One of the things about this job is that it has a way of making you do things that otherwise you would not do in your everyday life.
The Nazis were very angry I got in the van, and there's a lot of cursing about this that was caught on tape because, like a white nationalist, a blogger was like filming the whole thing.
ElleReeve was reporting for Vice News tonight when she did her best known work, a story where she embedded with white nationalists at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Of course, this was back in 2017.
Everybody in! All right, all right, let's get on. Let's go. Do we need more people?
And yeah, there's a lot of like. Effin' vice got in the van!
Is this f****** media right here? Yeah exactly, f****** Vice jumped in the f****** van. Open the door. Let him out. If we gotta kick the media, we do.
And then Chris Cantwell, who I'd been following, goes, you know, we'll kick the media out if we have to. And I was like, if, IF! He's kind of asking permission to let us say.
Knowing how to read people, knowing how to get them to open up. That is her superpower. And it is not, as the extremely blond and pale skinned Reeve tells me, her looks, which is what some critics and frankly envious colleagues have implied.
That it was like somehow easy for me when actually this is the most horrible experience of my life. And what made me able to do that was not my hair. And I was like, okay, I need to first off, let me set the record straight on how I was able to get this story. I was able to turn a very, very negative experience into something that gave me strength. And I want credit for it.
So giving credit where credit is due. CNN correspondent Elle Reeve is our guest. She is the author of a new book. It's called "Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Ccome to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics." I'm Audie Cornish. Stay with us, because this is The Assignment.
You know that saying good fences make good neighbors? Well, it's from a Robert Frost poem where the speaker faces a neighbor kind of intent on building a stone wall between their houses. And he describes this neighbor by saying, quote, he moves in darkness. I thought of that when reporter Elle Reeve told me this story about how she grew up.
We we move next door to someone who. Hold on, let me think of how to put this.
Yeah. You're struggling to even say it now.
Yeah. We my parents got in a fight with the neighbor over a fence, and he became very, very obsessed with us.
I promise this is very, very relevant. And you need to know she's only around 14 years old in this story, when her family basically gets a stalker who would eventually drive them to move houses twice. And what was the fight over gardening?
The fight was over where the fence should be built. My parents said, well, the deed to our house where we had just move there, you're building your fence on our property. Let's get a survey. He says no, my parents get a survey. And guess what? It gives him more land. But he's still pissed and he has to move his fence. And that just sets him off. He would park his truck right on our property line and watch us all night long. Like I could see him smoking. I'd see the cherry of a cigarette. He would call us constantly. He would play chicken with my mom on the road. Once my mom was driving us to gymnastics, he tried to run us off a road. He followed me when I was a teenager in a grocery store. I believe it was him. We don't have images of him doing it, but, three foot tall letters saying bitch and whore materialized in our yard. Done with Roundup, which lasted for a year. So.
You're running thought this so quickly, and it sounds horrifying.
You're rattling it off as bullet points, but each one of these things discreetly would be terrifying.
Yeah. I mean, our cat turned up dead in our driveway. And at the urging of our lawyers, my parents got an autopsy. They were just, like, document everything. Document everything. We weren't going to be able to, like, stop this guy in court. You know, autopsy says, you know, severe trauma is suspected. And my parents believe that he had killed him.
And this is how her book starts. Black Pill is about Reeves reporting over the last decade on the evolution of the fringe right. The early message boards and online communities whose mixed bag of concerns over the role of men in the economy, white people in the culture and boys in the dating pool curdled around a kind of nihilism, an approach to life that, she writes, allows you to justify any action cruelty, intimidation, violence.
It's quite relevant to this conversation of his main mode of attack was to tell my dad he wasn't a real man. You say you ain't, you ain't a real man. Your wife wears the pants in the family, and you would call my mom an ugly bitch. It was very sexual and it was very much about masculinity. Now, I, like outwardly, took all this very somberly. Right? But at the time, I was a gymnast and I was at the peak of my powers. I mean, I was stronger than all the guys in class. Like, I mean, me and my dad moved heavy furniture together. Like I was totally shredded. I had rippling abs. Like it was crazy. Like, it's a crazy sport. So inside, I'm like, yeah, try something, dude. Like, I would love it. Like, at that moment, I was so, so, so angry. I was like. I would love it if he tried to attack me so I could beat him up. I don't know, like my my teenage fantasies were not, I mean, they're a little bit about moving to the big city and having a job but they are mostly about beating up this 40 year old man.
They're mostly about fighting the bully that you've seen before.
Exactly. Getting justice. And like, let's face it, it gave me a lot of tolerance for really unpleasant stuff, like having people scream horrible things at me and knowing it doesn't actually reflect who I am. Does that make any sense?
The Assignment is a lot about origin stories, and I have to assume you put that in the front of the book because you feel like it's part of yours.
People may have heard of you because of your reporting on Charlottesville and when you were following that story. You write in the book that when you first tried to kind of pitch it to your bosses, they're not that interested. Can you talk about why? Because it helps us understand, sort of like the general thinking about these things prior to that point.
Yeah, there were a few reasons for it. One, there was this idea that it was all ironic that they were just joking and messing around online, and they weren't really Nazis. And then there was this idea like, well, but they're just losers in their parents basement. Like they're not going to actually act on anything. So there's they're not threatening, like don't give them any attention. Then there was the no platforming argument. You know, the more attention you give it, the bigger it gets. And I didn't find any of those things convincing, in part because they had already created their own media ecosystem. Like they didn't need our help being amplified, like they were getting big on their own. And until Charlottesville, it wasn't clear how real and how big it was and how many people were willing to show their faces and say like, yes, this is what I believe in. I'm willing to take these actions for it. I'm willing to do violence for it.
'Because they weren't just on your camera. They were on camera in general. Right? There were film crews there that night. There were people taking cell phone images, and people were not wearing not all of them anyway, like hoods. No, like there was a this sense that you needed to be fearful for carrying a physical torch, like a light, and chanting anti-Semitic slogans.
Right. I think that the internet had given them a sense that they were bigger and had more mainstream appeal than they actually did. I mean, there were a lot of them. It was unsettling. There's this moment. So the Friday night before the rally, they had an unannounced torch march. I heard there was something was going to happen at a field. So I go to this field and there are all these white nationalists mingling about white vans are dropping them off and start lining up in pairs, and they pass out these tiki torches and then all at once they light the se torches.
Jews will not replace us! (laughter) Jews will Not replace us!
And it illuminates and I can see this massive line of white nationalists snaking through this field. And at that moment I'm like, oh my God, like, this is really big. Like, this is so many people like, are they are they going to be successful? Like, are they going to win?
Jews will not replace us!
So you're even passed, are they doing it and you're at wait a second, am I witnessing a movement on the rise?
Right. Am I witnessing some kind of tipping point? Like how many more people are going to see this and feel excited by it and want to join?
Jews will not replace us!
After Charlottesville, there is momentum for that movement, so to speak, right? They are starting to get an influx of people of different ages and backgrounds onto these message boards who are who are interested in alternative sources of information, but not the way they expect. Right? They get, they get Q Anon. Can you talk about the branches of this tree online?
'So in the book, I compare it to radiation sickness, because radiation sickness follows this pattern where first you have these mild but kind of familiar symptoms like nausea. And then you have a period that's like the latency period where it seems like the patient is getting better. But actually inside what you can't see is that it's breaking down. And then finally you have the manifest illness stage, and that's when your body falls apart. So for the alt right, like in the moment, like they knew they took some hits, believe that this was going to be their big moment. But a lot of society reacted very, very negatively to what they did. Like people there, of course, there's a lot of bigotry and racism in our society, but most Americans do not want to be Hitler-heiling Nazis. So they got kicked off their social platforms, they got kicked out of financial services platforms, and they got sued. And so that really shattered the movement. But, but, but the people who didn't get the worst consequences of that of Charlottesville, they adapted. So they started downplaying all this, like weird German like, Nazi stuff, and instead they start wrapping themselves in the American flag instead of being atheist. Now they're very, very Christian. They play down the race thing and they play up, traditional gender roles. And that is the kind of thing that gets a lot more attention.
Is, is that cynical and precise, or do I start to see voices in the movement make this shift?
'Yes. So Patriot Front is probably the best example. The founder was part of a fascist group that was in Charlottesville, Vanguard America. And, that group fell apart. They got sued. The guy, Thomas Rousseau, he's gone on to found this group. So there's a few things that they do when they wear these red, white and blue uniforms. They carry these almost Marvel comic book-esque shields that are red, white and blue. And they have a lot of localized groups where the men get together and workout because they want to feel like they're doing something and they want to have brothers in arms. They want to have friends. A lot of these people don't have friends, and they want to look hot. And I know that sounds really stupid and and superficial, but actually esthetics is a huge part of this world.
Yes, because part of the gender roles is like to be a man, so to speak. You got to look a certain way to convey a certain sense of power or status, and I won't ask you to delineate it. But this is where the online world it starts, the lines begin to wave right between the world of just like extreme misogyny, extreme racism, extreme, extreme, extreme. But there's some there's some porous ness to the boundaries here.
So on one of the websites where a lot of these white nationalists, like subculture was strong and swirling was 8Chan. And 8Chan was founded by Frederick Brennan, who was, a very smart but troubled young man, teenager, who wanted to create this platform for ultimate free speech. There would be no rules on what you could post. And he thought the best ideas would like battle out and you'd have them rise to the top. But that's not what happened. On one board, white nationalism and fascism is what rose to the top and became the dominant force on another board was QAnon. QAnon began on another site 4Chan, got kicked off there, they had moderators, and went to 8Chan where there are no rules against it. And there it flourished.
And we should remind people for QAnon. The roots of it are kind of a single post implying there's a vast conspiracy. And this, the person who made this post also implied that they had some sort of high level government clearance, which they call Q clearance, and all of QAnon community, etc. at least in the beginning, it was part of a kind of puzzle piece experience of following this person who posts information and then trying to verify whether or not that information was true.
'This was like a participatory conspiracy theory. And at first, you know, there's some white nationalists who liked the chaos. But, over time, this, like, grew and grew and grew into something bigger and bigger. And, and I think what's really important to understand about the difference between, like, white nationalism and QAnon is there's still in QAnon, an evil entity that is suppressing, you know, the in-group. Right? But instead of it being like Jews and white people, it's satanic, pedophilic, liberal elite who are attacking children. And you can see how, you know, in a country that prides itself on having kicked Nazis asses in World War Two, that would be a lot more popular than any kind of movement that valorize Nazis.
And who doesn't want to save children?
Very straightforward. Right? Yeah. Well, I like. It's very straightforward in terms of aligning incentives and and and aligning to values.
Right. And then so later on, and especially after January 6th, there are several white nationalists, as I spoke to, you would have thought that they would have loved January 6th because they had been at the time, black pilled, and they talked about ending democracy, bringing about a more fascist kind of government. But they were shocked by it, and I think it held up a mirror to them. They kind of been through this like smaller version of it, and they didn't like what they saw. Like Richard Spencer, for example, complained to me like, oh, they always wanted to red pill the normies. But when you read till the normies, you get QAnon, you get a woman raiding the Capitol and shot in the neck.
How are they shocked by that? Like. That's a moment where just to step out of your story for a minute and be a little meta. When you look back at that, where the white nationalists are like January 6th now that went too far. Like what? You know what I mean? Like, do they not see the connection? How how did you make sense of a moment like that?
Right. I mean, one of them said to me, you know, I actually like the rule of law. One of the ways they thought of it was that while the alt right had been more ideologically radical, as in wanting, you know, a white supremacist, fascist government that these, in their words, normie conservatives were much more, tactically radical than they were willing to, like, take these actions to try to overturn the votes in majority Black cities in America, that they're willing to raid the Capitol to try to stop the certification of the election.
'You do write something very specific about how the pro-Trump movement has affected this world of the alt right online. I don't know what else to call it. But you say, at the top, this was the same man the alt right had joked was their god emperor. The pro-Trump movement took the alt right's frenetic pace of internet content, a bit of swaggering misogyny, the joking, not joking pose, and throughout its swastikas and creepy virgin loser stuff. And with that magic recipe, it attempted to stage a coup against the United States. And you write that Spencer was offended because you were basically like, maybe you weren't successful because you went full Nazi.
Yes, that really offended him. He sounded almost hurt by it. He said that, you know, he was a serious person with serious ideas, but all anyone ever remembered was that time he shouted Heil Trump! And you know, to me, like, this is what happens when you build your ideas around, like America's number one enemy.
After the break, how extremist ideology is trickling into mainstream political discourse and what can be done to stop it. We'll be back in a moment.
This is The Assignment, and I'm speaking with CNN's Elle Reeve about her new book, Black Pill. Are there any ideas that you hear in modern political discourse? Literally on our employer's, like on CNN, right on a panel or whatever, that you just think, well, I know where that's from, and I know the path it took to get to this talking points moment.
So many. Yeah. I mean, it's so disturbing to me is it's tough to sit there and see it happen. But one, the great replacement, the idea that a group is bringing in nonwhite people to into America in order to control the vote. Now among white nationalists, the idea is the Jews are bringing in like people of color in order to decrease the white population, to maintain control. You've seen floated on Fox News, maybe Tucker Carlson, the idea that Democrats are importing immigrants in order to have more nonwhite voters.
And you think that there's a direct link between those two things?
A hundred percent. That's where it comes from. It's like the same it's the same thing. It's the same thing. And I mean, like Tucker Carlson, he goes through this idea and it's like, well, that sounds like replacement to me.
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.
So that's one. I interviewed some Moms for Liberty who said that there was a concerted effort, an alliance between the Biden administration and teachers unions in order to groom children, to teach them about, you know, gay rights and make them gay and transgender.
Why would they want more kids to be gay and trans? Because it breaks down the family unit. What's breaks down traditional conservative values. It breaks down a lot of things in this country that it changes the way that people think. It changes the way that people, handle politics.
JD Vance talking about childless cat ladies who hate their lives and want to make other people suffer. I mean, like.
The way he says it to underscore, he says the Democratic Party is run by childless people who don't, and he's saying they don't have a real stake in this country in some way. We can't trust them. And he said it about the media. But I'm glad you brought that up, because this one in particular, he said, in so many iterations and places where he obviously thought there was an audience to receive it.
Well, right. I mean, so a lot of people were shocked by that. And I have gotten people like Nazi trolls said that to me over and over and over starting in like 2015, 2016, you know, and I think, well, I'm allergic to cats, so calm down. But like, so the way he said it, like, I don't think in the moment he thought this is going to be a hot take. This is not going to make people angry. I think it speaks to being in a bubble in which this is a normal thing to say. And and like, because he's rattled it off over and over and over again. Now, does that mean JD Vance is on 4Chan like posting with these people? I certainly have no evidence of that. But clearly these ideas have filtered up and have reached him and he is very much a part, or he he is part of this world of the New Right, the sort of like the Peter Thiels and the Blake Masters and the Curtis Yarvins. It's just almost shocking to me that it would be so open, I guess. That you wouldn't have enough of a check to say, like, you know, I probably shouldn't say this kind of stuff out loud.
One of your takeaways that I found interesting is you said that if you want to convince Americans to do something different, it's hard to do it by arguing that America is bad and your idea is good, it's much easier to convince them by claiming your idea is the most American idea, and that America is not already doing it is a tragic, but temporary deviation from the true American spirit. This is one of the most interesting lessons I heard from the book, and that to me, aligns most with what you hear in political rhetoric, right? Like, how do you take this language from somewhere else and use it in political rhetoric. For you, is that something that you have come to realize about how these ideas spread?
I mean, I think that the conservative movement has very much figured out that the participatory conspiracy theory thing works is a way of drawing lots and lots and lots of people in, and you just have to make sure that there's like a framing that appeals to more people than these, like, you know, incels in somebody's basement.
When you use that term, the incels in somebodys basement, we hear that somebody's in a basement language all the time, right? That when it's being kind of dismissive or undercutting the seriousness with which we should take any given problem. There's also been this conversation about the motivations of people who get involved in extremism or conspiracy thinking.
One of them is just loneliness and the loneliness epidemic. We hear that when it comes to lone wolf shooters, political or not. We also hear it in this conversation about conspiracy. When you hear this conversation about loneliness. How do you think about the work that you do?
'Well, I mean, I think it's very, very true. I mean, I have interviewed people. Maybe it wasn't in their basement, but they're living in a studio paid for by their mom. That's very real. Leading up to January 6th a source that I had interviewed posted this link to a Telegram channel that he was running to organize about 60- ish people to come to DC for January 6th here from all over the country. So I like join this chat room and just lurked in there and it was just unsettling, I suppose, to read these people talking about the others who didn't get it, the normies who didn't understand. But they were so excited to meet each other on January 6th. It was all building up to this. They were finally, like meeting their real friends, the people who really understood who really got it.
It's almost impossible to miss that most of the people you write about in the book are men. How have you started to think about that?
Right. So there have been various phrases that try to get at this, and I don't quite get at it all the way, but there is something there, you know. Crisis of masculinity, toxic masculinity, whatever. There is something, there are a lot of men who are struggling with how to be men. So the way an incel put it to me was that, he asked me to name a positive, masculine characteristic. He's like, you can't say brave or strong because that means women aren't brave or strong, but you can't say dominant because that would be toxic. So what does it mean for him to be a man? And, you know, the sort of the solution he had found for it was his, like, very corrosive idea that like essentially feminism and women had sort of castrated him and made him feminine and weak, and he had no way to be a man in the world. So he just spent all his time in chat rooms on the internet. Within the alt right a lot of these guys, they would talk publicly about how women needed to be dominated. Women shouldn't have jobs, but behind the scenes, they're crying to their girlfriends. They don't have jobs. It's the women who have jobs who are supporting them. I interviewed many women who talked about this.
Weight, women dating these type of guys?
Yeah, women dating these guys. I mean.
And would they talk to you in a context of like. Okay, Elle, just so you know, he doesn't pay for anything, right? Or was it more of like. Well, here's my role in the movement.
The only women who would talk to me were women who had left. Women who are within the movement very much express a lot of internalized misogyny. I'm sorry if that sounds too like academic, but, like, I don't know how else to put it. They would scream like that I was a dumb slut. So, I mean, it's just jarring to hear it from a woman, but they...once they had left and while reflecting upon it, you know, they would talk about how, yeah, all these guys would have their podcast about, well, women shouldn't have jobs. Meanwhile, none of them had jobs and they were all supported by women. Another woman told me about how she had this her her white nationalist like racism influencer boyfriend was crying to her about how he would never be able to have the house with the white picket fence and the kids and the dog, and she was like, I, I have a good job, I have a good source of income. We can have that. Like we can have that. We can make that dream come true. And he just turned cold and stared, looked her in the eye and said, shut the f**I* up. Like that, I mean, there...I don't know that there's just this profound hatred of women, and also this desire to use women as a way to prove to other men that they've got all their stuff together.
The reason why I ask is because I feel like we in the news business are woefully underprepared to talk about this. We don't know how. So when there's a mass shooter, we don't really talk about who they are, because there's been this back and forth about whether you should talk about the shooter or not, talk about the shooter, even as the profile is quite similar, almost each and every time a person who has no real connections with anyone, and even with the shooter who tried to assassinate Donald Trump, you know, there's been a very vague conversation about evil and political violence. There's not been very much conversation about this person being a guy in his early 20s who, you know, really didn't have much of a political life. It's like a political amoeba, frankly. And there hasn't been an attempt to make sense of him in the context of the long line of other white guy shooters in their 20s. Each time we treat each shooting as a discrete operation. That is unique, but it just feels like it's not.
No, it's not. And I mean, a lot of times they post manifestos where they're sharing the same memes, they're quoting each other. So the Buffalo shooter quoted the Christchurch shooter, I used memes that I had seen on 4Chan, I don't know, eight years ago at this point. Now this guy, the man who tried to assassinate Trump, we don't know that much about him, but the very few biographical details we have are very familiar to me. Quiet. Lonely. No friends. Into computer programing. Gets into guns? I don't know. Are we going to find a secret trove of his political like ideology, I don't know. Maybe we never we never find out. But clearly there is like a profile.
Yeah. For a country that's prone to racial profiling, we're sort of stumped on this one.
'Who am I? Who am I to say? Who am I to give advice to America? Right? But I do feel like just as we have remedial math and English for kids who are struggling in those subjects, we should have remedial social skills for children who struggle to connect and make friends with others. I mean, in other countries like high school's, not the Thunderdome that it is in America and being bullied in school does not make it okay to commit a mass murder, obviously, but in the interests of our own self-preservation of of people who are able to make small talk, who are able to make friends, like we want everyone to feel more part of society and more connected, because otherwise we might be victims of that violence.
You recently had a child, and I know, for me, I am sometimes reticent to be as cynical as journalists naturally can be because I feel like I want I do want to hand a better world to my children. Having kids has actually made me think a lot about how they're raised as to not end up in one of my news stories. When I think about raising my sons now, I think about loneliness. I also think about teaching them how to back out of rooms. That it's never too late to say I shouldn't get in this van. Right? I think about, can I teach them to become people who know how to intervene when a crowd is taking a turn. And by crowd, I mean it's a crowd of three. It's a crowd of five. It's a crowd of 50. But how do you not get carried along by things that you have a feeling about that isn't quite right. The same way we and we instill in girls, we sort of teach girls like, hey, there's something in your gut that's going to tell you, don't make this move or that move. And is there a version of that I can teach them? I don't know. I don't know, but I think about the kinds of people you've written about. When I think about it.
My parents, and this is not a lesson that I wrote about in the book, but my parents very strongly instilled in me as a kid to be the one who says that's not right. Like, even if you have to make a scene, like be the one to say, stop that. Like, don't do that. That's not right. And part of that lesson my mom taught me was in the moment your friends might be mad at you for making a scene or for like, making people feel uncomfortable, but later they're all gonna remember that they were cheering you on. In retrospect, they'll be like, oh yeah, I was totally on your side. Thank you for saying something.
But it's something that has to be taught.
It's not. We're we're pack animals. It's like it's not our instinct sometimes to say, hey, we shouldn't be doing this. And in the book you almost ask for that. In the end, you say that like, this is a problem we have to pay attention to. Like, like other problems that demand an intervention.
Right. I've spoken to mental health professionals who say parents don't want to see. They want to just imagine that their kid is happy and you've got to break through your denial.
Well, good luck to both of us, then.
We have a little bit of time. Yeah.
Like, both under the age of six. Okay. Yeah, but Chris Cantwell was six once.
Richard Spencer was four years old once. Right. Like there's a path that you go down.
But this is so relevant, Matt Heimbach. He told me that his father was a history teacher. And in high school, he starts ordering like an SS flag and the Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf and all of this stuff. And his dad never said anything. According to him, his dad just ignored it. And that infuriated him even more. And he denied that he was on like a 20 year long, like LARPing campaign just to piss off his father. But he raised that right?.
'Yeah. And I mean, that's like a stark and chilling lesson. By the way, Heimbach has left the white nationalist movement. I don't know if he's put away all of those ideas, but he's left that movement and said that he is very involved in raising his children and that they are the most de-radicalizing force in his life.
Yeah. That was Ellie Reeve. She covers extremism here at CNN. She's also the author of the new book, ":Black Pill How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics. And that's it for today's episode. The Assignment is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Isoke Samuel and Graelyn Brashear. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We also get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manaserri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lennie Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. And thank you for listening.
