Black Pill
How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
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.
Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups.
At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, had arrived in the real world with greater and greater frequency.
With a sharp eye for detail and a dash of dark humor, Reeve explains the origins of this shocking sweep of political violence. Drawing on countless interviews with sources in the white nationalist movement as well as hundreds of as-yet-unseen documents, she takes us on a surreal journey from the darkest corners of the internet to the most significant and chilling scenes of real-world political violence in generations. A stranger-than-fiction odyssey into the dark heart of what American politics has become, Black Pill is necessary reading for any supporter of democracy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
