Lawfare Archive: Elle Reeve on "Black Pill" and Alt-Right Internet Culture

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Marissa Wong, internet law fan,

“with an episode from the law fair archive for April 26th, 2020.”

On April 21st, the Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for allegedly engaging in a nine-years-long

fraud operation by covertly paying over $3 million

to informants associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. For today's archives, I chose an episode from December 17th, 2024, in which Katherine Pompeo is sat down with L. Reeves, to discuss Reeves' book, "Lock Hill."

How I witnessed the darkest corners of the internet come to life, poison society, and capture American politics. On the role of building working relationships with alt-right figures in her investigator's reporting process. [MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING] It's the law fair podcast. I'm Katherine Pompeo, associate editor of law fair, with L. Reeves, correspondent at CNN, who covers right-wing extremism and the all-right.

But January 6th was, like, grown-ups, elders.

People who clearly had jobs, like, people who were wearing nice ninja coats. People who could be, like, my dance. And just seeing them so possessed by these ideas that, again, that I didn't feel like they even understood

the words he was up. Today, we're talking about Reeves' book entitled "Block Hill." How I witnessed the darkest corners of the internet come to life, poison society, and capture American politics.

“To get a situated, what is your elevator pitch for this book?”

What is it about? I mean, originally, I was like, I'm like, what the subtitled would be? Why did all this crazy stuff happen? The elevator pitch is how, like, a very obscure small part

of the internet, created a very powerful culture

that eventually took over all of politics. It spiraled up and up and up, and stepped out of just the internet world into the real world. Repeatedly, Charlottesville, January 6th, to an inside of that.

Yeah. What made you want to write the book? It was after Jan 6th. I had been standing by the White House watching Rudy Giuliani give a speech about how we're going to have a trial by combat.

And there was a man in front of me in his 50s, wearing chain mail. And he was so thrilled by what Giuliani was saying. He was like, yeah, a trial by combat. I'm ready.

And he was wearing a peppy, the frog shirt. And peppy, the frog had been this alt-right symbol that was, like, a huge part of my reporting life, like, in 2016 and 2017, has, like, do you know where that comes from?

He says, oh, well, it's made by someone back in the day. And there was just, like, so much of what had brought people to January 6th was created by these guys. I had been following for 10 years, and they had no idea. That's absolutely wild.

And I cannot wait to dive into that. So also just super broadly, the book builds off your really personal interactions with various alt-right figures. Can you talk a little bit about your research? How you turn that into writing?

“And what is it like building relationships with these people?”

And frankly, how do you do it? Yeah, I started covering the alt-right really in 2016. And it was very difficult because it is a very hostile movement to reporters. It is a movement that things lying

is an acceptable tool for their activism. And it is extremely misogynistic because it was very heavily influenced by insell culture. So at the beginning, it was extremely hard. I mean, I often--

I had a lot of false starts. I mean, I would just call people only with screen racial slurs at me, and that's it. And I would get to the end of them. But sometimes, you know, I'd let them yell at me for 10 minutes,

or 30 minutes, and then they'd start telling me that live story. Because no matter how extreme someone is, almost everyone I've ever met wants to tell their story, they wanted to be recorded for history. They want their lives to be meaningful.

And even someone calling for peaceful ethnic cleansing, like something of that hateful,

and that they're affecting history.

So just having incredible patience and sticking around

for a long time until I became an accepted part of the surroundings in that world. In 2021, like the main figures of the alt-right went on trial for their role in Charlottesville. And it was like a four-week trial.

And they were really forced to confront what they'd done. They had to look at all the evidence, the communications. They'd had to go through and defend everything that built up to that day. And it put them in a very reflective mood.

And I was able to talk to them. And after that, talk to them for hours and hours and hours about what they'd done. Over time, again, there's a mutual respect that develops.

“Like, obviously, what I think they're doing”

is very bad for the world. And bad for their own families. And I say that to them. But the hostility melts away. - Wow.

Yeah, I guess a person to person connection, even though under all of that. - Yeah, well, it can be a little thing. - Yeah. - Well, both left handed, how about that?

(laughs) So, throughout the book, one central figure is Fred. We keep coming back to Fred. Who is Fred? And why do we keep coming back to him to tell his story?

- Frederick Brennan was a brilliant teenager who had a very difficult disability. Osteogenesis imperfecta. It means his bones are very brittle. So he can't, like, a very small amount of movement

can cause them to break. So he said that he's had more than a hundred breaks in his life.

And there's some bones that are never going to heal.

So he had a very difficult situation he was taken from his parents. He was in foster care. He was very angry at the world. But he was really good at computers.

It's not given him a computer and he's a little kid. So he had this feeling that words were this ultimate weapon. He could use against other people. Like, he realized he could say, there was nothing he couldn't say.

He could say the meanest possible things to infuriate or insult his caregivers because if they struck him, they could kill him, maybe, or hurt him very badly. They would go to jail. So it was almost like his total vulnerability

was an invincibility shield. So he's a very angry young man and he's in foster care and he gets on forecham. And he starts asking, why is my life like this? Why is this allowed to happen?

“Why am I this kid who can't play outside, trapped in foster care?”

Like, why is it like this? And the people he's asking that question to are already often neo-nautzy is on forecham. And their answer is, because your mother was allowed to breed, that people with disabilities should not be allowed to breed.

And now, of course, he knows that that's wrong. But at the time, that was compelling to him. So eventually, he started this website, HNM, or a wild version of forecham, and that became a platform where for a lot of the outright wild anti-semitism

and hateful harassment campaigns, game regate, QAnon, mass shooters, poster their manifestos there. Eventually, he realized he'd created a monster and did take active steps to try to kill that monster.

That's wild. He's just like a very distinct view of the world. He's a very deep thinker. He's like an incredible person to talk to.

I've always enjoyed talking to people like that more

than a politician, a politician comes there and is sued, and they say a banality and expect you to almost applaud for them. This guy is very unique, prospective on life. And he did things that were wrong, and he knows how wrong,

but also his view is very eliminating for us living in a more in the normal world. Yeah, absolutely. And before we really dive in, I want to get some terminology straight, because I consider myself to be chronically online,

and even sometimes I had to find myself go back and rereading. So what are the pills? What's red pill, black pill, yeah, the pills? What do they mean? Yeah, red pill.

“I think a lot of people know red pill by now.”

I mean, this really got going around the first Trump campaign, but the idea comes from the Matrix. So Kiana Reeves is presented, the red pill in the blue pill. The blue pill, he lives in the pleasant illusion, created by the machines.

The red pill, he learns the truth. He's stripped of his illusions, and he sees that humanity, humans are slaves to the machines. So that idea, as taken off, especially on the right wing internet, to take the red pill, it's not to take on a different

ideology in this way of thinking. The idea is that you're being stripped of your illusions,

Which is, of course, not true.

It's just a zone set of ideas, but that's not the way they see it. And then from that, we came all these other pills, like pill becomes slang, like, are you crypto-pilled? Are you Russia-pilled? It can be a term of division, a term of pride,

somewhere in between, green pill, whatever. There's a wild comment called iron pill,

“but I think black pill is the most important one,”

because it's not even about ideas. It's about a feeling of glifle nihilism, that all of this is corrupt, it's hopeless, like society is iradeemable. And so the best thing you can possibly do

is accelerate towards its destruction. It becomes what comes after it will be a golden era. You can remake the world the way it ought to be. And with black pill, thinking you can rationalize a lot of immoral and unethical actions,

because the morals and ethics created by this society are totally bankrupt. Like why should you have to follow them? - Scary. (laughs) So you begin chapter two with a discussion

of what you say that is the loosely connected group of people working to make America more racist. And you explain that you like to use the term Nazis, lowercase, and to define this group. Why do you use this term specifically

as compared to white supremacist or white nationalist? - White nationalist, that was actually a PR term that they came up with in the '90s, 'cause they didn't want to be called white supremacists anymore. Now, so whatever is associated with them,

eventually that word becomes toxic, no matter how they try to shape the PR around it,

“but Nazi to me just is like the generic drug, right?”

It's not neo-Nazis of the '90s, it's not the German Nazis of the '30s.

It's like, and the reality is this is also what

they sometimes refer to themselves as, like in their text between each other, in their sex, which became public as part of that federal civil trial, you know? Richard Spencer texted a woman saying,

when you're America's number one Nazis, there's nothing more alpha than that, like they really reveled in it. This was really interesting and difficult to, like as a journalist, I'm reporting on it,

but I'm talking to people who, you know, my editors, et cetera, they're disconnected from it. So they're in nervous about calling them racist, calling them Nazis, whatever, and I have to be like, don't they call themselves racist?

- Yeah. - They call themselves Nazis, like they embrace it. - It's a badger honor. - Yeah. - Yeah, it's, yeah, it's just weird to think about,

and those inside this camp call it a movement, who's at the center of this movement? I know you mentioned Richard Spencer,

“and who are the vampires, as you describe in the book, yeah?”

- So the white power movement, we can call it that. The white power movement has been around a long time, sort of modern era is dated to the '60s. George Lincoln Rockwell would give these campus speeches

where he would be heckled, and like the more wild the students got the more he liked it, 'cause eventually he could get them to listen. And I think that was very influential on this movement going all the way forward.

And you see the trolling potential back in these grainy audio recordings from the '60s. But starting in about the 2000s, they felt like their movement was dead in the Bush era. Most of the people involved were really old,

or there were skinheads who seemed like cartoonish. They were called Hollywood Nazis. So this guy, Bill of Regnery, created the Charles Martels Society, and it was a secret society that was meant to sort of cultivate the white nationalist

movement and help bring forward new younger leaders. They had a really hard time up into the Bush era, recruiting young people. So most people involved were like super old. Like Matt Hyback told me the story

about joining a concerned citizen's council, and people saying like, "Oh, is your grandpa involved in this? Like, why are you doing this?" But around the Obama, mid Obama era, all of that changed.

That's when the alt-right came online. And that was a very different thing, born on Fortune and anonymous message boards, where making ironic racist jokes kind of shifted into making sincere racist jokes

into it being like a full-on ideology. Richard Spencer, he'd been cultivated by the Charles Martels Society. His patron was Bill Regnery, who he called vampire. He calls all these men vampire stuff.

He says they try to suck the blood and the life out of anything that is alive and vital. So Spencer had created this turmoil, right?

Then kind of abandoned it 'cause he's always beefing with people.

But fortune, like the little anonymous trolls on Fortune,

They created their culture and their whole ideology around it.

They created all of these this wing. And as it started to rise in 2014, 2015, Spencer saw that and tried to sort of surf on top of it. Because Spencer was willing to use his real name and his real face, like reporters could talk to him.

The way they couldn't talk to her to an anonymous troll. So he became the face of the movement, even though he didn't actually have control of it.

“- Did he understand it or was he just kind of riding an wave?”

- In retrospect, he does not understand it. As do the other young girl leaders of his generation. - Yeah. - That they thought they had this massive, populist movement swelling behind them. But really, it was an entirely different animal.

- All of a sudden, this cartoon frog appears and it's your symbol.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

What did this new influx of alt-right people bring to the movement human? Like New Meas? - It was youth vitality, a punk rock sensibility, a feeling of being countercultural.

I mean, you see this even now, like so many of the comedians are sort of right-coded, maybe they're not explicitly Trump supporters, but like Joe Rogan.

But they made, or they were trying to make racism, cool, and bigotry, and misogyny.

“Like, and Trump was a really great icon of that.”

Like, they didn't think that Trump was one of them, but he had this swaggering macho sensibility within the troll world, like if you complain about your mistreatment, your loser, and like the most epic troll is like,

you know, the meanest person online is the coolest guy in these communities, right? And Trump is like an excellent shit talker. Like, he's a master shit. He's almost like an insult comic.

So he was a perfect icon for that. - Yeah, even though he didn't fit, I guess exactly the way they wanted him to, or-- - They saw that.

Thought of him as a useful tool. And that it was like kind of funny and ironic to be for him, because he made all the people that they didn't like angry. So Matt Highbach described to me like on election night

“when Trump won, that the feeling was better than sex,”

not because Trump won, but because all the people he hated for so upset about it. - Wow. - So you keep, you keep mentioning Matt Highbach, and who's Matt Highbach, and who's Matt Parrot?

You talk a lot about them throughout the book as well. Why are they important? - Matt Highbach and Matt Parrot, two friends or friend of me, who were a big part of the White Nationalist movement for 10 years.

Parrot was 10 years older than him. Matt Highbach was like in like 2013, he was like a young hot shot of being racist. He got a lot of attention creating a White Students Council on campus at Towson University.

So they met at these White Nationalist conferences, and they were very frustrated with the White Nationalist movement

because he thought it was basically, you know,

get together, have your conference, say racist stuff, but then just vote Republican. And they thought that they wanted a more a broader welfare state. They wanted more support for White families,

so you can really see the influence of this today. Their slogan was Faith, Family, and Folk. Folk being white people. And their ideas, they wanted to create like a stronger community of white people

working together more socialist in that way. I mean, they were truly fascists. And instead of providing a little bit of support for Republican tax cuts or a war in Iraq, that kind of thing, high-mob comes to live with parrot,

who parrot had married a much older woman. And so he became a stepfather at 21 of a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old girl. So by the time he's 30, high-mob is in his early 20s as are these stepdaughters.

So high-mob marriage is one of them. So they've become not just partners in racism, they also become in loss. And they have this very difficult push-and-pull. Like, almost like this is a Shakespearean relationship.

Eventually, high-mob has an affair with parents one of his wives. So he's having technically having an affair with his stepmother-in-law. They get caught.

They get there's a fist fight that breaks out. He's arrested. And that was the end of their traditionalist workers' party. That was in 2018. But eventually they came together again.

Like, once you join this movement,

“like, you're poisoned to the outside world.”

And it's very hostile inside. Like, there's a lot of people with mental illness. It's kind of a terrible place to live but you can't leave. It just traps you forever.

So these guys, like they had this horrible affair, they already came news like they're humiliated in public but they have to get back together to defend themselves against this lawsuit. And it's just their lives are bound forever.

- That is so Shakespearean. - It's just wild in there. So those were two of the younger leaders who are around before this, like, online, all right, wave. And they were rivals of Spencer

who they thought was like a snooty fancy boy.

They were considered more like working-class, low-class, they were trashy. It's just called bad optics within the right-nationalist movement. Well, Spencer was considered good optics because he's like fancy, like, worth repeat suits.

He seems like an intellectual. Really, all of them are middle-class, all of them. But there's like a lot of shame about being middle-class so either pretend to be in a aristocrat or you pretend to be working-class.

They all hide-bought compared to our dickies. The symbol of their movement was like a gear and like a plow, like they pretended to be workers and farmers.

“Like, you kind of see this now from the left, right?”

It's just like this working-class face. - Yeah. - But in reality, yeah, they're just, he's just a guy from the suburbs. - But the brother who makes Disney videos. - That's right. - That's right.

- Yes, yes. - On YouTube, yeah. - Yeah, Matt Heimbach, his brother made reviews Disney theme parks. For a living, I'm accenting me a video of it. Which he sees is like, the pinnacle of capitalists,

like, slop, like the, the meekiness of American culture when it's driven by corporate capitalism, right? So he sends me a link to one of those videos. And he's like, "I can't tell if he's the evil one or I'm the evil one."

And it's like, "Oh, you, you did fascism." - You can't tell if he's the evil one. - Oh, and then in your discussion of these two and the larger movement, you say that

“parent and high-back refer to themselves”

and one another as artists. And I know, you offer many qualifiers throughout the book, like, you know, autism does not mean that you are more likely to commit violence or being these groups. But why do they refer to themselves as autistic?

Are they actually autistic or do they just call themselves as to categorize themselves as an other or not a normie, as they would say? - With high mock and parent, they both were diagnosed with asburgers

in the 90s as children. That's no longer in the DSM, it's just all considered part of autism's back from disorder. So high mock, though, his mom was a teacher. He took a lot of behavioral training.

He basically had a remedial social skills classes.

So he learned how to have conversations, how to be charming, how a conversation was like, a tennis game where you lob the ball back and forth, even if you think the other person is kind of boring. And so, parents saw him as the perfect face of the movement

because parent described him as autistically social, that he approached socialization with an autistic obsessiveness in order to sort of perfect his performance. Even if you're looking at his hands, he's like fidgeting and tearing up a little neck

because he has so much social anxiety. Within four-channel, this was one of the first things I noticed about the alt-right movement was how often this term came up, autism, A-U-T-I-S-T, in those anonymous spaces,

I can't actually find out where you diagnosed. So it's not clear, a lot of them talk about being diagnosed, but in general, they would appeal to them as this idea that they're highly intelligent, but they lack the social skills to operate normally in society.

And especially, they lack the skills to get a girlfriend, that one of the older, more, less offensive pieces of slang that came out of this was to have spaghetti fall out of your pockets. Meaning, like you go and you try to have a social interaction and you humiliate yourself so badly if feels as though.

Spaghetti is falling out of your pockets. This is, again, like heavily influenced by in-cell culture, the idea. So in-cells, a lot of people have heard by now about Chad. He's the sort of mythical handsome man

who gets all the girls. Chad tells you to just be yourself because Chad being himself has worked so well with women,

if they are themselves, they will turn off

anyone they talk to. I did speak to Rachel Bloughden.

“She examined Dylan Roof in his sentencing.”

And diagnosed him as autistic. She said that he had approached racism with an autistic intensity. And she couldn't talk to me about him specifically, but she said that people, she advised parents of autistic children to severely limit internet time

because extremist communities can be very appealing to them. Because one, they offer a rigid, clear view of the world in how it operates. It's rules that are understandable. Two, they can communicate with other people

without social anxiety because they're doing it through the screen. And three, because there's archives of these message boards, they can go back and see how people interacted and mimic those interactions. With someone says, how is your weekend, you say it was great.

The small talk that most people do naturally, like they could learn through these archives. So I don't know what percent is actually autistic,

“but a massive percent of them identify in that way.”

Got it. OK, kind of switching gears a little bit. What is, what is gamer gate? And why is it significant?

gamer gate, gamer gate always like this.

Me a headache when I was a kid. I'm sorry. No, it's OK. It's gamer gate started with a guy claiming, falsely, that his ex-girlfriend had traded sex

for a positive review of her video game. Like the review was never even published. Like this didn't happen. But that sparked this kind of online movement of people who were obsessed with video games.

And they were coordinated on 4chan and then later at 8chan. And these were white guys who felt like they had made the video game industry what it was. And they didn't like having diversity and like women's rights forced down their throat.

They didn't want to be scolded about

that the video game girls had their boobs were too big. Like they didn't want to be yelled at about that. They wanted their video games to be the way they were. So they harassed a lot of people, women involved in the video game industry, who protested about this.

They coordinated like advertiser boycotts of Glocker and for the way that they covered gamer gate. And it was quite effective. The movement was kicked off 4chan and Fred Brennan then marketed his website, HN2, the gamer gateers.

He was like, you can come in. He did this through a man who named Mark Man who lives in Brooklyn in a home for autistic adults. So Mark Man marketed all these like the video game influencers. He's like, come over to HN.

You can harass whoever you want to. Here.

“And that's what grew HN into a huge site.”

And so Fred sort of lured it over this. He was not really into video games at all. Or the movement. But he took the opportunity to create this persona for himself as this internet super villain.

And can you talk a bit about the behavior or culture on HN or other extremist forums? Why is the general idea be more cruel than the next guy? And how does that contribute to that? So I think the people who have the best insight into this

are the few ex-girlfriends or women who are in that world. One woman I spoke to, I call her and the book, she said that these spaces reward cruelty, that a lot of times these are guys who are bullied or even abused and they are replicating

that mistreatment, that they are trying to mimic men that they've seen dominate women. There's also this phenomenon, Natalie Wind, she goes by contrapoints on YouTube. Has talked about it's like within an digital self-harm

the idea that whatever hurts is true. And people will kind of seek out the most painful comments. And like the more painful they are to read, the more I want to believe them. In cell forums, these guys would post videos of their faces.

You know, and they believe of course that they're too ugly, too ever, ever have a relationship. And the other, in cells will come in and just brutally criticize what they look like. It make fun of them.

And the original poster will just like eat this up. Like it's actually like a really dark sick place. And people involved in it, they harass other people.

I'm not saying they're like innocent victims here,

“but they are trapped in a very toxic world”

that is very painful to leave. One guy I talked to who would been in cell discord for a decade was like, he said that, you know, you're chatting in these rooms for a long time, you'll eventually let little secrets about your life slip out

and collectively, collectively, the group, the room will remember that. And then whenever you piss someone off, disagreeing with them about politics or whatever, someone will say like, hey, but like,

didn't your girlfriend break up with you? Aren't you really fat? Were you molested as a child? Nothing is off limits. Didn't your parents die in a fire?

Like it doesn't matter.

Like, and so the result is that all day long,

it's like having a speaker next to your ear if you're playing the worst moments of your life. And yet they're addicted to it. They can't leave, they spend, I mean, that one guy I talked to would go

like a full day without sleeping. He just live inside these chabrooms. Wow. It just really warps their idea of what's normal in the world, how normal people relate to each other.

I mean, they're extremely cruel to the people that they sort of consider friends. Yeah, and how are you supposed to get out of that if it's all you hear all this time? Yeah, and so you know, and then you try to interact

in the normal world and you come across as a huge asshole. (laughs) Yeah, and it's confirmation. It's like, okay, well, everybody's right online.

And then people reject you, right? 'Cause you're such an asshole. And so you just keep going back into your digital world. (dramatic music)

“Nah, there's no way you need to find out.”

(speaking in foreign language) One of the chapters that I found to be the most compelling, especially given, you know, everything we've talked about now and everything you've written about in terms of the hatred of women

and talk about women specifically on these forums and in these movements, why do women join these movements? How do they get involved? And what's their reasoning? Yeah, it's like, super dark.

(both laughing) So, one woman I spoke to, I mean, almost all of the ones that I spoke to had some kind of trauma in their past, some much worse than others, one woman I spoke to,

she started on her own going into in-cell forums because she really liked the idea of ugliness. She said that she had been sexually abused and she started to feel like she had been ugly. It wouldn't have happened to her.

And she said that she could almost de-personalize and not think of herself as a woman when they were saying these horrible things. Or alternatively, like, there was almost like a freedom or release in believing that as a woman

like your stupid, you exist for sex, like your sort of like a lower life form. Like, it's easier to believe that she said than to believe that someone that you like or love or respect is mistreating you.

Other women, they came to the all right through YouTube, usually. Several came in because they liked Richard Spencer and not 'cause of this racist stuff, he said. They liked the way he talked about protecting families.

They found it very appealing this idea of women being protected and respected for doing feminine things, right? Instead of thinking like cooking and cleaning and just being beautiful and raising children

that that's lesser or stupid or unintellectual, that in a way that that's venerated. At least that's the pitch. Now that's not the reality, once you're inside. Once you're inside, these women were treated terribly

and was awful disrespect and, you know, one woman, I became a meme in 2017, the concept of white Sharia. This is their idea of Sharia law

that like women would be second-class citizens

and a divorce, no jobs, no voting, child marriages, right?

“Rape being okay, that the only way to create the world”

they wanted in America was to strip women of the right to vote, so they called this white Sharia. And it started as a joke. And with so much of this stuff, it started become real, it started to live that way.

This woman started showing up in a hijab at alt-right parties. Her boyfriend treated her terribly spit on her in front of other people. Just she would be, I should just to back up for a second.

I got my hands on a woman's phone

Samantha for like, she quit.

“And that phone remained offline unspoiled by Wi-Fi.”

And so I like, I got the screen fixed, I go into it and I'm reading all these different chat threads. I'm living her life through these like, the many different Samantha's that exist in all these different relationships.

And one of them is with that woman who wore the burka. And that woman would tell her, like, how much she loved her forever and how much fun they were having what a cool, fun guy he sounded like on his podcast,

he was such a stud, where he talked about rape. And impregnating women and then late at night, the text returned and she would say, like, I've been dehumanized enough for one weekend. Like, I've been crying in the car for two hours.

These men are so horrible. Do not trust these men.

I'll never respect myself again.

I can't be around other men who know how I'd let my boyfriend treat me. And that would go late into the night. And then in the next morning,

“she'd be sending a link to a burka on Amazon.”

And like, I mean, I had read about how women and abusive relationships, how it takes many, many times to actually leave your abuse or how difficult it is to get out of the mental head space that you deserve this treatment.

And that he's a really a good man. But I sought play out in these text messages. And that woman left when she got pregnant. Wow. She didn't want to untold her kid to be treated that way.

That's really sad and dark. But like, all these women, like, even in front of other women in a group chat, they would say, like, I don't--

you know, these guys, like, I didn't get the jokes at first.

They were like, neeming so hard. I thought it was kind of offensive. But then I've learned that they're just joking. And this is how they're going to grow the movement. And I don't take it so personally.

But then, privately, one-on-one, they're like, I am afraid of this man. Like, I can, like, one text, it's the man that's saying, like, I cannot, and good conscience make any more propaganda to lure in women to a movement that hates them.

Wow. And I just want to say, like, the old school whitenatialists, it's like, full on Neo, not see, I interviewed Jeff Scoop, like, full on worrying, like, reinforced knuckles, like--

There's a huge scar on the back of his head from getting-- it was a tire iron, like, like, tough guy. We'll just put it that way. Like, he had done this for 30 years.

He'd known people who'd killed people. He'd known a family annihilator. But when the alt-right came online, it was so misogynistic. He's like, whoa, okay, like, this is too weird.

That's where I draw the line. I can't deal with these guys. It's just too weird for me. Oh, my God. Yeah, I remember that.

In your book, and those-- I have it highlighted. [LAUGHTER] I want to-- I could talk about this forever. But to cover all the bases, the book also details your experience at the Charlottesville, United the Right Rally.

Could you just talk about your experience there? When did you realize what was happening and what were you thinking? Yeah. I know that was going to be big going into it,

because every single light nationalist I interviewed, like I reached out to, like, even trolls. They all knew about it and thought it was really cool. It was supposed to be the climax of what they called the Summer of Hate.

There've been these like street brawls that were escalating in size and violence between leftists and the alt-right, all that year. And this was supposed to be the big one. And so I just knew I had to go.

And my bosses are correctly.

“My bosses were like, you have to get an interview.”

If you want to have to interview someone. So I reached out and this guy called me Chris Cantwell. He later became known as the Croning Nazi. And so we arranged to have an interview there. And we met in a park, in a public park,

and he had about two dozen of his little fans around him. And immediately, like, immediately, like, you could feel the, they had confidence. But also, it was very menacing. Like, even I, even I have been studying these guys for a while.

Like, even I am swayed by the feeling of like, I don't want to admit that I've been, quote, trolled, or that I am feeling any feelings, but it was, it was crazy. Yeah, yeah. I interviewed this guy and he's trying to provoke me

and repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that I am female and all these guys around him are like haggling and jeering. And, you know, like, one of the camera men over her to guy being like, oh, she's doing all the stereotypical female stuff.

You know, but they were very obsessed with my voice. But I don't have that high of voice.

But I just, I am a woman.

My voice is not as deep as a man's. Like, that's just reality.

“So from that, like, the tension, the potential energy, right?”

That you knew was going to turn into kinetic energy. Like, you could feel that it was very thick with that. And one of my colleagues overheard them saying that there would be something a nameless field that night at 930.

I knew something was happening at night, but I didn't know what. And we were like, what's nameless field like, oh, so must be some kind of code. No, there's a, there's a field at UVA called nameless field. We googled it and so we just go to it.

And there are all these vans, white vans, dropping these guys off on this field in white polos. Like, you could tell immediately that it was very well organized. Like, this wasn't just kind of thrown together. Everyone just show up.

Like, there had been a lot of planning.

So we go out through this field. And I'm standing kind of on a road above it a little bit. Looking out on this field. And they start lining up and handing up teaky torches. And then they light the mulling unison.

And suddenly you can see. It's a massive line of right-nashless with lit torches of all sneaking through this field. And that was when I was like, oh my god. Like, I mean, that was when you could see the size and seriousness

of it as a movement. Like, this is a lot of people in a college town on a summer weekend.

“That was when I was like, oh my, are they gonna win?”

That was the question that was in my head. Like, are they going to really seize the government with these ideas? So then they start marching. They were only supposed to march for five minutes.

But I found out later, they went the wrong way. Like, this wasn't planned. So they were like, they went the opposite direction. So they're marching all through campus for like 45 minutes and amping themselves up.

Like, like, in these, uncovering this world, like, I've truly learned what mob mentality is like in a way that I didn't understand before. Like, you can feel the human emotion. It's like electric moving through the crowd.

They're like, moving and hollering. And they got, they had a list of chance that they thought would be good PR. You will not replace us. But they got so excited.

They said Jews will not replace us, which is what they really believed the great replacement conspiracy theory. And that was really important for us to capture. Because before that, I'd been up for grabs.

What the all right was, was it truly a racist movement, or an anti-symanic movement. Steve Bannon had talked about it, like, you know, he's like, yeah, there's some anti-symites in it, but you know, that's not what it is as a whole, right?

They were like regular conservatives who wanted a piece of it until Charlottesville. So yeah, and like the cops didn't even show up. Like, just like March ins and this massive melee, this enormous brawl, we lost our cameraman in it.

Like I stood on top of this little column, like trying to find them, like we'd like lost them in the crowd until it all started to disperse. Who's insane, and the cops didn't show up until it was over.

Like it really was a feeling like they could do whatever they wanted. It's like this was gonna be their town for a weekend. Yeah, so that night I suppose was when I realized it'd be big. This is the next day, the next day,

that's the day of the March, the Saturday, August 12th. I mean, again, all those guys know my name. They all were familiar with my coverage and had obsessively researched my boyfriends and kinds of things about me.

I have catchphrases to them. I mean, I'm a meme to them, right? So when I would walk through their crowd, they'd be like, oh, that's a picture of mine. So are they, they'd be like, oh, hello, hello?

Like that's interesting. - Yeah.

“- That's what I say, you know, and I'm talking to them”

and I didn't want to say, oh, cool idea, dude. I say, oh, interesting. So that like, I experienced it all those differently than your average person because everywhere I walked, I would be with a focus of attention, at least for a moment.

And that like that day was like in St. Cass, there was a whole world pool of fights happening in the street and again, the police weren't stepping in to stop it at all. Not until the governor declared it was a state emergency. And then, and then they all dispersed in,

they're just marching through the streets to this other park, like it truly did feel lawless and like they ran the town for that moment. - Oh, and you write, you hinted at this in your answer, but you write that Charlottesville

was like a nuclear disaster for the alt-right. Why? - Right. So I think radiation sickness is a good metaphor here is that when you are poisoned by radiation,

at first you get really familiar symptoms like nausea, right?

But they're pretty mild. And then you enter the latency phase

but actually your cells are breaking down.

“And then after that, you enter the manifest illness stage,”

which is a gruesome and your body falls apart. And that is what happened to the alt-right. So they knew they'd taken some hits, some PR hits, they regrouped, they weren't quite sure what to do.

And then they even got some more recruits for a while for a couple months after that, like identity Europa, one of the white polo frat. And they got a lot of new recruits after that. But over time, the consequences started to build up

to where it killed the movement. Like their kicked off social media, they were all named and shamed online. They were most importantly kicked off financial services companies online so they couldn't raise money.

There was a point where a sponsor was like, I can only take money through physical checks. And then they got sued, right? And if you can't raise money or rally people to your cause, and you can't afford a lawyer,

like that's gonna have very negatively go consequences for you. And you know, there's just infinite recombinations. That moment where high-bought compared at fight each other over a woman and there's an arrest.

And that's becomes known as the night of the wrong wives. In that world, that happens in the aftermath of Charlottesville. Spencer gives a speech on a college campus in Michigan that goes so poorly, he does a YouTube where he says Antifa is winning.

Like all of it breaks apart. They all run away with their tail between their legs.

“- I think you characterized it really well in the book as well.”

And you said Charlottesville was the first kind of step off

the internet or this big step off the internet where they could say whatever they wanted on these forums be completely lawless. But as soon as you enter real life and reality, there are consequences for your actions.

- Yeah, once you enter physical space, there's a different set of rules that we have. And I don't like the idea that what happens on the internet isn't real, it is real, but it has a different laws of physics and out here.

One of the ways I think about it sometimes is this concept of tech disruption. Like yeah, you can do all kinds of disruption or whatever when you're talking about sending ones and zeros over the internet through social media companies

or apps or Uber or whatever. But that's the risk of all the submarine company, they're trying to disrupt in the physical world, right? And they have to deal with the reality of like what,

“you know, a mile of pressure of water will do”

to like a canister of steel, right? Like boom, like you run into reality when you hit physical space, a different reality. And that's what it was for them. - Moving on to another lighthearted topic,

you were there on January 6th. - I sure was. - What that heck was that like and what were you? - It was crazy as I thought it was in my little life. - Yeah.

- It was even crazier than Charlottesville because like in high school I had gone to like, all they just punk shows, I'd seen moshpids. I didn't like it. Okay, I wasn't cool.

I don't want to portray myself in that way, but like I used to seeing young men on the margins of society act a little crazy. But January 6th was like grown ups, elders. People who clearly had jobs, like people who were wearing

nice winter coats, people who could be like my aunt, you know. And just seeing them so possessed by these ideas that again that I didn't feel like they even understood the origins of like it's like they were just, I mean mob mentality, again they were just like wild,

like, capped it by this belief. I mean, I, you know, seeing it isn't thought of too well in that community. And you know, but I don't hide where I report for because if they just find out later,

then you're really in trouble. But I was just, I wouldn't be telling this one I worked for CNN. She's this kind of like physically fit. I'd say like about 60 years old,

Wiry hair, crop, I mean she looked very nice. And just the way her face twisted up with rage.

Like, I was just never forget it.

I was so shocking in the moment. Like I wasn't feeling like corresponding anger or upset at her being mad at me, but just but what horror at how the rage twisted up her face. So we heard they were like trying to break into the capital.

We raised down Pennsylvania Avenue. We get to the capital. And again, you can feel the intention of the whole crowd goes to this one's staircase because it looks like that's the only way into the capital.

stopping over bushes, whatever, climbing over retaining walls.

So my crew and I like go over there and there's just this push. We're standing on top of the walls. Some guy screams at us, you know, either good over the wall or get out of the way.

Like these elderly couple are scrambling over it. This woman says of her husband like, watch the cane. This is like so crazy. And my producer Sam Gough, she's very petite.

You know, I started to get scared. I was like, "Sam, okay, if there is a stampede, "no matter what, don't fall on the ground.

“"Like you must stay standing no matter what."”

She's like, I know. I know what happened to Moofasa. (laughing) So we'd be going to this other wall.

And a lot of people, you've probably seen this footage

of people like madly scrim climbing up a wall to get into the capital. Okay, so that's our footage, completely unnecessary. Like I'm actually standing there thinking like,

"Do I need to climb this wall?" And then here's some guy shot at this top, I'll just go around, there's stairs. (laughing) Usually we walk around the corner of the capital

and just cruise up the stairs, cruise past a couple of cops and walk on. But like that's how crazy it's over. But that's how crazy they're like, I thought they were gonna fall down

and hurt themselves. They're scaling this like two story wall. It was so insane. It was so insane. That's why we go streaming out

'cause they've been tier-guessed or maiced by the cops and they're like, genuinely upset that cops weren't on their side. Like they didn't understand. In your description,

“and I think in the talking to specifically Richard Spencer”

after January 6th, he was talking about how he was and also parroted, and I think I back as well, that they were appalled, that the normal people were now red-pilled. And you don't want too many normies

or the masses to become red-pilled. You know, they said we did Charlottesville but they did January 6th. (laughing) If this is a movement that they're trying to spread,

why don't they want the masses to be red-pilled and why are they distancing themselves from this? - Well, they used what they started. - They used to think the masses should be red-pilled. But then they saw the products of that.

So they had talked quite glibly about fascism about like changing the way our government is,

about how they would exploit the first amendment for now,

but there wouldn't be a first amendment when they were in power. Like they had spoken about that very openly, but once they see the slightly different movement that has so many of the same characteristics, actually do something much more radical

than they had considered their apology.

“- I think there's a little bit of jealousy.”

Like I've listened to podcasts where ex-alvaride guys are like, why wasn't it us? They're upset that the movement, the online social movement behind Trump are what they call the alt-light.

So like your tempules, you know, like your Benny Johnson's, your Ben Shapiro's, like Charlie Kirk, like guys who are conservative, but they're not explicitly racist. And the alt-right guys, like Spencer,

they consider those people their intellectual infereers. And they're like, so why was it them and not us? Like we could have protected society. Like we could have protected the Western Empire and instead it's in the hands of these idiots

who are just stealing our memes from 10 years ago. - Hey. - So I think it held up a mirror, a little bit, to what they had advocated for. Again, like a lot of that world started,

it all started off as a joke. And it becomes more sincere belief, but then when you see it in real life, you're really confronted with what you've been talking about. You know, tend to see it in a whole new way.

So I mean, what parents would say to me is like, I actually respect the rule of law. Like I actually think that's a good thing. I think the constitution is a good thing. He said that he thought, now Normie Conservatives

were not as ideologically radical as he was, but much more tactically radical, and then he was afraid that they would win. Spencer said, like, when you read Pil the Masses, like you don't get, you know,

this like white race that he had once talked about, like, you know, an army of chads, like a new age of Western civilization, like what you get is Ashley Babbit being shot in the neck. We get Q and O on.

I think they are much better than Q and O on. Even though, so like they believed, okay, so they believed Jews were convincing women to have babies with people of color in order to suppress the right or white race.

That's their great replacement, right?

A cabal of pedophiles is like doing mine control

in order to have child slaves and cannibalism and that kind of thing, as well as import voters for the democratic party, like the structures of these conspiracy theories are very, very similar. But the old Nazi guys, they think they're much better

because we're a lot smarter than Q and O. They think Q and O on a stupid boomerism. Wow. One of the crazy things is like going into January six, I got inside this telegram channel

on where they were planning, they were organizing, going to January six. And the people in there were talking about the normies getting bread-pilled. That's just like watching this, like you are the normies.

You are. That's you. Yeah. Oh gosh. Big question.

Broadly, how is black-pilled culture

seeping into the mainstream?

“Oh, I mean, I think, oh my God, like it's scary to me.”

I mean, yeah, the idea of burning it all down. I mean, so there's been all this discourse about podcasts, right? And I love podcasts. I listen to them a lot. So I kind of love this discourse.

But like why aren't there big liberal podcasts the way there was Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughan who had Trump on to talk about cooking? And I was listening to Theo Vaughan recently and at the very end of normal just like two-hour podcast

about not being able to get girls or using dick pills. He's like talking about how the number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt. And how fucked up the system is, how terrible it is. And why hasn't there been any change?

It's been so long and there's no change.

And he's like, you know, people are so sick of the system. You almost want to ward it into it all for whatever. Right? Like that kind of thinking. That's a black-pilled thinking.

And like, it's everywhere. I mean, I interviewed these women who had been radicalized during COVID because the thought school should be open. Like they were living in blue states. And there were very strict controls

on when kids could go back to school. And to be fair, like in hindsight, they were right broadly, right? Like kids probably should have gone back to school. It was very bad for kids to go back to school

and they didn't spread COVID as much as adults. But like that really changed her. She did it turned her from a liberal to a hardcore to Santa's support her. And she called herself black-pilled.

Like it's just like this idea of everything is corrupt. Burn it all down. Like when you'd interview people, like I interviewed normal people who were excited about Donald Trump or like they thought he said crazy stuff

or they thought Jan 6 was crazy. But, you know, they're a desperate for some kind of change. They just want to like burn it all down. They don't want to defend institutions, right? The way like Democrats and moderate Republicans

talked about this election. They want a huge shake up. They want change. Maybe they're not able to find it in the best healthy as places.

“But I mean, that's how desperate they are for it, I think.”

- Better than nothing, right? - Yeah. - What would you have written, if you wanted to, as an update to the book, if you had finished it after the 2024 election?

- Working on that now. - Yeah. - The theme that I'm interested in is one has how this election was framed as a boy's versus girl's election. The massive, massive gender gap.

And what where that comes from and to, just the pervasiveness of this culture that I wrote about that was once so obscure and how it is just, it is the foundation that online political culture is built on now

and people will repeat ideas taken from there without even realizing it. So I was listening to Joe Rogan right after the election. And he was talking about how we've been walking on the street with a guy who was a liberal

that he called a cook, okay? So that, that wasn't all right term. Like that meant from cook hole,

“the idea, you know, men who have women have sex with other men, right?”

That was their term for conservatives that conservatives were letting in immigrants to have their way with America, right? So in that moment, is Joe Rogan thinking, I'm gonna reference the all it right now

in this weird sexual exploitation for immigration, like no, of course not. Of course he wasn't thinking that way. It's just like how deeply embedded these ideas are and how, like, this way of looking at politics

through this lens of masculinity and like defending your masculinity

how to make the world like more generally better

“year over year, like, they're about projecting strength”

and power and your identity as a man.

- And finally, what message would you like readers

to take away after reading Blackpill? - I want people to take away that, for good and for ill, like little actions can have big effects down the road. Small movements, small changes in the culture, can have a massive impact on society down the road.

So when I was at Gen 6, again, people extremely hostile to CNN, but if I wanted them to talk to me, I'd say, tell me what happened for history, right? Like we just got to get it all down, like say what happened because these guys wanted to be part of history

and they wanted to step forward and take their place in history. And they did, for the worse, right?

But like, they were willing to go forward

and take that action. And I think I want regular people to understand, like the danger of some of these ideas, but also that, like, you don't have to wait for your member of Congress to do something.

Like you can take an action to change society for the better, right? Like stop just waiting around for Kamala Harris to rescue you, like, politics happens at your on your school board.

- Yeah. - And when I think, if you're a little cousin, you're not few of your son, especially women as well, but particularly the boys spending a lot of time

“on the internet, like, you need to make them go outside”

and literally touch grass and like have conversations with those guys, so they don't get lost. - Yeah. - I'm not a very dark world. That is bad for society, but also bad for them, personally.

- Yeah, absolutely. Recognizing the alt-right internet slaying creep too, I think it's a big part of me. - Yeah. This is like, when they get that little smirk on their face

and like they say some slaying you haven't heard of, like, go ahead and go Google that. We're just let it go, like, you're screaming and yelling and sort of like a moralizing speech doesn't change minds, but don't just let it go easier, don't just play it, right?

- Yeah.

“- You know, there's actually phone calls with the guy”

who murdered a woman, James Alex feels at Charlottesville between him and his mother that we're made public in this trial. And in the phone call, he's telling his mom, how he wants Richard Spencer to be president.

Like, don't be that mom. - Yeah, say something mom. (laughs) - Yeah, like say something with words too late. - Well, thank you so much.

This I learned so much and this was awesome. - Oh, it was really fun talking to you. I really appreciate it at a good time. (upbeat music) - The Laugh Fair podcast is produced in cooperation

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