the square-jawed, clean cut alt-right, like Spencer.
Peter Bergen: What's new about the alt-right and what's kind of basically just the same old stuff dressed up in a different suit?
Elle Reeve: The alt right is different in that Spencer complained that the old white nationalist movement was IQ scores, crime stats, vote Republican.
In other words, the old guard was stuck in believing they could gain power by just continuing to push claims that white people have higher IQs and a lower propensity to crime. But Reeve says Spencer thought that racist ideology could be put to work pushing policy. And their policy proposals didn’t always toe the Republican Party line. Like with healthcare, for example.
Elle Reeve: The alt-right thought that the reason that America couldn't have a national health care system was because of racism, because people felt that black people would benefit from health care more than white people and so they opposed it. So a liberal might say, well, that's the reason we need to lower the amount of racism so that we can all have health care. The alt-right said, that's why we need to get rid of black people so that we can all have health care. So,
Peter Bergen: Interesting.
Elle Reeve: Yeah, I know, I mean. When I first started interviewing these guys, like, I, this was all so new to me, and it was mind blowing that people would say that kind of thing. Over time, they started explicitly describing themselves as fascist.
And the fascism went hand in hand with a striking level of misogyny. So it might surprise you to know that there were women in the movement. I know it surprised me.
Peter Bergen: Let me ask you about the, the women in the movement because it doesn't seem like there's much in it for them. Uh, you know, a bunch of male misogynists are dressing up and you know, spouting sort of neo Nazi rhetoric. What is in it for them? Why do they join?
Elle Reeve: Yeah, I had the same question because I would go to these white nationalist events and often at the end there would be one woman there and as I'm walking away at the very end she would be the one to shout the most misogynist thing, you know, some horrible combination of like, dumb slut, whatever, like the most–
Peter Bergen: At you.
Elle Reeve: At me, and I’d think who, who are these girls?
Reeve decided to find out. She got to know one of them: a woman named Samantha. Samantha got into the movement through her boyfriend, after he started making jokes that she didn’t understand.
Elle Reeve: And she Googled them and realized they were jokes referencing the Day of the Rope, which is this fantasy that after this fascistic revolution, all the race traitors will be hung from lampposts. And so she was horrified, but she didn't want to break up with him. So eventually she made peace with it and she got really good at it. She rose up through the ranks and became women's coordinator.
That connected Samantha with other women in the alt-right, including one whose boyfriend was really into what they called “white sharia.” That’s a reference to the sharia laws used in places like Afghanistan to make women second class citizens.
Elle Reeve: The idea was that because women in America support social justice, the only way to bring about the country that they wanted was to deny women all these rights. Their idea of sharia. No divorce. Child marriages, many babies, no birth control, no jobs, no credit cards. Women are stupid, women need to be controlled.
It’s hard to understand why any woman would be attracted to these kinds of ideas. But Reeve says the reasons that women join are often pretty ordinary.
Elle Reeve: I mean, what they're really selling is happiness. These guys would post these images of, you know, blonde families with the strong, handsome man and the wife sort of draped on his shoulder and two smiling children. It's often in a wheat field at sunset. That's the life they wanted. They liked a strong, protective man, and then she would have her role, but she would be respected. And it just never happened that way in real life.
It certainly didn’t happen that way for the woman whose boyfriend was so into “white sharia.”
Elle Reeve: This woman played along with it for a long time and in public she would say like, oh, ha ha, these guys are so funny, they sound like total chads. But then late at night she'd be texting Samantha saying, you know, ‘I've been dehumanized enough for one weekend. Do not trust these men. I've been crying in my car for hours.’ At one point she texted, ‘I don't think I'll ever respect myself again.’ But then after that, she turned right around and starts sending links to burqas on Amazon, like she thought it was so funny.
Burqas. As in, the head to toe coverings worn by women living under some very conservative interpretations of Islam. Reeve says that the idea of “white sharia” and women wearing burqas began like so many other facets of this movement:
Elle Reeve: It's the same process. It starts as a joke and then they start really doing it. They're actually doing the white Sharia. They're actually living that way. They're actually showing up to parties with their girlfriend in a burqa.
Samantha ultimately ended up leaving the movement within a few months of Charlottesville 2.0. The violence there marked a turning point. Most of the alt-right leaders, especially Richard Spencer, had felt like they were on their way up, within reach of real political power. But after Charlottesville, the wind started going out of their sails.
Elle Reeve: They'd been so proud to march barefaced down there and they didn't think about the consequences. They were kicked off social media. They were shamed in their hometowns. A lot lost their jobs.
They also lost their means of funding when financial services companies kicked them off their platforms.
Elle Reeve: If you want to raise money on the internet in America, you need an American company to process the credit card payments. And so they could not find one. Richard Spencer at one point complained to me he could only get money through checks. So these social and financial ramifications come together to worsen the legal ramifications, because they got sued by very powerful lawyers who had argued before the Supreme Court. And they couldn't pay for their own equally powerful lawyers. Either they couldn't get one because of their reputations or, you know, they couldn't raise money. They had to represent themselves in court. So those specific guys, the leaders, they kind of washed out of politics.
The likes of Richard Spencer may have lost their platforms for now. But Reeve says that doesn’t mean their influence has disappeared. The internet radicalization that she saw online before Charlottesville — the shift of ideas from the fringes of the internet to real-world violence — that’s a pattern she saw repeat itself. She saw it in the leadup to January 6th, 2021, as she monitored the social media and encrypted messaging threads of people planning to go to D.C. ahead of the presidential inauguration.
Elle Reeve: It was a lot like Charlottesville. And it's the same pattern repeating. They start talking about self defense, that Antifa was going to come and Antifa hits children and old ladies so they better bring carabiners that they can use like brass knuckles that, or like posts on their signs that they could use to beat people with if they had to.
Once again, Reeve was there, reporting on the ground, this time for CNN. And while the online lead-up was familiar, Reeve says there was a lot about that day that she never could have predicted.
Elle Reeve: I didn't know they were going to storm the Capitol. I didn't have that much imagination, even though some people had said it to me. This guy in a QAnon shirt, next to the Washington Monument, like, he's sitting in a tree. [REEVE LAUGHS] I was doing an interview with him. He said they were going to storm the Capitol. And they did!
Reeve was there when the mob started to breach protective barriers and swarm a staircase to get into the Capitol Building. And she was struck by how this crowd didn’t look quite the same as the people in Charlottesville.
Elle Reeve: These were not young men on the margins. These were like regular looking people. it was just the craziest thing I'd ever seen. An older couple, like, are scrambling over it, and the woman screams about her husband, ‘watch the cane!’ People's faces get all twisted up with emotion. I just never experienced mob mentality. I'd only read that phrase. I hadn't felt it physically. I hadn't felt, like, the emotions of the crowd, like electricity.
This time, the people perpetrating the violence weren’t only those young disaffected men. The January 6th riot certainly included plenty of them — there were alt-right groups in attendance. But the crowds in D.C. were also full of people like that older couple with the cane — people that Richard Spencer might have once dismissed as, quote, “normie boomers.” And that is where the lasting influence of those mostly forgotten alt-right leaders can really be felt. Because Reeve says their ideas have gone mainstream.
Elle Reeve: So a lot of their ideas are now allowed to be debated by people in the public sphere without social consequences. And you don't really need to be anonymous anymore to engage with this stuff.
And that has implications, Reeve says, for the entire conservative movement.
Elle Reeve: I fear that a lot of the Republican Party has gotten black-pilled.
She says that examples of this “black-pilling” of the American right are everywhere. Like Tucker Carlson espousing his version of the Charlottesville “You will not replace us” chant on Fox News...
ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement. If you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that's, that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true.
Elle Reeve: Now, he didn't say Jews were replacing white people with people of color. He said Democrats were replacing white voters with immigrants who would vote for Democrats and keep them in power. So it's a softer, more diluted version of it, but this is still the same idea.
Reeve says the alt-right influence can also be seen in the wave of legislation across the country — mostly in red states — targeting transgender people.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: And tonight, one of the nation's toughest anti-trans bills is now law in Kentucky.
ARCHIVAL Pundit: This year alone, over a hundred anti-trans bills have been introduced in state houses, and 12 states have signed or enacted them, with all of this happening against a backdrop of violence and...
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Today, half the country has some sort of anti-trans legislation in effect.
Elle Reeve: The alt-right had been very obsessed with trans people. Like the first person who ever sent me a picture of a drag queen story hour was a fascist teen in 2017.
And Reeve argues that this “mainstreaming” goes all the way to the top of the Republican party.
Elle Reeve: There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who J.D. Vance has cited, who is explicitly a monarchist. [REEVE LAUGHS] Explicitly wants a dictator-like CEO of America to take charge and force through the change that is not possible through democratic means. I mean, like, J.D. Vance cited him, like, you don't have to do the crazy red string on a cork board trying to tie all these people together. Vance himself has cited this guy.
She’s right — you can hear Vance citing him here, on an alt-right leaning podcast:
ARCHIVAL Vance cites Yarvin_Youtube_210917: You're kind of, like, completely de Americanizing American culture. That's really what's going on. There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written, um, about some of these things...
And then, of course, there’s the website that I still insist on calling Twitter.
Elle Reeve: You know, you see Elon Musk sort of circulating a lot of these ideas that I heard from incels only a few years ago. And you can play around with these ideas on Twitter with your real name and not be kicked out of the conservative movement.
When it comes to Twitter — and its current owner — Reeve points out you can see the influence of those 4chan dwelling incels everywhere. Reeve walked me through one example from Musk’s own Twitter feed.
Elle Reeve: So Elon quote tweeted this with the phrase, “interesting observation.” So it's a screenshot from 4chan and it says , “People who can't defend themselves physically (women and low-T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask, ‘is this true’, they ask, ‘will others be okay with me thinking this is true?’”
The screenshot from 4chan Reeve is talking about goes on to say, basically, that women and “low-T men” — that’s men low in testosterone, another incel term — adopt whatever opinions they think are popular. And then it concludes... well, I’ll let Reeve tell it:
Elle Reeve: “If every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.” “This is why a republic of high-status males is best for decision-making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.” So that's just like straight from the incel fascists that I've interviewed. To me, that's just the same stuff. It's the same stuff. It's the same worship of your own IQ, the same grievance about your poor social skills and like converting that from a flaw into a quality that makes you better than everyone else. The assumption that people who believe like you do, do not have an ideology, but that you've been stripped of all ideology, that you're seeing the truth. That you can't have, like, democracy with women and low-T males in it, like, that's black-pilled.
For Reeve, stories like that illustrate exactly why it’s important to pay attention to people whose ideas seem too extreme to be taken seriously. Because their “stuff” can end up permeating the wider culture in ways that aren’t always obvious if you don’t already know what you’re looking at.
And I think she’d agree with me when I say that ignoring “bad guys” doesn’t make them go away. Reeve’s book has an author's note at the beginning about an incident that happened in her childhood. It involved a neighbor who bullied, stalked, and harassed her family for years. She says that this experience prepared her to deal with “this exact kind of man.”
Elle Reeve: There’s not necessarily justice in the moment, but especially if you have a video camera to document it, that's the only hope of justice is if you can document it. The only way to fight against people like that is to be totally calm and to get it all on tape.
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If you’re interested in learning more about the issues and stories we covered in this episode, we recommend: Black Pill by Elle Reeve — available on Audible and read by Reeve herself.
CREDITS:
IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original. Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.
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