Black pill My strange journey into the darkest corners of the internet

CNN correspondent Reeve draws on a decade's worth of her own reporting to offer a riveting debut chronicle of the rise of the alt-right. Tracing the movement from its beginnings on such message boards as 8chan to the January 6 Capitol attack, Reeve depicts the alt-right as more organized than is commonly believed and urges for more mainstream news coverage, arguing that a policy of "deplatforming" has not quelled the movement but instead allowed it to fester in the shadows. Through in-depth interviews with key players, including 8chan founder Fred Brennan, who helped inculcate the internet's "incel" subculture, and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who organized the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va., she gives a fine-grained account of the movement's philosophical and sociological origins online, where young men "disillusioned" with life, especially their relationships with women, developed fascistic worldviews that they could "try on... without risk" in anonymous forums. Though different wings of the movement have risen and fallen (Brennan and Spencer now both partly repudiate their pasts; Spencer gained media attention in 2022 for listing his politics as "moderate" on the dating app Bumble), Reeve warns that the movement's core of "dark but gleeful nihilism," which promotes violence as justifiable under a corrupt and imminently collapsing regime, has only grown stronger. This immersive political history will captivate readers concerned about the future of democracy. (July)

A reporter takes a gimlet-eyed look at the dangerous worlds of the deluded who gave us QAnon, right-wing extremism, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The black pill of CNN correspondent Reeve's title is a trope borrowed from the Matrix film franchise to describe "a dark but gleeful nihilism: the system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable." One of the author's principal characters is a young man who, suffering from "brittle bone disease," founded an "online forum for male virgins." Later, he switched his energies to the site that would become 8chan. "He'd imagined that a site with unrestricted free speech would create a robust forum that would bring forth new and better ideas, but over time, 8chan became an incubator for conspiracy theories and violent ideologies, like incels, the alt-right, and later, after he left it, QAnon," writes the author. "8chan made Fred an internet supervillain." Reeve has her sights on numerous other villains, though, including neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, more interested in money than ideology, backed by rich and secretive old men who bankrolled a movement that got away from them. "The leaders lost control of the cult," writes the author. "Now the cult controls the leader….The power is in mass anonymity. The racist hive mind collects a catalog of all leaders' worst moments." For the moment, that cult finds Donald Trump and his white nationalism useful, but perhaps only for the moment. Throughout the book, Reeve treads on controversial ground, but she does so with measured intelligence--and, as she notes, "It's a real mindfuck for smart people to hear that many of the nazis are really smart." Smart, perhaps, but also paranoid, conspiratorial, misogynistic, racist, often narcissistic, mendacious--and now deeply entrenched in the "respectable" conservative movement. A sharp exposé that does much to explain a strange, dangerous underground movement steadily emerging into daylight. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.