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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 5, 2024: The American journalist Elle Reeve has written a remarkably readable book titled Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics Atria (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
The Wikipedia entry on Elle Reeve says that "Reeve earned her Bachelor of Journalism degree at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 2005."
According to Wikipedia, "Reeve covered the August 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for Vice News Tonight, during which she interviewed neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell and other demonstrating white supremacists, capturing footage of them carrying tiki torches while chanting 'Jews will not replace us!' which went viral. Her report, entitled Charlottesville: Race and Terror, earned both her and Vice News Tonight a Peabody Award, four Emmy Awards, and a George Polk Award."
Now, in Reeve's "A Note on Sources" in her new 2024 book Black Pill (p. 253), she says, "This book is based on countless hours of interviews from 2013 to 2023, as well as contemporaneous emails, text messages, social media posts, police reports, plane tickets, receipts, etc. Some of the internal communications between Unite the Right organizers [of the tragic August 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia] were revealed as evidence in the federal civil lawsuit Sines v. Kessler in 2021. Facts reported by other news media are noted. Some names have been changed, including Anna and Lisa, in some cases to protest those who feared violence from the people they used to know."
The August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville turned tragic when twenty-year-old James Alex Fields from Ohio plowed his car into the Charlottesville crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring others (p. 184).
According to Reeve, "In Maumee, Ohio, a twenty-year-old with a framed photo of Hitler in his bedroom, named James Alex Fields, thought [Richard] Spencer should be the president of the United States. At least that's what he told his mom, many months later, from jail, after he was arrested for murder at the rally" (p. 152).
The federal lawsuit Sines v. Kessler was filed in October 2017 by "Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer who'd successfully argued at the Supreme Court to end the ban on gay marriage" (p. 198). "There were nine plaintiffs - people who lived in the area and were hurt on one or both nights. The twenty-six defendants, including Richard Spencer, Elliot Kline, Nathan Damigo, Jason Kessler [a local], Christ Cantwell, Jeff Schoep, Matt Heimbach, and Matt Parrott, could not afford such fancy lawyers, if they could afford one at all. A few had convinced a lawyer to represent them, only to be dropped when they failed to pay" (p. 198).
Spencer (pp. 281-282), Kline (p. 277), Damigo (p. 272), Kessler (p. 276), Cantwell (p. 271), Schoep (p. 281), Heimbach (p. 275), and Parrott (p. 278) are all listed in the "Index" (pp. 269-283) with multiple page references for each.
In addition, Reeve says, "I have reproduced the hateful comments of the people I interviews only where necessary and to remove any doubt that terms such as white supremacy, misogynist, and fascist are accurate" (p. 253).
As to Reeve's title Black Pill, she explains in her "Prologue: Surf the Kali Yuga" (pp. 1-5) that it was derived by certain people on the internet from the 1999 movie The Matrix. Reeve says, "In The Matrix, the hero, Neo, is presented a choice: take the blue pill and return to life in a pleasant illusion created by machines, or take the red pill and learn the truth. And what is the truth? 'That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.'
"The red pill became the main metaphor of internet politics. It didn't suggest a conversion - that you had adopted a new set of beliefs - but that you had liberated yourself from politics entirely. You saw the world as it really is. You were thinking clearly for the first time in years, maybe in your whole life.
"I'd heard the red-pill narrative of dozens of alt-right trolls (whose red pill was that white supremacy was good) and radical virgins called incels (whose red pill was that feminism had ruined society) long before I'd heard it from QAnoners (whose red pill was that Trump was fighting a secret satanic pedophile cabal that had seized control of the government). Many had been searching for an explanation for something - a breakup, a bad idea, a felony conviction, the financial crisis - and discovered this secret knowledge. A gay Jewish lawyer told me he could point to a single meme that made him a Holocaust denier.
"Once the red pill took hold, endless variations followed - the green pill, the white pill, the iron pill, etc. You could be Russia-pilled or crypto-pilled or Marx-pilled; the term could express pride in your own epiphany or contempt for a nutjob. The only one that matters is the 'black pill.'
"The black pill is a dark but gleeful nihilism: the system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable. There is no hope. Times are bad and they're going to get worse. You swallow the black pill and accept the end is coming" (pp. 2-3).
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