To access information detailing racist ideas and discourse, people had to send a request through the mail and receive cheaply mimeographed newsletters that were often years old.
But like many other subcultures, the internet has made all of this much easier — even easier, in fact, for white supremacists and Nazis. Reeve recounted a time when he spoke with a man whose life had been driven deep into racist discourse by capitalism’s recommendation engines.
“When you buy a Nazi flag on Amazon, they’re saying, maybe they’re interested in books about fascism, like ‘The Turner Diaries’ or ‘Mein Kampf,'” Reeve said. “It makes it a lot easier to get hold of that literature, and then it makes it a lot easier to find other people who believe it.”
A new era of hatred has begun.
Reeve rose to fame in 2017 when she covered the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for Vice News. If you’ve seen the aerial footage of a car plowing into a group of counter-protesters, that’s her reporting. She now works for CNN, where she covers the American right wing, particularly its extremist elements, which led to her visiting the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
On Tuesday, her first book was released. Titled “The Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Internet’s Darkest Corners Come True, Corrode Society, and Take Control of American Politics,” the book explores exactly what the subtitle suggests. I’ve known Reeve for more than a decade; we previously worked together at The Atlantic Wire. With her book out, I reached out to her about something I’d been thinking about for a while: the role of anxiety and revenge in driving right-wing rhetoric and politics.
In that respect, the timing of the book’s publication was fortunate. This week alone we’ve seen Donald Trump press ahead with his return to the White House, campaigning on, as Trump puts it, promises of retribution. Semaphore’s David Weigel detailed how those Trump might bring to the White House are making similar vows. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) blasted the “angry feminist movement” for “sapping the male cause.” He promised that in January, when Trump returns, the country will “strive to return to the America of the 1960s.”
Reeve’s book focuses primarily on the most extreme elements of the political right – white supremacists and neo-Nazis who specifically espouse racist and anti-Semitic beliefs – but who often share the same political leanings as Trump and his supporters and are often driven by similar motivations.
Consider immigration: Trump supports strict limits on who can enter the US from Mexico and has advocated deporting millions of people in the country without visas. His allies in Congress backed legislation this week designed as a response to fictitious efforts to deliberately import people to vote Democrat, a formulation of the “Great Swap” conspiracy theory. Reeve said the main difference between the racists is the scale of their theory.
“They believe in a more anti-Semitic version of the ‘Great Replacement’ than you’ll ever hear on Fox News,” she explained. “They believe that Jews are deliberately conspiring to undermine white power and racial consciousness because they believe white people are harder to control than people of color.”
Or consider the debate over race: Trump supporters are opposed to advocating for social justice because, in their view, “America isn’t actually racist,” Reeve said.
“They’re being made to feel bad about something that doesn’t exist,” Reeve said. “And they love that. They love that America isn’t racist… [and] They don’t want to be told to care about it.” In contrast, “white supremacists think America is bad because it’s not racist. sufficientThey think there should be more racial discrimination. They want more obvious policies that have an unequal impact on black and white people.”
While emphasizing that the statement was not hers and is not true, Reeve explained how white supremacists view the issue.
“White people are at the top because they’re smarter,” she explained, “so they don’t have to worry about social inequality. Assumptions May it be so.”
In both instances, Trump supporters and racist extremists espouse similar politics. Both groups have a sense that the country is changing, and that they and others like them are victims of that change. As Reeve puts it, “If you want to take back your country, there’s an implicit belief that someone has taken it unjustly from you.”
The sense of loss and victimization is often more personal. I’ve written before about how the mindset of older conservative Americans is often shaped by the political and demographic world their children and grandchildren live in. Reeve explained that a similar pattern exists among white supremacists.
“A lot of them come in hating women: ‘Why don’t women like me? Why is it that someone else is getting all the girls?'” she says. “Instead of facing the idea that they need to be able to make small talk, dress differently, or be more attractive to the opposite sex, it’s easier for some of them to just accept that feminism and immigration are to blame for them not getting girls.”
This overlaps with the sense of isolation that is often associated with the impact of the internet.
“They want brothers. They want brotherhood,” Reeve explained. “Former Proud Boy members have told me that these are people who’ve never had a wingman before. They want to know that when they go out to a bar, they’ve got someone on their side.”
They find communities online, and even those who aren’t seeking racist rhetoric or propaganda often stumble across such communities by chance through sites like 4chan.
“These anonymous message boards allow people to dabble in fascism without incurring any social cost,” Reeve said of such sites. “They can experiment with fascism and no one has to know about it.”
Many users of these sites, particularly 4chan, embed racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric in their humor, weakening the passive resistance of new users over time. (This was an explicit strategy of the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer.)
“Jokes are the spoonful of sugar that helps soften fascism,” Reeve said.
Beyond the obvious sympathy for (and, to some extent, the response to) Trump, there are political implications here: Recent data from the Pew Research Center finds that young white men are one of the groups most likely to prefer Republican politics over Democratic politics.
Having spoken to people who have taken the “black pill” – those who have fallen into the traps of racism and anti-Semitism – Reeve has found the rise of Trump and his base to be disconcerting at times.
“One white supremacist said that regular people, regular MAGA people, are not that radical ideologically in that they’re not Nazis or racists or anything like that,” she explained. “But they are… Tactically “They were much more radical. They were willing to storm the Capitol. They were willing to challenge the votes of majority-black cities. They thought that was disturbing.”
And they have had far greater success organizing: Tens of millions of people have backed Mr. Trump’s platform, in part because he presents it so well.
“White supremacists never gained widespread support because they adopted symbols of America’s enemies, like the swastika, and that’s never gone away,” Reeve said. Trump, meanwhile, isn’t trying to replicate that aesthetic; he’s pitching a distinctly American vision.
“When you’re campaigning to bring about fundamental change in America, you’ll get farther if you portray it as a purer embodiment of the American spirit,” Reeve continued.
Trump supporters and far-right figures alike recognize the flip side of this approach: It is a way of marginalizing opponents. Hostile Attacking America works, too. It victimizes average Americans and turns mundane failure into systemic failure. Add a web browser and you’re in business.
