Matt Parrott, Matt Heimbach, and Josh Smith rented a house about half an hour outside Charlottesville in October 2021, when they were defendants in a month-long federal civil trial. Parrott and Heimbach were accused of conspiring to commit racially motivated violence at the Unite the Right rally in August 2017.
Article continues below
That summer weekend had been the apex of the alt-right, a newer, younger segment of the white power movement that was based online rather than in local clubs or gangs, and they were two of its leaders. They’d marched with nearly the entire leadership of the alt-right, including Richard Spencer, Chris Cantwell, Nathan Damigo, and Elliot Kline, as well as older white nationalists, like Jeff Schoep, and the rally’s main organizer, Jason Kessler. Now they were all codefendants.
Parrott concealed himself behind a hat and a sandy beard. He vaped incessantly. He and Heimbach had known each other a long time, but Smith was new to their circle. He was their lawyer, and when he wasn’t wearing a suit, he wore an all-over-print Rocky and Bullwinkle T-shirt and True Religion jeans with decorative back pockets. He was gay and Jewish. When I asked Smith if he was a Holocaust denier, he said it depended on what I meant by “Holocaust denier.” I said that most people who are not Holocaust deniers would just say, “No, I’m not a Holocaust denier.” He said he believed the official number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was off “by a lot”—millions. It was an odd scene.
To be “too autistic” to engage in some part of mainstream society could be either a badge of honor or a shameful confession.
The rental was lit by fluorescent lights and decorated with big leather couches. Smith had put his desktop computer and a giant printer on the dining table. The bathroom had dirty clothes in the floor. I entered through the kitchen and past the stacked pizza boxes with my producer, Sam Guff. Sam was a petite New Yorker with ADHD, and a talented video editor, and as I’d pulled her deeper into covering the world of extremism, she could roll with any situation, no matter how strange. She walked into the white power bachelor pad as if she were visiting an old acquaintance from college—calm, friendly, just the right amount of distance.
Most nazis had been extremely hostile to me in 2017, but by 2021, they accepted my presence. Charlottesville had turned out to be the high point and the undoing of the alt-right, and my coverage of it was a significant reason for that. It was like we were veterans who’d fought on the opposite sides of a war. There weren’t many other people in the world who had witnessed the same events. So when I called them and asked for an interview, it was pretty easy to get them to say yes.
By that point I’d known Heimbach for eight years, and though he was polite to me, he’d never let his guard down—always on message, never quite real. Parrott had walked out of an on-camera interview with me. But on the evening after the trial’s closing arguments, when their fates were in the jurors’ hands, we went back to the house to try again.
Heimbach had gone home. Sam was looking at court documents with Smith. Parrott sat cross-legged in the corner of the overstuffed couch, vaping. I sat close to him, slouched in a matching overstuffed armchair, my feet on the overstuffed ottoman. It was bad lighting for gossip, but Parrott was talking anyway.
He mentioned he was antisocial. He’d testified he was an introvert, an accidental revelation of some vulnerability. Afterward, he’d said, “It’s really hard to not be yourself after several hours of that kind of drilling. The real you boils out.”
I tested the waters with one of my favorite questions: Are you left-handed? Parrott said he was. Heimbach was left-handed, too, which I’d noticed while looking closely at a photo of him in the middle of a brawl—he had a puffy red left hand. I asked Parrott, in a tone of shamelessly fake casualness, what he thought of the ubiquity of the word “autist” in white nationalism.
It was like whispering the secret password in a fairy tale—the whole side of a mountain opened up. He said he’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s in the nineties, and that Heimbach had, too. (The American Psychiatric Association has since dropped Asperger’s as a diagnosis in favor of autism spectrum disorder.) He looked delighted as I slapped the arm of my chair and shouted, “I knew it!” Now we had a language to explain their lives.
Autistic people are more than twice as likely to be left-handed as the general population. It’s one of many bits of autistic trivia I’d picked up while researching the anonymous extremist internet. From the very first days I started going on 4chan to figure out what the alt-right was, I noticed that a stunning number of posts on the website used the term “autist,” as in autistic, or someone with autism spectrum disorder. It was both a term of endearment and derision.
To be “too autistic” to engage in some part of mainstream society could be either a badge of honor or a shameful confession. The products of obsessive and meticulous internet research were sometimes called “weaponized autism.” Neurotypical people with mainstream politics were called “normies.” I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I couldn’t find mainstream people talking about it anywhere, and when I told friends or colleagues about it, they seemed extremely skeptical.
Early on in their friendship, Parrott understood that despite their shared autism, Heimbach could connect with people in a way that he couldn’t. He had a theory about it: After Heimbach was diagnosed as a kid, his mom put him in behavioral therapy for ten years. He was drilled on how to maintain eye contact, how to maintain a conversation as though he were playing a friendly game of tennis, lobbing the ball back even when it was boring. It created a monster—the mind of an autist with the social skills of a normie.
“He’s autistically social, which means he aggressively makes eye contact and approaches socialization with the autistic fixation that autistic people put into their model train sets or constructed languages or whatever stupid shit they’re fixated on,” Parrott said. I asked what Heimbach was like when he wasn’t on TV.
“He’s autistic and he talks about the same ideas over and over again,” Parrott said. Heimbach had by that point dropped fascism for communism, which they argued about constantly. Heimbach’s infamy had made it hard to keep a job, but as an hourly wage worker he found material to support his new politics. “He’s calling me on break at McDonald’s, carrying on about the labor theory of value and how he’s being alienated from his work product and all this bullshit.”
Autism does not make someone more likely to commit violent crime, according to a lot of social science research, including a study of nearly three hundred thousand people in Stockholm published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2017. But for a long time, the only internet extremists for whom I could find documentation of their mental health were those who’d committed acts of political violence, because their psychiatric evaluations were evidence in court.
In early 2017, Dylann Roof was sentenced to death in federal court for murdering nine people at a Black church in Charleston two years earlier. His defense team had hired Dr. Rachel Loftin, a clinical psychologist who specializes in autism spectrum disorder, and she’d diagnosed him with it in jail. But Roof did not want this evidence presented at his sentencing. “I didn’t want my act to be discredited,” he told the judge. “I don’t want anybody to think I did it because I have some kind of mental problem I wanted to increase racial tension.”
Reading Loftin’s official report had felt to me like unearthing the Rosetta Stone—finally, here was an expert analyzing the interaction between the extremist internet and one person’s autism. Roof was isolated, easily embarrassed, and likely a virgin, Loftin wrote. His sister “estimated that he had basically been living inside his room on his computer for nearly 5 years before the crime.” Loftin had traced his internet history, and his conversations with family and friends, and found that “Dylann pursued his preoccupation with racism with an autistic intensity.”
“While there is no reason to believe that ASD can cause racism,” Loftin wrote, “ASD as well as other psychiatric conditions can fuel behavior in people that draws them to fringe political movements.”
Ethics rules forbade Loftin from talking to me about Roof specifically. But she told me her top advice to parents of kids with autism, particularly those with high IQs, was to limit internet time. Autistic people can be especially vulnerable to extremist online communities, she said, for three reasons. One, it allows them to socialize without social anxiety. Two, the rigid worldview makes it easier to understand the way the world works. And three, the forums have archives, so they can go back in time and read to understand how users talked to each other and then mimic those interactions.
With Parrott’s disclosure, I’d finally found people who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and been drawn to extremism through the internet—but had not killed anybody.
I called Heimbach the next morning. “You’ve cracked the code,” he said. “The secret of the alt-right is that it’s actually a movement of autistic guys with internet access.” They all got their start on the internet, back when there were no rules. He’d spent hours reading liberal and conservative think pieces so he could better troll the authors. “The only sort of people that are going to have the energy to do all that is a bunch of autistic people.”
“Of the ‘alt-right,’ I’d say a quarter to half of us are on the spectrum,” he said. “That’s the dividing line between the old movement and us—we all have the ’tism.”
Some people who identified as autists online were trying to understand what made people outcasts. Others were thinking more big-picture. “The history of the world is literally the history of autistic people,” a guy in his late twenties who went by Spaft told me. Spaft had been in and out of incel forums for a decade, and the first time we spoke, he made a bomb threat and dared me to report him to police. In the years since, we’d developed a rapport. Spaft believed the significant figures of history, for good and for ill, were all autistic: Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. (Stalin was maybe autistic, too, he thought, but Stalin was also a brute, and that was probably the more relevant part of his personality.)
Any revolution required not just new ideas, but the ability to convince the public that those ideas were good. And to do that, you had to understand how regular people think. He thought this was not possible for regular people. They were too deep in being normal to analyze what normal was. “The only way you can assess how a regular person thinks is if you’re not a regular person—is if you’re an autistic individual who is external to society and you’re observing people all the time,” he said. “You’re observing human interactions, human psychology, and how people interact.” He’d developed a system for ranking all mankind:
1. Autistic Chad
2. Chad
3. Normie
4. Beta
5. Autistic Beta
With hard work, he said, an autist could go from “the absolute bottom trash of society” to the elite.
Every expert I spoke to cautioned that there is an enormous difference between people with clinically measurable symptoms of autism and people who think identifying as autistic gives them a little cache on the internet. The relative size of these two groups is impossible to know, because of the forums’ anonymity. Three mental health professionals told me they had seen a wave of people seeking autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Two of them said many of these people were actually depressed.
It might be that a huge number of 4chan users really are measurably different from neurotypical people according to rigorous analysis based in science. Or it might be more like astrology, a way to talk about your personality and how you move through the world. Saying you’re a Gemini is shorthand for a fast-talking charmer who loves a good party. Saying you’re an autist could be shorthand for a misunderstood outsider who can never navigate the unspoken rules of the normal person world.
There is an enormous difference between people with clinically measurable symptoms of autism and people who think identifying as autistic gives them a little cache on the internet.
I was a sad, weird teen hanging out at my best friend’s house when her zodiac book changed my life. Astrology was a whole system that explained the invisible structure of the social world I’d struggled to navigate. I memorized it. There were twelve signs, and they all mixed and matched in different ways, and when they didn’t get along, it wasn’t because they were bad, it was just that their stars didn’t match. The best part: I was a Gemini. Geminis were not lonely and misunderstood, but magnetic and witty. My destiny was to be a fun person that people liked. What would my life have been like if instead of finding that dumb little book, I’d found 4chan?
There was enough I recognized in their “autist” posts that it made me nervous. Obsessive intensity, social anxiety, sensitivity to sound? I had all those things. I’m left-handed! I’m good at standardized tests! I was a huge loser in school and resented its inscrutable hierarchy. YouTube commenters taught me that my eye contact was suboptimal, because they were always posting under my interviews that I looked stoned. So I found a clinical psychologist who specialized in adult autism diagnosis and got myself tested.
The results? “Elle presents with some features of ASD, though there is insufficient evidence to support a clinical diagnosis. She does not currently present with restricted/repetitive behaviors that cause functional impairment, and she has many high-order social communication skills. Instead, Elle can be conceptualized as a twice-exceptional (2e) adult—someone with extraordinary cognitive abilities along with ADHD.” My husband patted me on the shoulder and said it was like I’d been DQ’d on a technicality.
“I don’t see myself as having some kind of psychological condition that causes me to believe these deranged ideas. They are correct ideas,” Parrott said. But having a condition that made him more immune to social shaming helped him stay in white nationalism. “You can psychologize me, you can frame it as some kind of like ‘trauma response’ or whatever—put all these labels on it. But I gotta tell you, I think I’m correct.”
Heimbach complained that journalists were always looking for the wrong psychological explanation for his extremism. “When they ask about white nationalism, it’s like, Oh are you just angry? Do you hate your fucking dad? Did some Black kid—was he mean to you? And I’m like, No, I just read The Bell Curve, bro. I got into it because of charts.” (A few weeks later, Heimbach told me that he did, in fact, hate his fucking dad.)
My conversation with Dr. Loftin came before these online forums spilled over into the real world—before Charlottesville, before QAnon and the storming of the Capitol. When I asked Loftin in 2021 what had shifted in her thinking, she said she now believed a much bigger subset of the population was vulnerable to online extremism, and the sense of community it could offer.
Most people had no idea Heimbach was autistic unless they knew where to look—like at the crumpled up napkin he fidgeted with in our interviews, a tell that betrayed his social anxiety. Parrott preferred “to hide behind people who are more handsome and socially adroit than me.” More people would listen to his ideas if they heard them from Heimbach.
When they founded the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), Heimbach was the face, and Parrott was behind the scenes, building their website, managing their members, writing essays, and making money with cryptocurrency to finance their activism.
*
By the time I asked them about autism, they were in the mood to talk about how they got here. They were being sued for millions of dollars. Their group was dead, they’d been humiliated, they’d ended their friendship, and had been forced to reunite because their legal fates were linked. They’d set out on a path of masochistic self-destruction, and took some pleasure in having succeeded.
The concept of “ruining your life” came up so many times that it made me wonder about the concept itself, the way a stoner repeats a word until it makes no sense. What did it mean to ruin your life? They seemed pretty certain they’d done it. They expressed it with an ironic tone and a big laugh.
Parrott said that American society demanded he apologize for being white working class, and “I’m just stubbornly refusing to do it, and would rather ruin my life, objectively speaking, than go back to my vulnerable college self.” Heimbach said he would not make the big public apology he thought was required to reenter society, because it was a stupid “neurotypical” morality play. Only a couple weeks later, Heimbach was fired from McDonald’s after management discovered he’d been a professional racist. He read me his termination letter and said, “They never forgive you. They never forgive you… There’s no expiration date for how long your life will be ruined.” His voice had more edge than usual. “You get to a certain point where everything is just like that Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days.’ You just sit around like, Man, remember 2015?”
__________________________________
Excerpted 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. Published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
