Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve

Overview

This tour de force of investigative journalism—in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We’re Polarized—reveals how the battle between the right and left is spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences.

Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups.

At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, had arrived in the real world with greater and greater frequency.

With a sharp eye for detail and a dash of dark humor, Reeve explains the origins of this shocking sweep of political violence. Drawing on countless interviews with sources in the white nationalist movement as well as hundreds of as-yet-unseen documents, she takes us on a surreal journey from the darkest corners of the internet to the most significant and chilling scenes of real-world political violence in generations. A stranger-than-fiction odyssey into the dark heart of what American politics has become, Black Pill is necessary reading for any supporter of democracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982198909
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	07/09/2024
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Elle Reeve is a CNN correspondent whose work has won numerous awards, including the Emmy, the Peabody, and more. Her writing has appeared in VICE, The New Republic, New York magazine, Elle, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. She lives in New York. You can follow her on Twitter @ElspethReeve.  

Editorial Reviews

Chilling and insightful...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.” –The New York Times

“Intrepid...a feat of fearless reporting.” —The Washington Post

“A sharp exposé that does much to explain a strange, dangerous underground movement steadily emerging into daylight.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Elle is a phenomenally skilled interviewer.” —Bookpage, starred review

“A riveting debut chronicle...This immersive political history will captivate readers concerned about the future of democracy.” —Publishers Weekly

“Powerful and propulsive...Reeve fearlessly investigates some of the most insidious corners of the Internet and showcases, to horrifying effect, how these radical pockets are threatening the rest of us.” —Brian Stelter, New York Times bestselling author of Hoax and Network of Lies

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-24
A reporter takes a gimlet-eyed look at the dangerous worlds of the deluded who gave us QAnon, right-wing extremism, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The black pill of CNN correspondent Reeve’s title is a trope borrowed from the Matrix film franchise to describe “a dark but gleeful nihilism: the system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable.” One of the author’s principal characters is a young man who, suffering from “brittle bone disease,” founded an “online forum for male virgins.” Later, he switched his energies to the site that would become 8chan. “He’d imagined that a site with unrestricted free speech would create a robust forum that would bring forth new and better ideas, but over time, 8chan became an incubator for conspiracy theories and violent ideologies, like incels, the alt-right, and later, after he left it, QAnon,” writes the author. “8chan made Fred an internet supervillain.” Reeve has her sights on numerous other villains, though, including neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, more interested in money than ideology, backed by rich and secretive old men who bankrolled a movement that got away from them. “The leaders lost control of the cult,” writes the author. “Now the cult controls the leader….The power is in mass anonymity. The racist hive mind collects a catalog of all leaders’ worst moments.” For the moment, that cult finds Donald Trump and his white nationalism useful, but perhaps only for the moment. Throughout the book, Reeve treads on controversial ground, but she does so with measured intelligence—and, as she notes, “It’s a real mindfuck for smart people to hear that many of the nazis are really smart.” Smart, perhaps, but also paranoid, conspiratorial, misogynistic, racist, often narcissistic, mendacious—and now deeply entrenched in the “respectable” conservative movement.

A sharp exposé that does much to explain a strange, dangerous underground movement steadily emerging into daylight.

Kirkus Reviews