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If You Want to Understand Why Democracy Is Under Attack, Read This Book
In “Black Pill,” the journalist Elle Reeve finds that the once-fringe alt-right is dead — because now it’s mainstream.
BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics, by Elle Reeve
If you have watched video of 2017’s Unite the Right march, in which hundreds of young men in khakis paraded through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., chanting “Jews will not replace us” before one of them drove a Dodge Challenger into a group of counter-protesters, chances are that you have seen a recording made by Elle Reeve.
At the time, the journalist (then at Vice News, now at CNN) had been following the alt-right for about four years; before Charlottesville, the movement was frequently dismissed as fringe, and her editors were apparently reluctant to send her on reporting trips.
Reeve chronicles the alt-right’s rise in “Black Pill,” a chilling and insightful account of the throughline from dopey internet memes to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the seductions of QAnon and the storming of the Capitol. In Reeve’s telling, Charlottesville was the fulcrum between a before, when hateful ideologies were coalescing, largely out of view, and the after — which we now inhabit. If you want to understand why it increasingly feels like liberal democracy is failing, and why white supremacy, misogyny, antisemitism and homophobia are ascendant, read this book.
Reeve’s reporting begins around 2013, but the internet culture she depicts starts at least a decade earlier, when a teenager modified the source code of a Japanese website to launch an English-language version, 4chan. The site let users post images anonymously, and it did not take long for pornography and vile memes to find a home there. Eventually, the site’s developer became troubled and began blocking the worst of it, especially during what came to be known as Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign against women in the video game industry.
Because Reeve pursued this story before it went mainstream, she gained the trust of its leaders who were willing to share their plans and motivations — despite at times harassing and threatening her. By 2021, she writes, it “was like we were veterans who’d fought on the opposite sides of a war. There weren’t many other people in the world who had witnessed the same events. So when I called them and asked for an interview, it was pretty easy to get them to say yes.”As a consequence, her narrative is unusually intimate and personal.
