Offline with Jon Favreau - The Biden Reckoning Will Be Tweeted; plus, Interviewing Nazis with Elle Reeve

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

Elle Reeve, CNN commentator and author of the new book Black Pill, joins Offline to share her reporting on the darkest corners of the internet. For over a decade, Reeve has tracked the emergence of the alt-right, watched them radicalize on sites like 4chan and 8chan, and documented their migration off the web and into the streets of Charlottesville and halls of the Capitol. She and Jon talk about how this new brand of white nationalism feeds on male loneliness and white resentment, the schisms within the movement, and its implications for politics. But first! Jon and Max unpack the last few weeks of Dem Drama®. The guys critique the debate discourse, explain why social media forced this conversation to happen, and reveal why Jon is finally disabling some of his Twitter notifications. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Chris Cantwell, he's the person the burden of defending the white race. And when he goes out with a woman, he wants to have popcorn and watch a movie and not talk about race war and how hard that is. And my producer in that room, Tracy Jarrett, a black woman, goes, Are you sad? And he starts crying. He's like, Yeah, I'm sad. It's just, it's right under the surface.

I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, journalist and CNN correspondent, Ellie Reeve. Some of you may remember Ellie from her days at Vice News, where she embedded herself with white nationalists at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Since Charlottesville, Ellie's dedicated her career to covering the rise of the alt-right. Unfortunately for all of us, there's been lots to cover. She just wrote a phenomenal new book called Black Pill,

How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. Very offline title, right? Yeah, we have a daily practice here of witnessing the dark corners of the internet poison our society. And capture American politics is everything. I mean, in the book, Ellie writes about everything from the early meme magic of alt-right shit posters to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. At one point, she even gets a hold of Richard Spencer's old emails. It's a fascinating book. Ellie's a tremendous reporter.

I'm a big fan. We had a great conversation about the book, how the white nationalist movement has changed since Charlottesville, and how the darkest corners of the internet led us to our current political shitstorm. But first, Max, I don't know if you've been paying attention. There seems to be some turbulence in the presidential race. You know, I did hear something about this. Have you heard about this? I did. So just to catch everyone up on where we are, here's what happened. Joe Biden challenged Donald Trump to an early debate as a way to capture voters' attention

in this fractured media environment that we talk about. That's the strategic mind at work. Yes. In a race where he was slightly behind, 50 million Americans tuned in. Trump lied about everything, but the president didn't really respond because he was basically incoherent for a full 90 minutes. Voters immediately judged Trump, the winner of the debate by the largest margin in any presidential debate in history. And in the two weeks since that moment, Biden has fallen further behind in the polls amid calls from Democrats like us for him to step aside before the convention so we can nominate a candidate who has a better chance of defeating Trump. That is the reality of what has happened.

We've talked about it on every episode of Pod Save America, but for so many reasons we'll get into, this is a very offline story because social media and especially Twitter has had a huge effect on the post-debate discussion of whether Biden should drop out, what the polling says, and the democratic drama that has divided the party that we have on Pod Save America found ourselves a bit in the middle of. All right. Everyone's heard more than enough on this from me. What is your reaction to watching all this unfold?

So I think we've been very rightly focused on the degrees to which this is one of the largest political moments of our lives, both because it really matters for what is going to happen for the future of our democracy as we president, but also because we are watching the way our democracy works evolve before our eyes in real time. And I think by the same token, it is also one of the biggest and most important media and social media stories of our lives. I mean, I think this is a moment that would not be happening without certain media outlets and social media playing this role of sparking this moment, creating this moment. That's something that I have heard from a lot of people in media and in politics. I'm sure you have too, where

this didn't just happen spontaneously, where we had these media outlets, social media, that were able to both create a sense of consensus, common knowledge, where we all kind of already knew this in the back of our heads that like the campaign's not going well, he's really old, he's struggling, he's behind in the polls, but creating this moment where we are all going to look each other in the eyes and we are going to publicly agree that this situation is a disaster. And we are all going to join hands and jump together to do something about it because no one else was going to create that moment. There was no one else who was going to instigate that. There's no, you know, we're all kind of waiting for someone to step in and play this leadership role. And I think that that was something that happened through

social media, creating that consensus and through media outlets, like, you know, you guys stepping up and saying, we have to have this conversation. We have to all acknowledge what's happening. We have to do something about it because nobody else is going to do it for us. And I think it's why we've gotten as far in this as we have. Yeah. I mean, to go back to like moments after the debate, we had not really dug into the Twitter reaction or the public reaction. We didn't have much time. It was late at night. We were on the East Coast. We had to record. So, you know, we saw like the first moments on CNN after the debate was over. But we sort of looked at each other and we're like, what? Like we can't, how could we say anything but the truth of what happened?

We had also been getting texts from our friends in democratic politics, activists, organizers, smart people we know saying all the same thing, right? But privately. Privately. That's the key, I think. And I was just like, how could we maintain our credibility with our audience? Or even like, how could we look at ourselves without just being honest about what happened? And I'm not even saying this from like a morally righteous thing.

Like we can debate that at some other time. But like just from a pure political strategy perspective, I'm always thinking of like as a strategist and an organizer, right? Like people saw what they saw. We've talked a million times on this show about media filters and how something that happens ends up getting to someone through whatever platform they're watching, whatever platform they're using, whatever they're watching on their screens, etc. This is one of the few

sort of unfiltered moments in American life. We've talked about the monoculture on this show before. And like Taylor Swift or the Super Bowl or the Oscars, like there's very few things like this. This is one where 50 million people watched and they were able to form opinions before a single pundit reporter, anyone, opened their mouth. I think that's important psychologically, not just because everyone was

seeing it unfiltered rather than like you're saying the usual way we experience it filtered through social media, where we see the clips that are presented to kind of confirm our existing biases, but also because we all knew everybody else was seeing it. Have you heard the social science concept common knowledge? It's this idea that, I mean, we know colloquially what common knowledge means is that everybody knows something, but there's this idea that, I mean, we know colloquially what common knowledge means is that everybody knows something. But there's this idea that if I tell you something like Joe Biden might be too old to campaign against for president, you might agree with me and you might believe that. You might think like, yeah, that's true. But if I tell you that in front of a room of 100 people who you know, who you consider your peers and colleagues, and you see them all absorb that information together, you will believe that exponentially more strongly and you will be exponentially more willing to act on that

because we're social creatures. And that knowledge that something is shared information, shared knowledge among your community is extremely powerful. So I think that was part of it. But I think there is also a like, I don't know, not to use like pundit filter because that is a little derisive,

but I think that there is a really important role here for the media to play and that they did play in telling people there's no one who's going to come to the rescue here. It's us who's got to do it. We've got to create this pressure. We've got to create this moment. And it's media being able to tell people that it's not okay, it's not working, and that something has to change and that something could change. I think is a really like, look, I spent a lot of time in past jobs reporting on and in backsliding democracies in Europe and Latin America. And something that you really see is a big determinant for whether they succeed or fail, whether they're able to protect their democracy, is whether they have independent institutions that can hold the leader accountable. And that doesn't just mean like, do you have an independent DOJ who can prosecute like actual crimes by a commander in chief? It means do you have an independent media who can step in and tell people the political party needs to be checked by donors, by rank and file members in the party, by the voters who can have something. The media can come in and play this role as an independent

like auditor to say it's not working and to galvanize people to action in a way that was not going to have before. You know, we were saying before we recorded that former rep Jane Harmon unfavorably compared this to the Arab Spring, which I thought was a choice. I thought the Arab Spring was good. Weird to say the Arab Spring is bad now and it's bad to fight for democracy but i think it is similar in the sense that people in egypt wherever had hated hosni mubarak forever i'm not saying joe biden is hosni mubarak but that's the takeaway title of the episode but that people had always known in egypt like i hate hosni mubarak all my neighbors hate him but what could we possibly do about it and that the introduction of social media and Facebook had created this moment where everybody could come together and they could see, oh, we actually all agree and we're all ready to jump

together to do something about him. And 80 million people has the power to do that. And I think that is what's happening now, thanks to media conveying to people that this needs to happen and also giving them permission structure to do it. I also think though, on the flip side of this, what a lot of the, I would say the Biden or bust crew, I think is missing is that this is a situation where the elites, the pundits, especially democratic pundits, especially Democratic officials, had like caught up with where most Americans already were. And I think that's for those of us who, you know, for the wilderness, right? Like I sit in, I for years now have sat in focus groups before the midterms where people were like, Joe Biden is too old.

Why are we doing president? I'm like, oh, no, we're going to lose midterms. But then at the end of the focus group, they'd say, oh, well, I'm still going to vote for a Raphael Warnock or I'm still going to vote for John Fetterman. But it's just Joe Biden that I have a problem with. And so, and it's not just like me that saw that. It's like everyone who does polling,

everyone who does focus groups, right? And so it was this moment where everyone else sort of caught up. And I kind of thought, but it was fascinating right after it happened, right? Because right after the debate, all of these people who have influence in the party, they have to make a split decision, right? And so on CNN, I see Kate Bedingfield, right?

Who was White House Communications Director under Biden. Very close Biden staffer, great person, super smart. And Kate in the split second is like, that was bad. That was a disaster. It was really bad, you know? And then I watching like Gavin Newsom, right. Who has been like rumored as a possible replacement, you know? And he does the, like, this is unhelpful, this criticism of the debate but and i was just like oh interesting yeah like it like everyone and i and it was sort of at that moment i'm like i we i wouldn't want to i don't believe it and like i need we need to win right so we need to have this conversation

yeah and then there was this interesting dynamic where like the next day and the day after like i expected the biden campaign to be annoyed and to push back that's their job right that's what they're doing i can quibble with how they did it but whatever but like every single other person in life normies junkies right former colleagues current strategists and staffers be like it was awful what are we going to do? Yeah. And the only universe of people who were like, that didn't happen. Everything's fine. Is like this universe of resistance, progressive accounts on Twitter.

Sometimes they pop up as cable pundits. And it was just fascinating to see this sort of closed circuit world. Right. That was, I've never seen the divide between like what's happening on Twitter and I guess Instagram and some other platforms. And what's going on in reality or offline. Right. Because it's all the real world now. Right.

What's going on offline. I've never seen the gap so big. I think that's true. And I think that actually also speaks to the importance of having a media who can tell people hard truths sometimes. This is a really uncomfortable moment for everybody. And like a heuristic that you have used a lot that I think is absolutely right. It's like, you either respond to this moment, like you think democracy is on the line, or you don't. And I saw this really, I thought, really telling moment on MSNBC where there was, I can't remember the name of the host, but there was some host who was like,

we got some new polling. It's really bad for Biden. And she said, I know this is a tough story for our audience, but I'm not going to hide anyone from the news. And I thought that's really interesting. Oh, that's right. That's right. It was Nicole Wallace. Thank you. And I think that you see- I will say, MSNBC has been fascinating nicole wallace yeah jen saki who was i feel for jen my good friend and also was joe biden's press secretary in the white house alex wagner have been very like they've been covering the story you know and i think you know in fair chris rachel too i think yeah but like a lot of the MSNBC hosts have decided like we're going to tell people what they want. You know, our audience might be mad.

We're going to do the other thing and like whatever. Right. That's their thing. But it's been it's fascinating. Well, it's similar to the elected Dems. Like I think it seems like basically every elected Dem, as far as I can tell, agrees that Joe Biden is going to lose. And it seems like the disagreement is either you think democracy is on the line and therefore we have to do whatever we can to take the appropriate necessary steps in order to save democracy. Or you think, you know, Trump's not so bad anyway. Like, we can deal with another term of that and it would be really uncomfortable for me to, you know, challenge a sitting president.

And I think you see something similar in the media where I think that there is this question of do we challenge our audience on what they want to hear? And do we really reconsider media norms for how we've covered someone like a sitting president? But the other dynamic here is I don't know that a lot of people are equipped with knowing what the audience wants.

That's true. And what the audience really wants, which gets into the polling and everything. And this is where Twitter is not real life and is real life. Because I think that a lot of people are being influenced by the very noisy but small contingent on Twitter that is very angry.

So like, I'm obviously in this because of this show. Well, it didn't take me off my phone during my week of quote-unquote vacation in Maine. But at one point, I was like, I don't want to read all these replies. This is crazy. So I changed my settings in Twitter to only get mentions from people that I follow. It's so funny that this was the moment to do it, which feels telling. I know. It feels, I mean, this is a-

But then I'm like, why do I need this input from these people who are not making very logical arguments? I got there years ago. I've only seen replies from people who I follow for years now. So I changed to that and I was like, and honestly, it was better.

Like I was on my phone, I was doing that. But you know, Emily was saying this to me. She's like, you don't seem like angry or anxious. You see, and I'm like, because I'm saying what I want to say and I feel good about it. Like I don't, I'm not worried about it. And then I'd get all these people in my life, people who are not political junkies, just being like, hey, I just want to check in and see if you're okay. Because I know it's been tough. And I'm like, what do you mean it's been tough? Like I just, I saw the reply to some of your tweets.

Oh, yeah. Oh, and that's happening with with other people. A strategist reached out to me and one of the members who had Democratic members who had spoken out, that person was getting just a ton of incoming on Twitter, I guess. I didn't see it. But the strategist was like,

can you help this member out because they're just getting a lot of bad feedback on Twitter. And they wrote, the ratio is bad. Get off your phone. And I was like, the ratio, come on. I know. Member of Congress, don't worry about the ratio.

Read a poll. The ratio is a thousand people. This is the problem. I'm really concerned. And this is me as the polling nerd and the person who's done wilderness. But like polling is imperfect for sure. It's true.

Polling can be wrong. Yeah. But it's the only tool we have to measure public opinion. Right. And I will tell you. Your Twitter replies are not a good measure. That's not a good poll. Yeah.

I will tell you, it's absolutely not a good poll. Mm-hmm. Like, and random people who claim that they're like PhDs in political science and have seen the future. That's not, like, come on yeah yeah it is wild it is wild so i think the the like biden dead ender contingent online does not seem to represent that much of a like political faction it doesn't seem like they are like speak to some larger movement that we have to worry about i do think it is a telling moment that they exist even just online even if they don't represent that many voters, because it is a reminder that this is just how politics works

now, that it can affect absolutely anything, that your policy beliefs and your candidate of choice are not just like preferences anymore. They're your identity and they're your identity and that you are a soldier in an army and your enemy is any faction or group that is at odds with your preferred candidate or your preferred policy beliefs and that's something that i know we've seen like in democratic primaries past and like elections past we've i think it's something that we associate more with like further left or further right positions but this is a reminder that this is really universal and how our politics work now and it's especially something you experience online because

the things that you're going to see on your feed are going to be the people who disagree with you the most who have like the sharpest version of the argument and it's like it is both a reminder that twitter is not real life and the like angry biden dead enders that you see online even if they have a few thousand retweets that's fucking nothing it's a country 300 million people like that doesn't represent anything, but is also a reminder that this same kind of politics as identity, ultra-factional polarization,

it can happen to centrist, blue-wave folks too. Yeah, and I do want to say something to people who may be listening or watching us on social media right now and getting ready to angrily tweet, I do not want to impugn motivations or conspiracies on anyone, right? I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who are like, you know what? I also think Joe Biden's old.

I'm a little worried. I'm going to vote for him. And I worry is all of this debate is hurting the democratic party who's going to hurt joe biden stuff like that so i get that i do want to just tell people that i mean first of all some of the there's there is one thing going around online that has been picked up everywhere that's like it's only these white men that are trying to that are trying to the white men are trying to um push aside the 81 year old white man in favor of his like i said i i do think kamala harris would give us a better chance than joe biden at this point sure so like i'd be very happy if kamala harris uh stepped up i also said an open process and convention would be great but like i definitely think kamala harris would give us a better chance than biden

um and it's somehow that is the racist sexist position it's the racist sex It's like, well, these white men don't have as much at stake as like everyone else. And I'm like, but so it's, it's illogical on its face, of course, but also again, it's a polling thing. The polls show a majority of black voters, Latino voters, young voters, Democrats, or like half, at least half of Democrats also want Joe Biden to step aside. The people in your Twitter feed online, that's not representative. I don't know how else to say it. It's just not representative of the larger population. And then the other thing about like,

is it hurting them? This is the other media bubble thing we need to realize. This discussion that we are all having right now that we've had for the last several weeks, the judging the press conference and the George Stephanopoulos, all this kind of stuff, undecided voters are not consuming this. Yeah. They're just not.

Yeah. They are not like intense news consumer junkies like all of us are, probably those of you who are listening to this, right? Like, I know it seems like you're like, oh, I only listen to a couple podcasts. That's still so much more news consumption than most of the country and most of voters, right? And so the idea that this is going to somehow influence voters in November is just not borne out by any of the research or any of the way that the media environment works today. It might have been at some point way back in the day when people just watched pundits on

television and the whole country watched them together. It's just not the case now. And this is also a situation where people are going to think about how Joe Biden did at the debate. If they're going to think about it all, maybe they'll forget about it, but they're going to think about, they're going to think about that all maybe they'll forget about it but they're going to think about they're going to think about that before they think about what i said sure what anyone on television said what david anything right like that's just the way opinions are formed these days and that's not you know i'm saying i'm not like and you know it's like i also saw polls and ben and strategy group i cited this on on pod save america they did a poll a couple days after the debate.

Turns out that people who watched the full debate were voting for Trump by four points. And the people who didn't watch the debate or just heard about the debate were narrowly for Biden. Really? Yeah. So this is not necessarily a, oh, it was the media freak out that did it. Right, right. No, this is something that's borne out. Although 50 million people is a lot of people.

And 8 million for Stephanopoulos as well. I think it's a really good point about like we convince ourselves that the conversation and our like politics junkie media bubble is like where the national conversation is or where national sentiment and it's not. But there is a lot of evidence that that like majority of people who are not listening to 18 podcasts every week do take a lot of cues from what they think the like the formal word is elites but what they think political leaders in the country think and so hearing you know even if you're not watching morning joe every morning to see like

what did nancy pelosi say if you hear that, leaders in the Democratic Party think Joe Biden should step aside, that is, we do have evidence that suggests that that is information that does trickle out to people. And that can be really decisive because people, when they, you know, a question of like, decisions to think through. And yes, most people will not like sit down and game it out, but they will outsource their thinking on that to what are the people who I trust in politics and media? What do they say? And if I hear them saying that like, this is something we should do, then okay, I'm going to believe them. And so I think that this is actually a moment where Twitter for once, as much as it's not real life, has been really important because I think you don't get to that moment at the end of the chain where you have Nancy Pelosi sending certain signals or, you know, people around Barack Obama sending certain because, you know, we work at the same company. I think your guys' podcast, After the Debate, played a big role in that because it created this permission structure of we're going to acknowledge what's happening and we're going to talk about whether we can do something about it. And I think one of the first dominoes to fall

to is discussion on Twitter. I think when people log on to their feeds, even if it's just politics junkies, even if it's just house staffers, even if it's just, you know, mid-level reporters at whatever newspaper, they log on and they see everybody agrees that we've crossed a line now. We've crossed a line now where we have to talk about this. I think it's an inside-outside game here, right? Like this is because this is a decision that's going to be made by Joe Biden. And in some ways, then it's an influence campaign for people who are going to talk to Joe Biden and help him make this decision. That's right. Then the opinions of people who are on Twitter and electeds and pundits and like it all matters in that scenario. Right.

I think far beyond that group of people, it, like you said, at some point it has some effect. But like, for example, last night he gave the press conference, recording this on Friday, he gave the press conference and he said, my vice president, Vice President Trump, and it was like a gaffe or whatever. And, you know, on Twitter... Is that still the word we're using for this gaffe? Yeah, I know. I'm trying to find my best here.

But a lot of commentators were like, that's unfair. Anyone could make that gaffe. He did. He was, he demonstrated a firm command of foreign policy issues and all that kind of stuff. lot of commentators were like that's unfair anyone could make that gaffe he did he was he demonstrated a firm command of foreign policy issues and all that kind of stuff and i and i said on pod save america too i was like look the the vice president trump thing is not what gets me what gets me is that there wasn't a clear message right on about the campaign and trump which is why i'm dying for him to deliver yeah But I saw our friend Peter Hamby tweeted this, on TikTok, the vice president Trump thing, by last night, 8 million views on TikTok.

So we are not, again, it's the way the media environment has changed even since 2020, right? Yes. Like, I don't think we're fully how how much of a bubble our political conversation is compared with how sort of people who aren't regular news consumers and not political junkies are experiencing this. And they're not experiencing like Democratic elites saying bad things, though they are experiencing some of that. But they're experiencing Joe Biden saying stuff like that. Right. And getting those moments unfiltered. And it feels to call it a viral moment feels like we're downplaying it or talking about it. But I think that like if that's what you experience in politics. I mean, look, this is something we talked about a lot with Gaza a couple of months ago

where it's like people get these like, you know, it's short clips. Maybe it's not representative. Maybe it's not framed in the like most artful way. But people get on their whatever feeds on Reels, TikTok, short clips of seeing what's happening in Gaza. And you see that a bunch of times, even as a 10 second clip. And maybe you don't become an expert in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but that can really change people's perceptions and their thoughts on how they feel about it and what they feel like they can or should do about it. I think we're seeing that already in the polls. And I like this thing that I keep coming back to. I think we are all learning right now. And this has kind of been in the way that like Americans learn geography by like starting wars in foreign countries. I think we're like learning a lot about.

Dark. Sorry. Dark, but fair. I think that we're all learning a lot about how our democracy actually works right now and how different that is and how we perceive it works. Where it's like something I encounter all the time is like people assume there is a back room somewhere where the decisions are made. There's a leadership cabal. Like after the debate, a thing that I heard from a lot of people is like, well, the Democrats have to tell Biden that he can't run. And it's like there's no – there is no one in the party who can tell them that. And now we're like, see?

Right. I think it's actually really important that people have learned that. People have come to understand, well, there is no like person in the back room and decide it's us. It's a great bookend to the 2020 conversation when everyone supported Biden after he beat Bernie in South Carolina. And there was this like, oh, the cabals, the DNC has come together and decided and like push Bernie out. It's like, no, it's just a bunch of people that were like, this is the best way to win. Right. And the voters made that decision.

Yeah. And now people are seeing that even the cabal is not exerting much influence at this point. But I do think, like you and I were talking about before recording, it's like, where do we feel in this particular moment about whether it's going to happen or not? And I do think that, like, first of all, that will change by the time we come out of the recording and check our, like, push alerts on our phones. Every time there is some signal from somewhere in this big, messy, unorganized diaspora that we call, like, the Democratic Party establishment or the left or whatever you want to call it, there's some signal from like donors are holding something back

or there's a like, you know, news alert that says that anonymous campaign aides are saying we're trying to tell Biden that he has to. Every time one of those signals go out, that signal isn't just to you, the news consumer. That's a signal to everyone else

in that coalition. Yeah. That like someone else is joining in and is ready to like push and to make this happen. That is a very good point. That's a good place to leave it on maybe a hopeful note. Look, I think that for once, our democracy is, now we'll see where we end up, is working pretty well. Now it's working

through informal mechanisms like the media, like us going to monocast and savings and people tweeting. That is an important part of democracy. Those are really important institutions. And seeing them come together to try to make this big collective action work on behalf of saving democracy, I think is a big important moment. Yeah. It's the, Anant Shankar always says democracy is the biggest, most interminable group project. It's correct. Group projects are terrible, but you got to But you got to do them. But you got to show up. It's very hard to get along. It's a very big group project that we're engaged with.

Everybody I know is coconut pilled and ready to go. We could have done a whole. We probably should have. We probably should do a coconut. A whole other. We'll do a coconut pilled segment. It's a fascinating moment. It's amazing.

It's amazing. And it says so much about like TikTok and Twitter and how things change. Identity, politics. Wild. Yes, it's incredible. Next time, maybe if we have the time, we'll do the coconut fill. On our cocoa pod. When the K-Hive has reignited democratic enthusiasm.

Okay, before we head to break, some quick housekeeping. If you haven't read Justice Sotomayor's dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court's decision to grant Trump absolute immunity, here's a quote that stood out to me. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law. Reading that, it's clear that we are entering an unprecedented era of politics. If you're looking for answers

on the decisions made this term and how they'll impact everything from the election to your everyday life, Strict Scrutiny just released an episode recapping the entire term to give you all the in-depth analysis you need to make sense of what happened and what comes next. Tune in to the latest episode on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Love them. And no one should have to process the news cycle on their own. So come process it with us in Madison, in real life. The Democracy or Else Tour is headed to the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wisconsin next on Friday, July 19th. With special guests Ben Wickler and Aaron Haynes. And on the 20th, Love It or Leave It will be in Madison, joined by Victoria Vincent and Mandela Barnes at the Barrymore Theater. There's tons to discuss, including the threat Trump poses to democracy

and what kind of pill regimen we need to get Biden on in order to stop him. This copy was written more than a week ago. What is going on here? Anyway, you'll probably... The regimen is not what we're getting him on these days. Yeah, I don't know what we're getting him on at this point. You'll probably still be freaked out, but at least you won't be alone. Head to cricket.com slash events to grab tickets

now. After the break, my conversation with Ellie Reif. Ellie Reeve, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I think last time we chatted on a pod was after your excellent coverage of Charlottesville in 2017. Your new book, Black Pill, is fantastic. The subtitle sums up a lot of, uh, what we talk about on the show, how I witnessed the darkest corners of the internet come to life, poison society and capture American politics. So we are currently in the midst of a campaign where,

um, one of the many mysteries is why younger voters, men, and especially young men, seem to be moving away from the Democratic Party, some to Trump, some to RFK Jr., some who just won't vote, some to the darker corners of the internet. There are a lot of different possibilities for this. And I think your book tells an important part of the story. Can you talk about what initially drew you to that story and the reporting that you did yeah and can i just say the last time we talked i was in the back seat of an suv uh staking out a white nationalist that's right yeah so if i sounded distracted it's because we were waiting for him to turn himself into the cops we were just psyched that you agreed to come on the show while you were

doing all of that you were doing that was much more important than talking to us yeah well the big picture way i got into this was i grew up in atlanta in the inner city most of my neighbors were black my classmates my teachers when i was 13 i moved to rural tennessee very white very christian very conservative so i saw two sides of the south in a way that helped me understand there wasn't just one narrative of american history um then when i because do you know the political cartoonist ben garrison yes okay so i saw this crazy ben garrison cartoon that really made explicit this masculinity pageant that American presidential elections always sort of seem to be about. So he's like this hot, flat stomach guy dancing with America who has big boobs and she's in love.

I was like, who is this guy? So I look him up and it looks like he's a neo-Nazi. There are images of him in like brown suit uniforms anti-semitic cartoons then it turns out that was a massive character assassination campaign by 4chan this anonymous troll message board and one of the most fascinating things about it was he would go on 4chan and 8chan to try to fight them be like please guys just like leave me alone like let me be. And one of them was like, listen, I know this seems kind of mean, but the character that we have created for you

is the character of our living idol. And if you have a little grace and a little finesse, you can just join us and become the God that we've made you out to be. And it was very, very compelling. I mean, it was chilling, but it was compelling. And Ben Garrison has gone much, much further down the conspiracy rabbit hole. And so that's what got me started. I was like, what is this world? The book begins with you outside the Capitol on January 6th, and you write that most of the rioters probably didn't know that the basis of their ideology could be, quote,

traced back to the psychedelic epiphany of a three-foot virgin. Care to explain? Yeah. Yeah, that was in part because I saw this older man wearing a Pepe shirt, thrilled at Rudy Giuliani speaking in front of the Capitol. So in 2013, Frederick Brennan, he was a very, very smart teenager who had brittle bone disease. So really any kind of tough movements. I mean, I've driven around in the car and had to slam on my brakes, and I was scared I almost broke his bones. He's very fragile. So the Internet is his way to experience the world.

But he'd had a difficult life. He was in foster care, and he became very angry, and he got into incel culture. That's involuntary celibate. These men who think feminism and their genes have doomed them to a life of loneliness. So he was involved in that world for a while and a woman reached out to him and was like, hey, my fetish is virgins. Do you want to get together? And he eventually flew her to New York and they had an unusual relationship. She kind of opened up his eyes to sex, but also to psychedelics, and they did a lot of drugs together. On one of them, he had an epiphany that he could make a

website like 4chan, but even more free, even more of a palace of free speech where the best ideas would battle each other out and the best would rise to the top. And so that is how he created 8chan, which later went on to be the host of QAnon that drove so many people to the Capitol. I mean, it reminded me what Fred did or what he thought 8chan, 4chan and 8chan were going to be, reminded me of like what Elon Musk said he wanted Twitter to be. We know how that turned out. And a lot of these now like techno optimist bros who've sort of become reactionary over the last several years. Like, what do you make of the general belief that unmoderated platforms could be havens for

free speech? Do you think it was always bullshit in the minds of people like Fred? Or was it just naive? Like what's the connection between what sounds normal enough, free speech is good, with what 8chan and 4chan and, you know, increasingly other social media platforms have become? It has been very unsettling to me to watch these same ideas that were these like dark subcultures playing out again 10 years later in the minds of the tech oligarchs i do think fred genuinely believed it and this was a mainstream idea at the time like in 2008 the new york times read ran this editorial ridiculing joe leverman because leverman had requested youtube take down al-qaeda's channel. And at the time, they were like, oh, it's so absurd, this idea that the internet could have a role in extremism. It's just like a phone, you know? That's like saying your phone has a role in extremism.

So, you know, 10 years later, obviously, it becomes very clear that that's not true. But this was a mainstream belief. Reddit, Facebook. Facebook used to allow Holocaust deniers. I mean, this a mainstream belief. Reddit, Facebook. Facebook used to allow Holocaust deniers. I mean, this was mainstream belief. So your reporting at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was obviously enormously influential in shaping public perceptions of the alt-right. But the aftermath of Charlottesville also shaped how the alt-right perceived itself. And it really changed their strategy.

How do you think Charlottesville changed the trajectory of the alt-right movement? So the people who were involved in it, the actual leaders who were willing to show their faces, they were just pushed to the margins of society. So at all levels of society, America recoiled. There were like the financial services companies kicked them off so they couldn't raise money online. They were doxed. They were ostracized in their hometowns. It became very clear that using these overt neo-Nazi symbols was a huge turnoff to mainstream society. And white nationalists have told me that, that the ones who have continued to go forward, such as the Proud Boys,

the Proud Boys were going to be part of Charlottesville and then backed out at the last minute. They talk about Western chauvinism. They don't talk about white nationalism. Or Nick Fuentes, who is at both Charlottesville and Jan 6th six he calls himself america first he wraps himself in the flag he talks about religion like they've learned that americans don't want to be a nazi they want to be indiana jones they want to punch the nazi but you can i'm sure from your reporting are there places and spaces where they are still espousing these neo-Nazi white nationalist views? Well, Nick Fuentes, he had dinner with Donald Trump. I know, I was going to ask you about that at some point.

Yes. Yeah, so is it just more, it's gone more underground? Yeah, they downplay that. So Patriot Front is a white nationalist group. One of the founders was part of the groups that went to Charlottesville. You see them marching. They do flash mobs so that counter-protesters can't show up and denounce them. And they hide their faces.

But you see their uniforms are red, white, and blue. They're wearing almost like comic book-esque shields yeah they march with they were just marching in nashville i believe like last week or the week before right right and those that that march is not for nashville i am sure that most of the people or at least a lot of the people who are at that march are not from nashville the point of those videos is the internet the internet is the audience because the message is join us like we're a big movement we're growing you get to be a chat you get to be macho you get to be a cool guy like they work out together um now i did

see after october 7th um a lot of white nationalists were really excited because they got Elon Musk to interact with the ban the ADL hashtag. They feel like there is an appetite for right-wing criticism of Israel and that they're not getting it from the Republican Party. And so therefore people will come to white nationalists to seek that out. So they were sort of crowing after that, that they were able to punch above their weight. I find it so fascinating that, I mean, it seems fairly obvious, but that their real audience is the internet. And that brings up the challenge of calling attention to white nationalist groups like this and also not helping them spread their propaganda. And I wonder how you think about that tension. Yeah, it's really difficult. I mean, I think it's important not to interview them like they're senators

or someone with a legit perspective. But at the same time, ignoring it doesn't make it go away. So I felt like leading up to Jan 6, there wasn't enough coverage of QAnon because it was so absurd. You know, you sound like a crazy person just trying to report on the allegations that drove that movement. But then all these people are surprised on January 6th. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between this newer, younger, alt-right generation and the older generation of white nationalists? Because I think in your book, you talk about this a little bit, and there's some conflict. There's just some interesting drama there.

Yes. So, in the 90s, 2000s, the movement, they call it the movement. The white nationalist movement was pretty dead. George W. Bush was all about compassionate conservatism. They just couldn't get a lot of traction. This old school neo-Nazi I interviewed, Jeff Scoop, he led one of those groups for almost three decades. He'd come up in the skinhead Gang in the 90s. He talked about how most of the kids that he recruited were angry and working class and maybe had already experienced violence. Then around 2014,

2015, all of a sudden the alt-right comes online and he and his friends are baffled by these guys. You're like, these are girly boys. These are fancy boys. They're trying to look rich. They're wearing polos. They're talking about a cartoon frog. He thought it was weirdly homoerotic. He was scandalized by how many jokes there were about hurting women. This one moment when it all began for him was when he saw on his old message board, Stormfront, someone that had pulled something from the outright website of the Daily Stormer.

And it was an image of a white woman who had been beaten. And it implied that women should be raped. And they were joking about this on Stormfront. And he was like, this isn't cool. Like, we're protecting white women. That's what we think our thing is all about, like protecting white women. And what Scoop told me was like,

in the old days, someone who had promoted an image like that, they would have gotten a boot party. Like, they would have gotten beaten up. But now all these new guys were extremely anti-woman. So what really struck me was just that Scoop knew murderers. He knew people who were murdered. He knew someone who was a family annihilator who killed his whole family and himself. So he went through all of that and he was still a white nationalist. And then the alt-right comes online and he's like,

okay, this stuff's too weird. I just can't roll with these guys. What's your sense of the generational difference there? Why do you think this newer generation has become in many ways more extreme and just different in general than this older generation of the people that you interviewed? Well, it's very focused on the internet instead of a club in your small town. There's not... It might sound strange to say this, but Scoop had some wisdom as an old, on-the-ground Nazi that these new guys didn't have.

So one of the things he told me was that when a new guy would come into his group, if he started talking about wanting to do violence to, you know, black people or Jews or something like that, he would call them in and be like, you're either saying this because you're a fed or you're crazy. Like he didn't have a moral objection to violence against other people, but he had a legal one. So, and he would tell that guy,

either you stop talking like that or you get kicked out. These groups that developed on the internet didn't have anything like that. They didn't have any moderating force. And instead, they had these Discord servers where they're chatting with each other all day, and there becomes this pressure to be the most racist person in the chat,

to be the most extreme. And over time, as all these messages wash over you again and again and again, you find yourself believing it. And then another factor, of course, is the influence of incel culture. They were on some of these same websites and they merged. And a big part of these ideologies is like, why is someone else getting all the women? Like there must be someone or some force that is preventing me from getting the girls that I want. And the alt-right, that's Jews.

Right. It does sound to me like it's the difference between fanaticism and nihilism in a way. And that like there is a cohesive ideology, I guess, to the older Nazis and white nationalists and some kind of strategy. And it's where you see this on the internet everywhere. And you write about the nihilism as well. That's how you describe the black pill. But it does seem like when you think nothing matters, everything's corrupt, it's all a game to see how much attention I can get, how racist I can be on a message board, then, and I think both could be equally destructive, but it does feel like that's one thing that the internet and social media platforms have introduced into this whole

movement. Yeah. As part of a federal civil trial over the organizer of trial over Charlottesville, the organizers of Charlottesville were brought to trial a couple years ago. And so all of their messages came out, their internal messages. One of the things that this woman, Samantha Prolik, who I interviewed, she had been part of Identity Europa. That's a white nationalist frat. She'd been inside and she left. She denounced this all. And she said that her boyfriend at the time, who was part of this group, his idea was to help build up Richard Spencer and make him a really big deal. But once REHOA, Racial Holy War, came about, he would have Spencer first up against the wall. Like there was this kind of maniacal desire for destruction, even among each other.

You know, a lot of people joined for the sense of brotherhood. But once they're inside, they're all knifing each other. Wow. A lot of the characters you write about, Fred, alt-right leaders, Matthew Parrott, Matthew Heimbach, even Richard Spencer, have all walked back, if not fully renounced, their prior beliefs? Is that unusual? And what have you learned about people who leave the movement or change their beliefs? Most of the people that I've interviewed who left, first left because of some personal slight, like their frustrated ambition, someone stole their girl, something like that. That's what I've found causes people to step away. And then only after they're out of it do they start examining their beliefs

and thinking, oh, wow, I was really racist. I was an asshole. Richard Spencer imagined himself as this great intellectual. He was always trying to be perceived that way. He told me he was completing Nietzsche's project. But looking back, he now says that 2016 and 2017 were the most racist he'd ever been because the messages of 4chan and Twitter, like they had become his thoughts. They had sort of taken over and he had felt this pressure to be the most far-right guy in the room.

It was only stepping back, he was like, okay, well, maybe that was too far. Matthew Heimbach has said he wouldn't protest in support of a Confederate monument anymore. He decided that he's a Marxist-Leninist, not a fascist. Matthew Parrott told me that he found the alt-right and the people who organized around Charlottesville to be a cartoon villain evil culture. But all of those guys, they got sued. They had very substantial legal bills, and they had to sit in court for six weeks listening to what they'd done, looking at their victims in their faces as they told them what had happened. They were forced to consider, like, the other people. Other human beings in person.

Exactly. And look at the people that they'd put their faith in and be like, wow, why did I follow that guy? So it worked for those guys, but like, how do you prescribe that to people en masse? Right. Well, that's, I asked the question sort of from the like political strategy perspective. I'm like, I'm always curious whether there are de-radicalization strategies that work. It sounds like in this case, it has to come from the person who just happens to have a personal slight, leaves the movement, or is sued or arrested or has a run-in with the law. And then I guess their experience of getting offline and touching grass is sitting in court for multiple weeks and being confronted with the people that you followed and the people

that you hurt. I definitely was able to get people to listen to me, like question their beliefs over time as I talked to them. But this was hours and hours of phone calls. I mean, I really spent hours and hours and hours on the phone with these folks. Well, that was, I was going to ask a more of a personal question here. Like you've made a career out of interviewing white nationalists. Like you said, you've spent so, so much time with them. How do you get them to trust you? And then how do you come to trust them just from a reporting perspective? Like how do you build a rapport with someone who dared you to report their bomb threat to the police?

Right. You know, I ended up having, so that's a real example of an incel who threatened me on camera and then dared me to call the cops. Time and knowledge of their movement has been helpful. So at the beginning, especially in 2016, 2017, if I got a phone number for one of these guys, usually there'd be 10 or 20 minutes of them screaming horrible things at me or just extreme hostility but after that they like calm down kind of wear themselves out and then everyone wants to tell their story like chris cantwell he went he's the person i interviewed in charlottesville he went on to be known as the crying nazi i interviewed him right after um the rally in a hotel room.

He was boasting about how a lot more people are going to die before we're done here. He had all these guns. But at some point, he starts talking about how, you know, it's hard for him to date. You know, like his life hasn't been easy since he's taken on the burden of defending the white race. And when he goes out with a woman, he wants to have popcorn and watch a movie and not talk about race war and how hard that is. And my producer in that room, Tracy Jarrett, a black woman, goes, Are you sad? And he starts crying.

He's like, Yeah, I'm sad. It's right under the surface. The other element is that I'm kind of a meme to them, like not really a person, but, but like a figure, like an internet figure. So if one of them spots me in public, they want to get a picture with me or they want to say something to me that lets me know that they're a little internet fascist. Like they could talk to me in a polite, respectful way and I would never know the difference. But they always have to let me know who they really are.

Wow. And then as for like verifying what they say, I mean, one of my main techniques is I have them bring their computer and open up their email and just search key terms. And people forget what they have in their email. So having receipts, you know? Yeah. How has your mental health been doing this? Like, I'm sure a lot of emotions, fear, I can imagine, anger, sadness,

like anxiety. How do you deal with this? Yeah, I guess my natural, not necessarily healthy reaction is anger more than sadness. I'm just an anger person. And I need dark jokes. I need gallus humor to get through this. I would imagine. I would imagine you have to. Yeah. Right after Charlottesville, this guy, a military veteran, reached out to me and was like, hey, I know you're not going to listen to me, but you've been through a traumatic event and you should go to therapy. And I know that you're going to ignore me and

think that you're fine because you're numb, but you're not and you should do this. And he's pretty much right all the way, 100% straight through. I was like, I'm fine. I did eventually seek mental health care and it ended up making it a lot easier to talk about. Honestly, I couldn't have written this book if I hadn't sought therapy. I would imagine. You got to talk to someone that's, who's, who will listen, who are not neo-Nazis that you're interviewing.

Well, and somebody who can break. Friends and family, of course, but like someone who's just going to sit there and listen. Yeah. Right. But you don't want to abuse your friends and like ruin the beach party by talking about this like really messed up thing a Nazi told you. Exactly. Exactly. So. I want to go back to where we started, which is our current political nightmare here in 2024. We alluded to this earlier that Trump started his campaign by having dinner with Nick Fuentes. He's got the QAnon music playing at his rallies.

He's truthing all kinds of crazy shit from extremist accounts. How do you think the alt-right or what's left of the alt-right now or whatever it's evolved to views Trump and his campaign right now? Well, right after Jan 6th, they were angry at him. They thought he was, I'm trying to think of like a non-offensive word for it, but you know, like a, but like a wimp. There's a story that Cassidy Hutchinson told about how the Secret Service had been driving Trump and he grabbed the steering wheel and was like, take me to the Capitol. And the Secret Service was like, no.

And they thought he was a wimp for not being able to actually do fascism. He couldn't bring those people under his control to bring about this fascist revolution. So there are many that are angry with him about that. There are some that were angry with him about not preemptively pardoning the Jan Sixers. Even before that, there were some that were angry at him for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in Israel. They have felt that Trump was captive of Israel. So that's one element. Now, the Nick Fuentes types, they understand that Trump is a good

vehicle for them. And they're not going to get very far by being opposed to him. Yeah. I've often felt that there's a larger, more indirect way that Trump benefits from the online culture that your book is about. I mentioned this, but in the beginning, you write, the black pill is a dark but gleeful nihilism. The system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable. That view of the world seems quite compatible with the rise of demagogues and authoritarians. At the very least, it seems incompatible with democratic governance. What do you think about that? Yeah, they want someone who will smash the whole system.

On Jan 6, I interviewed all kinds of people before the rally. I talked to this guy from Michigan who's kind of this grandpa, like, with a nice, neat, trim beard. Like, he looked like a normal guy and said he didn't believe in QAnon. But he told me he expected there to be military tribunals of Democrats in Guantanamo. Like, he had this real thirst for vengeance. I think something to think about is the whole generation that grew up on 4chan, they are now old enough to enter politics. So last year, Ron DeSantis' campaign releases this video of, it's a pro-DeSantis video, but it's got a neo-Nazi symbol in it.

And that's what everyone clung to, the sun in red. But the whole vibe of it was from 4chan, everything about it, the style of it. And Richard Spencer growls to me at the time that DeSantis wanted to do 2015 but me. He was like, how do I make that energy around Trump just work in my favor? But he didn't really have the persona to capture that. It worries me because I just, I think that cynicism about politics and distrust of institutions is at its peak. It's been growing for quite some time now but when you have cynicism towards institutions combined with

the nihilism of the internet and and and and you have a lot of younger men who are feeling lonely alienated like it's just it seems like a mix that, I'm not saying it's creating a whole generation of Nazis or white nationalists, but you can almost see the path, right, from someone who's just sort of pissed at the world and what they're seeing on their screens to going down this rabbit hole. Is that something you think about a lot? Yeah, but then, and then what?

And then what do they do about it? Do they keep posting? Well, that's what I wonder. Or do they join Turning Point? What are they doing about it? Well, what do most of them do about it? Or some, because I guess the, it's not really an optimistic view,

but the more optimistic view is that they're all just, that's where they end. They just post a lot. Their bark is worse than their bite. They're yelling on the internet all the time. Maybe they're voting and then that's it. But it does seem that at least some subset of this culture is committing political violence, other violence, extremism,

joining these movements. But I just don't, what is the state of the movement today? There's this guy that I started interviewing in 2016 who started a fascist group who told me he thought that violence was coming. I only realized months later that he had lied to me about his age and he was still in high school. But I kept tabs on this guy. And he tried different groups all along the way. He's hopped between different white nationalist groups as they've risen and fallen. And now where I see him popping up is outside Turning Point USA

conferences. He and Fuentes' followers, they are always trying to infiltrate these conferences because they see it as fertile ground. But they also are able to stage these spectacles that, again, play out for an Internet audience of getting kicked out of these conferences. So this same guy, some of his friends came up to me at Turning Point Action Conference last summer. And they gave me, like, my spidey sense was tingling, but I didn't know who they were. And one of them asked to take a picture with me. And as he holds up his phone, I see on his lock screen swastikas. And I'm like, oh, I knew it. Like, I knew it.

I knew it. You could always spot them because they also kind of dress like the 80s, like in a suit and ray bands. Like, they're really into the 80s. So then there was this whole confrontation. The Turning Point spokesman tells me, oh, we're always trying to kick out these guys. We already kicked them out once. But they keep showing up at these conferences. And then much later, Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point, he tweeted that Matt Walsh had said nothing wrong when he said that race and culture cannot be separated,

that those things are connected. So I messaged this Turning Point spokesman, and I'm like, listen, I can show you a transcript of Chris Cantwell saying that kind of thing to me, and not in Charlottesville, saying that support for democracy and capitalism is transmitted through DNA. He meant sperm. He didn't say it delicately. I was like, this is the same idea. And the spokesman was like, denounce fascism. We don't want anything to do with white nationalists.

He's like, no, but I still think it's important. The people who come from Anglo-Saxon countries, the culture does matter people coming from mexico they have a different culture and it shapes our society and it's like don't you see that you're letting those ideas like infiltrate your brain yeah and your movement i think it is just this is why i loved the book i think it is fascinating how much more complex and subtle some of these ideas sort of filter into the mainstream and how they interact with some of the more extremist groups. And in some ways, it's even more insidious and more dangerous. But I do think it's much more

complicated than you just see in the news and the headlines. And so I'm very grateful for your reporting on this and also for this book. Everyone should go buy it. Ellie, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It was really cool. Good talking to you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor.

Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, and Reid Cherlin for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Why are two old, unpopular men the only candidates for the world's most demanding job? The answer lies in the peculiar politics of the generation born in the era of the bomb. It's a generation that has enjoyed extraordinary wealth and progress, yet their last act in politics sees the two main parties accusing each other of wrecking American democracy. As the boomers near the end of their political journey, John Prito tries to make sense of their inheritance and their legacy. Search Boom from The Economist wherever you listen to your podcasts

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