Accessing information detailing racist ideologies and rhetoric meant dropping requests in the mail and getting back cheap, mimeographed newsletters, often years old.
But just as it did for so many other subcultures, the internet made all of that far easier. In fact, it went further for the white nationalists and Nazis. Reeve described speaking to one man who was pushed deeper into racist rhetoric by capitalist recommendation engines.
“You’d buy the Nazi flags on Amazon and they’re like, hey, maybe you’re interested in ‘The Turner Diaries’ or ‘Mein Kampf’ or all this other fascist stuff,” Reeve said. “It becomes much easier to get this literature. Then it becomes very, very easy to find other people who believe in it.”
A new era of hate had dawned.
Reeve became famous for her Vice News coverage of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. If you’ve seen the footage of the car barreling into a group of counterprotesters filmed from above, that comes from her report. She’s now at CNN, where, among other things, she covers the American right and particularly its fringe elements. That brought her to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, as well.
On Tuesday, her first book was published. Titled “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics,” it explores exactly what the subhead suggests. I’ve known Reeve for more than a decade, having previously worked with her at the Atlantic Wire. I took advantage of her book’s publication to reach out to her about something that I’ve been mulling for some time: the role of insecurity and revenge in driving right-wing rhetoric and politics.
The timing of the book’s release was fortuitous in that regard. This week alone, we’ve seen Donald Trump press forward with his bid to return to the White House, a campaign driven, as he’s said, by the promise of retribution. Semafor’s David Weigel detailed how those Trump would be likely to bring with him to the White House were making similar pledges. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) lashed out at “the angry feminist movement” for taking “away the purpose of the man.” He promised that, in January — that is, when Trump returns — the country would “work our way back to where America was in the 1960s.”
Reeve’s book focuses primarily on the most extreme elements of the political right: those white nationalists and neo-Nazis who specifically espouse racist and antisemitic beliefs. But they are often pointed in the same political direction as Trump and his supporters, and often driven by similar motivations.
Consider immigration. Trump endorses strict limits on people crossing into the U.S. from Mexico and advocates deporting millions of people in the country without visas. His allies on Capitol Hill this week supported legislation that was framed as a response to an imagined effort to intentionally import people to vote for the Democratic Party — a formulation of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. The main difference among the racists, Reeve said, was the scale of that theory.
“They believe in a more antisemitic version of the ‘great replacement’ than you might have heard on Fox News,” she explained. “They think that Jews have an intentional plot to dilute the power and racial consciousness of White people, because they think that White people are harder to control than people of color.”
Or consider discussions of race. Trump supporters, Reeve said, object to social-justice advocacy because, in their view, “America is not actually racist.”
“They’re being made to feel bad about something that doesn’t exist,” Reeve said. “And they like that. They like that America is not racist … [and] they don’t want to be asked to care about it.” By contrast, “the white nationalist folks think America is bad because it’s not racist enough. They think there should be more racism. They want more explicit policies that unequally affect Black and White people.”
Taking pains to note that the rhetoric was neither hers nor true, Reeve explained how the white nationalists view the subject.
“White people are on top because White people are smarter,” she explained. “So you don’t need to care about social inequality because it’s supposed to be that way.”
In both examples, Trump supporters and the racist fringe embrace similar politics. Both groups have a sense that the country is changing; both see themselves and those like them as victims of that change. As Reeve put it, “If you want to take the country back, implicit in that is that someone unjustly took it away from you.”
Often, the sense of loss and victimization is more personal. I’ve written about the ways in which the views of older, conservative Americans have often been shaped by the political and demographic worlds in which their children and grandchildren live. Reeve explained similar patterns among those embracing white nationalism.
“A lot of them come in through hating women. ‘Why don’t women like me? Someone else is getting all the women, why is that?’” she said. “Instead of having to confront the idea that you need to learn to be able to make small talk, you need to dress differently, you need to make yourself more appealing to the opposite sex — it’s, for some, more comforting to accept that this is because of feminism and immigration that you can’t get a girl.”
This overlaps with a sense of isolation that is itself often linked to the effects of the internet.
“These guys want to have brothers. They want brotherhood,” Reeve explained. “An ex-Proud Boy told me that these are guys who have never had a wingman. They want to be able to go out to a bar and know that there’s a guy who has his back.”
They find community online. Even those who don’t seek out racist rhetoric or propaganda stumble onto it, often through sites like 4chan.
“With these anonymous message boards, it becomes easier to dabble in it without any social cost,” Reeve said of sites like that one. “You can experiment with being a fascist and no one needs to know.”
Many users on those sites (and particularly 4chan) bury racist and antisemitic rhetoric in humor that, over time, erodes the passive resistance of newcomers. (This was an explicit strategy of the white nationalist site Daily Stormer.)
“Jokes are the spoonful of sugar that helps fascism go down,” Reeve said.
There are political ramifications here, beyond overt sympathy for Trump (and, by some measures, reciprocation). Recent data from the Pew Research Center found that one of the groups most likely to prefer Republican to Democratic politics was young White men.
Speaking to those who’d been “black-pilled” — that is, who’d fallen into this rabbit hole of racism and antisemitism — Reeve found that the rise of Trump and his base was at times disconcerting.
“One white nationalist put it that the normies, the regular MAGA folks, they’re not as ideologically radical in terms of not being Nazis or racist or that kind of thing,” she explained. “But they were tactically much more radical. They were willing to storm the Capitol. They were willing to challenge the votes of majority-Black cities. That was something they thought was disturbing.”
And they have had much more success in organizing. Tens of millions of people support what Trump promises. That’s in part because he does a better job in presenting his arguments.
“White nationalists failed to get broad appeal because they adopted symbols of America’s enemies, such as the swastika. That was never going to go anywhere,” Reeve said. Trump, on the other hand, isn’t trying to reproduce that aesthetic. He’s advocating an explicitly American vision.
“When you’re campaigning on radical changes to America,” Reeve continued, “it’s going to get a lot further if you portray them as a more pure embodiment of the American spirit.”
What both Trump supporters and the fringe-right also recognize is the flip side of that approach: Tapping into opponents as hostile to America is also useful. It turns average Americans into victims and common failings into orchestrated ones. Add a web browser and you’re in business.
