'They Want To Be A Part of History': Elle Reeve on the Extremely-Online Fascist Resurgence

Edited by Sam Thielman

THERE IS NO SHORTAGE of parallels to reach for in the wake of Saturday's attempted assassination of Donald Trump, but my mind went to an aspect of The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. Bevins' excellent book notes that among the commonalities in the blood-soaked U.S.-backed anticommunist repressions in Indonesia, Brazil and Chile are myths of left-wing incitement, in the form of imagined left-wing assaults on symbols of the nation resonant with the right. And while we don't have a motive—and the first wave of reporting on the would-be assassin portrays him as a much-bullied kid who seems not to be conspicuously political—in this case, the attack was real, and the mythmaking is underway.

Trump is already engaged in the mythmaking that matters. "It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening," he posted Sunday morning. The 'God-Emperor' meme is getting incepted into reality. Many liberals have stomped their feet in frustration that so many conservative Christians have backed a Man of Mammon like Trump. They need to understand the appetite for an instrument of divinely-guided earthly retribution—retribution of the sort Trump has promised. "We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness… not allowing Evil to Win," Trump continued. I wonder who he means by capital-E Evil. [I feel obligated to point out here that this “FEAR NOT” construction is very recognizable to those of us who grew up in Protestant churches from praise and worship songs that paraphrase a particular verse from the book of Isaiah.—Sam]

Trump's supporters, people who rail against "Un-Humans" and who call the left (meaning liberalism) "practically jihadist in its theocratic stance," are also seizing the opportunity. They demand the liberals cease portraying Trump as an anti-democratic menace, a portrayal based on both his rhetoric and his demonstrated record, in the name of stopping political violence. Again, it's point-missing for liberals to cry hypocrisy. The point is that the Trumpists are using the threat of violence to intimidate their political opponents, and now they have a bloody ear to rally to, in a way that is already prompting the liberal media and the Democratic Party to ask themselves if the right has a point. I heard President Biden say throughout the weekend that political rhetoric needs to calm. I don't know what's going to happen. But I feel confident that won't. 

I would also say this: Beware anyone who speaks casually about violence and war who has had no experience of it. My (limited) professional experience seeing such violence up close robs it of any Hollywood romanticism. Violence creates reactions that its advocates, and indeed its practitioners, do not anticipate. People who have had to live through such violence tend not to wish for it to recur, except as vengeance—which then creates incentives to further vengeance. In my experience, many such people cast blame not only on those who committed the violence, but on those who could have stopped it and didn't. 

Shortly before Trump got shot at, I had lined up an interview with Elle Reeve, an excellent journalist I've known for something like 15 years and through circumstances neither of us surely want to rehash. She's spent years reporting on the coalescence of fascist currents on the right and their bleed into the nationalist resurgence. Last week she published an outstanding book, Black Pill: How I Witnessed The Darkest Corners of The Internet Come To Life, Poison Society, And Capture American Politics. You should buy it. While we conducted the following (lightly-edited) Q&A before the Trump shooting, Reeve's reporting has a lot to say about this moment, and the precipice we find ourselves on.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: What role does misogyny play on the extreme right? Reading your book, I got the sense that it's an adherent force running through various factions that might not otherwise cohere.

ELLE REEVE: An incel once played me a clip of my interview with a white nationalist and called him a culture vulture. He thought the alt-right was appropriating his culture. 

These cultures evolved and mingled on some of the same anonymous websites. There's a fundamental sense among them that someone else is getting all the women. Incels blame feminism for this, that it's tricked women into being sluts until they're old and ugly. White nationalists have their "great replacement" conspiracy theory—that Jews have tricked white women into having families with men of color as part of a conspiracy to dilute the white race in favor of people who are easier to control. They believe women evolved to be political conformists and are simply parroting the popular social justice ideology around them, and so to roll back social justice, you have to roll back women's involvement in politics. Both groups want to see women brought under control, dominated, put in their place. 

There's a visceral hatred of women that's much creepier than the straightforward rage I've gotten from random people on the internet. 

Why did so many of these losers talk to you? Are they incapable of shutting up when presented with a camera and a mic? At a few points in the book you talk about your repertorial tradecraft for getting them to open up, and I bet a lot of people who wonder why Nazis and the Nazi-curious would speak to a journalist would be interested in hearing about it. 

They want to be a part of history. One repeatedly said to me, "I matter." And that means telling their story to a reporter, even if they think I'm working for their enemies. There were times some leaders were afraid to talk to me on the record, because they were scared of their followers and their followers were angry at me. But when someone admits that to you, it's not that hard to get them to go on, to fully articulate the great burden they've taken on by committing to professional racism. You just keep calling with more questions and eventually you get the whole story, or at least, a lot more of it.

Who counts as "white" is different in South and Central America than it is in the U.S. 

Eventually they got used to my presence—maybe I was an old enemy, but there was comfort in the familiar. For those who were in Charlottesville, I'm one of the few people who saw what they saw. We'd end up talking about, say, 'Where were you standing when X happened?' 'Did you see the cops on that street?' 'How long did that whirlpool of fistfights really last?' 'Why did that other guy cry so much?'

Why did I want to report on them? There was this Obama-era idea that the old bigots were dying off and young people were happy with America's demographic changes. I think I bought into this to some degree. I spent the first half of my childhood in downtown Atlanta, where most of my neighbors and classmates were black, and the second half in small town Tennessee, which was very white. When I first started reporting on the alt-right, I thought they were making explicit a lot of beliefs that had been stated more subtly in the South. And I could tell there were a lot of them. They were not dying off.

How bothered was Richard Spencer by getting punched in Washington right after the Trump inaugural? What was the lasting impact of that punch on him and on his broader project?

Extremely [influential]. This was a pivotal moment for these guys. That the whole internet thought it was really funny made it worse, because it fed into their belief that white men were the truly oppressed class in the U.S. "The punch," as they call it, led to a guy with actual military experience creating a protective force around Spencer. They rationalized violence as self-defense.

That was true even during the torch march in Charlottesville, which ended in a massive brawl. Chris Cantwell, who later became known as "the Crying Nazi," insisted to me that the alt-right marchers were the real victims of the brawl, even though they outnumbered the student counter-protesters, by his estimation, 20 to 1. 

When Spencer tells you he isn't a white nationalist anymore because he "care[s] about civilization more than race," is that a distinction with a difference? I find it hard to escape race fantasies of superiority when encountering people determined to tell you which civilizations are better than others. 

I think a lot of far-right people figured out post-Charlottesville that they're not going to get very far by going full Nazi. That's just too weird for the vast majority of Americans, even if they have some racist or antisemitic beliefs.

One of the reasons the Proud Boys were able to grow post-Charlottesville is that they were not white nationalists, but "Western chauvinists." But this allowed men of color, particularly with heritage from South and Central America, to participate. Their leader was Enrique Tarrio, who identified as Afro-Cuban. (Some Proud Boys hated this and wanted to be white nationalist.)

Some people seem drawn to a subculture that hates them, or they're in denial that they're the target of it. Samantha Froelich, who interviewed applicants to the white nationalist frat Identity Evropa, said she often got Latino applicants, whom she rejected. Who counts as "white" is different in South and Central America than it is in the U.S. 

A fascist troll once showed me the chat transcript of the time he revealed he was half Jewish, and pleaded that he was committed to defending Western civilization. He got booted from the white supremacist chat anyway. 

As for Spencer specifically, he's told me he is working on creating a new religion that will challenge the dominance of Christianity and eventually bring an end to the Nietzschean "slave morality" with which Christianity has poisoned Western Civilization. So, like, his understanding of Western Civ might be different than the average person's. 

It's 2024 and the alt-right feels both like a spent force and something a scaled-up extreme right no longer has a need for. How do you assess its legacy, as a phase of development or otherwise, on what the right has become nearly a decade later? 

They certainly succeeded in their stated mission to move the Overton Window rightward, even if they didn't get the personal benefits they might have been expecting from it. White nationalists and fascists have struggled to take a bigger piece of conservatism for years. 

The most disturbing pattern I see repeating is the way people in a group chat can talk themselves into committing violence.

A story I uncovered that exemplifies this was a battle over the legacy—and money—of a wealthy inventor named Walter Kistler. Kistler had developed an interest in race science in his later years. The $100,000 "Kistler Prize" was awarded for work that increased the "understanding of the relationship between the human genome and society," and in 2011, the winner was Charles Murray, the conservative think tank scholar and author of The Bell Curve. 

At the gala celebrating Murray's award, Richard Spencer was there, networking. Spencer thought Kistler might give him money—he remembers thinking, "We're gonna have a billionaire!"—and was going to publish Kistler's book. But when Spencer sent Murray a galley, Murray responded that the book was a bad idea and made Kistler look obsessed with race. The fallout killed Spencer's relationship with Kistler. 

Spencer complained bitterly to me that Murray had enough "escape clauses" to stay in polite society, while Spencer was marginalized for being racist. And Spencer and his allies remained stuck on the margins until anonymous teenage fascists on 4chan and 8chan created an "alt right" movement that Spencer tried and ultimately failed to control.

Along with calls for "peaceful ethnic cleansing," the alt-right wanted a more generous welfare state, less rights for gay people, a return to an imagined past swaggering masculinity, a rollback of women's rights, more protectionist trade policy, fewer wars. You don't see institutions and politicians with real power adopting the creepy Hitler fandom of the alt right. But here's part of the RNC platform: 

"CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY"
"PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE" 
"FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS"
"CUT FEDERAL FUNDING FOR ANY SCHOOL PUSHING CRITICAL RACE THEORY, RADICAL GENDER IDEOLOGY"

Senator Josh Hawley has said "the left" wants "to define the traditional masculine virtues" as "toxic," that this supposed years-long effort might be why "more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games." 

"Replacement theory" is now something many more people have heard of and mainstream figures have dabbled in. I mean, in 2022, a Republican candidate for Senate praised the Unabomber manifesto!

What do you see as changed and what do you see as unchanged about the aspects of the internet that permitted the extreme right to coalesce? 

The most disturbing pattern I see repeating is the way people in a group chat can talk themselves into committing violence. They start by talking about how evil the enemy is—antifa or whatever—and how they supposedly assault women and children and the elderly. Then they start talking about self-defense, how they'll protect themselves against the enemy. Then they talk about what weapons they'll use to do so. That's how they give themselves permission to do violence. 

Often these chatrooms have a few people who push the limits on how the group talks about violence. This happened in Charlottesville—a guy repeatedly posted about whether it was legal to run over protesters with cars. I watched it in a Telegram channel of people going to Jan 6, which included moms and old people, and where they discussed alternatives to brass knuckles to fight the antifa that never materialized. 

When I interviewed an incel in 2018, part of me wondered if seeing himself on camera, and seeing some of his ideas challenged, might encourage him to leave. He was normal looking, he was smart, and he was locked in this mental prison of his own making. But three years later he messaged me at 7am on a weekday morning after having been up all night chatting in the same Discord servers while drinking wine and eating benzos. He and several of his friends told me these chatrooms were torture, ruining their lives, but they couldn't quit them. Many people have experienced a less extreme version of this, and they can't quit.

Did writing this book help you recontextualize the last several years of your reporting, or did you know what your narrative was by the time you were ready to write BLACK PILL?

I didn't really understand how connected it all was. I'd wanted to warn people that extremists are not monsters, they're regular people who think and do monstrous things. I knew who they were but I didn't understand why they did what they did. What I learned was how terrifyingly common their problems were, and how they descended down this nihilistic path where they could justify doing terrible things. And I had not understood initially how much the "leaders" didn't really understand or control their own movement, and didn't know it till it was too late.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.