The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and citizens who are making a difference. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify to hear more.
What do Nazis, fascists, incels, skinheads, misogynists, insurrectionists and Proud Boys all have in common? Many of them confide in reporter Elle Reeve.
It was around 2015 and Reeve was reporting for Vice News about the rise of the “alt right,” a term coined by its leader, Richard Spencer. She spent time on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan where far right activists communicated, trolled liberals, and began to coalesce as a movement. These were often ordinary people who increasingly embraced conspiracy theories and violence.
This was during the presidency of Barack Obama, when many people were imagining that the U.S. was in the glow of a “post-racial” era. Reeve knew better.
“Racism wasn’t dying off with an older generation,” she told the Vermont Conversation. “There was a strong beating heart right there on the internet.”
In 2017, Reeve was there when the alt right burst out of obscure Internet chat rooms and into public consciousness in a violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her documentary account, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” earned her and Vice News Tonight a Peabody Award, four Emmys and a George Polk Award.
In 2019, Reeve became a correspondent for CNN, where she works today. She was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 reporting on the attack on Congress by Trump supporters, many of whom she knew well.
Why do they talk to her? “They want to tell their story, they want to confess, they want to unburden themselves,” she said.
Reeve has a new book, “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.” The title refers to how far right activists speak of taking the “black pill” of nihilism to justify their cruelty and violence. “It’s this dark nihilism that the world is doomed. There’s nothing you can do to change it, and you at best, can hope for it to collapse.”
Reeve traces how far-right rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance channeling extremist ideas and language.
Vance has denounced the “woke ideology” of “white women who are miserable about their own lives, enforcing codes about racial justice, gay rights on other people to make other people miserable, to account for how miserable they are in their own lives,” Reeve explained.
Vance’s use of the term “childless cat ladies” is another far right meme. “I’ve read that on 4chan six or seven years ago,” said Reeve. “It has trickled upward.”
Another far right notion that is now embraced by mainstream Republicans is that diversity is bad. “They think that racial and ethnic and gender diversity makes us weaker. It makes us fools. This is just something that they ridiculed all the time.”
Reeve explained the far right context of Trump’s attacks on people of color. “If a white person commits a crime in their world, it’s because they’re a bad guy. But if a Black person commits a crime in their world, it’s because they’re Black.”
Reeve warned that many people “are vulnerable to those ideas. I just interviewed a ton of people at a Trump boat parade. They were so nice to me, and then they started talking to me about how it’s not right to eat people’s cats, and these people do animal sacrifice, and they’re dirty and they bring disease.”
“It’s not all crazy people who believe this stuff. It’s regular people and your neighbors,” said Reeve. “You have an obligation to push back against that, whether or not they’ll listen to you.”
Reeve said about the future, “There has been an escalating radicalization among the Republican elite and a softening among the voters… People speak freely about civil war. That is dangerous.”
“I don’t like it but I don’t know where that balance ends up after the election. You can’t do something like Jan. 6 without a feeling that there’s an army behind you of supporters who will back you up.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: CNN’s Elle Reeve on how far-right extremism became the Republican mainstream.