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I spent my entire teenage years at war. Not a real war, but a psychological war, followed by a legal one. It did not have a happy ending. At the time, when explaining it to my high school friends, I referred to the situation as “my evil neighbor.” Decades later, I understand what happened: My family had a stalker.
It started when our neighbor built a fence. We’d just moved to a 1970s housing development surrounded by nothing off Highway 109, a road referenced in a country song about murdering an abusive husband. The neighbor was a man in his early 40s, slim with jet-black hair, narrow eyes, and ruddy skin. The deed to our house showed he was building the fence on our property, so my parents asked him to get a survey of the land. He refused. My parents got one, and it gave him more land. It seemed like a win for our neighbor, but he had to move his fence, which made him angry.
We started to notice small acts of vandalism. A light on our driveway was shot out. Someone keyed our car—strange, given that we had a long driveway on a 2-acre lot and our neighborhood was like a sample-size suburbia dropped in the middle of empty fields miles from town. The plants died. Bolts appeared behind our car tires. A license plate was stolen. The air conditioner was tampered with. Someone started calling our house at all hours of the night, hanging up when we answered, or sitting in silence.
Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
By Elle Reeve. Atria Books.
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The ambiguity did not last. My neighbor started watching us. We had big windows in the back of the house, and after dark, we could see the red cherry of his cigarette as he sat in his truck and stared. Sometimes when one of us went outside, he’d heckle us—mostly saying that my dad was not a real man or that my mom was an ugly bitch. There are only a couple of confrontations I remember clearly. One happened at night, when my dad and I were walking outside to the garage. The neighbor was sitting on a lawn chair in the bed of his truck, drinking beer and eating popcorn. As we headed toward the driveway, he shouted that he was enjoying the big show we were putting on for him. He held out the popcorn and asked if we’d like some. I was 14 years old. I knew he was trying to be menacing, but I didn’t feel fear so much as astonishment at the way this adult was willing to debase himself to ruin our night. I remember staring up at his flushed red face as he stood up in his truck bed, way over my head, and thinking, What a strange person.
What doesn’t kill us makes us weirder. I didn’t realize how the neighbor war had changed me until 2016, when I got a job as a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, on HBO. As I was reporting, my mannerisms, accent, quirks, and vibe were being filmed all the time. They became part of not just my job but that of my co-workers, who shot, produced, and edited stories with me. And one quirk mattered most: my uncanny nonreactivity. The angrier a man got at me, the calmer I felt, and if he started shouting, I would enter a trancelike state, knowing that the real him was being captured in 4K. This shaped our stories, whether I was interviewing a nice older gentleman who wistfully flicked through his old explicit nude-modeling archive or an incel who made a bomb threat.
At Vice, I began tracking the alt-right, a loose coalition of white nationalists who skewed younger and who had connected primarily through anonymous online forums like 4chan. The alt-right had existed before Donald Trump began running for president in 2015, but his candidacy gave those who were a part of it the sense that their memes and provocations could affect reality. By 2017, they were regularly stepping into the real world in street brawls with leftists, videos of which would circulate back into their social media ecosystem and make them feel as if they were growing in numbers and power. They branded the summer of 2017 “the summer of hate”; the climax of it was to be a rally called “Unite the Right,” held in August in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was only years after covering that summer that I realized how much my neighbor had prepared me to cover a little army of internet trolls eager to move their tactics into the real world.
I had been friends with the neighbor’s daughter before the bad times began. She was a year older than me, with a goofy laugh and loopy handwriting and bangs. When I spent the night at her house, we stayed up late watching Interview With the Vampire, and she didn’t make fun of me when I told her it was my first R-rated movie. We sat in the grass between our houses and talked for hours. She held out her left hand and showed me her gold Mickey Mouse promise ring—a promise to her daddy that she would remain a virgin until it was replaced with a gold band on her wedding day.
We stopped speaking once her dad took an interest in mine. The grass where we’d sat together became the battleground between our families. It’s where her dad usually parked his truck, whether he was heckling during the day or honking the horn and flashing the lights at night. It’s where he’d be when my brother or I would walk down the driveway to wait for the bus. He’d stare, or rev his car engine, or drive down his parallel driveway and watch us up close till we were picked up for school. One summer morning, we woke up to find the words Bitch and Whore burned into the grass with weed killer. I wondered if my former friend ever looked at it.
A cop stood in our living room and told us, “If you don’t get it on video, we can’t do nothing about it.” We never got it—not good enough video, anyway. Back then cameras were awkward, and tape was finite. I was confused: Did the police never solve a single crime before the invention of the camcorder?
The harassment escalated. The neighbor liked to play chicken. He tailed my mom as she drove me to gymnastics practice one Saturday morning. When we got to a narrow part of the highway where it had no shoulder, next to a ravine, he’d drive up next to our car. My mom thought he was trying to scare her into swerving off the road. Then he’d drift back behind us, and my mom watched his red face through the rearview mirror. “Get lower,” she told me, pushing down on my shoulder, “in case he tries to shoot us.”
My parents kept all the neighbor documents in a maroon briefcase from T.J. Maxx. They’re still there: timelines, diaries, photos, court orders, my subpoena, my 8-year-old brother’s subpoena, my dad’s letter firing our first attorney for not knowing which side had the burden of proof. Escalating police reports for vandalism, stalking, harassment, assault. When I sift through the papers now, I see my mom and dad trying desperately to play by the rules. It didn’t work.
The rally in Charlottesville was promoted as a protest of the city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park in the middle of town. Before the event, Richard Spencer, who’d become the face of the alt-right, told me the real point was to show that he and his allies were not just online trolls but a real movement that could occupy public space. Every other alt right activist and anonymous troll I spoke to either was going to the rally or knew about it and thought it was awesome. Private messages between organizers, later made public in federal court, show the bizarre frenzied mentality behind it. Organizer Jason Kessler texted Spencer, “We’re raising an army my liege. For free speech, but the cracking of skulls if it comes to it.”
The author, Elle Reeve, reporting at the Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida in 2023. Al Diaz/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
I thought the rally would be significant—and significant really is all I could have articulated at the time—so my boss said if I wanted to go, I had to set up an interview. Kessler declined, but he posted my phone number in an alt-right chat room, and Chris Cantwell, an aspiring white nationalist podcast personality, called me. Cantwell deemed himself one of the “edgiest” guys in the movement, edgy being slang for “very racist,” and we agreed to meet for an on-camera interview the day before the rally. We sat on a picnic bench in a sweltering city park, and he tried to provoke me as a crowd of his fans stood in a semicircle around us, staring and heckling. They loved his performance. But the camera was the audience that mattered most. Cantwell told me, “I’m carrying a pistol. I go to the gym all the time. I’m trying to make myself more capable of violence.” (That statement, and a few more like it, would be replayed again and again and again, on TV and in court, as proof of the alt-right’s true intentions.) Within 24 hours, an angry white polo-clad mob had marched on a college campus, wielding tiki torches and yelling “Jews will not replace us!”; a day of brawls between alt-right protesters and counterprotesters had caused the governor to declare a state of emergency. Then a “Unite the Right” marcher drove his car into a crowd and murdered a woman.
My parents finally got a court order that prohibited them and the neighbor from “harassment or nuisance from talking, shouting, whistling, or other forms of communication or activity construed by the court as being done to intentionally harass.” Three days after that, my parents filed a petition for contempt, detailing how the neighbor had already violated the order twice. The neighbor answered the petition by claiming that my parents had “continually harassed and maligned” him and that he was suing them for $100,000. The judge wrote that he did not have “the time needed to hear evidence from both sides” and sentenced both my dad and the neighbor to 10 days in jail. The sentence was suspended as long as both men paid a bond, $5,000, that would be forfeited if they engaged in more harassment.
The next month, on a snowy January morning, my parents found our cat, dead, near the end of our driveway. At the urging of their lawyers, they got an autopsy. The findings: “A severe trauma is suspected.” My mom said the neighbor had left a baseball bat leaning against the outside of his house. She thought he wanted us to believe he had used it to kill my cat.
The cat autopsy is where I usually start when I tell this story. A lot of people subconsciously assume that victims do something to deserve what they get, at least a little. But a household pet getting hurt? That triggers real horror.
Though we hadn’t had much success in court, the lawyers told my parents to continue documenting every incident with the neighbor. I don’t remember him targeting me at all, but according to the diary, he did, because my dad wrote an entry noting that while I was waiting for the school bus, the neighbor drove his pickup next to me and parked and waved and winked.
Around this time, my dad taught me some self-defense—how to break someone’s grasp on my wrist, how to carry my keys when walking through a parking lot at night so I could stab an attacker. Put my thumb on the dark circle under his eye, push inward and up, and I could pop his eyeball out of its socket. I nodded solemnly as my dad explained these maneuvers. But inside, I dared him to try. I was a 14-year-old girl, but I was a gymnast. I could do more pullups than all the guys in gym class. I hauled heavy furniture with my dad. I had extreme endurance, and I was very, very angry. I was certain that if my neighbor tried to hurt me, I could beat the shit out of him—and I would enjoy it. Like any teenage girl, I dreamed about the future, about moving to a big city and getting a glamorous job and wearing cool clothes and meeting cute boys. But most of my teen fantasies were about beating up a 40-year-old man.
In the end, there was no real justice. No final comeuppance, no order from the court that meant more than paper. The neighbor moved away. We moved to a house way out in the country, and we thought that was that, until we found cigarette butts on the bridge at the end of our new driveway. We moved away from there too.
After my reporting in Charlottesville in 2017, I heard one comment over and over: The only reason I had gotten interviews with white nationalists was because I was a blond woman and those guys wanted to make Aryan babies with me. I know that’s not what everyone thinks, but I heard it a lot, and it pissed me off, so I wanted to tell the story my way.
The reason I was able to do it was not my hair. It was because I was forced to learn at a very young age that most bullies are cowards, that confrontation is necessary, that you must get it all on tape. When I was surrounded by hostile armed lunatics in Charlottesville—and Oregon, and Michigan, and the United States Capitol—I didn’t tap into my years of experience with shampoo and conditioner. What got me into those crowds, and what got me through them, was spending my adolescence preparing for confrontation with this kind of man.
Before Charlottesville, there had been a struggle for what alt-right meant: Was it a new type of right-wing populism that was anti-war and anti-immigration, or was it neo-Nazis? At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Steve Bannon had told a Mother Jones reporter that the alt-right was nationalist, not white nationalist. “Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic,” Bannon said.
While many of my old alt-right sources remained ostracized, the most important people in the world started ripping off their ideas.
After Charlottesville, after the alt-right had been filmed bearing torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” that fight over meaning was over. “Unite the Right” participants faced devastating social, financial, and legal consequences, each one compounding the next. They’d been so proud to march barefaced, and now the internet at large was doxing them. They were shunned in their communities, some fired from their jobs. Financial services companies booted them as customers, so they couldn’t raise money online. That made it hard to pay for lawyers when they got sued. Many retreated and disbanded their groups, some denounced white nationalism, some got divorces, some struggled with addiction, a few died by suicide. One started going on Grindr, he told me, to find new interview subjects for his podcast.
And then, a strange shift: While many of my old alt-right sources remained ostracized, the most important people in the world started ripping off their ideas.
The alt-right talked about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory as a plot by Jews to dilute the culture and power of white people through immigration and gay rights; Fox News hosts began to warn of “replacement” as a plot by Democrats to dilute the power of white voters with immigrants. (In 2023 Vivek Ramaswamy referred to it as “the Democratic Party’s platform.”)
“Import the Third World, Become the Third World” was a slogan that circulated on 4chan and other websites for more than a decade before it started creeping into mainstream conservatism. Last fall, when Donald Trump said at a presidential debate that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, Donald Trump Jr. said: “You look at Haiti—you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average IQ. If you import the Third World into your country, you’re going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. Like, it’s not racist. It’s just fact.”
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This fixation on IQ in online conservatism, with increasingly popular insults like “midwit” and “low IQ,” is an echo of the alt-right’s view that IQ is the most important factor to explain individual lives as well as whole societies. That doesn’t mean that everyone who uses this slang was in an alt-right group chat or even within a couple degrees of one. But it does show how completely this subculture has become the main culture. Vice President J.D. Vance recently dismissed a critic for supposedly having an IQ of 110. I’ve been here before. Several men in the alt-right told me their IQ scores; one even sent proof. And the truly bizarre thing is that some of those alt-right guys have since told me that their focus on IQ was a mistake, that it was not a helpful way to evaluate a person or understand the world. “It is ultimately a way to arbitrarily, retroactively justify inequalities,” one told me. “It’s saying, ‘Look at all the science that says I should live like this and you should live like that. Deal with it.’ ”
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During inauguration weekend, when I watched Elon Musk put his hand over his heart, then thrust it outward at a peculiar angle, it reminded me of an incident more than eight years earlier, in November 2016. Trump had just won his surprise victory, and Richard Spencer was speaking at his organization’s white nationalist conference in Washington. At the end of his speech, Spencer told the crowd, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Many people think they remember watching Spencer himself give a Nazi salute, but he didn’t. It was the men in front of him who leaped to their feet; some of them gave Nazi salutes.
That didn’t happen with Musk. The crowd did not make the gesture back at him. And that’s important to remember, not for what it says about Musk but for what it says about us. The edgelord stuff is titillating but not that popular. Most people don’t want it, once they see it for what it is.
My neighbor took a lot from my family: money, time, peace of mind, my cat. My mom says her children learned too early that their parents were not all-powerful. What I got out of it was a deeper understanding of not-so-wholesome small-town America and a permanent chip on my shoulder that has been a powerful motivator in my work. It taught me that you can’t assume that being polite and following the rules will lead to righteous outcomes.
I am often asked how to defeat fascists. If I had an easy answer, we wouldn’t be here! The point of my story is that I do have experience dealing with people who enjoy the anguish of others, and I know how fragile those people’s confidence is. When I did a story on a troll harassment campaign against a woman in Montana, I published the audio of the creepy voicemails the trolls had left for her. A couple of my alt-right sources were furious because they felt embarrassed—the voicemails did not sound cool when played to a mass audience. As troll culture has ascended to the highest levels of American governance, it’s worth remembering this simple fact: One way to rebalance the power between a billionaire troll and regular people is to make sure everyone sees who they really are.
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