From 4Chan to Charlottesville to DOGE
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Just a quick heads up, today's show talks about the far right, violence, and white nationalism. Please take care when you're listening. Okay, here's the show. On November 19th, 2016, about a week after President Trump's first election, journalist Ellie Reeve packed into a conference room in Washington, D.C. There was a ton of media there, including me.

Ellie is a correspondent for CNN, and she's covered the far right for about a decade. I'd say there are about 300 guests, mostly men. There are a couple women there. It was a conference of white nationalists led by Richard Spencer, who liked to call his movement the alt-right.

I think Spencer called the alt-right a body without a head and the Trump movement as a head without a body and so that they could combine, that they could give force and ideas behind Trump's presidency. But what most people have seen from his conference was at the end of it, Spencer, he's giving a speech saying,

He's holding a glass of alcohol. He lifts up his glass and he says, "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" And a bunch of guys in front of him eagerly jump up and give Nazi salutes.

And that video goes extremely viral because it's very quick, easy visual shorthand for what the alt-right was all about. It's not just a new populism that's a little more protectionist and a little more anti-immigrant. There's full-on neo-Nazis in there. When you saw Elon Musk do whatever he did at the rally after the inauguration,

Did it feel the same? Were there echoes to you? Yes. That's the first thing I thought of, of course, was that moment with Spencer because what Spencer would bitterly tell people afterwards was that he never did what they call the Roman salute. It was that people were inspired by him to jump up and do it. And I thought about that a lot with Musk's actions because the crowd didn't follow him back. They weren't there ready to respond with that kind of gesture. Yeah.

I don't think it's very plausible that he didn't know what he was doing. But Musk and his defenders also did something that Ellie immediately recognized from the right-wing internet. People defended him online by saying, oh no, he wasn't doing a Roman salute, he's just autistic.

Well, real ones know that within that world, even being autistic is itself kind of a meme. For a decade, they have had this slang, A-U-T-I-S-T, for someone who seems autistic, who has these characteristics of high IQ and high social anxiety, and that's why they can't quite fit into the world.

And so they lived online, on 4chan and 8chan, creating a vocabulary to classify the world and their place in it, using racism for trolling, white supremacy for fun. Ellie wrote about it in her book Black Pill. But what is so striking now, in 2025, is that if you listen to the words of Elon Musk or the podcasting manosphere,

Even the words of J.D. Vance and some of the Trump family, the DNA of the far-right internet is clear. Cringe-based clown world. NPC. I mean, Musk in particular often uses this lingo. I've listened to podcasts with old alt-right guys saying, we invented liking Russia. You know, in Charlottesville, they chanted, Russia is our friend. I almost can't believe what I'm watching.

Today on the show, Ellie connects the dots from 4chan to Charlottesville to Doge. All of that to me has like DNA in the paranoid, angry rantings of people who describe themselves as socially awkward virgins. I'm Lizzie O'Leary and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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I started this story in 2016 with Richard Spencer, but Ellie says you actually have to go back further to GamerGate. The very brief version is that GamerGate began with a blog. In 2014, a guy lobbied unfounded online accusations at his ex-girlfriend, who was a video game developer.

saying that she traded sex for good reviews of her game. The idea made its way to 4chan, and among the incel community, it quickly morphed into something else, creating a campaign of harassment against people who wanted broader representation of women and people of color in gaming.

4chan banned people talking about Gamergate, but then they moved to 8chan, a similar platform with even fewer restrictions on speech. Ellie talked to a lot of people who were involved. They saw this as a moment where these guys realized that

they could combine forces and affect reality. Before their world had been solely online in these chat rooms, but now together they could make something happen in the real world. One of my sources is Frederick Brennan, who created 8chan. This became the main hub of Gamergate where they worked together to harass people. And he said at the time he thought this was

wasn't harassment, it was just free speech and political thoughts from people that the mainstream didn't like. Another guy I interviewed was Mark Mann, who lives not far from me in Brooklyn, in a home for adults with autism. He helped make Gamergate big by going to all these other posters and being like, "Hey, you can come onto this website and you can talk about all the Gamergate stuff and you won't be censored."

At the same time, white supremacists on the website Stormfront realized that they could harness the Gamergate anger and turn the kind of trolly, supposedly ironic online Nazi jokes into something uglier and real.

There's an internet law named after a troll that says what one generation does ironically or as parody, the next generation of a community will come in, miss all those social cues, and take those ironic postings as sincere. So over time, the community becomes the thing it had originally parodied. And so some said that happened with 4chan.

Several incels I spoke to talked about that too. Like at first, it's all kind of nice. But over time, it became a very dark, blackpilled place where people talked about depression and suicide. The process of blackpilling is kind of the key to everything. In The Matrix, Neo is presented with the red pill and the blue pill. Take the blue pill, stay in your pleasant illusion created by machines. Take the red pill, live in the nightmarish reality, but know the truth.

That spawned a lot of different

ideas, pill slang, right? To be green-pilled or crypto-pilled or Russia-pilled. But being black-pilled took on a very particular meaning, which is this total nihilism that everything is corrupt, it's decaying, society is falling apart. And that really the right thing to do for the elect, the people who really see it for what it is, is to hasten its collapse because what comes after will be a golden age.

It's just like a very, very dark, nihilistic view of the world. And if you're on the internet, you can find a lot of evidence for it being real, like the island of trash in the ocean, some horrible murder case, human trafficking. There's no shortage of terrible news that helps you build a case to yourself that humanity is screwed. It's over. There's nothing you can do to save this current regime. And so you need to bring it down.

I mean, I think this world came to life most visibly for people who were not following it intensely in Charlottesville. How important was the internet to bringing that to life?

Oh, wow. I mean, absolutely. Okay. Most people don't know about this, but there was a sort of a pre Charlottesville in Charlottesville in May. And so like, it was all, there's like all this hype building up to it. They were called it the summer of hate and Charlottesville is going to be the grand finale. And like,

James Alex Fields, who murdered a woman in Charlottesville by driving into a crowd, he actually didn't have strong connections to any of these groups. He'd just seen it online. He got there and he put on a polo shirt and he carried a shield, but he wasn't really, he wasn't a mastermind, but he wasn't even a foot soldier in one of the groups. He'd just seen this stuff online.

What does that do in that moment, do you think, that the images that come out of Charlottesville, the way the action there can be kind of commodified into a consumable image and one that can move around the world, what does that do for the right movement in that moment?

Well, in Charlottesville from August 2017, it was like the peak of their movement and its destruction. Because before that, people were saying, well, maybe this is just ironic racism. Like, you lefties, you're all triggered. Like, you're getting all bent out of shape over some kids joking around. They don't really mean it. And maybe at some point that was even true. But...

That process of the joke becoming real had long since taken effect. These guys were, they were really convinced that they had the momentum, that the culture was on their side. And so that's why they showed up bare faced. Like they weren't like the Klan hiding behind hoods. Like they were proud of themselves. - Breaking news, a horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence and chaos.

Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! The image is just coming in, a car plowing into a crowd of demonstrators protesting against those white nationalists. A 32-year-old woman killed a number of civilians. Ellie was there, reporting for Vice on the event and its organizers. Her documentary on Charlottesville is, in my view, mandatory viewing.

Is there a moment in which you think what you saw there made it to Trump? I've wondered about that because, you know, he said there were very fine people on both sides. I do think it's possible that he...

People at the high levels had bought this idea that this was just a Confederate history buff kind of event. They didn't want their statue taken down. I think it was possible for people to not know that this was planned and executed by the alt-right, like anti-Semites. There was no infiltration of the movement by then. It was their event. So he could have come out and said afterwards, oh, sorry, I misread that.

Situation, I didn't know the full extent of what's going on, but of course, that's not really in Trump's nature. When we come back, how the language of neo-Nazis and MAGA began to coalesce. Get that Angel Reef special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. And participating restaurants for a limited time.

Live your career further, faster in just two days with the Harvard Professional and Executive Development Program. Advance your leadership skills, craft smarter business strategies, build your network, and transform how you work and think to keep your career moving forward. You'll earn a certificate and can add Harvard to your resume with Harvard Professional and Executive Development. Learn more at professional.dce.harvard.edu.

From taco night in Tulum to sushi in Tokyo, make every bite rewarding with gold from Amex. Wherever you dine, four times membership rewards points at restaurants worldwide are piling up. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash explore-gold. Terms and points cap apply. What happened in Charlottesville was a deadly spectacle. And it was everywhere. Heather Heyer's death was shocking and tragic and incredibly public.

And Ellie says that even the neo-Nazis realized the implications of going full mask off. I think after Charlottesville, so all the actual open anti-Semites get pushed to the side. And what takes over in terms of that online energy is the alt-right. Now it's kind of called like the new right, the dissident right.

to signify this very online, authoritarian, curious movement that's kind of different than your mom-and-pop Trump supporter. What I think has happened, though, is that we are now at the time, it's like 10 years since stuff really got going, that a generation of people who grew up on 4chan and 8chan are old enough to have

presidential campaign jobs, congressional staff jobs, like to be on the staff of Turning Point. Or on the staff of Doge. But likewise, the kids who Musk has hired, one of them, according to Bloomberg reporting, was involved with chat rooms related to Kiwi Farms, which is another one of these kind of extremist sites that

is known for being a place where people post people's personal information, docs people's, to better coordinate harassment campaigns. It is a very dark part of the internet. I just think now this world is a part of ours. We have passed the period where we could have drawn a hard line and severed that part of the internet from our reality. It has completely infected our reality.

Where do you put Donald Trump Jr. and J.D. Vance in that equation? Because the style of communication seems very drawn from Gab, from 4chan, and yet we're talking about people who are extremely powerful in the current administration. Yeah, I mean, Vance went on so many podcasts.

And little comments that were said on that podcast, like, came up during the presidential election, but I felt like bigger picture. It says a lot about his media diet. For example, Vance went on investor Eric Weinstein's podcast in 2020 and explained the benefits of having his mother-in-law around to help raise his child. Vance speaks first here.

but it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents. And the evidence on this, by the way, is super clear. That's the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female in theory. But let me ask you a question. During the presidential campaign, Vance's office said he disagreed with Weinstein's comments about post-menopausal women.

explaining why grandmothers should be allowed to live. Like that's such an incel conversation. Like I've read those conversations about like, why do women live past 30? Or he went on the Jack Murphy podcast. Murphy is this like also manosphere influencer who has some kind of like membership organization or,

He said some pretty inflammatory things. On that podcast, Vance talked about needing to do a debathification of American institutions to purge wokeness from those institutions. Like, I have heard that from actual fascists before.

Like, does that mean, like, Vance is, like, buddies with those guys? No, but he's DMing with Chuck Johnson. Chuck Johnson, in case you don't know, is a major internet troll who, among other things, has doubted the Holocaust.

According to Washington Post reporting, he and the vice president exchanged text messages for almost 15 months from 2022 to 2024. I asked Chuck Johnson about it and he said it spoke to fans perhaps not having the best judgment that he would be DMing with a guy like him. Like he said that about himself.

We asked the White House about the vice president's communication with Johnson. They did not respond by deadline. But last year, a Vance spokesman told The Washington Post, quote, Chuck Johnson spam-texted J.D. Vance. J.D. usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things he said, unquote. Then there is the Silicon Valley part of this Venn diagram. Eric Weinstein, the podcast host who talked about postmenopausal women, used to work with Peter Thiel.

as did the vice president, as did David Sachs, the administration's crypto czar, and Joe Lonsdale, a Trump fundraiser who supports U.S. control over Greenland.

I see the populations of Silicon Valley as being not that different from some of the people who are on the incel boards. You see this, like part of the culture of Silicon Valley is like the rejection of what normies, supposedly us, believe. And all of our sort of silly superstitions and social rules that are hindering progress. I mean, I guess most people would place it with TL's

backing of Trump in 2016. I think also with the fall of the alt-right, Silicon Valley is now the place where a lot of the intellectual energy comes from, or the sort of dissident right, new right ideas. Curtis Yarvin has been described in a biography of Peter Thiel as the court philosopher of Thiel. He is an authoritarian. He believes in Caesarism. The

The idea that like American institutions are so sclerotic that the only way to actually like do what the people want is to have a Caesar-like figure who takes over and like forces their will on the American people. Ellie says it feels like the black pilling of Silicon Valley.

Another Trump backer, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, mused on a podcast three years ago about the concept of Nietzschean slave morality. Which is also a fixation of Richard Spencer and many in the alt-right. The idea is that

In the old days, morality was beauty, strength, intelligence, power is good, weakness, illness, sickness, ugliness is bad. But Jews, Christians lived as slaves. You can't go along with just like living, thinking like you're a horrible person because you're weak. So Christianity inverts that morality.

And so instead of strength being good, humility is good. Obedience is good. The meek shall inherit the earth. Here's Marc Andreessen in 2022. A society that tries to reclaim master morality ends up being the Nazis and a society that goes all the way to slave morality ends up being the Soviet Union. And they aren't actually thermostatic. And you actually have to make a choice at the end of the day, you know, which one is worse and you have to steer society in either direction. And

I don't know the answer. I think the question is a very live question because there are a lot of forces at work, at least in the West right now, that want to push us much harder in the direction of slave morality and

You know, like I said, generally that experiment ends poorly. I was listening to Andreessen talk about that in the context of the idea that awokeness is the end, is like late-stage slave morality. It's that all of our social problems have basically been addressed. There's not a lot of inequality anymore, so liberals must find new victims to valorize and to hold up as Jesus-like people.

gods, essentially, in order to worship. And it's leading to all this terrible redistribution of wealth and just almost a self-sabotaging culture that values weakness and suffering instead of strength and power. I mean, I can't predict where it all ends, but I don't know. This is radical stuff. It's radical stuff. It's being pushed out by someone with 200 million followers on X who

appears to be interacting with followers in this sort of policy by tweet way. You know, what do you libs of TikTok think we should do with this thing or that thing? And is this like, is this how whatever grain that started with incels in 2014 is made manifest?

affecting 300 million Americans' lives? Yeah, I think it's representative of the idea that

Picture Elon Musk.

on stage at the conservative political action conference in sunglasses, a black MAGA hat, and wielding a chainsaw. Yeah, I mean, he seems really locked in that world to the point where when he goes out and speaks in public, even the regular MAGAs at CPAC don't seem to totally understand how to take it. Like, when he was being interviewed on the stage in CPAC and he's like, I have become mean, like, you can tell the interviewer is like a little uncomfortable. He doesn't

quite know how to like take this interview, how to keep it smooth and make it feel like, yeah, we're all friends here. And like, this is objectively weird behavior. One of the most interesting things that happened after Charlottesville was the infighting and implosion of many of the different groups of people who were there. When you look at that, does that tell you anything about

the different factions that make up the president's audience right now.

how unified they might be, whether there are fissures in that unity and what might happen to them. Well, I don't think there's fissures yet. So the Charlottesville alt-right world cracked after Charlottesville because there was a massive social backlash against it. Normal people were shocked and appalled, even people who served in Trump's cabinet, because some resigned.

The alt-right was under, like, they got kicked off social media. They got kicked off financial services platforms so they couldn't raise money. There are all these pictures that, images of them that they weren't in control of, where they thought they looked stupid or crazy or out of control. So there was a lot of fighting among them, like, blaming each other for making them look foolish. They're so angry at each other that then they start sending those memes of each other, like,

It's one way that the movement devours itself. It's like once they've turned on you, they'll send you all the pictures of you looking fat. Every time you say something publicly, the responses will be like you looking fat in a suit. The time that your friend cheated on, Derek slept with your wife. Like all kinds of things like that. There was also a civil lawsuit over Charlottesville that exposed the far right to ridicule, showing how it communicated and how it fought internally against

But now, that's not happening. And so my thought after Jan 6 was, this is the opposite. There's a massive number of prosecutions, both of Trump and of the people who showed up and raided the Capitol, but not a lot of social consequences. They weren't kicked off financial services companies. They weren't kicked off social media, or at least not in the long run. So my question was like, which one will matter more?

Well, now we can see it's actually the first one that matters more than the legal consequences. It's the entire culture moving against them. But who knows? I was just interviewing this woman. I was like, when are you going to run out of patience for Trump to get those egg prices down? She's like, I'm not going to run out of patience. Trump 2028. So I don't know. Ellie Reeve, thank you for talking with me. Good talking to you, too.

Ellie Reeve is a CNN correspondent and the author of Black Pill, How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. And you really need to read it.

All right, that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell and Tony Tran. Slate is led by Hilary Fry. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you're looking for more Slate content to listen to, I highly recommend checking out Wednesday's episode of What Next. Mary Harris talks to people whose lives are being impacted by the doge cuts firsthand.

If you like what you heard, the number one best way to support us is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, including this one, plus some other nice bonuses like no hitting the paywall on the Slate site. All right, we'll be back on Sunday with another episode. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thank you so much for listening.

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