How the alt-right became mainstream

BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

Author: Elle Reeve

Publisher: Atria Books

Pages: 283

Price:  $29.99

By Sue Halpern

If you have watched video of 2017’s Unite the Right march, in which hundreds of young men in khakis paraded through the streets of Charlottesville, Va, chanting “Jews will not replace us” before one of them drove a Dodge Challenger into a group of counter-protesters, chances are that you have seen a recording made by Elle Reeve.

At the time, the journalist (then at Vice News, now at CNN) had been following the alt-right for about four years; before Charlottesville, the movement was frequently dismissed as fringe, and her editors were apparently reluctant to send her on reporting trips.
 

Reeve chronicles the alt-right’s rise in Black Pill, a chilling and insightful account of the through-line from dopey internet memes to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the seductions of QAnon and the storming of the Capitol. In Reeve’s telling, Charlottesville was the fulcrum between a before, when hateful ideologies were coalescing, largely out of view, and the after — which we now inhabit. If you want to understand why it increasingly feels like liberal democracy is failing, and why white supremacy, misogyny, antisemitism and homophobia are ascendant, read this book.
 

Reeve’s reporting begins around 2013, but the internet culture she depicts starts at least a decade earlier, when a teenager modified the source code of a Japanese website to launch an English-language version, 4chan. The site let users post images anonymously, and it did not take long for pornography and vile memes to find a home there. Eventually, the site’s developer became troubled and began blocking the worst of it, especially during what came to be known as Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign against women in the video game industry.
 

Because Reeve pursued this story before it went mainstream, she gained the trust of its leaders who were willing to share their plans and motivations — despite at times harassing and threatening her. By 2021, she writes, it “was like we were veterans who’d fought on the opposite sides of a war. There weren’t many other people in the world who had witnessed the same events. So when I called them and asked for an interview, it was pretty easy to get them to say yes.” As a consequence, her narrative is unusually intimate and personal.
 

After Gamergate, many users migrated to 8chan, where anyone could post anything. Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who was the headline speaker at Unite the Right, was among many who found their people — frequently alienated, angry and lonely young men — online.
 

Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the website Breitbart and Trump’s former chief strategist, understood that you could “activate that army,” which is just what they did. These were people who, in the parlance of the community, had swallowed the “Matrix”-inspired “red pill” and seen “the truth.”
 

Maybe they believed that the system was rigged by Jews, or that racial equality would undermine the white race, or that Hillary Clinton led a cabal of paedophiles. But as the book painstakingly shows, these ideas then prompted such real-world actions as shooting up a pizza restaurant, or hacking into voting systems and stealing their software.
 

As Reeve describes it, an even more potent danger came from the black pill of nihilism. Taking that pill “allows you to justify any action: cruelty, intimidation, violence,” she writes. “If your actions cause more violence and chaos, that’s good, because it will help bring about an end to the corrupt regime.” It can, she argues, lead to Charlottesville, to massacres in Charleston and Pittsburgh and El Paso and Orlando. It can lead to a veneration for Putin. Or an exaltation of Trump.
 

Of all Reeve’s sources, the most intriguing is Fredrick “Fred” Brennan, the creator of 8chan. Brennan had also run a community for incels, or “involuntary celibate” men. (Elliot Rodger, whose killing spree in Isla Vista, Calif., was meant to punish women for rejecting him and harm sexually attractive men, has become a central figure in this circle.)
 

In a wheelchair because of a congenital disease, Brennan was also for years a proponent of eugenics, asserting that those with disabilities should be sterilised, and expressing anger that his own mother had not aborted him.
 

But he changed. His evolution, from a free speech absolutist who believed that he was creating a marketplace of ideas where the best ones would rise to the top, to someone who declared that 8chan should be shut down, suggests that it is possible to deradicalise oneself.
 

However, Brennan, who quit administering 8chan in 2016, is just one man. And soon thereafter, 8Chan was rebranded by its new owner as 8kun, ultimately becoming home to QAnon.
 

That mass delusion, as insane as it may seem — that a deep state exists within the government, supported by celebrities and business leaders, operating a Satan-worshiping human-trafficking network — continues to infect minds both on the internet and in real life. If, as Reeve claims, “the alt-right is essentially dead,” it is only because so many of its ideas and obsessions are no longer alternative.
 

The reviewer is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of eight books ©2024 The New York Times News Service