'It Starts With Misogyny': A Q&A with Elle Reeve

The author of the new book "Black Pill" discusses the far right, youth radicalization and how adults can intervene.

Hey MomLeft readers. This week I spoke to Elle Reeve, a CNN reporter and longtime chronicler of the radical right. Her new book “Black Pill” explores the darkest parts of the internet, and how they’ve come to influence the IRL world. She explained how the far right makes its pitch to young people, and how parents can help.

Kelly: You’ve been covering the far right for ages. Where were you seeing young people getting radicalized when you started covering the right, and has it changed since then?

Elle: It has and it hasn’t. Ten years ago, the big place I was looking at was 4chan and Twitter. Nazis were allowed to run free on Twitter until around 2017. Most of the time it was anonymous message boards. Then there would be Discord servers.

The platform changes, but the dynamic stays the same. One incel circle I talked to was on TinyChat. They started off talking about incel stuff and eventually moved into fascism. It was a video chat room where they would be online, either on camera or in chat 24/7. There was a European adult who was a member of this. He told me he would wake up in European time and see these American teenagers sleeping on their keyboards in front of their computers. That’s how much time they were spending on it. I think private Discords are still a big part of it. You also see a lot of TikTok; Andrew Tate-type commentary is very popular among tween and teenage boys, and that can be a way in. 

What hasn’t changed is that it starts with misogyny. A lot of boys are asking like ‘why didn’t this girl pay attention to me at school?’ It can be very seductive to hear someone say ‘it’s because of feminism. It’s because of liberalism, because of equality, because of all these political reasons. You are being deprived by some outside force of the ability to have your crush like you back.’ That’s been the gateway drug the whole time. It hasn’t changed at all.

What narratives are young people seeking out online when they encounter this kind of material?

I think about how, growing up in the 90s and 2000s, women’s magazines were almost pro-eating disorder. I think what has happened is the fashion and beauty world has become more inclusive, but young boys have been drawn much more into feeling ashamed about how they look. What I see in these message boards over and over again—with fascists and incels—are these boys who are very unhappy about what they look like. Then they feel anger at the outside world that feminism, liberalism, whatever, has made them ‘soft.’ There’s a replication of their negative experiences. If they get picked on for being feminine or weak, or they get called ‘gay’ as a pejorative, instead of saying ‘I don’t want to be part of that masculinity,’ a lot of these guys are drawn further in. 

There’s a lot on the internet about literally, physically looking more attractive. It’s very superficial. There was this phrase that was popular for a while: chad nationalism. It’s crazy. Looking through their message boards, they’d be embarrassed if their fellow fascist was photographed looking chubby. It’s so much about looking better. There’s also this idea there, which isn’t crazy, that millions of people are working slavishly away at boring jobs they don’t care about to buy garbage on Amazon that will just be thrown into the ocean, and that you can reject that and return to a more meaningful way of being, by being trad. There are these really idyllic images of women in beautiful wheat fields, usually their backs are turned, long blonde hair, it’s sunset; the idea of peace and an ‘escape’ from modernity.

One of the really common memes came from this Italian fascist: the idea of ‘revolt’ against the modern world. Reject all this garbage and go back to a more meaningful life where ‘men were men and women were women.’ They promise a more meaningful life where you get to be hotter. It’s so much about image. People post these photos of ‘Aryan’ families where the woman is demure and submissive and the man is muscular and strong. Or it’ll be taken from a 1950s advertisement—it wasn’t real in the 1950s, either! It’s just marketing. There are little cherubic children and it’s a very seductive picture if you’re unhappy, if you struggle to connect with other people, if you’re frustrated about the way your life is going. You can look at it and make up the narrative you want.

Do these online circles function as social support groups for these boys? I’m not saying they’re successful support groups, but are boys looking for camaraderie there?

Absolutely. I interviewed a former Proud Boy in Portland. He said these are guys who have always wanted a wingman and have never had someone at their back. They want to have friends, and maybe they’re a little bit awkward in person. They join this group, they say they believe in these ideas, and soon they have a group of friends. Where it gets extra dangerous is when sometimes these guys have wanted to go fight somebody, but they’ve been afraid to do it without wingmen who have their backs. They join a group to do that.

But I’ve gone through incel and white nationalist forums. I’ve gone through their message boards, their Discords. They call each other ‘fam,’ they feel like these are their real friends. And really they don’t know each other. When they meet each other in real life, the fantasy about who they were talking to crashes into the reality. It turns out they’ve been trusting people that maybe they shouldn’t have. That’s a big revelation that Chris Cantwell had. He’s known as the Crying Nazi after Charlottesville. [In the book] I meet him a year later [after Unite The Right]. He’s just gotten out of jail, he has this very depressing house full of clutter, he’s fighting alcoholism, and he talked about how he realized in Charlottesville he had trusted a lot of people that maybe he shouldn’t have. Now of course, there are a lot of people who would say the same thing about him. 

These guys are really lonely. They want friends. That’s why it’s easier than you think to report on them. Once you get over the hurdle of them screaming misogynist insults at you, they want someone to listen to them.

How can an adult speak to a young person in their life who’s going down this path of radicalization?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. I don’t have a certain answer. I’ve spoken with a woman named Shannon Foley Martinez. She does deradicalization, and she told me how she speaks to people: not trying to combat the ideology, because these guys will memorize their arguments. If they believe in eugenics, they have the studies that they think prove their beliefs. It’s pretty hard to get them to drop that. So she will appeal to their emotions, talk to them about why they want to join this movement. One problem she said she runs into is that, if there’s a conspiracy theory like QAnon, she can’t say ‘no, there are no elites who violate our norms against hurting children,’ because look at Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein was a real person. You have to be careful in talking to them in a way that you acknowledge the ways in which the world is a very imperfect place, while still untangling conspiracy theories.

In the beginning, when I was just starting talking to these guys, I would say things like ‘race is just a social construct.’ Well guess what, they’ve heard that before. They’re not living on another planet; they’re very attuned to mainstream or liberal or leftists analyses of the world, and they’ve already built up a system to reject that. If you want to try to convince them that eugenics is bullshit, you have to actually do some research to talk to them about why what they believe is junk science. They’re not going to just believe something like ‘race is a social construct’ or ‘diversity is our strength.’

You have to approach them like they’re intelligent. You can’t talk to them like they’re stupid. And in many cases, their idea of their own intelligence is a recurring theme. For some kids who were in gifted programs in school, from an early age, they were told they were better than everyone else. It’s a very easy transition, and it has been for multiple white nationalists I’ve spoken to, to go from thinking of yourself as gifted to thinking of yourself as born this way because you’re white; and that maybe the whole world needs to be organized in a way so that people like you are on top.

You mentioned that you’ve spoken with people who left the far right. What makes people turn away from these movements?

In almost every situation, it’s not that they had a sudden realization that they were racists. A lot of the time, there were frustrated ambitions. They joined these groups to find brotherhood, but when the brotherhood betrays them, that’s when they first start questioning. After that, it takes a lot of time to slowly untangle themselves from those beliefs. I spoke to one woman who left because her white nationalist boyfriend treated her quite poorly. When she got pregnant and it was a girl, she said ‘I can’t let that happen to my daughter.’ Another woman was dating a white nationalist. It wasn’t a great relationship. She stayed in it until she realized that this movement hates women and there was only so far she was going to be able to go in it. Then she started questioning a lot of the things she believed.

One white nationalist woman was talking to regular people—normies—and the white nationalist woman said ‘if you saw a house that was burning, and you broke inside and saw white people and Black people, wouldn’t you save the white people first?’ The normies said ‘I would save whoever I could save.’ This woman realized that was what she probably would do too, and she realized the racism she’d been embracing didn’t make a lot of sense.

When questioning people about their white nationalism, I’ve gotten the furthest when pointing out how those movements hurt them. Because everyone who touches it gets destroyed eventually. Eventually they’re humiliated or divorced; there are a lot of suicides in that world. It goes a lot further to say ‘yes you’re hurting society, but you’re hurting yourself and your family, too.’

We’ve talked a lot about how this movement recruits boys, but are there efforts to recruit girls online, too?

Old white nationalism was never feminist but it had women and it had women in leadership positions. Around 2014 onward, what was the alt-right was very influenced by incel culture. It was very misogynistic. It was so misogynistic that full-on neo-Nazis who celebrated the anniversary of Kristallnacht were like ‘look, this is too far.’ So it’s important to understand that this is the atmosphere. Most women I spoke to were brought in by white nationalists who portrayed themselves as intellectuals and spoke about ‘protecting women’ and respecting women as housewives. That was almost universally the way in. Once inside, they realized the movement is not about respecting and protecting women at all. It’s about humiliating them for the entertainment of other men. 

I have reams of messages from these women talking about the abuse they’re facing, whether it’s emotional or physical, and how maybe something is wrong with them because they’re not understanding the joke—because this is all supposed to be a joke, right? They’re asking themselves ‘do I not understand these memes? What’s wrong with me that I don’t like this?’ It was one of the hardest things I’ve reported on, to go through these messages from women who were being mistreated, texting each other ‘I’ve been dehumanized enough for one weekend’ and staying in the movement.

Is there anything I should be asking as a parent?

It’s something I think about a lot: what am I going to do? Severely limit internet time? I would rather my kid have an Olympic-level trampoline in the backyard than have social media. It’s easier to fix a broken arm than a broken brain. One of the biggest things I’ve learned here, is that if you have a child who is a gifted student, to not let that child develop a warped sense of superiority, because it has really set a lot of the guys I talked to on this path.

I was watching a speech once by a white nationalist who was talking about how he'd been in the movement so long that when he was talking to an old friend who was an outsider to the movement, he was shocked when realized his friend believed the Holocaust had happened. This man had been in this world so long he’d forgotten it’s not normal to be a Holocaust denier. Based on my reporting, it is very important that kids break out of the little internet world they’re part of and talk to regular people who will challenge what they’re seeing.