Factually! with Adam Conover - How 4Chan Took Over the Republican Party with Elle Reeve

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Here's a harsh truth: the internet is real life. The toxic mix of misogyny, racism, and anti-democratic sentiment that has been festering online for years has now blatantly spilled over into the rhetoric of Republican politics. But how did the online right-wing become so extreme and unhinged? To explore this question, Adam sits down with journalist Elle Reeve, author of Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. Together, they discuss how incels, mass shooters, and white nationalists found fertile ground to grow on the internet, and how their influence has seeped into the broader political landscape. Find Elle's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright That's okay I don't know anything Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, there have been a lot of clips of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance going around, and a lot of them are pretty entertaining. My personal favorite is the one where a reporter pitches him

an absolute softball question, asking why the public would want to have a beer with him. This is a complete political cliche. Politicians are asked this all the time. Vance's answer is incredibly awkward. He goes, Ha ha ha, well, I think they'd want to have a beer with me because I actually like to drink beer. In fact, I like to drink beer a little too much. Ha ha ha ha, well, I think they'd want to have a beer with me because I actually like to drink beer.

In fact, I like to drink beer a little too much, ha ha ha, but I'm sure the media won't give me too much crap about that. It's a bizarre moment because Vance is desperately trying and completely failing to act normal. He seems like someone who has not interacted with regular people much at all in his life, but as someone who has learned how to interact with them from some of the weirdest corners of the internet. There's a performative masculinity to it, an aggressive edge. It's not the sort of thing you'd want to hear from someone you were actually grabbing a beer with. It's a style and attitude that sounds like it comes more from an online message board than it does from reality. And Vance takes that same slightly off vibe

to substantive issues, whether he's calling for mass deportations or taking a failed dig at the millions of Americans who don't have kids, calling them childless cat ladies. But the way that JD Vance talks didn't come from nowhere. His style and substance emerged in part from some of the most toxic reaches of the internet, from a stew of online misogyny, racism, and anti-democratic sentiment that has been percolating on the internet for much of

the past century. The way that JD Vance talks didn't just come from nowhere. You can see echoes of his style and substance in some of the most toxic reaches of the internet, from the stew of online misogyny, racism, and anti-democratic sentiment that has been percolating on the internet for much of this past century. And you can also see those same echoes in the way incels, mass shooters, white nationalists, and billionaire fascists like Peter Thiel also conduct themselves on the internet. So how exactly did this toxic internet culture spread from Gamergate and disaffected edgelord

comment threads and end up central to the modern Republican Party itself? Well, the story behind it is fascinating, but before we get into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free, and you can join our online community, which I swear is not toxic. It's just a lot of nice people talking about how fucked up the world is,

and what we can do to fix it. And if you like stand-up comedy, come out and see me on the road in a city near you. Nothing feels better than getting off of the internet and into a real room with real people who are actually laughing at some funny shit. Your brain will thank you, I will thank you. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Baltimore, Maryland, Austin, Texas,

Batavia, Illinois, just outside Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Canada, a bunch of other cities being added soon. Head to adamkhanover.net for tickets and tour dates. I would love to see you out there. And now, let's get to this week's episode. You know, we used to think that the internet was not real life, but we now know that it is. All those people with the weird avatars saying the crazy things on Twitter and Reddit, they are real.

They exist, they vote, they have influence in the world. And here today to talk about the weirdest, most toxic reaches of the internet and its influence on the world that we all live in. We have someone who knows more about it than just about any working journalist. Her name is Ellie Reeve. She has been covering this beat for over a decade now.

She's a correspondent for CNN. You might know her from the incredible work she did covering the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville for Vice, and her fascinating and entertaining new book is called Black Pill, How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, poison society, and capture American politics.

Please welcome Ellie Reed. Ellie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks so much for having me. I followed your work for years. You've been one of the best reporters covering the rise of online extremism, or whatever the hell you want to call it. You have a new book out called Black Pill.

What is the Black Pill? The Black Pill? Well, most people who have been involved or read about politics on the internet know the red pill metaphor that comes from The Matrix, right? So Neo, Keanu Reeves, he's handed two pills, a red pill and a blue pill. The blue pill, he goes back to his pleasant fantasy

created by the machines, the reality of 1999. Red pill, he finds out the true reality. fantasy created by the machines, the reality of 1999. Red Pill, he finds out the true reality. So he's living the real life and it's horrible in this world in which humans are enslaved by machines. So this is often the metaphor for becoming involved in far right politics or extremist politics. But from that became lots of other different pills.

I mean, Coconut Pill is blowing up right now, right? Yeah, this is the internet. People are gonna, once there's a joke, people on the internet latch onto it until it is fucking beaten to death. Yeah. And we learned that like, it's called a snow clone when you take like the format of a meme

and replace it with a president. Anyway, so the one I think is worst compelling is black pill because it explains how people talk themselves into doing these terrible acts of violence. It's this kind of nihilistic way of thinking that the system is totally corrupt, it's totally collapsing, and you're kind of liberated to behave any way you want to and maybe even hasten its collapse

because what comes after it will be so much better. Now, this is a way that I'm familiar with people talking on the internet. I'll go to different subreddits or message boards or whatever and just sort of see what people are talking about. But there's this temptation to talk about those places as though they are not connected to everyday reality,

that they're just sort of a little fantasy land where people could talk about Lord of the Rings or they could talk about the decline and collapse of the American system of government and both are about the same. I imagine you might have a different view of how powerful these ideas are. Right, so one of the people that I interviewed extensively

for this book is Frederick Brennan. He created 8chan, this anonymous message board that eventually became the home of mass shooter manifestos. Thank you, Annette. And one of the things he spoke about compellingly, I mean, we're sitting in an Atlantic City casino. We're eating chocolate cake, it's 10 o'clock at night. He is in a wheelchair because he has a brittle bone disease. He's only about three feet tall. His bones

are very, very fragile. He's explained to me that everything that happens online is happening in the real world. There is no divide between online and the real world. Sometimes the consequences for our actions are different in physical reality than they are online. But there's no longer this distinction of the internet as the goofy, like, I can have a cheeseburger cat land. Right? Like, that's gone.

It's over. Yeah, and it's all too often easy to forget that when there's someone with an anime avatar and a crazy username and they're saying something horrible to you, and you're like, oh, this is just what happens on the internet. This is just some sort of the trash that washed up on my internet monitor today.

No big deal. And it's easy to forget. No, there literally is a person on the other side of that who exists in, I don't know, they live in Phoenix or something. And they might vote, they might know people, you know? Like these are real people and these ideas do affect real people.

Yes, and when those Pepe avatars are in an enclosed room, like a Discord server or something like that, they are washed over with these same messages over and over and over again, even if they don't know who they're talking to, even if they're totally anonymous, even if they think those people are losers. And over time, what they used to joke about,

what was just a joke to them, becomes a thing they truly believe. And I've encountered this in many different communities. The alt-right, Richard Spencer himself said to me in 2016, it started as a joke and then became real, talking about people who had read up on racism and eugenics in order to be worse trolls. And in the process, started to believe it. I talked to a gun rights supporter during, I don't know if you remember, the beginning of the Boogaloo Boys, right? It was a gun rights rally in Virginia. Again, a guy told me like the joke,

it's gonna be Civil War II, electric Boogaloo, like they laughed about it and then they started believing it. And then of course again, in storming the Capitol, it was just something they were joking about and then it happened. And that connection between comedy and reality is really fascinating to me as a comedian because

So much of the time, you know comedians will say oh, it's just a joke. I'm just joking It's just a joke and I myself have done jokes where Mike that's just a joke. I do not believe that but The majority I believe of comedy is made up of things that people actually believe that Comedy is like fundamentally connected to the truth you laugh when something strikes you as both surprising and true on some level and I do believe on some I mean sometimes I'm like who gives a shit You know what they say on what John Oliver says or whatever what I do

It doesn't really affect what people think it's just to like blow off a little bit of steam And then sometimes I think no this really does have the power to change minds or to influence behavior in some way. And I think that that is really interesting when you track it in the observed rise in how much conservatives and right wingers are using comedy in their political work, which has been a big change since the Bush years. During the Bush years, it was like it felt like liberals or people left of center had a monopoly on comedy, and it no longer feels that way right now.

I mean, Fox News has the most popular late night show on television in Greg Gutfeld's show. So, I mean, how do you think humor, comedy, and these ideas interact, and why has there been this rise of comedy on the right? That's so interesting, because just what you're asking me, I mean, I've thought about this so much because comedians will say like,

oh, the job as a comedian is to speak the truth that can't be spoken like Lydia Bruce or Richard Pryor. And then if you call them on a joke, you're like, hey buddy, what'd you mean by that? They're like, man, I'm just making fart sounds. Like I'm not a real comedian. I mean, I'm not a, yeah, I'm just making fart sounds. Like I'm not a real comedian. I mean, I'm not a politician, whatever.

There are a lot of comedians that do that. And by the way, I believe that when comics do that, they're fucking cowardly. Because are you saying what you're saying or are you not saying it? Are you a brave truth teller or are you just making jokes? And they wanna have it both ways. And I think it's bullshit and cowardice

and it doesn't impress me when comics do that. And the biggest comics in the world do that constantly. And it's just fucking demeaning what they're doing. Either you like comedy and you think it means something or you don't. Either you give a shit about the words you're saying or you don't. Like which fucking is it, you know?

It really frustrates me as a comic. Yeah, I mean I'm not trying to start any beef for you but I was listening to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld where he was talking about the only job is to make people laugh. And like of course that's the job, obviously I know that. I'm not an idiot but when you mean something, your words mean something.

Like I'm not stupid, like don't try to convince me that otherwise. But yes, I'm here. Yeah, no, I mean even Jerry is like, he's confused about where the socks went in the dryer. He had that thought, that was the thought that came to him. He thought to write it down and come up with it. Yes, the only job is to make people laugh,

but you have a choice of what you make them laugh about. And if you're a good comic, you know that you make people laugh better if you care about what you're saying, or if they care about what you make them laugh about. And if you're a good comic, you know that you make people laugh better if you care about what you're saying, or if they care about what you're saying, and these things are all intimately connected. And by the way, you can start as much beef between me and Jerry as you want,

because, yeah, I don't know, I think I am a tiny ant to him and his billions, so I think I'll be okay. But I very much remember the era you're talking about, the Bush era. There was this show on Fox called The Half Hour News Hour. I remember this. Very short one.

Yeah, they tried. Because they answered to The Daily Show. They tried to make a Daily Show knockoff that lasted like two months or something in what, the mid 2000s or so. And it was really, really painfully unfunny. And it took them about, what it must have been, 15 years to finally make Gutfeld's show,

which I will say is at least funny to its audience. And I can recognize it as being very, very close to other comedy shows that are actually on the air and having success at it. Right, yeah. There are all these sort of think pieces, and it was the era of blogs, there were blog posts about why conservatism inherently

was that funny. And because of the reverence for the authority and all of that stuff. And then turns out that's not actually true. Of course. Once the internet made a lot more people able to participate, life found a way. Well, and there was, the way I think of it,

and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to make this a lecture for me about comedy, but the way I've always thought about it is that, you know, liberal or left of center comedy has the perspective of like, why do we have to do things this way? Like the world's fucked up. Why, why can't we change things? That's kind of weird that the world is like this, you know? And conservative or right-wing comedy tends to go, why is everyone always trying to change everything? Like, what the old days nice?

Don't you miss, what's with all these people running around being crazy? You know? And like that's a very small C conservative, you know, way to put things. But like, there's a consistent conservative perspective that you can, you know, express through comedy and that is expressed by conservative comedians. It was just, for some

reason in 2009, people were like, oh, that doesn't exist. And now in retrospect, it looks ludicrous. So yes, and sort of 4chan and that world, that sort of alt-right world, they figured out that they could portray the left as these like scolding teachers to associate people who wanted social justice.

Of course, this is a very serious thing. People take it very seriously. You start saying people deserve rights, they're gonna be mad at you, right? But they're able to portray the left as these scolding, censorious school teachers. And it took them very far. Yeah, and that has now made its way

to the mainstream of right-wing politics. I mean, Donald Trump, I believe, for all this fault as a speaker, his audience often finds him very funny. JD Vance has been making attempts at humor, at least, lately. I've seen him try to tell jokes. And so how does that sort of, if not comedy, but lightness, silliness, right?

Just a sort of jocularity, how did that change the right-wing political project at all in your view? Well, it's a very powerful tool to sort of poke at equality, democracy, that kind of thing. And then if someone gets upset to say, hey, man, I'm just joking around, you're the fool if you take it seriously. For example, Gavin McInnis created the Proud Boys. He's of this generation of not PC humor of the 90s. Right? And part of the proud boys

initiation ceremony was you had to promise not to masturbate. You had to name five breakfast cereals while getting punched. There was all this absurdity so that if someone like me tried to write about it, I look like an idiot, either by taking it seriously or making fun of it too much. Like you couldn't touch it without some of that stupidity rubbing off on you. And they were thrilled, thrilled when Hillary Clinton denounced the alt-right and the Pepe the Frog guys.

Like, this is our moment. We made this lady denounce a cartoon frog. Like, doesn't get any better for that. Yeah, it makes you look ridiculous if you take it seriously. Yeah. Even though there is a serious project underneath, right? Like Gavin McInnis and people like him

did have a serious project. And by the way, Gavin McInnis, famously friends with a lot of comedians, great friends with like David Cross in the mid 2000s and et cetera, like was very much part of the comedy scene and still is to a certain extent. Goes on comedians podcasts, things like that.

So that continues, but underneath there's a serious project, right? Absolutely. I mean, in these guys' discords, they are posting, now their jokes are not funny to me at all. They can sometimes be clever, but like Holocaust, concentration camp jokes, that kind of thing.

While they are organizing, they're like, say, preparing to organize Charlottesville. Within that context, they're joking about Rojoa, racial holy war. One guy in text messages that were later revealed in court was texting his girlfriend about, or talking to his girlfriend about how, he was gonna help Richard Spencer become this guy,

like the sort of fascist leader of America, but once the fascist revolution happened, Richard would be the first against the wall, and this guy would take over. And just joking, just joking, just joking. James Alex Fields, who murdered a woman by driving into her, he had shared memes about driving into protestors on his Instagram.

Wow. And this was, by the way, I believe the day that we're speaking, this is this, we're right near the seventh anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And so this is not even new stuff that we're talking about. This is close to a decade ago. Have those trends intensified in the years since?

A lot of the people who are directly involved in Charlottesville have sort of washed out of public life. There was all this infighting and recriminations within the outright. They got kicked off financial services platforms so they couldn't raise money online. Because at the end of the day, if you wanna raise money on the internet,

you need an American company to process a credit card. And so if those companies say they don't want you as a customer, you need an American company to process a credit card. Yeah. And so, you know, if those companies say they don't want you as a customer, you're pretty screwed. Those who did not face a lot of consequences have gone on. Nick Fuentes might be the most prominent one. He had dinner with Donald Trump. He was on Alex Jones's podcast radio show with Ye from Kanye West as Ye was praising Hitler and Nazis. Fuentes too has understood the power of the swerve, the sort of comedic pose, but instead

of using swastikas, he wraps himself in the American flag. He's not anti-American as he all right was in many ways. He is instead portraying white nationalism or Holocaust denial, anti-immigrant sentiment as the most American position. He's trying to conflate those two things. That's interesting because it sounds very much like a throwback to an earlier era of American politics. It sounds, I mean, I'm not that much of a student

of 19th century American politics, but it reminds me of, I don't know, the no nothings or that sort of period where you had a really strong sense of racist nationalism in the country. Does that sound accurate? Yeah. Yes, but I think it's important to think about pop culture and how it influences our daily lives. Most people are not reading political theory. They're watching Indiana Jones or movies.

And most Americans want to be Indiana Jones. They don't want to be the Nazi that Indiana Jones punched. So if you you wanna have massive heel, however radical your project is, like you need to understand that that is how you should frame it if you want to connect with it. This is another reason that people like this love to be associated with comedians

or love to present themselves as comedians because comedians are in many ways, social heroes to the public. Ah, here's someone who is charming and funny in the way that I would like to be, and you know, I would look up to in such and such a way. And if you can associate yourself with that sort of personality,

you gain cultural credibility. Absolutely. Many of the people that I interviewed were socially awkward or isolated, or in the case of FranFran, he's isolated by his disability. And once they started feeling like they had movement online, they wanted to project this image of this like cool, like based, you're familiar with that term, right? Like this cool base, like doesn't care what anyone says, guy. The incels had this concept of Chad. Chad Thundercock was his real name, right? So

Chad is the guy who's out there getting all the women, leaning the poor incels with nothing. After a while of all this anger towards Chad online, it kind of flips in like 2017 as the stuff gets really crazy and they start calling themselves Chad Nationalists. They start working out. I mean, Chris Cantwell, who I've interviewed in Charlottesville and went on to be known as the crying Nazi. And there was a moment in his hotel room, we're surrounded by guns on the bed, like literally like seven guns. And he picks up his like, both flex weights and he starts like curling and grinning at me, right? He had like, you know, broccoli I think

and fruit in his room. He was all about like trying to take pride in his biology as he put it and therefore now letting his body go to hell. Yeah. And that's, I mean, good I guess, you know, good nice, good for you to work out, but how does that change the political movement

in your view to have it go through that change and for them to be focused on Chadness? I think it spoke to their sense that they were winning, that they were gaining momentum. It also helped them draw more people in. Another fight they would have was over optics. also helped them draw more people in. Another fight they would have was over optics. That's what they called it. So they wanted to look, they didn't want to look poor

and they wanted to look smart and they wanted to look in shape. And often when they were fighting with each other on the internet, it was over who it was bad optics. Yeah. Yeah. Like who's disgracing the movement. Who's disgracing the movement

by looking kind of dumpy in his polo shirt. And like, that is not my, I'm not trying to diminish them for what they look like. That is what they would say about each other. Well, you know, this movement really had its peak, or at least an apparent peak in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected and at Charlottesville soon afterwards,

there was really this like cultural high watermark for it. And they described themselves as, you know, memeing Donald Trump into the presidency and et cetera. How has this movement or this group of people or this online community, whatever you call it, how they changed in the years since bringing us to this election. So a lot of the big name leaders washed out.

They thought they were gonna be like public intellectuals and of course that didn't happen. But many of their ideas live on the great replacement, something we heard on Fox News. Now in the white nationalist world, it was a conspiracy theory that Jews were tricking white women into having babies with people of color in order to do a white genocide. Jesus.

Okay. But you hear on frogs, except from the Tucker Carlson's of the world, that Democrats are importing immigrants of color in order to dilute the number of white votes. There's also a generation, or enough time has passed that people who grew up in 4chan and these kind of extremist online communities, they're old enough to get jobs in politics. And you see little signs of this every now and then. So for example, Ron DeSantis' campaign led a very sort of like, name war circa 2015-esque campaign online. And one of his staffers was fired after they posted a video,

which they had tried to make look had been like it had been made by an anonymous fan. There was like this fan cam video about DeSantis that had all this war chant imagery, including a neo-Nazi symbol, the song in red, the black. Okay, and it's just things like that that you see bubble up over and over again. It's like, where'd you get those ideas, buddy?

Like, you didn't just stumble across that, you know? What world were you in? I've been to several, I've been to conferences for Turning Point, this conservative group led by Charlie, Charlie has spoken many times at their events. And I- Very powerful influential group, very big in,

getting the president of Harvard fired, I believe, shit like that. Like they're all over the place in mainstream conservative circles. Right, so there's been this strange thing that has happened where white nationalists are often trying to, it's like almost a, it's like a metaphor, right?

They're trying to break into these conferences. I was there once, and because I'm a meme to white nationalists all right times, right? You're a meme because what? You've interviewed them so many times. Yes. And what is the meme about you? What's their take on you?

They seem kind of feel alcohol syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry that that's so funny. It's funny. They're copper. This is just based on,

they're just like her physiognomy reveals an alcoholic mother in months seven through nine. Wow. Literally, yes, because they are very obsessive. They are very obsessive. They spend a lot of time on the internet and they notice something about me that is measurably traceable.

My eyes are very large and far apart. Like, I'm in like the 98th percentile or something, but mostly only optician's notice this, right? But they have noticed it and they think it's a sign because that can be a sign of fetal alcohol syndrome. So anyway, they like try to get pictures with me or whatever, so I'm at a train point conference. They're like, oh, this is a fetal alcohol syndrome

journalist I was talking about on 8chan. Can I get a selfie? Basically. Wow. Well, they'll try to trick me into a selfie. So this happened at Turning Point at a conference last year. I was like, I don't know about this guy, but OK. He lifts up his phone to take the selfie,

and I see there a swastika phone screen. Jesus Christ. I was like, I knew it. He calls me in Jewish press or whatever. There's a whole little tubbub. He tries to like circle up, tell people I'm like Antifa or whatever. We have a little standoff.

Then later the turning point spokesman is like, oh, these guys are so terrible. They're absolutely awful. We're not fascist. We want nothing to do with them. We've kicked them out multiple times. Okay, cool, great. But in June, at a

turning point conference, they're handing out hats that say, white boy summer. Well, that was a big meme on 4chan. You know, Charlie Kirk in February was reported to be working on a way to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. Okay. Now, like that is also a 4chanting because often a moral conservatives, they will say, why can't something like Black Lives Matter live up to the image of Martin Luther King? That's how they will criticize civil rights activists, right? But to try to diminish the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is very much of this extremist world.

So I just see these ideas bubbling up in places even among people who are like, tell me explicitly they are opposed to them in every way. So, in answer to my question, how has this movement changed, your answer is it's basically entered the mainstream more and more, that like it's infecting, for instance, turning points, and I would say that J say that JD Vance's selection as vice president is evidence of this as well,

because it's been observed by a lot of people. This guy talks like a poster. You know, he talks like a guy who's been online too long, who's, he's trying to get up votes on his private subreddit when he speaks to the press. That's what it sounds like. Do you share that judgment? I mean, I have a know behind the scenes reporting

on JD fans, but the childless cat lady thing, I met hundreds of white nationalists, like tweet that at me. Like that was their number one insult. So. Literally that insult, not even just the concept of it, but like childless cat lady. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You know, and when you're confronted with this kind of stuff, like, I mean, I just, my reaction is like, but I'm allergic to cats. I know what you're talking about because you know what these people tweet at me is they tweet, you look like the kind of guy who drive his girlfriend to her boyfriend's house. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

They do that one over and over again, which like, you know, I mean, first of all, I guess, I don't know what you have to think to think that that is like a devastating insult, you know, like there's a lot of assumptions about people's sexuality baked into that in the first place, but also they repeat it over and over again. And if JD Vance on the, at an interview was like, Tim Walls looks like the kind of guy who'd drive his wife to her boyfriend's house.

I'd be like, that guy's been on 4chan, I see it. So you've had that same experience. Yeah, well, and also the way he said it so casually, it's not like he, he doesn't, when he's talking, he doesn't look like he's saying some wild, crazy thing. Like he's being childish, he just rattles it off as if this is something that he said before. Yeah, so it seems like he's the kind of person

who grew up in that same environment. Maybe he was on 4chan, maybe he wasn't, but at the very least seems like he's been part of that stew just based on what ideas he's saying. That seems like a pretty big shift in the Republican Party and in the salience of this movement to mainstream politics, doesn't it? Right.

Now we do know that JD Vance is closely connected to Peter Thiel. Thiel gave some 15 million to JD Vance. Thiel has talked about moving the Overton window. Maybe that liberalism is spent, maybe there are some big questions about democracy. He's expressed anti-democratic sentiment. He's not explicitly said maybe women shouldn't vote,

but he said women voting and libertarianism can't really work together because women support a large social welfare state. Like, yeah. And that's bad. So, and his conclusion is not that, well, maybe there's some problems with libertarianism if 51% of the population is inclined against it.

His position is, we need to change something about women because that's the problem. Right. We also know from reporting with Buzzfeed that Teal met with some people involved in the alt-right. And in fact, Richard Spencer, again, the sort of most prominent alt-right guy, complained bitterly about this to me

because he wasn't invited. Mm-hmm. He complained bitterly to you? Yes. These guys really open up to you, it seems like. I've seen your interviews, and you have these long conversations before. Just in a little parentheses here, why is that?

Why do you have the ability to sort of get these guys to open up? Well, at this point, it's persistence. I'm around, and I'm one of the few people who has seen what they have seen. I also have, I don't wanna say a a thick skin, but like I am very good at putting up with the first 10 to 30 minutes of sort of hostility and screaming that often would come from calling them. And then I just let them talk. So they will go on and on and

on. These are, again, these are often people who have a high need for socialization, but also a lot of social anxiety. Or sometimes they struggle to make friends. I have multiple sources, Matt Peridon might have, they were both diagnosed with Asperger's. Spencer calls himself a narcissist. So I mean, I would have these situations. Elliot Klein, for example, he ran this racist threat identity rope.

He would say like, oh, I don't want to talk to you. I don't know why would I even talk to you? I don't want to have anything to do with you. Then like an hour and a half later, it's me. He was like, okay, listen, I gotta go, right? Like I gotta go with my life. I mean, it's incredible that the answer to my question is, you're nice to them and they needed someone

to be nice to them. Well, yeah, I mean, honestly, please and thank you goes a really long way. Yeah. And I guess a bigger point to think about is that people I think don't realize how much they project social hierarchy and the way they interact with people. And the white nationalists, however much their ideas

have infiltrated the world, like most people do not like them and do not respect them. So if opening a phone call with hello, thank you for talking to me, I appreciate your time, goes really a lot further than saying like, hey jerk, like aren't you a big asshole? Yeah. Yeah, I've done that myself in my own conversations

with people who I'm very ideologically on the other end from, and they know that and they come in with a lot of heat. And if you just start with like, hey, nice to talk to you, thanks for talking to me, and keep the temperature down, they're kinda, oh, oh, okay, and you can sort of shift the conversation into a different mode if you refuse to come in

with your own heat. Yeah, it really, really goes a long way. That is wild. You know, listeners of Factually know that I take health seriously and that one of the most important ways to do that is to consult with a doctor. And that is why I'm so happy to recommend

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I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm not sure if that's the right word.

I'm not sure if that's the right word. I mean, I used to have to dig for little scraps of evidence that this stuff was infiltrating the mainstream, but now it's like it is a conversation. I mean, tradwives, for example. Right. You're familiar with like these women sort of larping as old fashioned 1950s housewives and not working, that kind of thing.

It's sort of an implicit rebuke to feminism. I first read about them like in 2016 on 4chan. And I interviewed many women who were in the alt-right who tried to live that life for a little while until it became absolutely intolerable because they were treated very poorly. Wow, really, that's fascinating. became absolutely intolerable because they were treated very poorly. Wow. Really, that's fascinating.

Yeah, so outwardly they would wear white dresses, they would look denure, they were very conscious of their image. These men wanted an adoring wife who would support them and project status to other men. Behind the scenes, what I learned because I got the phone from a woman who was in the white nationalist movement

and it had been disconnected from the internet since then, right? So it's like this treasure chest, like a time capsule of her time within there. So I just dig through this phone. I'm searching for- You literally got her physical phone. Yeah.

Wow. The screen was all cracked. I went to some little storefront in Brooklyn. I was like, can you take this? And I was like, we'll try. And I'm like sitting on the couch hoping, and it worked. And I just sat on the couch and it's got all, I mean, she saved David Duke's number

as gross old man in her phone. How did you know it was David Duke's number? You're like, who's this gross old man? She told me. Oh, okay, okay. Okay, okay. Oh, and you had her phone. She gave you her phone. She gave it to someone else who gave it to David Duke's number. You're like, who's this gross? Oh, okay, okay. Okay, okay. Oh, and you had her phone. She gave you her phone.

She gave it to someone else who gave it to me with her program. Okay. But with the intent that someone would go through it and find this stuff. And the original intent was to be used as fact checking. But you know, I had a lot of questions. When I, sometimes I would go to like a public

white nationalist event and there would be one girl there. And it always, this happened multiple times where I would be walking away at the very end and that girl would scream something after me that was like the most misogynist thing, that anyone had said to me, the most explicitly, some like version of dumps left. And it's just like, why, who are these girls?

And so once I had an opportunity to look, I found out and a lot of them were drawn to it by the more intellectual seeming fascists like Spencer and YouTube once played a big role. But once they were in, they're texting each other like, this guy is dangerous, or I can't make any more propaganda encouraging women to join this movement that actively hates them. The most disturbing text thread that I found, this was almost like reading an experimental novel was this woman whose boyfriend was relaying

to this concept of white Sharia. So that is their idea of Sharia law, right? Because women support equal rights and social justice and whatever. The only way to bring about the America they wanted was taking away women's rights. No jobs, no voting, no false divorce is gone, child marriage, that kind of thing, right?

So she's moving, she's going along with this, she's wearing like fake burqas, that kind of thing. Wow. Yeah. Okay, this is like truly fucked up stuff. Truly the most fucked up thing I've ever read in my life. Like seriously, it really is. I mean, I've seen a lot of dark stuff,

but it was very, very disturbing and she would be going back and forth between, oh, these guys are so funny, joking about white Sharia and how stupid women are. And then later in the middle of the night, like texting her friend, like, I've been crying in the car. I've been crying all night. Do not trust these men.

I'll never respect myself again. I've been dehumanized enough for one weekend. You know, I can't be around men who know I let my boyfriend treat me like this. Like truly dark stuff. So she'd be texting like that late at night. And then the next day she'd be sending her friend like an Amazon link to a burka.

I'd be like, ooh, this is so funny. And sometimes she would question herself, like were these guys just joking? Like maybe I'm just not getting the joke right. Like was he maiming again? Like maybe he was maiming and I'm just not cut out for this world because I just don't totally get the joke.

Wow. And that is such a perverse use of comedy to, I mean, at that point, I'm get the joke. Wow. And that is such a perverse use of comedy. I mean, at that point, I'm imagining the situation in which this man is saying these things. There's no comedy here. There's no joke. It's just a faint. It's just a way of obscuring your actual intent

a little bit, keeping this poor woman slightly guessing and destabilized. Yeah, and I had this conversation with other white nationalists, just met high block, we went round and round. They're like, oh, we're just being extra extreme to provoke you in order to get more followers. And I'm like, if you're doing the bit when you're alone in the shower, it's not a bit anymore.

Like, was this guy being ironic when he spit on his girlfriend in front of other people? Like, is the spit ironic? Where's the irony? Yeah. Well, and again, just bringing this back to mainstream politics, we have people running on this shit now, you know, on a, you know, sort of thinned out,

slightly more palatable version of it. But there does feel like there's this weird confrontation between, you could see when JD Vance hit the media that he didn't quite seem prepared for what the reaction would be. That he was a little bit in a bubble and he and the public had a little bit of like, wait, who the fuck are you?

And like, what are you saying? And, you know, like, I don't know, just like he was being quote retweeted for the first time or something. Like, this stuff is like hitting, everyone's had the experience of, you're talking to your friends, and then it goes outside your network on the internet.

And other people are like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know? And it did have a little bit of that feeling. So it's like, it feels like an awkward moment for the right-wing white nationalist memosphere. Sure. Yeah.

I mean, I know older people who vote for Trump because they want low taxes, right? And I was talking to a couple in their seventies, right? In a way, like even when talking, trying to talk about this bubble, I was in to a couple in their seventies, right? In a way, like even when talking, trying to talk about this bubble, I was in my own bubble. Cause I was telling them like, oh yeah, I used to get this like childless cat lady thing all the time.

And this older man was like, you didn't? People said that to you on the internet? And I really like kind of ruined the vibe of the dinner. Cause I was like, oh yeah, that's just like part of my life. I mean, people said a lot worse stuff to me, but most people don't live in this insane toxic stew on the internet. Like they're out there living in,

like going fishing and stuff, going to the beach. Do you think it's possible though for this toxic stew to broaden its appeal enough to win an election? Because I hear JD Vance say this shit, and I'm like, well, this is, this can't survive outside of its private subredditor Discord server, right? But maybe he and his ilk feel otherwise. I mean, the short answer is I don't know.

I mean, Roe V Wade was overturned. Yeah. And people long thought that that was an impossibility. I mean, the short answer is I don't know. I mean, Roe v. Wade was overturned. And people long thought that that was an impossibility. You see in some of these circles, people talking about making divorce more difficult or ending no fault divorce. Like how successful does that? I don't think that that will ever have a majority

support on its own, but is it able to piggyback on a larger movement? Yeah. Donald Trump has a lot of fans. I talk to them all the time. I interview them all the time. They're not saying because he sticks it to childless cat ladies. They're saying, it's because he cares about working class people like me. That's the kind of things that people say to me. You want to quibble with that. that's a different question, but they feel that Trump genuinely cares about them and genuinely wants to help working people.

And like the cat lady stuff just has to ride on that in order to get power, but that's not saying that it can't. I mean, before Joe Biden dropped out, he was behind in the polls. Oh yeah, oh absolutely. And you know, the fundamentals in the election have changed, but not in a way that I think changes the potential victory of these kinds of ideas.

And you know, Roe versus Wade was overturned despite the fact that that is a minority position among Americans. Most Americans did not want that to happen. And yet here we are living in a world where it is the case. And the small minority won out over the wishes of the majority. I do wonder though if,

and I wanna get off of Vance in a second, but the way that the left has jumped on Vance making fun of him so directly. The joke about him fucking a couch, right? Which is like, what is interesting about that? It's a joke that came out of nowhere. It was just a silly thing somebody said on Twitter and then it sort of snowballed a little bit.

What struck me as interesting though is, A, it became completely widespread. It's now part of like the mainstream election narrative. But B, it's also a joke about sexual humiliation, right? It is sexually humiliating Vance, saying that he fucked a couch. It is very similar to the type of joke, you look like the kind of guy who would drive his wife

to her boyfriend's house, right? It is like, essentially, the left of center, including the mainstream left of center, seems to be calling Vance a cuck. And that is an attack that I think would work on him, because I think he's very sensitive about being a cuck, because of the world that he comes out of. And so I'm wondering, does it seem like

the rest of our political culture has picked up on a little bit of this, you know, and is using it in this case? Yeah, I mean, yes, I believe that that's happening. I would like to reserve being, I do not want to be asked whether I endorse it or not. I cannot say that it is good. But yes, it is like, yes,

they have seized on the power of sexual humiliation. Absolutely. And in a world where that is a valid insult, I mean, I have been shocked at how powerful it seems to have provoked a real reaction on the right. In a way that, I mean it has surprised me. I mean this is the facts don't care about your feelings world or I mean people wear T-shirts that say

fuck your feelings. So I honestly was very surprised how strongly so many have reacted to it. Yeah, I mean, it would be one thing if you had the sort of extremely mainstream establishment, people going, oh, that's a little bit rude. Like, are we really doing this? Which you've seen some of, but you've also seen the,

you know, the rest of the rights sort of like have their feelings hurt over it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just kind of astounding to me. Well, you know, I mean bullies are weak. Bullies are cowards, right? Bullies wanna hit someone who's not gonna hit back. And so that's an element of it.

I hate that bullies is the word, right? It's so juvenile, but it does speak to a certain sensibility. Yeah. A lot of comedians are also weak and cowards and get their feelings hurt when you try to make fun of them, even if they claim that they don't. And so, because a lot of comedians are bullies, to be quite honest.

I think honestly, the nexus of bully and comedian is the essence of right-wing comedy. But yeah, just connects to that sort of like weak, strong hypocrisy, you know, oh, I wanna say what I say, but I don't wanna be held accountable for it dichotomy. I have a couple other questions here on my notes that I have to ask you before we end here.

I have questions here on my notes that I have to ask you before we end here. How much is, I was on the internet for Gamergate in about 2014, 2015, right? And the more we look back on that, the more influential it feels as a moment. How do you think about it? Oh, it's a pivotal moment. A very white nationalist I've interviewed said

it changed the white nationalist movement. Because it had gone. How so? Oh, it was this kind of dying thing. It was either these like eugenicist old like professor types or these like stale aging neo-Nazis. There is a group, National Socialist Movement, they used to wear swastika armbands, they would parade around in black areas trying to provoke a riot. Their leader,

Jeff Scopoose, who's since renounced white nationalism, talked to me a long time about how bizarre it was when the alt-right came online. He has a very specific memory of seeing a meme of a white woman beaten as if she deserved it. And he's like, in my day, a guy who posted a joke like that would get a boot party, meaning multiple people beating the crap out of him, right? He's like, but these guys were all laughing at it. They're all saying, oh, it's just a joke.

And he, it suddenly brought in middle-class people. He had, he called them girly boys, you know, he said like the, all his old like skinhead friends were like, like, who are these guys? Like, who are these snotty rich guy types? Like the pro-boy types. Yeah. And, but it was bringing in so many more people way more than they'd ever been able to attract before. And he's like, and they were obsessed with this cartoon frog. I'm like, you're a grown man.

What's so appealing about this frog? I don't understand. His mind is blown by that. So it was really a moment that brought new people, like the white nationalists at Gamergate brought new people into the white nationalist movement. Right, so the Gamergaters have this massive public outcry. There's a lot of media attention.

They all go to HN, which Fred Brennan created, because he allows them to organize there, to harass people there, to those, it makes the site a million post-it-a site. And old white nationalists, like they already see this kind of like anti-woman, anti-social justice vibe among the gamer gators, right? Because they're, they feel like this kind of diversity or whatever is being imposed on them. And so that starts mingling.

And at first there was a reaction against the Stormfront guys. They had a anti-gay slur name for them that I don't need to repeat, but over time. It starts with new and it ends with a slur, right? Well, actually they had specific for Stormfront, which was storm slur. Ah, okay, okay, okay, okay.

I was trying to act like I knew the lingo. All right. Yeah. But yeah, over time, like it stops being ironic. And this is where like the political station of these gamer types. And what Fred tells me is like, it didn't have to necessarily go that way.

Like some of them had joked in sort of vaguely communistic ways about government issued girlfriends, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In retrospect, what was the gamer gate moment though? Because I remember, you know, I was following all of it and it started out with people claiming to be mad at the idea that like reviews on certain video game websites were biased in some way. And that was like the first 30 seconds of it. And then it blew up into this rolling culture war that was about like everything and nothing.

And it's very hard to even define what exactly it was. And so, I mean, how do you think, what do you think it was 10 years on? It was the moment they realized en masse they could make the change in the real world that they wanted to see. Formerly people who had felt powerless, finally feeling like they had, when they worked

together, the ability to affect public events. Yes, it began with a man accusing his ex-girlfriend of sleeping with someone to get a positive review of the game. The review was never posted. Okay. So this is like complete fantasy. Yeah. But it was very effective. One of the things that happened was a Gawker writer

tweeted that Gamergate was proof that nerds needed to be bullied. And this is in the era of like anti-bullying, right? Yeah. So they were able to strip that of its context and spam Gawker's advertisers. Like, do you wanna support this site that supports bullying?

And it worked. Like, many advertisers withdrew their money from Gawker. But it sounds like, in addition to that real world effect, which is very powerful, they also experienced like an organizing wave in the same way that, I don't know, like right now the labor movement's

experiencing an organizing wave, and tons of new people are flooding in. Or you could look at, I don't know, the Obama moment, all these young people get involved in politics. Sometimes in a movement, you're just, oh, a wave is happening, I have to ride it. And you don't always know why it's happening. It sounds like for them, it just, for white nationalists, that was the wave.

It was just the beginning of it. Yeah, they called themselves alt-right at the time. It was a term that Richard Spencer coined and then later abandoned after fighting with some other white nationalists, right? These guys created this culture on their own in this high blind online. And once it started getting really big,

other white nationalist leaders who'd been around for a while tried to like climb on top of it and claim it as their own, portraying themselves as leaders of this populist movement. And now Matt Parrott is one of them. He was at Charlottesville. He was like, listen, I was kind of patient zero of this like internet hall of mirrors. Like I believed that I was leading these people,

but I didn't actually fundamentally understand that. Wow. To me, what was shocking about that moment was, I remember talking to a friend I worked with at the time, and I was like, who are these people, right? Like, where are these people coming from? And my friend was like, oh, these are right-wing teenagers. Yeah. Right? And at the time, I was like, oh, these are right-wing teenagers. Wow. Right?

And at the time, I was like, such a thing can exist? Because we had just come out of the Obama moment, right? Where it was like, so the internet that I grew up on, right? From college on, full of young people, people in their 20s, largely, you know, socially, very socially liberal, right? On the internet, everyone wanted gay marriage. On the internet, everybody wanted legal weed, et cetera. Just, this stuff is easy.

We're all watching The Daily Show going, Bush is crazy, and all we need to do is have a generational turnover and takeover, and then things will be better, right? And then that was the moment at which I was like, oh wait, there is such a thing as like, you know, like racist right-wing teenagers and all the other associated people.

Why was that the moment that all of that came to light? Was it just like, hey, we have more access to the internet now, now broadband has made its way across the country or to people who didn't previously have it or what was the change? Well, another important precursor was this online atheism. I don't know if you remember that era. Of course.

Right, but it was really cool to debate fundees or Christian fundamentalists and make them look stupid. One of my sources, Matt Parrott, that's how he got his start. He was a big atheist and he loved to make fun of Christians. Yeah. What wrapped up in that was since the importance of his own IQ,

he was tested as a child to have a very, very high IQ and he believed in it. Like he calls it a cult of self-worship now. But at the time, he believed that IQ was everything. He read the Bell Curve by Charles Murray, which he believed that IQ was everything. He read the bell curve by Charles Murray, which argues that IQ is innate and it's higher among some groups than others, higher among white people than black people and Latinos.

And so maybe some of our policies should be crafted to reflect that. So there's that element, right? This like IQ worship, the idea that we wanna defeat these dumb idiots on the internet, whoever they are. Well, that's interesting because I remember that time and arguing with the religious was again seen

as part of the sort of new wave of, out with the old fundamentalists, right? I mean, it was Christian conservatism was seen, that's Bush, right? That's the right wing. And if you're taking down those people, then we're all on the same side. And yet that movement led to a new right.

Right. And then of course, there's also this game regating, right? This moment where to them, all these female, all these women are scolding them about how they're so racist and how they should accept games they don't wanna play that feature women characters with smaller boobs. Then right at that moment comes Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump enrages all of the same people they felt like was scolding them. Yeah. One guy said to me like, yeah, he's a pussy grabbing asshole, but he's our pussy grabbing asshole. He's a troll in exactly that way. And he does the same thing of, is he joking?

Is he not? Yeah. Having it both ways. He's entirely fits that movement aesthetically. Yeah. And if you take anyone phrased too seriously, you look like a fool. So Matt Heimbach, another guy who was in Charlottesville

and in someone I profile, he said to me that when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the feeling was better than sex. It was the best he had ever felt. He said, he's like, I don't know if I'll ever feel that way again. Not because he loved Donald Trump, but because Trump made all the people that he hated

so angry. Wow. I mean, that would feel good. Right? Like, if everybody you hated was simultaneously really sad, Yeah. I mean, that would, that would feel good. That is, that's vengeance, right?

Vengeance fulfilled feels good. Ask Quentin Tarantino. He's built an entire career on it, you know? People lust for vengeance. Absolutely. And there's all these images, right? Social media makes it possible to have all those compilations of crying Hillary fans going viral, right?

I mean, it's just like a drug for them. Yeah. Do you feel that now, you know, it's been 12, wait, how many years has it been since that election? It's been eight years since that election, excuse me. That, you know, some of the flavor has come out of the chewing gum of that movement. You know, that that was such a fresh thing

to those people at the time. Now we're on Donald Trump's third campaign, you know, he's older than he used to be. And, you know, you see Kamala Harris taking, rather than taking the tack of like, can you believe what Donald Trump said? He said these ludicrous things and you can laugh at her and say, oh, why do we take that so seriously?

She just says, ah, same old story. Like, aren't you sick of this? Like, we've been hearing this for a decade now, right? Yeah. So for the very extreme folks who are kind of like the pioneers in this world, they are over Trump for a variety of reasons. Maybe they felt like Trump betrayed the Jan Sixers

by not preemptively pardoning them. Some of them think Trump was too close to Israel and they feel like he has been compromised by Jews. But there is a much, much larger group of people now who have admiration for Trump that reaches nearly the same frenzy. Like I've reported on multiple Trump stores. Have you ever been to a Trump store?

I've never been to a Trump store, no. Oh, it's fascinating. I mean, there's full storefronts that just sell Trump merch, like different slogans, hats, T-shirts, Confederate flag stuff. Like, there's like this like figurine of Trump mooning someone called Moony Trumps.

I mean like that in many, many places there is enough appetite to sustain a story like that. I think it really speaks to the power of this guy. I mean, he's like an icon. He's more than a politician to a lot of people. Yeah, and I mean, what that reminds me the most of is I lived in New York after 2008, and there would be Obama stores, you know, or people selling Obama's shit on the sidewalk, you know,

just because of his popularity was so extreme that you could just put Obama on a t-shirt and sell it. And that is still true of Trump. He is a political movement in that way. Maybe, I mean, people are, the Democrats are now having their media moment with the change, but they might not have that much juice. Right, it remains to be seen. Well, the election's only like another 100 days or so,

right, so there's a much, it's a compressed time period means there's less time to get bored. Yeah. And I think that time to get bored. Yeah. And I think that's an important factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have one other question here I have to ask you about. It's apropos of nothing. My producer, Sam, put it here,

I think as just to entice me into asking you. So it must be something that you write about. How does an incel threesome work? How do incels have a threesome? See, that's a great question because it's why everyone needs to read my book because there's so much juicy gossip. There's so much juicy gossip.

Irresistible phrase, incel threesome? How am I not supposed to ask you about that? And it's in one of the first chapters. I mean, it just gets right in there. You gotta have this. So what happened to us? So Fred Brennan, he was an early incel. They called themselves wizards.

The joke being that once you reach the age of 30 and you're still a virgin, you get magic powers. Now Fred was only a team. That's a pretty good joke. I always liked that joke. That's like, if you're, as a self-deprecating joke, that's like pretty fun. These guys are clever.

I would not take that away from them. They've just done bad things. So Fred is running Wizard Chan, this early site for incels. He's got friends who are moderators on it. While he's on this site, a woman messages him. It's like, would you like to lose your virginity? He thinks he's being trolled,

but continues the correspondence. And eventually she reveals she has a fetish for virgins. And now listen, I have the receipts, I have the plane ticket. He buys her a phone, he buys her a plane ticket. She flies out to Brooklyn where he's living and shows up in his apartment. And they establish some rules.

They won't be monogamous. And because she's interested in virgins, as he grows more confident in his sexuality, he'll lose that virginal quality, and so she will become less attracted to him. So their relationship would have an expiration date to know what it was, but it wouldn't last long. He's like, okay, that's fine.

I need help cooking and cleaning because I'm disabled. So if you can make me macaroni and cheese, we're gonna work out. So they did. They had a relationship. He posts a picture of them holding hands on wizard Chan. Her arms straight, his curved because of his bones. And the wizards are furious at him.

And they reject him, he's betrayed all their values, how can he be with a succubus? That's what they call it women. And this, by the way, I'm sorry, could we just dive into the psychology a little bit here? Because I think this is where a lot of people get confused about incels. Because this is a community of people

who feel excluded from sex, excluded from something that other people have access to that they desperately want. They wanna have sex, and yet when one of their kind, or one of their members has the opportunity to have sex, they get very angry. They don't say, hey, good for you,

because you would think that their identification is based on their own misery, is it not? So what's the psychology happening there? Like you've betrayed us. You were a leader of us, and now you've stabbed us in the back. So their idea was that in the old days, everyone is ranked in hotness from one to 10.

10 was marry 10s, eights marry eights, twos marry twos. Because feminism has removed the stigma of women having multiple sexual partners, and women always want to sleep with the highest status men. And men on the other hand will have sex with anyone. It means that all the eight, nine and 10 dudes are having sex with all of the women,

including the two's and three's. So there's nothing for the two and three males. So once Fred loses his virginity, they create at least for a little while a new rule, which is that those at the very bottom, the zeros, will be able to have sex because a woman will see them as a fetish. And then Fred said this was like a very painful thing for him to read, but at the time he sought out those messages. He believes them. It made sense to him that he could never have genuine love. He could only be the object of someone's fetish.

That's so sad. I know, I know. I mean, this stuff is like really tragic. I mean, they believe ridiculous stuff, but like I feel for them as people, like I've gotten to know them over years and years. Like these are real human beings who suffer. Well, and these are ways that you only end up thinking

if you are suffering and if you do not have healthy community and a certain kind of love in your life that I think everybody should have, right? I mean, these are the ideas of folks who have been, you know, kept in the dark for a long time and you can't help but feel for it to a certain extent. So here's how the threesome happens. Yes, I was, please get to it.

He has a friend who's also a moderator on Blizzard Chan, a fellow version who would invite Bear. So Bear is coming over, cause Bear also lived in New York. They're hanging out at the apartment. Fred says, you know, can you go home? Bear, me and Kara want to have sex. And Bear says, can I watch? And they say yes, because they had actually experimented with that before. So Fred performs oral sex on his girlfriend at the time,

Anna. And he's not very good at it because he doesn't know how to do it. And he's a little awkward and he's embarrassed and he's worried that he looks fat. He's worried about cellulite. He's like bear continue. I feel so weird about this. Bear starts getting very frustrated. He's sitting on his chair. He's like watching me.

He's sweating. And finally he stands up, takes his shirt off and gets on the bed. He's a very large man so he sinks it deep down. and Fred is scared that he's gonna roll off the bed, which is dangerous because of his bones, right? He's like, all right, chill out, chill out, bro. Like, let me just crawl off the bed and you can get in there, okay? And so he patiently waits as Fred climbs off the bed.

Then Bear goes in and he starts performing oral sex on Anna and she loves it. She's having a great time. And Bear goes in and he starts performing Rolosex on Anna. And she loves it. She's having a great time. She's going, wow, but this virgin is doing this here. So climax, it's over. This is this afterglow period. They're joking with Bear, like, where'd you learn to do that?

He says porn. And then Fred says he stupidly turned the subject to Wizard Chan. And he's like, but Bear, what about wizard Chan? And his face falls. And he's like, are we boyfriend girlfriend now? And I was like, no. And he's like, starts freaking out. He's like, what have I done? What have I done? Like you've, you've ruined my life. Like I, I've lost my moderatorship on Wizard Chan and I'm like, it's true. Then we won't tell anyone. It's fine. You don't have to tell anybody. He's like, no, no, no, no. He's freaking out. He eventually lays on the ground. He's pounding

his fists on the ground crying saying, I've ruined my life. I've ruined my life. And Fred cannot figure out like, why is he so upset? He's finally gotten sexist thing with his life, just been built around not having, like finally he gets what he wanted and he's devastated. And Fred says, and he's telling them what happened was for Bear is he's not a nori and he's not a wizard anymore. He's just a loser.

He's like lost the community that had given him some solace in his self-imposed or his, maybe not even self-imposed, in his isolation. He was isolated. He built a community around isolation and now he's worried he's gonna be rejected from that community, but also not accepted into mainstream society.

Exactly. He's still who he is, but now he's all alone. That is so sad. That's a very personal story. You were told this story by the people who lived it. Yeah. By Fred. It is such an intense personal story

that has, you simultaneously feel for these people and you question how someone could have gotten themselves to that point and it's self-contradictory, it's sad, it's joyful. How much of, how much are these dynamics present in the broader, you know, alt-right, black pill movement? Like, it almost seems like an allegory in a way where once you've won, well then you're no longer,

you no longer get to define yourself by being a part of the community of heroic losers. Right, by winning you've lost. Yeah. Yeah, well I chose that story to tell. Like of course, sure, it's juicy gossip, but it also speaks to extreme power of the desire to want to belong to these communities, no matter how bizarre they might seem to outsiders. And the pull of these almost imaginary friends that people make through

the internet and how much power they can have over your psyche. And the rest of the stories I tell speak to that, to the really strange way that people twist themselves into justifying these truly crazy or unethical actions. How much do you think that this is not necessarily a problem with right-wing politics or, or, you know, sexual dysfunction or et cetera, but is a problem with online community itself. Because, you know, you can go look at, I don't know,

sub Reddit drama, r slash sub Reddit drama, or hobby drama, whatever it is, and find stories of people treating each other horrifically of, you know, abuse and bizarre behavior in, I don't know, knitting forums or whatever, right? Or in the furry community or whatever. And it's such a profound thing that the internet allowed people to find each other

and create these affinity and community groups. And yet there's so many stories of them becoming twisted and harmful in real life ways. How much is that part of the problem? Because so much of them, you hear these stories and you're like, God, people don't know what goes on on the forums, you know? Like, shouldn't we know?

Like, people are hurting themselves and each other on forums all day, every day around the internet, you know? Yeah, well, alienation is a massive problem. There's so much social science research speaking to this. People have fewer friends than they ever did. People do stuff less in person than they ever did. And I used to believe that the internet just reflected who we really are instead of shaping it,

but I don't believe that anymore. I think it can profoundly shape your ideas and it can warp your ethics. And there's, I think people who've done online dating have experienced this where you are chatting with someone online and it feels like you have a strong connection. And then when you finally meet them in person,

you realize they're not who you thought they were. Like then when you finally meet them in person, you realize they're not who you thought they were. Like really, you were projecting this fantasy about who they were. And then when you meet them in reality, they're totally different. And online this can have, I mean, just play out in really horrible ways. And one of them is that there are people who have, there are people, there are people who say, some who have told me they have autism. And one of the features of autism can be that you have low cognitive empathy, meaning you don't understand why people feel the way they feel, but you have high cognitive or high affective empathy. Meaning when you understand what they're feeling,

you feel it too. So someone steps their toe and you cringe, someone is sad, like you feel bad. And there are these people who have darker personalities who are essentially the opposite trolls. They have high cognitive empathy, meaning they understand why people feel what they feel, but low affective empathy,

meaning they don't feel it when they feel, but low affective empathy, meaning they don't feel it when they see someone else feeling that way. Meaning they can manipulate but feel no pain from doing so. Exactly. And these two communities, I've spoken to social psychologists about this, meet online to disastrous results,

where the sort of troll types will manipulate people with lower social skills into doing self-destructive things. And it has like really terrible results. I mean, the lesson is turn it off, turn off the phone. I'd sound so trite, but it's a terrible brain washing machine and you've got to set it aside sometimes. Is there any broader thing that we can do as a society about these spaces and the ways that this happens?

I mean, you have a front row seat to it, the way few people do. A lot of people get worried about online radicalization or et cetera, but they're mostly just, oh, should we change the YouTube algorithm or what? Like they don't quite have the ground view of it that you are bringing to us today. So given that you've immersed yourself in it,

I mean, is there anything that can be done about these spaces or these patterns to cause them to be less destructive? And I'm not saying, is there a way we can get like right-wing people to stop existing or whatever the fuck is, destructive. And I'm not saying is there a way we can get like right wing people to stop existing or whatever the fuck is obviously not. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about like the toxicity caused

by exactly what you're talking about, the shape of the platforms themselves. So Fred Brennan, so he's made a face turn, right? He tried to take a chin down when he realized what a monster it had become. He worked really hard to reveal the true identities behind QAnon. And the case he makes that I find compelling is that social media companies need to be much more heavily regulated than they need to publish their algorithms.

They need to be required to publish their algorithms. No, not every person will be able to understand it, but experts can come in and analyze whether this is truly for the public good. I also believe that tech companies need to understand they have a moral and ethical responsibility for what's on their platforms, even if for now they don't have a legal one. And then finally, our elected representatives,

I mean, this is like well reported that they are afraid of their followers. It is a much bigger version of what I saw among the alt-right when they were terrified of their own followers. That like the cult controls the leader. Leader is not in charge anymore. And I feel people in positions of power need to take responsibility for actually leading and to not be so afraid of angry Facebook mobs or angry Twitter mobs because at the end of the day, you don't know who that person really is. That person claiming to be a suburban mob who's into crafts, a suburban black woman who's into crafts might be one of my sources, Matt Parrott, who that was his identity for

a long time. Another one of my sources pretended to be a feminist when it's in Father's Day. Understand that these mobs online are illusions and you don't have to be cowed by them. Well, they're illusions, but they are real to an extent as well. Oh no. Yes, yes. But like even if it's 10,000 people,

if you represent a million, it's a tiny, tiny percentage. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I think the platform is taking responsibility is so key and they've refu... The metaphor I always use is like, hey, if you threw the party, it's your fault if somebody broke a vase.

You know what I mean? Like you created the space and the, you bought the beer, you turned the lights down, you decided how loud the music should be, you know? And that causes people to behave differently. And so you have in a sense created this behavior and you don't see that at all. I mean, if you look at a place like Reddit,

which is, you know, home to plenty of these forums, they just see, oh, this is just, we'll just monetize it. We'll just like give it to Google for AI. We'll try to sell all these words. You know, that's the only way that they see the output of their community is as something that's something to be Google for AI, we'll try to sell all these words. That's the only way that they see the output of their community, is as something to be sold for profit, not something that real people are participating in

and being influenced and hurt by. I know, at some point you have to ask, when is it enough money? If you have enough money that you could never conceivably spend it in your all entire life. Like, aren't we good enough? Is it not good enough? When is it gonna be enough?

Well, that's an incredible question for our entire society and one we come back to a lot on this show, but I think it's also a good place to end. This has been an incredible conversation. We went long because I couldn't get enough of it. The name of the book is Black Pill. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books.

Of course, where else can people find it and where can people find your work, Ellie? Wherever books are sold, Amazon, all that stuff. And I am a correspondent for CNN, so I'm on TV and on the website. Incredible, find Ellie's work on CNN. Thank you so much for being here. It's been incredible talking to you. Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.

Yeah, stay safe out there, okay? Look at that. I'll try. All right. supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you would like to support the show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits

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