2,472 words

Elle Reeve
BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024

It’s often intriguing to compare a new book’s actual content and theme with its promotional blurb. Often enough, lazy reviewers can’t be bothered to read the thing, so instead they’ll write a précis based on the flyleaves and press release. (This seems to be the standard technique at such outlets as Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.) Sometimes the blurb and promotional materials emphasize a piquant but tangential aspect of the book in order to make it seem topical. I saw this in recent months when reviewing a couple of books about Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. The books both came out in the past two or three years, and in both instances they advertised themselves with contrived references to Donald Trump and the far-Right, even though they were mainly about the 1950s and 60. So what a book really is, and what it’s sold as, can be two vastly different things.

In the case of Black Pill, what we have is an episodic, personal memoir by a once-young (now early-40s) female journalist whose basic story is, Strange People I Have Known, and How I Met Them on the Internet. Elle Reeve has made a career of hunting down weirdoes. She writes about their mishaps, their foibles, their deformities.

But the book’s purported subject, what you see on the cover and in release materials, consists of a farrago of clichés and twice-told tales about White Nationalists, the Dissident Right, and all the Rightists the author wants to group together as lower-case “nazis.” You’ve seen it all before: the sort of coverage we got incessantly in the mainstream press, 2016-2019. No doubt it also reflects the way the author pitched the book to agent and publisher. You think the Alt Right is yesterday’s news. But I can tell you more!

It’s stale material, so they all do their best—author, agent, editors, publisher—to make the old news seem fresh and scary. You should head for the excerpt that recently appeared in Vanity Fair. Which I’ve archived here to avoid any paywall problems. It’s got all the hot parts, the promotional sizzle that’s supposed to be in the book. And what a wonderful title:

 “‘Don’t F-cking Leave’: How Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Trap Their Followers in the Movement Forever”

The author’s notion of a “Movement” has little to do with anything I ever witnessed; she’s a bottom-feeder, chasing after freaks. But go ahead and scroll through it. It’s a quick read, and rather nostalgic. All the old drivel and tiresome sloganeering. The kind of takes we’d read in anti-“alt right” opinion columns six or seven or eight years ago. All about racists, and White Nationalists, Identity Evropa, Bill Regnery, Heilgate, and of course Richard Spencer. Nathan Damigo! Elliot Mosley! The two bearded Matts!

Even American Renaissance, VDARE, the H. L. Mencken Club and the Charles Martel Society!—about which organizations the author knows next to nothing, and cares less, but she drops the names here in the interest of completeness (they’ll get an entry in the index, you see). She explains the arcane jargon of the movement: what it means to “counter-signal,” and what is an “optics cuck.”

Irrelevantly, even Dylann Roof gets a mention, bringing to mind that wonderful 2017 caricature of a fish-faced Elle Reeve staring off in two directions and asking, “But what about Dylann Roof?”

Oh, and check out Simon & Schuster’s breathless promotional blurb:

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.

The author’s birthname is actually Elspeth Frances Reeve, a very nice name indeed. But she’s been called Ellie all her life, and she’s been spelling it Elle, like the ingenue fashion mag and French pronoun, at least since high school, while nevertheless pronouncing it Ellie. Too precious by half, in my opinion. An endless invitation to misspelling and mispronunciation. (As though I were to rename myself Marie Claire, and insist that everyone call me Mary Clary.)

Taken only as a memoir, the book is sporadically interesting. Like many first-time memoirists, Elle Reeve here presents us with a series of rather disjointed episodes full of assorted monsters and grotesques. It’s a picaresque tale, and as you’ll remember from high school a picaresque is a narrative where the protagonist faces a series of often bizarre and unrelated adventures. Don Quixote is a picaresque. So is Huckleberry Finn. Tom Jones. Where Black Pill falls down as a narrative is that the author seems to be trying to draw a moral out of each adventure—a pious moral, or maybe a whimsical moral—and usually comes up short. What we get instead are recurrent whiffs of sanctimony. She likes to imply that self-preservation and race-realism are somehow wrong, but she’s unable to explain her underlying thesis. The book would be much more enjoyable if she blue-penciled her confused ideology and just entertained us with what she saw at the circus. Really, her core story here should be why she ran off to the circus in the first place, and how she found her place amongst the freaks. (Google-gobble! Google-gobble! We accept you, one of us!)

I was lying when I said the hot parts were all to be found in that Vanity Fair excerpt. In one of her more lurid episodes, she tells us about wheelchair-bound Fred Brennan, system operator of something called Wizardchan, later founder of 8chan, who meets a distant goth dominatrix online and buys her a plane ticket so she can fly from Oklahoma to New York, and incel Fred can finally lose his virginity. He thereafter employs her for a while as his live-in mistress and maid-of-all-work.

Fred pops up repeatedly through the book. The time-scheme gets skewed, so for a while there I was under the impression Fred was sort of Elspeth’s Virgil, leading her through the Shitlord Inferno from 2013 onwards, while meanwhile Elspeth provided moral support as he endeavored to pop his cherry. With that in mind, I decided Elspeth might seem rather weird—she does have an alien look to her—but seemed decent enough; a real caring person, you know!

Actually it seems the two met only in 2019. The brilliant, gnarled, breadbox-size Fred was recounting his twisted life and amorous adventures from a perspective of some years. Much of it seems to have been told during a visit to an Atlantic City casino, where Fred and Elspeth neither drank nor gambled, but dined on enormous slices of chocolate cake.

As this book is a PG-rated Elspeth in Wonderland, with many disconnected episodes, it occurred to me that what it really needed was illustrations. Rather like the Sir John Tenniel ones in the Alice books. That way, you could flip through it and see which adventure you wanted to read about: WizardChan’s Fred Brennan in his electronic wheelchair, enduring the intricacies of getting laid; the two bearded guys named Matt, one of whom has a wife named Connie who is diabetic and opiate-addicted, and sedulously plans her own suicide with a Rube Goldberg-type contraption that forces her to breathe helium instead of air; the January 6 “insurrection” at the Capitol, which Elspeth doesn’t witness, but which she gaily concocts misinformation about from the privacy of her laptop; a visit to Richard Spencer’s ex-wife, who data-dumps her old emails describing Richard’s plot to connive a fortune from a senile and dying inventor; the ex-con cook at Shoney’s where Elspeth waitressed in high school, who pulls up his shirt to show the White Pride tattoo he got in prison; and the murky, incompletely explained autobiographical chapter that opens the book, herein called “Author’s Note.”

This opening episode tells of her family’s feud with a bad neighbor. They were then living in a semi-rural exurb near Lebanon, Tennessee. (Her family is entirely from Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri, going back many generations.) And they had a troublesome neighbor. He developed a massive grudge against the Reeve family, harassing and vandalizing them in various ways. Shooting out a taillight, gouging their tires, killing their cat…that sort of thing. Elspeth here makes him sound like the Max Cady character in Cape Fear (I expect she saw the 1991 version, with Robert DeNiro as the crazy-bad guy), but that’s all right. She says she wasn’t really scared of this neighbor, because when she was fourteen she was a gymnast, and “shredded,” ready to take on any man twice her size! She thought about boys a lot, like most of her peers, but “most of my teen fantasies were about beating up a forty-year-old man.”

I see a lot of hyperbole and fictionalizing right here at the beginning. We’re not getting the full story. Surely her father had gotten the neighbor’s nose out of joint about something. Elspeth says it began with a little property-boundary dispute. But instead of being real friendly-like and trying to cool things down with that terrible redneck next door (Howdy neighbor! Happy harvest!) who spies on you from the bed of his pickup truck—and here you do have to wonder why Elspeth’s parents didn’t scope the neighborhood out before moving house—her parents escalated the situation with lawsuits and restraining orders.

Oh gawd, stupid move! Mr. Reeve and the Max Cady fellow now found themselves in front of an impatient judge. The Tennessee judge saw two feuding troublemakers, made up his mind about what was going on. He threatened to sentence them both to ten days in jail, but let them post a $5000 bond as surety for good behavior. The Reeves then moved a few miles away, whereupon Max tracked ‘em right down and left cigarette butts in their driveway (or so Elspeth’s story goes) and so ,the family moved once again.

The author doesn’t tell us how the feud finally resolved, although public records suggest it ended when her father died in 2001, by which point she was off in college in Missouri. And as she doesn’t offer any insights about her state of mind (other than wanting to beat up the Max Cady character), we are left to guess that the freaks and cripples and White Nationalists she hunted down over the next two decades held great fascination for her. Bad Max was just one in a long line. But she did learn about stalking, and predation, from old Max, inclinations that would fit in nicely with her journalistic career.

On the way, she had some curious jobs. In her late teens she worked the late shift on an assembly line, but the takeaway there is that she listened to early-a.m. talk radio in the post-9/11 era. Hasta la vista Bin Laden! This prepped her for being amazed and awestruck later when Donald Trump emerged as a presidential candidate in 2015-16 and mopped the floor with contender Jeb Bush.

“We should never have been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” [Trump] was telling this aristocrat [Jeb], Look at this fucked up world we have to live in because of your incompetent dynasty. Trump shouted, “You can call it whatever you want. I will tell you: they lied.”

This is interesting because it becomes clear that she was in sympathy with the Trump groundswell, and might very well have signed aboard the Trump team if a) Trump seemed to have a prayer of winning the White House (no, he didn’t seem to); and b) she wasn’t already employed by some middlingly Lefty rag (I believe she was at The New Republic at this point). Chasing down the nationalist Right over the next few years was a way of getting close to these people without getting herself in trouble.

No doubt about it. The fascination and admiration were there and so, like so many other Lefty-journalists-of-convenience, she had to rationalize to herself why and how Donald Trump was a bad thing. And not just the committed Lefties. I mean, look at J. D. Vance with his misinformed 2016 rants about how Trump’s support came mostly from uneducated, unemployed coal-miners and factory hands.

It was around this time, in March 2016, that she was working at The New Republic at Union Square in New York. She would look out the window at the “innocent skateboarders and discount fruit-sellers” down below…and ponder the tao of “Tay.” Tay was that monstrously silly Artificial Intelligence bot that Microsoft put online, then took down within a day. 4chan and 8chan pranksters peppered Tay with questions that “taught” “her” to banter like an A.I. Andrew Anglin. Again, there’s no payoff here, no moral to this story, it’s a just point and splutter: Wow, did you hear about that? Remember that? I sure do!

 Another pointless story about a bot comes at the end of the book. She’s idling around on Twitter. It’s now January 6, 2021. She sees a link to a Crisis Text Line. Which is of course a bot, and she realizes this. And a primitive bot at that, but never mind…

Elspeth starts tweeting to the bot, pretending to be someone panicking over the Stop the Steal demonstration going on at the Capitol. (She’s not in DC, she’s just following it on the internet.) Elspeth asks if Trump is “staging a coup.” The bot, which calls itself Sharita, says it sounds as though Elspeth is “feeling vulnerable and overwhelmed by Trump’s political tactics.”

Elspeth: There are literally armed men trying to stop votes from being counted…

Bot: Sometimes, when we’re surrounded by darkness, we can only focus on 1 good thing, 1 day at a time…

Bot then asks, “Are you presently having thoughts of ending your life?”

Because who wouldn’t, right? Particularly if you’re the sort of person who believes there was an armed insurrection taking place at the Capitol: a mob of MAGA hats at the Capitol seeking to Overturn the Results of a Fair and Free Election! Or at least the sort of person who weaves tales like that, and half-convinces herself that they’re true, and even earns her living by telling people they are true.

I think the Twitter bot had it right. If you’re deranged and gullible enough to believe unlikely tales, or sociopathic enough to concoct them yourself, and pass them off as “news”—well then, yes, we can expect a certain level of instability. But sociopathology is too strong an indictment, and I’ll fall back on my earlier diagnosis: Elspeth is a stalker, and a predator. She may not want to be, but she’s got one of those practical, opportunistic outlooks where she can frame good as evil, if it suits her purpose at the time.