There’s a lot of debate over what to call the loosely connected group of people working to make America more racist: white supremacists, white nationalists, white power advocates, professional racists, neo-Nazis, the alt right, the dissident right. None of these terms are perfect, and many originated in racist slogans coined decades ago.

I prefer “nazis”—lowercase, like a generic drug, to cover all their ideologies, and to distinguish them from Germans in the 1930s and ’40s and skinheads in the ’90s. What they want is more white power. What they are defending is white male supremacy.

What those inside it call it is “the movement.” All of them. The ones who resent it, the ones who think they’re above it, the ones who quit. They speak of it as though it is a sentient blob. Another word for it might be “cult.”

“The movement is angry with me,” Richard Spencer, its most infamous leader, told me after my interview with him aired on television. “The movement’s been propelled by insecurity,” said Matt Parrott, who’d been part of it since 2008 and was one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. His longtime collaborator, Matthew Heimbach, began a backstory with the disclaimer, “If movement lore is to be believed…,” Jeff Schoep, who ran a neo-Nazi group for almost three decades, answered most of my questions with the preface, “When I was in the movement…” They talk about their “movement friends” and their “non-movement friends,” if they have any. There are movement parties and movement funerals.

You can dabble in racism, hang out on racist websites, read fascist literature, and later come back to the normal world, but when you use your real name in the movement you have passed the point of no return. You can quit, but you can’t leave. No one will forget what you’ve done. The movement takes away your friends and gives you new ones, but they don’t really like you, and they’ll turn on you the moment you become a liability, or “cringe,” an embarrassment. After the movement ruins you, it will laugh at you. You deserve it. You were never really good enough, but the movement had fun while it lasted, You, of course, did not.

At the center of the movement is a group of old men. The old men provide the money—but there is never enough money to do much of anything, and the old men are always pushing the young men to find a new source. When the wealthy inventor Walter Kistler developed an interest in race science in his later years, one of his aides told me a significant part of his job was to stand between Kistler and the grifters who wanted to extract money from him. “He was like a childlike genius—brilliant, but naïve, easily manipulable,” the aide said. “We were basically all policemen…because Walter’s checkbook would be in his pocket and whoever walked in, he said, ‘Okay, here is a check.’”

The old men offer validation. They have overlapping clubs and conferences, and when a young man gets an invitation, it’s a sign he has promise. One of those old men was Bill Regnery, whose uncle founded an important conservative book publisher that bore his name, and whose grandfather was a member of the America First Committee, created to keep the U.S. out of World War II. Regnery did not have much of his own mainstream success. He’d been pushed out of his family’s textile business in the 1980s and removed from the board of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the 2000s. But within the movement, he was elite. In 2015, Regnery emailed friends in the movement that he was “flabbergasted” that mass murderer Dylann Roof’s manifesto showed so much intelligence: “Based on Roof’s essay he is the kind of youth we could have invited to a meeting.”

The meeting would have been with the Charles Martel Society (CMS), one of the old men’s clubs. Members are not supposed to talk about CMS publicly. When, in March 2017, a BuzzFeed reporter asked if CMS was a secret society, members debated over email whether they should say “It is not a secret society,” or if saying it wasn’t a secret society made it seem even more like a secret society. Regnery settled on “The Charles Martel Society is a private but not secret organization.” However, when the story was published a few months later, member Kevin MacDonald was quoted saying, “It’s a secret society.”

“CMS is, in many ways, the heart,” Matt Heimbach said. There were other elite movement organizations—American Renaissance, VDARE, the H. L. Mencken Club, etc.—each with a different message, whether that’s more focus on immigration, or race science, or a racism that’s friendlier to Jews. “All the different fronts have a specific purpose to bring in slightly different groups of people. But at the heart of it, it’s all, like, the same thirty dudes.”

Richard Spencer calls these old men vampires. “They see something that is alive, and they want to go suck its blood. And then the second they don’t think it’s alive, or it’s objectively dead, they want to move on to something else,” Spencer said. Regnery was Spencer’s chief vampire, and backed him for a decade. When Regnery died in the summer of 2021, Spencer did not go to the funeral.

The old men cultivate young men to be public faces for the movement. They give them just enough praise to get them hooked and working for more. One younger leader asked to speak off the record to avoid sparking “movement drama,” before comparing the way the movement saw him to the way it saw Nathan Damigo. Damigo had spent four years in prison for assaulting an Arab cabdriver, but he was square-jawed, fit, and wore preppy clothes. With some nurturing from CMS, he founded a white power frat called Identity Evropa. “It will irritate me to my death that I’ve done nothing wrong, done everything right,” the leader told me, “and yet, this guy—who literally attacked an immigrant worker, and is a shitty person—is considered ‘good optics’ that we should aspire to emulate and follow, and I’m ‘bad optics.’” The movement is divided by social class: “boots vs. suits.” The suits thought the boots—meaning neo-Nazis, skinheads, klansmen, neo-Confederates, and the like—made the suits look bad.

The old men do not always pick winners. “I don’t think anyone should be able to move up in power—or in relative popularity, or however you want to describe where I am right now—nearly as fast as I did, because that’s very dangerous,” Elliot Kline, then the head of Identity Evropa, told me in 2017. He said the movement needed to develop a stronger immune system to protect against unreliable people with sketchy backgrounds. A few months after our conversation, Kline was revealed to have been lying about his military record—he’d never served in the Iraq War. He then disappeared from the scene. A few years after that, he didn’t bother to show up to a federal civil trial in which he was a defendant. But his ex-girlfriend did show up for her deposition. She said under oath that Kline boasted he was building a militia for Spencer, but that after the fascist revolution, he said Spencer would be the first against the wall.

A major subject of movement gossip is who might be gay. This is not new; when Hitler ordered the execution of hundreds of Nazi brownshirts in 1934 in the “Night of the Long Knives,” one official justification was that their leaders were homosexual. Within the modern American white power movement, the sexual rumors mostly pose a reputational threat, not a physical one. Once, in a period of intense scrutiny, a white nationalist called me to complain that some people in the movement were calling him gay, and he wasn’t gay, they were gay. He claimed there was even a gay nazi house where they did gay nazi stuff, and said I should report on it. Years later, two other leaders urged me to expose the “pink mafia”—or “the fancy boy, let’s-invite-a-bunch-of-twinks-to-hang-out and-talk-about-racism crew”—and its rumored house. In frustration, I told them I couldn’t just print a headline saying, “There’s a Big Gay Nazi House”—I needed to see documentary evidence and talk to people with firsthand experience. That would be hard, one said, because there’s still a big stigma around sexual harassment: “That’s a really fucking emasculating shitty topic.”

Within the movement, I am a meme. I am the most famous to the worst people. When I started reporting on the far right, I was younger, more naïve. I had a public Instagram. They found a photo I’d posted of myself at a child’s birthday party, captioned, “me among my people, at a bar mitzvah.” My friends understood it was a jokey reference to a ten-thousand-word article I’d written about teenagers with a meme empire—“my people” meaning teens—but the internet nazis took it as a sincere expression of Jewish identity. They began sending me antisemitic insults through every digital avenue they could find; that I should die in an oven was a popular one. But I’m not Jewish. I didn’t know many Jews as a kid. The messages were vile, but they didn’t trigger memories of playground bullying or a grandparent’s story of a more bigoted time. It was like having thousands of people scream at me for being from Arizona.

As my reporting continued, however, they noticed something about me that is undeniably, measurably true: my eyes are large and very far apart. This fact does not register with average people, though an optician once shouted it when I walked into his store. The distance between my pupils is sixty-seven millimeters, wider than nearly 95 percent of females. But having big, wide-set eyes was not something I felt insecure about. Had they never heard of Kate Moss? It was like they were dunking on me for having long and luscious hair. Thanks? They said it was a sign I had fetal alcohol syndrome.

They made comics of me, GIFs of me, supercut videos of me. They researched my family and relationships; they posted my number in their group chats and drunk-dialed me on holiday weekends. Someone emailed a drawing of me naked with a gun to my head. I used to tell myself I’d quit when it got really bad, but in hindsight I know that it was really bad for a while.

I learned to be on high alert when recognized in public by a white male under forty. The few who were alt-right couldn’t help themselves: they’d reference a 4chan meme to make sure I knew who they really were. It could happen anywhere: at a mainstream conservative conference, in the TSA line at the airport, at the Guggenheim. At a happy hour for fans of manosphere tweeter Mike Cernovich, a young guy told me he was in an Identity Evropa group chat, and then tried to take my picture, which I bullied him out of doing. He told me to say hi to my ex. I reminded him he knew very well I was going home to my Jewish boyfriend. For months, false rumors swirled within the movement that my boyfriend, Jeremy Greenfield, and I were engaged. Then, a day after we did get engaged while traveling in Tokyo, a white nationalist called with urgent news.

At the end of our conversation, he asked, “You’re not really gonna marry that guy, are you?” I felt trapped: deny my true love or make the first person I told of our engagement a nazi? After a few seconds I found an escape by stating the obvious: it was none of his business.

The ones who took the most interest in me were part of a wave of young people brought into white nationalism by the internet. They called themselves the alt-right, and they changed the movement. The leaders lost control of the cult. Now the cult controls the leader. The internet is the enforcer. To “counter signal” is to criticize the political objectives of someone to your right within the movement. It is not acceptable. To “cuck” is to bend to criticism from outside the movement—the term comes from “cuckold,” as in a married man who lets another man have sex with his wife. This is also not acceptable. In essence, to argue that “race war now” is not a good idea is to countersignal. To argue that “race war now” is a fine objective but that visible swastikas might be a turnoff to the general public and slow the growth of the movement is to be an “optics cuck.” To join the movement is to be chained to the most violent extremes of it.

The power is in mass anonymity. The racist hive mind collects a catalog of all leaders’ worst moments. Break with current internet doctrine, and you’ll be flooded with photos of that time you looked fat, or reminded of that time your best friend slept with your wife. The young leaders resent the old men, but they fear their own followers.

The movement will get you punched, sued, jailed, divorced, bankrupted. But it will never let you go. Matt Heimbach had a round face with thick black hair and eyebrows, and he was always grinning, but underneath it was a seething anger. “My biggest advice to people in the movement is like, Don’t fucking leave, because there’s no point,” Heimbach said. “If you’re already in, your life is fucked.” It will leave you with no one to confide in but the journalists who’ve exposed what you’ve done.

Heimbach had been blackpilled, trapped in a nihilistic hopelessness that the only thing to look forward to was to watch the world burn. I reminded him that quitting the movement might provide some benefits that he hadn’t considered. When white nationalists kill people, they tend to kill each other. I said quitting would reduce his risk of being one of those killed.

“I’ve had a lot of loaded guns pulled on me over the years—a lot of fucking loaded guns,” Heimbach said. “Not a one of them has shot me yet.”

I said if I could choose between having a loaded gun pointed at me and not having a loaded gun pointed at me, I would choose not having a loaded gun pointed at me.

“If you’ve already got a death wish…,” he said, and didn’t finish the sentence. “I’ve been sitting around here, tapping my foot, waiting for martyrdom for the past goddamn decade, and no one’s been brave enough to do it.”

Adapted from BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve. Copyright © 2024 by Elle Reeve. To be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC.