Endless Thread - Black Pilled

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

When reporter Elle Reeve is recognized at the airport, it's often by members of the alt-right: the online white-nationalists who organized the violent Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017, and who originated much of today's political rhetoric. How did a bunch of 4chan users feeding Microsoft's Tay chatbot hateful language become such a potent political force? Elle Reeve joins Endless Thread to discuss her book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. Show notes: Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. (Amazon) Charlottesville: Race and Terror (Vice) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson. Our managing producer is Samata Joshi.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. My name is Ellie Reeve. I'm a correspondent for CNN. I live in New York, and I travel around the country talking to people about politics. We've talked to a lot of people have become memes before, but I feel like you have become a meme for a very specific group of people. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, I am the most famous to the worst people.

If I go through the airport, maybe occasionally someone will recognize me. But if I'm in a white nationalist rally, they all do. It's almost 100% ID. It's calmed down a little bit now. But there's a long time where if a white male like 18 to 35 approached me, I'd have to sort of be on high alert. Like, is this guy Nazi? Like, they usually couldn't help themselves and would make a little joke that was a tell about who they really were.

I mean, it's uncomfortable because it's so close, right? It's a lot easier to observe a phenomenon that's not happening to you. But just the intense rage at women, that was really shocking. Like, of course, I'd heard sexist comments in the world. Like, I've watched movies. I've seen TV. I've lived in the world. It's not a surprise to me that,

a lot of people view women as dumb and seeking male attention. But that's another big part of it. They believe that women are entirely motivated by seeking male attention, and they will do anything for male attention. You're not really allowed your own thoughts in their worldview. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and from WBUR in Boston, this is Endless Thread. I'm rolling solo with you this week, but with a little help, a lot of help, from Ellie Reeve, author of Black Phil.

So you may have noticed there's an election coming next month. And this month, we are talking about ideas, people, and online communities that may play into the election. We wanted to talk to Ellie because she spent a long time following one of the most endless and naughty threads there is, that of the alt-right, which she describes as an internet savvy, younger, more middle-class white nationalism. Vice News correspondent Ellie Reeve was in the middle of all that. She joins us now. Ellie, thanks for being with. Ellie decided to devote herself to the white nationalism beat because of a moment in AI, a moment that will be familiar to endless thread listeners.

March of 2016. When Microsoft launched its ill-fated and short-lived chatbot on Twitter, Tay. It was a computer that they named Tay. Tay was supposed to talk like a teenage girl, but she was programmed to mimic people who interact. with her on Twitter, which did not end well, thanks to a whole lot of people from the online alt-right. So I was on 4chan when Tay was released.

And so I watched all of this happen live, where at first they respond to Tay, like, oh, another dumb white woman, another stupid white woman, like the same way they would respond to me, even though obviously she's not real. But once they realized they could manipulate her, the way they moved as like a hive mind without knowing each other's names or faces, without any real coordination, like the only organizing principle was trying to be funnier than the last guy, trying to get her to say something more depraved than the last guy. And I realized watching this like they were clever, they were young, there was a lot of them,

they were pretty well educated. I'm from the South, so I had always been interested in the racial undercurrents of American politics, and I felt that Northerners turned a blind eye to that. But even so, like, I also had believed that racism was something that was a problem for the older generation, that those people were dying out, that the new people were educated, and we were all moving past that. And seeing that happen live with Tay, I realized that wasn't true. I mean, it's just the sheer numbers of it. I just could tell there were so many of it.

Trolling culture had a huge role in 2016, the rise of the alt-right. I know you've talked to Richard Spencer about how people online would read racist literature to troll and then actually be convinced by it, like really opt into it and believe it. At what point did you start realizing that even if many people's entry point into, to the alt-right was Pepe memes or whatever, it was actually something to be taken seriously because people were starting to really believe this stuff and operate their lives within this paradigm. Yeah, initially I thought if you trolled yourself into believing it, it couldn't be that deeply held to believe or you could, you know, troll yourself out of it. So that conversation I had

with Richard Spencer was in 2016, right after Trump was elected, I still wasn't sure how real it all was. I was speaking to him at a conference where 300 people had showed up. And, I mean, it was shocking how viscerally they believed it and they would repeat, you know, the great replacement conspiracy theory to me. I had several people tell me their IQs. But even then, I didn't understand And I still didn't understand it yet. But in 2017, there were this series of street brawls between the alt-right and leftist or anti-Trump protesters or anti-fascists. They just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It was proof they were willing to put their bodies on the line for this.

We talk a lot on our show about the blurring lines between online communities and real life communities. And this seems to get at that. This kind of feedback loop is created where people who might otherwise, at least in this case, for worse, be isolated and feel isolated and feel like their beliefs are not acceptable, start to find community, for lack of a better term. first online and then in real life. And that seems like it kind of comes to a head a little bit in Charlottesville. Can you talk about that? No, a lot of these guys want friends. And this gives them a way of having friends.

I mean, you know, in the starkest terms, right? It's like a community that will accept you as long as you're willing to say the inward, you know? That's all you have to do. But then no matter how awkward you are or weird you are or maybe you feel very unattractive, you have low self-confidence, you're in as long as you're willing to say this hateful stuff. So in Charlottesville, the Friday night before the rally is a torch march. I didn't know that's what it was going to be, but we stood as they prepared for it, disturbing and ominous, right?

But they were thrilled by it. And that emotion got to them as they kept marching. They're literally whooping and hollering. It's like crazier than any football game I've ever been to. They were supposed to say, you will not replace us. That was their slogan that was supposed to bring in moderate people. Because the idea is for normal people who aren't sophisticated about this stuff to think, like, yeah, why should these guys want to be replaced?

What's wrong with wanting to still exist and there to be white culture? What's wrong with that? But they got so amped up that they shouted, Jews will not replace us. Exposing that they believed in this bizarre conspiracy theory that Jews are intentionally replacing white people with people of color. I mean, it's mob mentality. It's like, it's real. It's just the way feelings move through the crowd. electricity, you know, like I could feel it, even though I was not of it. I could feel the power of

those emotions. And these guys all swirl together and they like fight this tiny handful of students. And they're so happy. Like they've done it. They've come, you know, notice like they weren't wearing masks in Charlottesville. They were proud of themselves. It's interesting. You're talking about this chant Jews will not replace us. And, you know, one of the leader of this event, Elliot Klein, told you that they should have organized a chant master and that that chant sort of ruined

the propaganda value of the spectacle. At this point, their anti-Semitic views are pretty well established to anyone who poked around on what they were saying online, including you. Why do you think the leaders wanted less anti-Semitic chanting? Well, I don't think that America is ever going to go full Nazi.

You know, like... How come? Because all of our modern myths are about how America beat Nazis. I mean, all these Steven Spielberg movies. Like, Indiana Jones punches Nazis. Like, do you want to be Indiana Jones or do you want to be the Nazi loser? Like, you want to be Indiana Jones. Like, Nazis are in our culture, like, the old.

ultimate symbol of evil and weakness and this like slippery nastiness, they lose, we win, right? They wanted to portray themselves as just defending their right to exist. Ellie said that in order to bring more people into the movement, a lot of the organizers wanted to represent themselves as slightly less extreme, including the then-avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer. Spencer also told me that the Confederate statue issue is really a great one for them because they almost didn't have to say anything at all. They could just say, like, look, this beautiful work of public art is being taken away for reasons you don't understand. And we don't want our history washed away. You notice that right after Charlottesville, Donald Trump gave a press conference

and when he talked about how, well, yeah, they're taking down Robert E. Lee now, but it'll be George Washington next. What happened to the alt-right after Charlottesville? Where'd they go? Well, they're not gone. Ellie tells us after a quick break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. hockey.

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Let's talk about the aftermath of Charlottesville a little bit. You know, in some ways, Charlottesville backfired on its organizers. Yeah. At what point did you start to see them really? realized that things had gone south on this effort, on this Unite the Right rally. So the rally happened on a Saturday, and that's when a woman was murdered, the guy driving a car into a crowd. A 32-year-old woman killed a number of severe injuries, many life-threatening.

I talked to Richard Spencer that Sunday, and he already was nervous about what had happened, but I don't think it had hit him yet. He talked about how he had talked to these guys in Vanguard America. It was a white nationalist group. The murderer, James Alex Field, was holding one of their shields. He had asked them, you know, who's in charge here? And they just gleefully responded, like, no one's in charge. He was saying, like, you know, maybe we need to do something to kind of control the wilder elements,

maybe the mentally ill people who are attracted to the movement. But they still thought they were on the rise. But then all those guys who had been so proud to show their faces got doxed. They got fired. They lost their jobs. They lost their social media accounts. Then they lost the power to raise money online. So a couple weeks after Charlottesville, Spencer is complaining to me that the only way he can raise money is through checks.

Because at the end of the day, if you want to take money in America on the Internet, you need an American company to process a credit card. and all these payment processors were kicking them off. They're getting deplatformed not just from social media and stuff like that, but even more kind of old-school parts of the way that society works. They're getting pushed off. Exactly. The de-platforming from financial services companies was very significant. So then they all got sued, or most of them, like the big name guys,

they all got sued in this federal civil lawsuit. And these guys, because they couldn't raise money, and also because of who they were, couldn't get or pay for good lawyers. This court case had a very long discovery process where all these internal communications were revealed. And it showed exactly what these guys had done in the organization of Charlottesville, how careless they'd been, how glib they'd been about violence. the people they trusted who maybe they shouldn't have, that there had been violent talk within their Discord servers, and they hadn't done anything about it. And they were later found liable for millions of dollars.

The judge reduced it, and that's still ongoing, how much they'll actually owe in the end. But they were just forced to sit there and look at what they'd done, and I think it was actually quite powerful. and almost everyone who was sued washed out of the movement. It's interesting to hear you talk about the sort of systematic disassembly of the movement via legal efforts and also just like de-platforming of financial ability for these people. Do you feel like people understand that, like understand what has happened?

Because my assumption would always be like, oh, they're fine because they're not getting deep. platformed effectively. But it sounds like this was a real blow after Charlottesville to the movement, as you saw it. Yeah, I think there's a bias toward pessimism. Obviously, politics in America right now is like crazy. And a lot of dark stuff is being promoted by pretty high power people. But yes, there have been things that worked. I spoke to this organization, Color of Change, who long before Charlottesville had been lobbying

these companies saying, hey, like, did you know you're helping the clan raise money? You're helping this white nationalist raise money. And they said that they, you know, what they hear is like the slippery slope argument. Well, if we do that, then we, you know, well, then we're going to have to like, then it'll be someone who's a little bit. And next thing you know, it's, you know, marginal tax rates gets you deep platforms. Next thing you know, they're pulling down the George Washington. It's the same kind of argument. Exactly. Then after Charlotte's all of a sudden, these companies found out they could do something, right? Even though no laws had changed, they found out they could do it.

I think when many people look at Charlottesville in January 6th and then at what's happening today, there's this temptation to think about these things as vaguely connected but really separate events that are part of a larger kind of chaos. But in Charlottesville, Nazi organizers were comparing counter protesters to Cat Ladies, and now J.D. Vance is comparing the entire Democratic Party, I guess, to Cat Ladies. So these things, these ideas do have more direct connections than I think we assume. It seems like we haven't learned that much about stopping hateful ideas from going mainstream. The alt-right pushed the Overton window very far right, and then they were sort of discarded.

They're not, like the troll culture is not necessary anymore. Like that feeling that sort of internet swagger, the like machismo, that's still there. But people are willing to do that on Twitter under their real names. And Tucker Carlson is willing to talk about the great replacement with his face and his voice and his real name. Now, he doesn't say it's Jews doing it. He says Democrats are replacing voters who are white with immigrants. immigrants. But like the alt-right is no longer necessary. Like you don't need a Pepe the Frog avatar. You tweet hard enough like you might make it as a MAGA media influencer.

Yeah, this brings me to this like fundamental question and I think a lot of us, well, I think a lot of people wrestle with, which is like internet bad, internet good. You know, hate has always existed. But what is it about this kind of specific? brand of extremism that we see now and that you've documented that really could have only happened on the internet? I've definitely joked with academics who researched this stuff that the internet was a mistake. And just like, you know, the 4chan folks where there's this blurry line between ironic and sincere, like that's true for me too. Like, sometimes I do just want to shut it all off. like being able to order food on the internet is not worth the rest of this.

It's not worth the cost. But I think the really dangerous parts about the internet is like a Discord server, a chat group, a Facebook group, whatever, where you feel like you're talking to your real friends, the people who really get it. And it creates this kind of doom loop where you're in this world, you're sharing the most horrible things possible, like the worst. possible examples of your enemy. And I can see this happen on the left too.

Like this is a content ideology neutral process. But it creates this very black-pilled way of thinking where just total nihilism. Like everything is horrible. And it prepares you to be open to much more radical change and radical tactics to bring down this like monstrous society that you think is doing these horrible things, whether it's, you know, a secret pedophile cult with QAnon or whatever.

Some of the most notorious alt-right people you have interviewed have changed their minds or kind of distanced themselves from the racist causes they, you know, championed previously. When have you been most surprised by these about, faces, and are you, and are you convinced by them, how did these about faces come about? Well, there's two different sets. So the guys who got sued in Charlottesville, those guys who were in court, who watched the testimony of the victims, there was a woman who was hurt both days, both in the torch march and was hit by the car, those guys were the ones who had to live. look at what they'd done and actually grapple with it.

A lot of them have come to terms with that they were racist against black people. A big part of this culture was like viewing themselves as the rightful heirs to the top of society because they had high IQs. And the outcomes of their lives have showed them that, you know, having an IQ doesn't really guarantee you success in life or guarantee that you'll make good decisions. You don't say. Yeah. So they've backed off that.

A little bit. Clearly from your reporting, what seems true is like the racists are not all going to die off. No. So the thing you really have to do is kill the racism inside of the people that harbor it or that, you know, make the racism their identity. It's like a virus. You need a vaccine for it. I mean, the most compelling example for me is Fred Brennan. Fred, a severely disabled, brilliant child, forced into foster care, very lonely, very sad, creates 8chan, a even more angry, free message board than 4chan, eventually becomes the place from mass shooters, post or manifestos for QAnon posts. Fred realized over time he had made something bad.

Like 8chan had changed his life. It had made him a lot of money. He, was able to afford a home health aid. He was able to leave really difficult circumstances, and it took him a long time to appreciate that this thing that had benefited him personally had made him famous and it got him quoted in the media was a bad thing. And unlike a lot of people who've helped make a bad thing and then just commentate on how bad it is, he actually went to try to destroy it. He wrote to all these internet services companies trying to get 8 Chan taken down. He's the person that I hold up is like the great lesson. Like if he can do it, if he can take action to try to make America a better place like the rest of us can do.

Ellie, thank you so much for writing the book and for spending this time with us. We really appreciate it. Oh, thanks for having me. It's been talking to you. By the way, when we talked to Ellie, she let us know that she had just started a family. And as we listened back to our conversation with her, I had a nagging question. For someone like Ellie, who just published a book on the darkest corners of the internet coming to life, why bring another soul into the world considering everything she's witnessed? She sent us a little voice memo in response, and I think you should hear it too. My friends and I have this long-running joke.

It goes, no, no dessert for me. I'm going to die someday. It'd be a waste. the idea is why bother doing anything, even eating chocolate cake, when we all know what's going to happen in the end. So you're not the first person to ask me why have a baby when I report on such a dark world. And actually that dark world has also been very interested in whether I had a kid for years. One guy warned me not to waste my Aryan eggs on my Jewish boyfriend, but I married that boyfriend. And we had a beautiful baby this year.

So the short version is I had a baby because I believe in the fundamental goodness of the human race. I see my job as pointing out problems that others might not have noticed in the hopes that others come together and do something to fix it. And I hope maybe my kid is a part of that. Excellent one. Excellent work. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. I am Cat Lady Ben Brock Johnson. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter.

Mix and sound designed by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Summint to Joshi, Paul Vikas, Amory Severson, and Dean Russell. Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and democracy, baby. If you have an unsolved mystery and untold history or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless thread at wbUR.org. See you next week.