Elle Reeves’ “Black Pill,” a disturbing look at “meme magic” and the GOP

I was two years old and happily offline at the time, but the image was still relevant when I logged on for the first time eleven years later. The cartoon, I thought, was just a joke about assuming a false identity, something I did all the time in silly chat rooms. I said I was 25 or French or a famous novelist, and I brought a little of the glamour of my fictions back into my mundane life. I later realised that the magic these lies conjured was slight, but it was magic nonetheless. What was the difference between being treated as a cosmopolitan and become one? Perhaps the dog imitating his owner in Steiner’s cartoon has at some point forgotten that he was ever anything else.

In Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come Alive, Poison Society, and Take Over American Politics, intrepid CNN correspondent Elle Reeve suggests that something similar happened to the ragtag crew of fascists, white nationalists, and chauvinists who staged a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Perhaps the resident racists of the so-called alt-right became what they first pretended to be. Sometimes Reeve’s sources tell her a similar story. Richard Spencer, the most visible face of neo-Nazism in America, claims the movement “started as a joke and then became real.” Not entirely unrelated, the alt-right’s political vision began as a digital fantasy and became a living nightmare: Spencer attributes Donald Trump’s 2016 victory to “meme magic”—that is, the concerted efforts of white supremacists posting on anonymous forums.

The flotsam of the internet is childish, ridiculous, and therefore easily underestimated. But even absurdities can be dangerous. The “black pill” and its associated lexicon and cosmology are among the internet’s silliest – and most toxic – products. They are jokes, but they are also deadly serious.

The “black pill” derives from the “red pill,” which Reeve calls “the main metaphor of internet politics.” In the 1999 film The Matrix, the protagonist takes a red pill and realizes that his apparent reality is nothing but an illusion. He lives not in a bustling city but in a capsule where he is fed through tubes by robotic overlords intent on keeping him docile. On the internet, the “red pill” refers to a piece of knowledge that exposes the supposed world as a deceptive facade. The logic of the trope is conspiracy-theoretical. Men who took the red pill in the early 2000s complained about the evils of feminism; cranks who swallowed it insisted they saw through the sinister plans of the global elites. Notorious influencer Andrew Tate, who was recently arrested for sex trafficking, warns his followers about the “matrix” of morals enforced by the establishment.

After “the red pill metaphor” took hold, Reeve says, “endless variations followed.” The most pernicious of these is the “black pill,” “a dark but gleeful nihilism.” Those who succumb to this potent pill believe that “the system is corrupt and its collapse is inevitable. There is no hope.” The black pill ideology is that of the desperate and desolate, such as mass murderers and “incels,” or involuntary celibates who believe that their inherent unlovability condemns them to eternal loneliness.

The transition from red pill to black pill is an example of the strange metastasis of online content that becomes increasingly dark. Reeve’s sources have observed this time and again. Her most sympathetic interviewee, programmer Fred Brennan, watched in horror as the imageboard site he built descended into chaos. When he founded 8chan in 2013, he hoped it would prove a haven for free speech, a true marketplace of ideas. Instead, Nazis infiltrated the site and regular users fled. The most extreme comments attracted the most attention, until every conversation became a contest of provocations.

“This may seem like a bizarre piece of internet ephemera,” Reeve acknowledges, but 8chan would eventually become the birthplace of QAnon’s extremist ideology. How did marginal comments on the internet transform into a mass movement that burst off the screen and stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

Black Pill is a book full of questions, not answers. Did the alt-right really create Trump’s MAGA movement, for example, as its followers boast? “There is no longer a separation between the online world and the real world,” Brennan tells Reeve. But in fact, her reporting shows that the gap between an online extremist’s fantasies and his comparatively disappointing life is often yawning. One man who spent “fourteen to twenty hours a day online” developed an online alter ego as a “seasoned jihadist leader”; in reality, he was a powerless 20-year-old living with his parents in Florida. While Spencer tweeted that “women should never be allowed to do foreign policy,” Reeve writes, “his wife helped him edit a National Policy Institute editorial.” It’s hard not to read these performances as pathetic exercises in fantasy fulfillment, but the alt-right’s arguments, gleaned from obscure forums, have was integrated into the conservative mainstream via meme.

Another question that is not conclusively answered in “Black Pill” is whether fascists are stupid. It’s amazing “that smart people hear that many Nazis are really smart,” Reeve writes. “Smart people have been told their whole lives that cleverness is a virtue, and by implication, smart people are virtuous.” Unfortunately, “the sick, sad truth is that the world is not being destroyed by stupid monsters, but by smart people like us.”

In fact, the Nazis Reeve interviews are often much clearer about conservatism and its consequences than the more respectable ambassadors of that ideology. “I was used to people lying to my face that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery, and that the Confederate flag was a heritage, not a hate,” Reeve recalls. When she began reporting on self-described white supremacists, she found their candor almost refreshing. One of them happily admits, “All that Was about racism, and that’s what we liked about it.”

The extremists featured in Black Pill can also be psychologically and politically smart. “They realize that smart people need to feel like they have to think logically and principledly, so they create embarrassment propaganda to alienate them from social justice activists,” Reeve writes. “Embarrassment propaganda is videos or screenshots of someone who is advocating for equality and is provoked into a major emotional outburst.” But while Reeve stresses that neo-Nazis aren’t all idiots, she also (understandably) calls their convoluted belief system “so stupid.”

Reeve and her interviewees sometimes suggest that extremism is a misguided response to a range of legitimate grievances. One Trump supporter she met asked her, “Why is the coronavirus vaccine free but chemotherapy isn’t?” She concludes, “He asked a good question and got a bad answer.” She could be talking about any number of the men she interviews. Why are they so lonely and alienated? Why are their political leaders so deaf to their concerns?

“If there is great inequality and there is no opportunity for change within the system, the system will not survive,” says Brennan, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, or “brittle bone disease,” which leaves him unable to walk. “When you’re disabled, you can feel like everyone thinks you’re a freak and you’re not wanted anywhere,” he told Reeve. He sought refuge online, and the distorted community he found there was a poor answer to the very legitimate question of his exclusion.

Few of the characters in Black Pill have endured such daunting ordeals as Brennan, but many are isolated and autistic—or, in the self-deprecating jargon of the forums, “autistics.” Although Reeve makes it clear that “autism does not make someone more likely to commit violent crimes,” an expert explained to her that “autistic people can be particularly vulnerable to extremist online communities” for three reasons: “They can socialize there without social anxiety,” “the rigid worldview makes it easier to understand how the world works,” and “the forums have archives, so they can go back in time and read how users have spoken to each other and then mimic those interactions.”

The Nazis Reeve interviewed were often as unsure of their motives as she was. Many of them insisted that their racism and sexism were rational reactions to the facts, but then admitted in the next breath that they had joined “the movement” because they were desperate for friendship, belonging, and a sense of power. One woman who dated a neo-Nazi asked a friend if his misogyny was serious: “Did he make memes?” Many of them seemed unsure whether they were making memes or not.

While Reeve doesn’t have answers, she does have incredible access. She managed to get Spencer’s emails, some of which contained suspicious musings about the possibility of an alt-right alliance with Russia, and she persuaded a former neo-Nazi to give her an old cellphone full of incriminating text messages. At the Charlottesville rally, she jumped into a truck full of white supremacists and left the cameras rolling. She persisted in reporting on the far right’s most heinous excesses, even as she faced the inevitable barrage of harassment, much of it sexual in nature.

Black Pill is a masterpiece of fearless reporting, and its ambiguities and tensions are not necessarily weaknesses. Rather, they point to essential contradictions at the heart of what was once the alt-right that is now Trump’s Republican Party. Perhaps the defining characteristic of this movement is its slippery irony, its refusal to come clean about how much of its racism and sexism is sincere.

But whether Trump’s online army is willing to imitate fascists as a joke or whether their beliefs are authentic, it doesn’t matter. On the internet, no one knows – or needs to know – whether you’re a real fascist. All they need to know is that you’re fully committed to fascism.

How I witnessed the darkest corners of the Internet come to life, poison society and take over American politics