Trolls have basically taken possession of the U.S. government. How have trolls been able to go from being mostly cordoned off in dark parts of the internet to gaining so much influence in American culture and politics? Our guest this week has spent years researching and reporting on-the-ground to learn more about how the battle online between the right and the left has moved into the real world. Elle Reeve is a correspondent at CNN and the author of “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.” She joins WITHpod to discuss the politics of “black pilled” and “red pilled” young men, the ways in which online extremism so often translates into political violence and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Elle Reeve: I did all this work like analyzing where all this stuff comes from, everything they believe, their tactics, the tactics that work, the tactic that failed what worked to bring the alt-right down, and nevertheless their ideas and tactics and vibes and aesthetics have become the mainstream of at least 50% of the American culture.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why is This Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
There’s a lot of ways that you could try to characterize what the first month of the Trump administration has been like, which has been pretty terrible, pretty close to worst case scenario, in my humble opinion. One way I think that’s useful is basically, and a few people have said this online is, the worst internet trolls have taken possession of the American government.
And I think it’s actually a super useful way to think about what’s happening, both as kind of metaphor, but also as reality, like for instance, on the day I’m talking to you, a bunch of right wing influencers who function as trolls essentially are at the White House being released binders of what they’re calling the Epstein files, on the day I’m talking to you, a relentlessly disgustingly misogynist influencer named Andrew Tate, who has been indicted by Romanian authorities for sex trafficking, including sex trafficking of minors and has been held in Romania for several years is on his way back to the U.S. where he has essentially been allowed by the Romanians to leave after conversations from the highest levels of the Trump administration’s government, including a special envoy with a Romanian counterpart.
We don’t know what was said. They deny there was any sort of exchange, but it seems very clear there was talk of his case. And then subsequently, this man and his brother who was arrested by the Romanian authorities for truly heinous crimes, they deny them, are headed to the U.S.
Andrew Tate is a troll. The people at the White House, the Epstein files are a troll, Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world and spends all day posting obsessively on the site that he owns so he would be the main character is a troll.
And for the people that are not familiar with this kind of particular dark ethos, this sort of reactionary, nihilistic, ethos, a troll is someone who, and I write about this in my book, “The Siren’s Call”, I write at length about trolling politics and the politics of trolls. A troll is someone who essentially sort of seeks negative attention via intentionally outrageous courting of conflict sometimes with a tongue in cheek, but often through repetition becoming real.
Kanye West is a great example here where he went from kind of like outrageous and kooky gadfly to apparently sincere Nazi over the course of his trolling. He was a troll and was like, oh, I’m going to wear a MAGA hat. I’m going to post about Hitler and swastikas and Jews. And then next thing you know, he seems to be a sincere Nazi.
There’s been a lot of great reporting about this subculture, which is no longer kind of cordoned off to some dark part of the internet, but is running the U.S. government in many respects is the cultural ethos at the top of the American government. Some of the best reporting is from Elle Reeve. She’s a correspondent CNN. She was at “Vice” before, and she’s got a book that came out last year, called “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.”
I thought she’d be a great person to talk to. Elle, great to have you in the program.
Elle Reeve: Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: Do you agree with that thesis, that statement that like trolls have taken possession of the American government?
Elle Reeve: Yeah, and the original trolls also agree with it because they have podcasts where they complain to each other, that MAGA stole all their memes, but they don’t get to be part of the party.
Chris Hayes: Say more about that.
Elle Reeve: I listened to this podcast where Richard Spencer, probably the most famous alt-right white nationalist guy, from like 2016, 20 7 saying we invented liking Russia. And now all these MAGA guys are doing it. We coined the phrase, import the third world become the third world. And now the son of the president is saying it, Charlie Kirk is saying it, Stephen Miller is saying it.
They are kind of bitterly jealous that MAGA has taken a lot of the ideas that they originated, even if, now that they like dispute those, now that they’ve abandoned those beliefs, they’re like a little bit miffed.
Chris Hayes: This is the sort of first wave of kind of like 2016 influencers who are so key to Trump’s rise.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. I think they really revolutionized the way we experience politics, the culture of American politics.
Chris Hayes: Can you talk a little bit about, there’s a weird, complicated set of psychological and ideological factors that make up for this kind of internet subculture that you explore in the book and that has tentacles in different directions and is sort of central to what has become the movement that undergirds Trump.
I wonder if you could sort of talk through some of them, like the first being kind of the flip side of like incel and manosphere culture and what that is for people that don’t really know
Elle Reeve: Right, incel and manosphere, do you remember the game? I think we’re about the same age. I was in college when it came up
Chris Hayes: The pickup artist thing,
Elle Reeve: Right. The idea is that any man, no matter how ugly, no matter how losery could pick up any woman by nagging her, you just follow these tips and tricks
Chris Hayes: Nagging, meaning like sort of insulting her,
Elle Reeve: Insulting her to her face. Saying interesting shoes or like, oh, I’m surprised you chose that outfit. So there was this huge reaction to that that formed in the incel community that was like, no, some men are so ugly that not even these like college course worth of tricks will help us get a girl. And so there’s always been this like push and pull hate between the incels and the guys who they see as alphas. Incel means involuntarily celibate. They believe that because of feminism, they are robbed of the ability of ever having a romantic partner, because in the old days, people who are 10 out of 10 would date tens people who are threes would date threes, but because men will have sex with anything and women are always trying to have sex with the highest status person, all the hottest men are having sex with all the women leaving no ugly women behind for the ugly men.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that’s important here. So there’s this idea that like female choice and female sexual agency has led to this like leftover group of excess men. And this is an idea that really got hooked in these, incel boards, but is now like a wildly mainstream idea. And one of the things I noticed is I always thought this 10 out of 10 or so, and so is an eight or nine was this very, very 1970s thing? For people our age, no one ever used that terminology. It was a thing that like, out of it, trying to be hip boomers from the seventies would be like, she’s a 10, there was of course, like the movie 10, whatever.
My understanding is this kind of rating system and this notion that there’s this sort of unitary designation of status or attractiveness really did get like hooked up in these incel message boards of these men who were raging with this sort of like feeling of impotent loss that they’ll never be with a woman because of feminism. And that is now just spread throughout the whole internet to become this very common trope. People use it all the time, but it really got its start, my understanding, is there.
Elle Reeve: Yes. They would very obsessively analyze the geometry of men’s faces, the faces of actors or like models in a Ralph Lauren ad. They had all these terms about like the midface and a few millimeters of bone is what separated the ugliest incel from the handsomest Chad, Chad being short for Chad Thundercock, the alpha male that is having sex with all the women,
Chris Hayes: Just to be clear, Chad Thundercock not being a real person, but instead a kind of iconic persona.
Elle Reeve: He is the man who can just be himself and actually get the women. That’s a recurring meme in that world. This advice just be yourself because that works for someone who’s hot and rich, but that doesn’t work for someone who feels like they’re a loser with a loser personality and loser looks and they know it’s ridiculous, is the thing like, you might be thinking like that’s so absurd, they know how stupid it is and yet somehow this culture has generated so many ideas, so many memes that everyone uses across the political spectrum now.
Chris Hayes: Even if you know younger people, this idea of mewing, which is like, like posing your jawline in a certain way to accentuate the jawline and the jawline as this specifically crucial part to the physiognomy of hotness, that all comes from like these psycho weird incel boards.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. I mean, have you seen the meme of JD Vance with this portrait where he suddenly has sharp cheekbones and a big jaw. He’s been turned into a Chad, like that’s just the, the Chad format placed on him.
Chris Hayes: What’s funny about that is, you see this with Trump too. I just think it’s so funny. He’ll be photoshopped as like ripped as hell.
Elle Reeve: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I understand it’s a meme, it’s communicating something. But to me it always just points out that like, he’s not that.
Elle Reeve: I know. But it’s like a way of, um, projecting that he’s based, that he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s going to believe what he believes and say what he wants to say. And he can’t be cowed by scolding women who are telling him he’s not behaving the way he should be.
Chris Hayes: Will you explain what based means
Elle Reeve: There’s based and there’s cringe, based is like, it’s essentially, it’s cool. But it’s someone who doesn’t care what other people think, they’ll go out there and say the red pill things they believe. It doesn’t matter how many scolding people call them racist. They’re going to do what they want
Chris Hayes: Based is cool. But also based is willing to say offensive things, bigoted things, gross things, use the R word, use the F word use whatever and not care, that’s based.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. Not care that someone says, hey, that’s offensive.
Chris Hayes: So you just mentioned another term called red pill.
I’m trying to open this up to people that are not familiar with the subculture. So what is red pill?
Elle Reeve: I think red pill is the one that people have heard the most generally associated with right wing politics. So it comes from The Matrix where Keanu Reeves is presented the red pill and the blue pill, the red pill will give him the ugly truth that humanity is slave to machines. It’s horrible. It hurts, but it’s true. The blue pill, he goes back to the pleasant illusion created by the machines.
I think it’s really important, embedded within that, taking the red pill doesn’t mean taking on a new ideology. It means you’re being stripped of your illusions and just seeing the truth.
Chris Hayes: Right. It’s very useful propaganda in the same way that like calling Fox fair and balanced is which is you’re not getting inculcated to a new political ideology. You’re shedding your illusions and seeing the truth. And the truth is usually natural human hierarchies of sex, of race, of other forms, that the illusion is of equality. The reality is hierarchy. The reality is domination. The reality is people on top and on the bottom, the reality is like IQ, race science, all that stuff. Right?
Elle Reeve: Absolutely. That’s the whole bag. If you’re an incel, maybe you’re a little bit more focused on the supposed reality of how the sexes relate to each other. If you’re a white nationalist, the more focus is on race. But yes, that’s what it’s all about.
Chris Hayes: So you’ve got these different subcultures that are kind of stewing on the internet. One of the things that’s interesting in your book, there’s this a few funny moments where like the race obsessed white supremacist subculture starts encountering the gender obsessed rage of men and the incel culture are like, whoa, those guys really hate women. This is kind of weird. They’re weirdly kind of, what is their deal with how much they hate women?
Elle Reeve: Yeah. So right. So around 2014, 2015, incel culture starts infecting white nationalism. I interviewed this guy, Jeff Schoep, 30 years running a full on neo-Nazi group. They’re called like White Nationalism 1.0 in this world, meaning like sort of like a skinhead gang, he gotten kinds of violent fights. He wore reinforced knuckles. His group had sparked a riot in Toledo. So he had been doing this for a long time. And a big part of that movement was protecting white women from the supposed threat of black men.
But then all of a sudden he’s like on his old message board and he sees this image of a white woman who has been beat up and presumably raped. And all these guys are laughing about it. Like that’s what white women deserve. And he’s like, I don’t get this, this isn’t funny. And they’re like, oh man, no, don’t worry about it. He’s just joking. And he is like, but it doesn’t seem like he’s joking. Like, like this neo-Nazi is going through the whole process that many normal people have gone through when they’ve encountered this stuff.
Chris Hayes: Like disgusting images, vile disgusting memes. That are like, oh haha. Tongue in cheek. We’re joking.
Elle Reeve: Oh, we’re just joking. It’s doesn’t seem like, like what’s the joke, you know? It seems like you believe it. And even this guy, he knew murderers. He knew a family annihilator, but when the like incels joined in the alt-right, he was like, okay, this shit’s too weird. I can’t handle this misogyny. It’s too much for me.
Chris Hayes: That doesn’t last though.
Elle Reeve: He never really interacted with the new white nationalist groups, these are the white polo guys, the guys who want to seem like middle class and upscale, he thought they seemed like girly boys and a feminine. And he didn’t understand why they hated women. He thought maybe they were all closeted and they didn’t really interact that much, but they did all come together in Charlottesville, which ended up being quite disastrous for them
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So we have this sort of this incel culture, we’ve got white nationalist neo-Nazi culture. Are there other strains of this? I’m trying to put my finger on what the right word is to describe this sort of subculture that is now like the subculture you see in Elon’s replies and the people he’s talking to. Are there other ideological strains in that?
Elle Reeve: In 2016 alt-right was like up for grabs, like the definition of it? Like, was it going to be neo-Nazis and anti-Semites or was it going to be sort of populous conservatives opposed to immigration like Steve Bannon said in 2016, like sure. There’s anti-Semites in the alt-right but the alt-right is not about anti-Semitism. After Charlottesville, that proves impossible. So what becomes more of the force behind MAGA is what they had called alt-light at the end. Alt-light being people who didn’t indulge in what they called the JQ or the Jewish question, meaning anti-Semitism, people who didn’t so overtly called for like eugenics or separation of black and white people or segregation, people who are still very much for restricting immigration.
It’s funny, in 2016, Richard Spencer was calling on for a 20 year pause on immigration to America. Well, now Laura Loomer is saying like 50 years, she’s calling for essentially the same thing, but she was flying in Trump’s plane.
Chris Hayes: Well, one of the things that seems clear about this is that elements of this. And again, what I’m trying to work through is like how to articulate what this ideology is. There’s a set of substantive reactionary commitments, which are about the dominance of what they view as natural hierarchies. That’s key, right? There are natural hierarchies. Men are stronger than women. Women have to be in their place. White people are smarter than black people and black people have to be kept in their place. These are just old classic reactionary hierarchy thinking those are substance commitments.
And, and often extremist antipathy to democracy, to the masses, uh, a desire for sort of authoritarian control to restore those hierarchies, again, that goes all the way back to, you know, old right wing thinkers, like Maistre and all those.
So there’s the commitments and then there’s the vibes. And the vibes are the kind of the trolling, the outrageous, the very brain rotted internet poisoned vibes. But there also seems to be a connection between the form and the content, if that makes sense?
Elle Reeve: Yeah. I think the vibes are in many ways more important than the ideas. I was just listening to this podcast where Charlie Kirk had Mike Cernovich on. Mike Cernovich was a pizza gater. He’s a manosphere influencer. And he came on to talk about the new right, which is their term for it or the dissident right. And the thing that he talked about the most was the attitude that how JD Vance and Cernovich and people like him embodied, unapologetic, confident attitudes of people who had done the reading in their words and had the facts on their side and couldn’t be cowed by the moderate mainstream people.
It was really fascinating how much of this conversation was about style and, and not the actual ideas at the heart of it.
Chris Hayes: And why is that, do you think,
Elle Reeve: I don’t fully know, part of it is what makes you want to join? What side do you want to be on? You want to be on the side where the people are cool, where they have swag, or they have confidence, even on these alt-right guys, like they would post these horrible trollish things. But behind the scenes, the images they would post would be of women in wheat fields or like a family of a handsome man, a demure submissive woman, and two children, what they were really selling was happiness, because these are really disturbed, unhappy people.
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s what I’m trying to get to because it seems to me that like, there’s really this deep connection between a certain kind of psychopathology enabled by the internet and enabled by a certain kind of attentional compulsion with this vortex of reactionary thought.
Elle Reeve: Well Ben Shapiro coined this phrase, facts don’t care about your feelings, but it is really taken on like it’s being a big part of this world. And, and the idea is I don’t care if you are upset about the pain and suffering of a family, that’s torn apart by deportation. You’re just a loser if you’re triggered by that. But the reality is feelings are very, very important to them like feelings of anger and honor and all of that.
Chris Hayes: That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s such an emotionally driven, it’s driven out of loneliness, desperation, deep feelings of alienation, people that are happy are not spending all their time, sitting around message boards, slinging memes of horrible shit.
Elle Reeve: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You’re out doing stuff. You’re seeing your friends. You’re with your kids. So there is this really intense nexus of misery and desperation with this subculture. And I see it particularly in this gendered way where there’s this entire subculture now and an entire industry built around taking young men, telling them why they feel bad about themselves telling them why they feel alienated, blaming feminism or the left or woke people or black people or trans people or whoever, and then trying to sell them something for it.
This stuff started in a kind of pre-market culture of the message boards that you write about in the book. But now it’s a entire industry. The whole world is you feel this way, and also if you take these supplements and you do this stuff and, and now you can be a Chad.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. So much of it is about self-improvement. Like this guy ranked all of humanity for me, like at the very bottom, the autistic beta mail, then the beta, then the normy, then the regular alpha and then the autistic alpha Chad at the very, very top. And he had this whole theory that he could convince the beta autistic male to be at the very top to be the alpha, like Elon Musk.
Chris Hayes: Okay. Who, who said this? And what was the context?
Elle Reeve: Well, the person who said it was a guy named Spaft who had lived in incel forms for about 10 years. The first time I met him, I was interviewing an incel and he was in the chat room and he made a bomb threat and dared me to call the police. The people who do this, they’re not stupid. Okay. They have insight about the world and their obsessive fixations on the normies, on the people that whose lives, it’s almost like little mermaid. Like if she were studying the people who could walk, but like really hated them for all their freedom and their ability to walk around on legs. That’s the way it is.
So sometimes they have actually interesting insight. A lot of them identify it as autistic, whether they actually have diagnoses or not, some alt-right leaders that I interviewed do have diagnoses. But the idea is that you are a high IQ person, but something about your inability to read social cues, your inability to feel confident and free from social anxiety and interactions is preventing you from rising to the top of the hierarchy where you belong.
Chris Hayes: Okay. So now we’re to the nub of this, this thing about autism, which I want to make a distinction here between like autism is an actual thing that’s diagnosed, which does not imply people have terrible politics or all these things. And then autism as this subculture understands it. Which is it let’s say in quotation marks or like incel board autism, which is a distinct thing.
But when we’re talking about that, it’s like, this is precisely the thing. It’s a kind of reactionary, alienation, born of a combination of, they think about themselves, very high IQs and they’re obsessed with IQs and we can get into that with inability to read social cues and social alienation. I am smarter than all these people. I should be dominating them. And yet I feel on the outside and alienated.
Elle Reeve: Yes. And women don’t want to be with me because I’m not high status. And I want a woman, not even necessarily because I want love, but because I want to project status to other men.
Chris Hayes: All right. So let’s talk more about this IQ because IQ, that’s another thing in the same way of Chads and mewing and we’re talking about people’s eights or threes or tens this you see now all over Musk’s X and, and even JD Vance and all these people just talking about IQ all the time. This is another sort of telltale indicator of people who are marinating in this world is IQ is a sort of shorthand.
Elle Reeve: Yes, absolutely. This is the most disturbing one, I think the most disturbing indicator. So again like these guys, so the alt-right guys, and a lot of the incels, they created this culture. They are not currently at the White House. They believe that white people are some of the smartest people on the planet. They believe that like some Asians and Jews are smarter than them, but are lacking in other inherited social traits that prevent them from being true greatness. It’s almost like white people are like the Gryffindors, the courageous and altruistic. This is what they believe.
So I’ve had so many white nationalists give me their IQ scores, one even gave me proof of his score on the military entrance test which is functionally an IQ test. They believe they’re way at the top. They have absolute disdain for what they think of like the 110 IQ, middle class mid-wits who will never like take action, who will never force their will on society and force change.
So when I saw the JD Vance tweet about a guy who thought he was 130, but was actually a 110 IQ, I was like, I’m just wondering is anyone else seeing this stuff?
Chris Hayes: Yes, I was. Straight from a white nationalist incel board post basically is how you would talk about.
Elle Reeve: When Trump claimed that they were eating cats and dogs in Ohio, Donald Trump Jr. Sort of justified this stuff by saying import the third world, become the third world, saying it’s not racist. Just look at the average IQ in a place like Haiti. And like that’s the whole white nationalist thing. One of the white nationalists that I spoke to, he had been tested with a very high IQ as a kid. Like he’s like working class. He horrible at sports awkward, Asperger’s, but he had this IQ and it told him that he was smarter than everyone else, that he was better than everyone else in school. Reporting this out really made me have second thoughts about gifted programs in elementary schools, because he spoke pretty movingly about how he had been taught to believe that this was government proof, hard data, that he was better than everyone else.
And people would say, oh, Matt, you’re so smart. If you just applied yourself, you could do a lot. And he’s like, why would I do that when I can do nothing and still get praised for it like that. He said that he had turned it into a total culture of self worship. That IQ was everything in society, that the individual and a society rose and fell because of the IQ score of that person or of the average IQ of a culture.
He said that he had turned it into a disgusting cult of self worship. To me, that’s so unsettling when an actual white nationalist is like, you know, this is a really immoral way to think of the world guys, the people who created some of this stuff have turned on it and yet you’re seeing the people at the highest level of society repeat it.
Chris Hayes: Well, this is why Musk to me is the ultimate end point of this entire thing. He is the sort of, when you talk about that ranking of the, you know, beta autistic and the all the way up, here’s a guy who very clearly is socially awkward. I find it almost physically difficult to watch him socially interact and speak. He is one of the most sort of unnervingly awkward people I’ve ever seen. He desperately wants to be cool in a way that is to me, so off putting, again, it’s almost a physical reaction.
He is the world’s wealthiest man. He has unbelievable power. He has described himself as having Asperger’s. I don’t know if he has a diagnosis or not, but he has said that about himself. I think he almost certainly, if you tested him, has a very high IQ, and it’s almost feels like some of the people that you report on your book, who are these sort of alienated self-described losers, if that same psychopathology that they were engaged in was put in the hands of one of the most powerful people in the world, and that’s what we’re watching.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. He’s appropriating their culture. He’s using all their slang, clown world, NPCs, all of this stuff, he’s posted Pepe memes. He was often the example they gave me as the ultimate autistic Chad, the genius who could rise above his social limitations and impregnate all the women and have this like very powerful position. But what’s been so disturbing to me is so I’m from the South, when politicians would talk about real America, I’m like, there’s no way you are more real American than me. Like I’ve eaten squirrel dumplings at family reunion on a dirt road. So don’t even talk to me, right?
So I went down to south Georgia to interview people, kind of assuming that while they had this extreme emotional connection to Trump, they wouldn’t feel that way about Musk, but I was totally wrong. So many people I spoke to were like, he’s a genius, he’s an absolute genius. This guy kind of got angry at me and was like, name one person smarter. Do you know one person who’s smarter?
He thought he saw my camera woman shake her head that she did know someone smarter. And he starts grilling her, like, who? Another guy I was interviewing, the portrait of a Trump supporter he was wearing overalls, he’s a big man. He’s wealthy, he owns a trucking company. But he didn’t go to college. And I’m asking him like, well, does it bother you at all that he’s kind of done some questionable things publicly. He’s talked about using drugs. He smoked weed on camera. And he got so, so offended.
Like he got, was like personally hurt that I seem to be attacking Musk’s character. And again, like really bought into this idea of Musk as a genius. And it’s such an unsettling contrast after years of suspicion of elites, universities, professors, I don’t know how many times people have sat cited, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” right? But the same people who reject the authority of the university professor are marveling at the IQ of Musk.
Chris Hayes: That fits with this other ideology. The bell curve meme that I think is really important and honestly, probably the most effectively, economical expressions of the reactionary spirit I’ve ever seen.
So the bell curve meme is an IQ bell curve. And there’s a drawing of like, you know, a dumb person in the low part of the bell curve, which is the left most end, if you’re looking at the screen and then there’s a genius on the right end. This is the person, so it’s like the 10th percentile and the 95th percentile. And then there’s someone up at the top, in the middle, the mid-twit, the person who’s like got the average IQ or slightly above it.
Basically the idea of the meme is like the person in the middle believes some wrong dumb thing. And the person in the 10th percentile, the lowest person IQ and the highest IQ believe the same correct thing.
This to me is the key meme of both reactionary politics going back many, many, many, many decades and centuries and this particular moment. And that sort of squares their circle on this, right? Because the way they view it, it’s like the people in the academy and the elites and all these people, they’re in that middle part of the bubble. But the common volks and, and the Elon Musks are on the same side against them.
Elle Reeve: Yeah, yeah. Against the groupthink, against the blue pill, against the illusion.
Chris Hayes: So when you say that Musk is appropriating, do you think it’s appropriating or do you think it’s just he’s one of them, it seems to me that he’s just like authentically one of them. In so far as he spends all day interacting and posting with them.
Elle Reeve: I don’t have any personal reporting on Musk, but I think there’s a group chat, there’s a dark social that we don’t have access to, because he interacts with these very small accounts sometimes. How did he come to find that? Isn’t he busy?
Chris Hayes: He doesn’t seem that busy.
Elle Reeve: He spends a lot of time on Twitter obviously, but he’s not originating these ideas. He is regurgitating them.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Completely.
Elle Reeve: He’s not generating any of these ideas. I don’t know how he surfaces some of these tweets without, just the way —
Chris Hayes: He’s getting tens of thousands of replies a day. So how are you finding all this?
Elle Reeve: Exactly. And sometimes you’ll see like a lot of people in the MAGA world, like suddenly commenting on the same concept and it’s like, okay, this went out in the group chat.
Chris Hayes: Right, right, right, right.
Elle Reeve: I don’t have a window into what that actually looks like, but anyone who wants to send me screenshots, obviously I’d take them.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What is your experience reporting among these folks like?
Elle Reeve: Well, at first it was extremely hostile and unpleasant and sometimes a new contact you get screamed at because I’m a meme to them myself. I’m a living meme. I embody everything they’re opposed to because they see me as a dumb woman who is mindlessly regurgitating what’s popular around me. Like you’ve seen Musk tweet the meme, I support the current thing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Elle Reeve: Right. I’m that right to them. Plus run by Vice who they saw as like this degenerate force bringing down the morals of society,
Chris Hayes: Even though weirdly Vice had like an incredibly reactionary strain from the beginning that was extremely connected to precisely their worldview. Interestingly enough,
Elle Reeve: I know, I know. I mean, Gavin McInnis. I saw him on election night. It was the first time I met him, They obsessively researched me and everyone I’m connected to, they’ve like taken the same incel eye for analyzing faces and analyzed mind. So like they’ve figured out that like my eyes are a statistically quite far apart, like most people don’t notice this, right?
Chris Hayes: No.
Elle Reeve: But they have these drawings.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you write about this in the book.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. They have all these drawings of me like, and it is true. My eyes are further apart. They’re more than 95% of women.
Chris Hayes: Yes. You measured it and you cite it in the book.
Elle Reeve: So at first the first wave was they thought I was Jewish. And so they’re like screaming at me for being Jewish. And I’m like, well, I’m not Jewish, but also there’s nothing wrong with this doesn’t hurt. Then they go to the eyes thing and like, I’m not offended by it, but it is kind of funny. They thought it was a sign I had fetal alcohol syndrome. But over time, they started to accept my presence and that I knew what I was talking about. So the only unpleasantness is they feel like they know me and they know something about me and they try to get a picture with me. It’s a little disturbing, but they confess everything. I know their divorces, their affairs, drug addictions, alcohol abuse, weird sexual experience, they’ve told me everything.
Chris Hayes: It just seems to me that like all of these people could use a lot of therapy or like sincere religious practice or something. It just seems so evident that this sort of thirsty, desperate desire to be a Chad and be on top and high social status is born of self-loathing, self-doubt. And what’s so weird about it’s all so graspy, and so palpably graspy, and again, part of it’s because the incel world created this universe in the beginning where they could all kind of be with each other and create their own forms of social status within that bubble.
Elle Reeve: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That that’s now sort of gone big, but I can’t get over how much palpable, emotional pain and desperation is shot through the whole thing.
Elle Reeve: I know, so one troll many years ago described to me like being in this discord server where someone knew I would come in and they would say, say the N word, say it. And they would resist and be like, what? It’s just a word, just type it out. What are you so scared of? Like, you can’t come in here if you’re not willing to say the N word. So then they do it. And those same people would turn around and say, well, now you can never leave because we’ll screenshot that and show all your friends that you said the N word.
And I almost see the same thing happening with the R slur, disabled people, that has become kind of like a word you have to use to show you are fully in like you’re fully read in, but like the all right folks that I cover is like, they are people who had such a hard time making friends that they needed a space where they would be accepted as long as they were willing to say the N word. And I almost see that replicating. They often know that it’s sad and desperate. They kind of revel in their own absurdity. Calling them losers was never very effective if I wanted to make them feel upset, if I was trying to get under their skin. I called Richard Spencer, a fraud and a phony to his face and it never ruffled his feathers. The first time I really felt like I got under his skin was when I was like, you know, I’m an athlete. Like I looked at your guys and I know I’ve got a better run time than 90% of them, like, I’m a better athlete than all those guys out there.
And he’s like, Hey, that’s really petty. Like, he sounded very hurt by it. It’s just the vibes, the aesthetics, it’s not a side thing. It’s the main thing.
Chris Hayes: One of the things we’re trying to sort of work towards is like, sort of understanding this, but I also don’t want to be like, oh, these poor whatever, because this ideology is violent and it’s genuinely dangerous. And there’s been examples of people that graduate from this ideology to mass murder. That’s a thing that happens. Not that infrequently to be totally honest. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, like Elliot Rogers being one, there’s other examples, but you know, the sort of ultimate, the terminal point of nihilistic black pilled baseness I don’t care who I offend or I’m going to do the thing that’s the most socially unacceptable is mass murder.
Elle Reeve: Those people who are trying to inspire more violence. The Christchurch shooter, they want to inspire more violence. They also want to become a meme. Like if you go and read the Christchurch shooters manifesto, it’s unsettling the degree to which he wants to be admired and memorialized by the teenagers on 8Chan that he was chatting with and it worked, he did become a meme. He wrote memes on his gun that he used to kill people with.
Another one of the mass shooters, I think it was the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter
Chris Hayes: Tree of life. Yeah.
Elle Reeve: Screw your optics. I’m going in. Optics meaning, we can’t recruit more normies if we look violent. And then the idea is like, time for thinking about optics is over. We have to take radical action.
Some of the white nationalists, I talked to said that like, after the sort of failure of Charlottesville, when they were like, just like beaten down, they were all fighting each other that led to more stochastic violence, that people felt like there’s nothing to be done, but accelerationism and you could do that by killing people. But I don’t know that they’re feeling that now, because things are actually happening.
Chris Hayes: Well, what do you mean by that?
Elle Reeve: Well, like Trump is actually deporting people. Trump is actually purging the federal government of people insufficiently supportive to him. He fired the military JAGs. He is doing actions that they only fantasized about when they were like so far from power. So there were white nationalists who were part of Charlottesville who regret their role in it. And people who said they were fascist, you know, they saw January 6th and they were like, whoa, like that’s too far. We were more ideologically radical. We were more radical about racism, but MAGA is much more tactically radical, willing to storm the capital to stop votes from being counted.
So there’s just like this strange moment where they’re like, I ran into this guy I’ve known since 2016, he’s a fascist. I saw him at inauguration. He goes by our Augustine Sanchez now. But he was like talking about Elon Musk doing what looked like a sig heil, a Roman salute, a Nazi salute.
Chris Hayes: Twice.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. And he’s like, you know, that’s bad optics even for us. And then later when Steve Bannon did it, I saw Nick Fuentes kind of said the same thing. He’s like, look, I literally worked for yay making up policies based on Hitler. But, yikes, this is going a little bit too far for me. I’m getting a little uncomfortable, guys. I don’t even know exactly how to analyze that.
Chris Hayes: I just feel like everyone is such a weird mix of irony, pilled and misanthropic that it’s like, people have been cut off again from the normal stuff of human relations.
Elle Reeve: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these people do have tons of loving human relations. My strong sense is they don’t.
Elle Reeve: No, I’ve had some say to me like, oh no, everyone hates me but you and my mother. But it’s like these guys for whom it was like so often irony and it’s so far removed the possibility of it actually happening. And now that it’s actually happening, they’re like, whoa, okay. Now I’m having to reckon with my jokes becoming reality,
Chris Hayes: The sig heil thing is a perfect moment of exactly how close all this is now. I mean, Elon Musk has a back end to the payment system of the United States government. It’s being regulated a little bit by a court order. He is actually firing people. He has actually through DOGE, canceled a contract that might lead to 400,000 Sudanese children starving to death. That’s not like a hyperbolic statement. That’s like a true statement about the world.
He has canceled contracts that has led to African women walking around with intrauterine devices that were put in them for clinical trials that they cannot now get taken out because the contract is abruptly canceled and the people that would oversee the clinical trial are not there.
There are people who are dying in multiple places around the world as a direct result of this. He also unilaterally is firing people from people in the forest service to people at the V.A.
This guy has an unbelievable amount of power. The guy doing the sieg heil, the guy who’s posting like he’s on one of these boards, that is the real world.
One of the things one of the early people in your book says that the 8Chan founder is like, there’s no more difference between online the real world. And when you see Elon Musk canceling a contract for starving African children and sieg heiling, like that’s it, there it is. That’s what it looks like in the real world.
Elle Reeve: And yet there’s still this pose of well, if you take that so seriously, you are the fool. You are the triggered one. And I think it’s actually very effective, this cringe propaganda, this propaganda of like shame. Like you don’t want to be caught as the victim of troll being like emotional in your reaction to this stuff. And when it’s successful, it paralyzes the opposition.
Chris Hayes: I definitely think it’s successful among 16 year old boys and people whose inner life is still the inner life of 16 year old boys. I don’t think it’s effective for people that aren’t that. And I think one of the issues is that an enormous amount of people, this is true of particularly along gender lines. There are millions of deeply stunted men out there who are just kind of broken inside and their brokenness is emanating in this way.
The founder of 8Chan is like the ultimate example of this, broken both as metaphor and reality. Right?
Elle Reeve: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think that like, yes, it’s effective among a 14 year old boy, it’s effective among a 14 year old boy who hates when his mom tells him to clean his room. And there’s many men walking around America at 24 and 34 and 44, the ones at 44, no longer talking to their kids, who are still in their heads and in their hearts, the 14 year old boy furious at his mom for telling him to clean his room.
And it turns out if you appeal to that part of men, there’s a lot of them out there. That really is what it is to me. You need to grow up, you need to go talk to a therapist, you need to go have normal relationships. You need to understand who you are, and you need to be a man in a sense, and I mean this in like another way, which is like growing the heck up. But it turns out there’s just tens of millions, of super, super stunted men who are walking around in which the trolling memes that appeal to 13 year olds on 8Chan appeal to them because inside they’re still 13 year old.
Elle Reeve: Yeah. So like, that’s too late. It’s too late for them to all get therapy and not respond. Like, Elon’s got his power now.
Chris Hayes: Well, sure. Yes, yes, yes. But I don’t accept this sort of inversion they’re pulling off. I mean, I truly believe this will all come to a terrible end in the same way that like the terminal point of this ideology in many ways as like the Tree of Life shooting, the attack of Montreal, like genuine violence, the ideology of Trumpism, its natural endpoint was January 6th. This will come to a very, very, very bad and dark end.
Elle Reeve: Right. And what are you supposed to do? Just hope you’re not one of the unlucky ones, you know?
Chris Hayes: No, but I think that in the same way that politics still exists and public opinions still exist that like normies are going to get a say,
Elle Reeve: Yeah
Chris Hayes: Like this is fundamentally a vanguardist movement that has seized a ton of power that is way beyond its broad appeal. And even though its appeal has gotten way broader than the fringes it started on, it is still not fundamentally a majority movement. And that, that vanguardism is going to run into something at some point. That’s my belief.
Elle Reeve: But then what I go out in the country, and I interview these people like this woman who commissioned a painting of Trump walking next to Jesus Christ on water.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I think I’ve seen that painting.
Elle Reeve: And like I talked to this woman, I was like, why do people want t-shirts that call Trump daddy? And she was like, I mean, your mama makes you feel good. She takes care of things. But your daddy, when he hugs you, makes you so secure. And just was a profound, emotional relationship.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Totally.
Elle Reeve: To the a politician.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Elle Reeve: So those two groups are together, right? The trollish adolescent.
Chris Hayes: That’s why the coalition works.
Elle Reeve: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The sort of religious right, which is a much bigger numerical base. People, much more embedded in sort of normal life.
Elle Reeve: Right. People with jobs.
Chris Hayes: They sort of fuse them. Yes, exactly.
Elle Reeve: I did all this work like analyzing where all this stuff comes from. Everything they believe, their tactics, the tactics that work, the tactic that failed what worked to bring the alt-right down, and nevertheless their ideas and tactics and vibes and aesthetics have become the mainstream of at least 50% of the American culture. So now what, what does that mean? I genuinely don’t know.
Chris Hayes: So here’s my, my feeling about this, it thrives in opposition and is going to die as a mainstream. I really believe that. And I think that part of this sort of we’re the rebel alliance against the empire is going to be much harder sustained culturally, like at a meme level. I feel very confident that this will implode in on itself. It’s just a question of how many people get hurt when and how it does.
People say like, oh, we survived the first Trump. And it’s like, yeah, well a million people didn’t actually, a million people died. Remember that year? Like there might be hundreds of thousands of Sudanese children who don’t survive. Elon Musk take over the federal government. It’s a question of who gets hurt and how, but fundamentally, the ideology is about hurting people by hurt people. That is what it is, and it’s going to hurt people.
Elle Reeve: So when I was on this last reporting trip, I kept asking people like, you know, because they had talked about the price of eggs so much, this was a follow up story. I’m like, okay, the eggs prices didn’t drop. Like he said, they would. And they’re like, well, you know, I’m, I’m ready to give him time. And multiple people said to me, they were willing to have their family significantly financially hurt.
Chris Hayes: Of course. Yes.
Elle Reeve: As Trump goes through his experiments and his process is to see what works.
I was like, do you have a time limit? Like when are you going to run out of patience? A year, two years? And this woman just looks at me and goes Trump 2028.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I think that that part of the movement is not going to be reached. The question is Trump’s victory was given to him by people much further in the outer parts of the concentric circle. You know, he won by 1.5 percentage points. So that sort of cultural force, those memes, they sort of ricochet out from a center of like the message board people and the folks. And they go and they end up in the infrequent voters, the people who said they pay zero attention to political news who went for Trump by 15 while the people who say they wouldn’t pay a lot of attention, went for Harris by six.
And so the question is what happens on the outer concentric circle? And we’ll see.
Elle Reeve: Yeah, I definitely am not confident enough to make a prediction, that’s for sure.
Chris Hayes: Elle Reeve is a correspondent at CNN she’s author of “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.”
Elle, that was great. Thanks so much.
Elle Reeve: Thanks for having me. It was fun
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Elle Reeve. That book is called “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.”
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