Men Who Hate Women: From incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all

by Laura Bates

The end result is revealed with terrifying clarity in a New Yorker interview with male supremacist Mike Cernovich. It describes an incident witnessed by the journalist and planned by Cernovich with military precision in which Cernovich used a video on social media platform Periscope to rally thousands of his followers to a narrative he had crafted about Hillary Clinton’s emails, using the hashtag #HillarysHacker. Before Cernovich had finished filming, the hashtag was trending on Twitter. Within a day, more than 42,000 tweets had been posted with the hashtag. The topic was widely discussed on Reddit, which resulted in coverage by media pundits, and then a congressman alerted prosecutors in Washington to investigate. The chain was complete.78 But crucially, before it penetrated the mainstream, it had been touched by enough pairs of semirespectable hands to carry an air of factual robustness to the casual media consumer. And by the time it reached the influential closed doors of Washington prosecutors, there was almost no remaining trace of its origins on the iPad propped up on misogynist Cernovich’s kitchen table.