After a recent Daily Beast investigation unmasked New Hampshire State Representative Robert Fisher as the secret creator of the Reddit community known as The Red Pill—one of the internet’s most misogynistic spaces—the two-term Republican resisted calls for his resignation.
As previously reported, throughout 2012, in comments left primarily under the username Pk_atheist in the Red Pill forum he created, Fisher, now 31, described women as having “sub-par intelligence,” suggested that women’s bodies are the only thing that makes their “lackluster” personalities “worth it,” and commonly expressed paranoia about what he perceived as a growing plague of “false rape accusations” supposedly used as a weapon by feminists.
While Fisher did not deny having created The Red Pill, he called his past comments “injudicious,” and suggested he no longer holds the views he once espoused online. Fisher told a local media outlet that he is not currently the moderator of any Reddit forums.
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Yet further investigation by The Daily Beast suggests that Fisher may still be very much be an active contributor and chief moderator of The Red Pill, where an alias that appears to belong to him—under the username redpillschool—regularly champions misogynistic views. Fisher’s apparent link to redpillschool has not been previously reported.
After The Daily Beast’s initial investigation, demands for Fisher to step down from politics came from Democrats and Republicans alike, including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, who called Fisher’s online comments “horrendous and repulsive.”
In response, Fisher attempted to put distance between his public personas—as businessman and politician—and his past online identities. In a statement to local media, Fisher said: “I am not disappearing. I will continue to stand strong for men’s rights and the rights of all.” He also insisted that his online rants were a result of a bad breakup and “some very uncomfortable experiences” in his early 20’s.
On Tuesday, a New Hampshire state house committee will convene to examine Fisher’s online comments and potentially recommend either a reprimand, censure, or expulsion. Fisher— a lawmaker who has refused to sit on a committee and shows up to vote only half the time—voted in favor of the probe, saying he’s “confident the matter will be settled” at the hearing. The committee is limited to just comments made during this legislative session, which began in January.
Back in January 2013, Fisher appeared to have passed off his control of the Red Pill forum to a new moderator named redpillschool. Fisher had just lost his first campaign (in which he ran as a Democrat) the previous November. After the New Year, while celebrating the Red Pill community's first 550 subscribers and slamming “white knights and feminists,” he wrote as Pk_atheist, “Mark my words, by the end of 2013, we will have at least 10,000 subscribers.” Then, the very next day, Fisher oversaw a quiet transition of power: Pk_atheist suddenly stepped down as head moderator of the forum he’d cultivated, relinquishing the reigns to another user—redpillschool—whose account had been created the day before.
So who was this mysterious new moderator?
Some clues appeared a few months ago, over on Reddit’s pro-Trump The_Donald forum, when redpillschool introduced a backup forum that he’d created for r/The_Donald. Redpillschool explained that he’d created similar platforms for The Red Pill in case Reddit’s “liberal groupthink” ever forced TRP to shutter. He’d also recently been talking on The Red Pill about how he built (“custom wrote”) and maintains these backup sites, trp.red, forums.red and Puearchy.com.
Two of these sites, trp.red and forums.red, were registered a year and a half after PK_athiest “stepped down”—and both were registered using email addresses connected to Fisher. Puerarchy.com, built prior to the others, was intended as an initial “announcement page,” while the contingency plan—trp.red and forums.red—was put in place. This page was created seven months after Pk_atheist’s resignation using Fisher’s personal email address.
Every domain name has a “Start of Authority” (SOA) record which, among other things, lists the email address of the party responsible for that domain. According to records provided by FarSight Security, a cybersecurity firm, Fisher's personal email address was listed in SOA records from July 2015, when the website was first created, to April 2016 as the party responsible for the trp.red domain—the same domain that redpillschool had boasted about personally creating.
Since April 2016, the data shows the party responsible for trp.red was updated to a second email address—one that was nevertheless still connected to Fisher’s personal domains. Records provided by DomainTools, a security and intelligence firm, revealed the same anonymized email address was listed in current SOA records as the party responsible for Fisher’s personal websites, including his campaign website and the website of his band, the Five Nines. Robert Fisher is the sole member of the Five Nines. This email address appears in the SOA records of over a dozen websites connected to Fisher.
Historical SOA records for these websites also show that Fisher’s personal, pre-anonymized email address was listed as the party responsible for these domains.
The current email address on the SOA for forums.red is also the same anonymized email address that connects to Robert Fisher’s personal sites and the other backup red pill sites.
Historical SOA records found publicly online confirm that Fisher’s personal email address was initially listed as the responsible party for forums.red, and puerarchy.com in addition to trp.red.
Multiple independent sources corroborate these findings, which were also confirmed to The Daily Beast by two different security researchers.
This suggests that Fisher fabricated a passing of the torch—and indicates that, as redpillschool, he has maintained control of the forum for the last four years, growing its followership to over 200,000 users and dedicating over 80 hours per week to the forum’s upkeep.
In an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday, Fisher called any link between him and redpillschool, “categorically false,” and said he hosts the websites of “a lot of people.”
“My email address is attached to a lot of websites—it doesn’t mean that I endorse the views of those websites nor am I responsible for those websites,” he said.
Asher Langton, one of the security researchers consulted by The Daily Beast, said Fisher’s denial “doesn't change [his] confidence” that Fisher was the likely person behind redpillschool. “In fact, he's admitting that the data itself is correct,” he said. “The denial would be more credible if he ran a larger company and could point to actual sites he hosted but wasn't personally involved with.”
Fisher—who according to domain records doesn't appear to have hosted other people's sites for profit—refused to comment on who owned the domains in question and why most of the websites associated with his email are sites associated with The Red Pill group.
“You’re looking to drag my name through the dirt and I don’t think that’s very nice. That’s all I have time for for today,” he said.
Representative Fisher was first contacted for a comment on the Daily Beast’s investigation into The Red Pill on January 2, 2017. At the time, he also denied having any connection to The Red Pill. Meanwhile, archives of redpillschool’s comments seem to suggest Fisher may have quickly moved to cover his tracks.
In his comment history, redpillschool makes three specific references to a geographic location—describing a recent move to the South from “Cali.” This information seems to conflict with Fisher’s location, as he lives in New Hampshire. The oldest reference, from October 2016, states, “I made the mistake of getting myself involved with a borderline [a woman who allegedly was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder] before I moved out of Cali.” Yet, a previously archived snapshot of the same comment reveals it had been selectively edited three months after its original post—and about two weeks after The Daily Beast first contacted Fisher about his alleged involvement with The Red Pill—to add the reference to California and the South.
One other reference to locale—“Southern girls don’t play as much hard ball”—was made via a similar edit following the request for comment, and the last reference was made in a new comment posted after the request.
If not sophisticated, Fisher seems at least to be dedicated to redpillschool’s origin story. In 2016, redpillschool claimed to another user that, “The sub itself was handed over to me early on, I had had a lot of long conversations with the founder who went on to bigger and better things and he trusted I would run the forum well.” Call it the “Dread Pirate Roberts” defense—after the outlaw hero of The Princess Bride, whose name was passed from man to man, and also after the creator of the notorious website The Silk Road, who ginned up his alias as an alibi in case the Feds ever caught up with him.
Yet over the years, redpillschool has offered conflicting information about his role on the Red Pill forum—including during what he claims are “dozens” of interviews with mainstream media. In one interview, with The Guardian, he stated he had been “moderating since the red pill’s inception.” He went on to say that “I got started when I stumbled upon a few manosphere blogs and realized there wasn't really a good forum for discussion on masculine topics.”
“Was there an event that led you to start TRP. Personal or otherwise?” The Guardian’s Stephen Marche asked.
“Well, the events in my life did lead me to it,” redpillschool replied. “Having spent my twenties as many guys did looking for relationships or female companionship, I noticed that the dating game just wasn't what I was taught.”
Discussing the Guardian interview on The Red Pill, redpillschool sneered at Marche and his questions. To the journalist, redpillschool had said, “There's no discussion of rape strategies [on the forum.]” But to his fellow red-pillers, he joked, “You don't need a strategy for rape, other than ‘where do i buy roofies, and what's the best brand of duct tape?’”
In another interview in March 2013, recorded on BBC Newshour, redpillschool discussed so-called “dongelgate,” which saw a male tech conference attendee fired after a female attendee tweeted his image, and called him out for making sexual jokes in a public space. She was later fired as well.
The event spurred a widespread discussion of sexism in tech culture. In the Manosphere, it sparked outrage. Using the moniker Morpheus Manfred, redpillschool represented the forum’s position on the issue, defending an effort to raise money for the fired man. This fund, started by redpillschool, was called the Feminists Victims Fund. A historical SOA record of this website reveals it, too, was registered using Fisher’s personal email address.
Speaking about the incident and the fund on BBC Newshour, redpillschool—whose voice sounds similar to Fisher’s own in a video from an interview with a local news station—stated, “We have a group, we call it the Manosphere, made up of men across the internet who have kind of come together under the banner of finding a voice and identity in today’s culture, and when we saw the news on this, the first thing that came to mind was, ‘here’s a man who needs help,’ and we wanted to stand together and do something for him.”
Online, redpillschool’s comments were less reserved. “This is a fund to help men who have been abused by feminists,” he wrote. “Unfortunately in today's climate, being a man has become a financial liability. Say the wrong thing in the wrong place and you can find your entire life ruined. Destroyed. Feminists have fought for equality, but now they're out for our rights,” he wrote.
Redpillschool was also active during perhaps the most notorious culture war within the tech and gaming industry—when a harassment campaign directed at female game developers exploded into what is known as GamerGate, and multiple industry women began receiving credible death threats. Developer Zoe Quinn, who created a choose-your-own-adventure game, DepressionQuest, was accused of sleeping with a journalist who later wrote about her game. (The journalist later clarified that he had acknowledged the existence of the game, not reviewed it.)
On TRP, redpillschool paraded his own personal critique of Quinn through a game he created modeled after the developer’s, calling it SlutQuest. In this game, like Quinn’s, the player navigates a series of text scenarios. But some options are greyed out—they can’t be clicked, signifying the limitations of your avatar’s mindframe. In Quinn’s game, that limitation is depression. In redpillschool’s satire, it’s a compulsion to be “a slut.” Constructive options to address a situation are greyed out, leaving only the ability to complain or use sex (or a rape accusation) to achieve an end. In other scenarios, there is no meaningful end—the avatar is simply acting on its exigency for casual sex.
“We felt particularly moved to produce a game that helped simulate her struggles, so that the home-viewer could understand just what she went through,” redpillschool wrote.
Under the username Pk_atheist, Fisher claimed to have installed a video recorder in his bedroom to protect himself against false rape accusations. He suggested that by posting surveillance disclaimers, men could shield themselves from prosecution under privacy laws. Twice, in 2014 and 2016, redpillschool suggested similar disclaimers, advising one should place a “Sign on front door, ‘Premises under audio and video surveillance, by entering this property you agree to be recorded.’” In his statement to local media last week, Fisher said, “I never taped a sexual encounter, though I have often considered that it may be the best, or only, form of protection for men to prevent false rape accusations.”
In December 2016, redpillschool conducted an exhaustive three-part “thought experiment” called “All Women Lie About Rape.” He claimed the title was facetious, and pointed out that rape was a real crime, explaining the purpose of the series was to propose whether rape statistics propagated in the media matched observed reality. “Every woman I know has a rape or attempted rape story… But on the other side I don’t know a single man who is interested in raping women,” he wrote.
While he knew of no men harboring the desire to rape someone, redpillschool often pointed out that feminists, on the other hand, are obsessed with the concept. “Feminists are obsessed with rape because we live in a rape fantasy culture, where feminists wish they were hot enough to be rape-able,” he wrote in April 2014. “
“Every woman wants to be attractive enough to be raped. It's like the pinnacle of male desire, when he can't stop no matter what.”
And marital rape—a crime in all 50 states—shouldn’t exist as a concept in his view. “If a woman does not wish to submit to her husband she should not marry him. The contract of marriage is the verbal and written consent for sex," he wrote in 2013.
For redpillschool, suspicion of women’s sexaul assault claims is a political ideology as well. After a 2005 recording of Donald Trump showed the Republican candidate bragging about sexually assaulting women—“just start kissing [women]...I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”—several women came forward, joining a group of other accusers, to allege Trump had assaulted them in the past. On The Red Pill, redpillschool wrote a lengthy post entitled, “‘Sexual Assault’ is why I’m Endorsing Donald Trump for President of the United States.” If redpillschool is indeed Robert Fisher, as the email trail indicates it is, this would have coincided with his run for a second term.
In his post, redpillschool contended the reaction to Trump’s comments was overblown, describing them as merely revealing “an off-color remark about his legal, consensual sexual exploits.” He stated that allegations of sexual assault against Trump which had come after the release of the tapes were “unfounded and convenient.”
In his October 2016 “endorsement,” redpillschool complained that the “feminists’ narrative” had become entrenched, and the “erosion and broadening of the term ‘consent’ (among others) has played a pivotal role in the grand movement against men.” He argued that rape accusations had become weaponized: broadening the definition of consent “made it impossible to play by the rules,” leaving men susceptible to attack. On his Facebook page, Robert Fisher had endorsed Trump much earlier in a post from January 2016, saying he was impressed with his “level of detail.”
Meanwhile, redpillschool believes some of his sexual encounters could qualify as rape under broadly defined, weaponized consent. In 2013 he wrote on the /r/askmen forum, “I have had A LOT of sex in my life. I think by feminist-definition some of it was rape. You know what the crazy thing is? It was totally consensual sex that the chicks were into and came back for more. But yeah, we live in a culture of Schrodinger's Rapist, where the only difference between a rapist and a non-rapist is what the girl decides the next day (or week). It's impossible not to be a rapist if you plan on having relations with women.”
On Reddit, redpillschool repeatedly argues that TRP isn’t “pro-rape.” At the same time, the community’s heightened paranoia about so-called false rape accusations appears to lie in the unfounded fear that rape convictions are easy to secure. Online, redpillschool claims that false rape accusations are “legal and encouraged,” saying that “as long as we live in a world where a woman can easily put a man behind bars on a lie, men need to be skeptical and careful with every single one of them [women]."
Redpillschool’s view on women in general is rarely complimentary. As part of what he calls an annual tradition as moderator, in 2015 and 2016 redpillschool posted a column titled, “Women are Children.” Though he stressed that he is not “literally describing every woman on the planet,” he contends that he has “met enough women” to make an accurate generalization.
"I'm saying that women, by function of who they are, cannot have the same perspective or experience as men, and therefore cannot be expected to have the same maturity level. Even if a woman is well behaved and well mannered, her thought process still comes from a limited and childish perspective,” he wrote in May 2016.
This perspective is one reason some on The Red Pill advocate stripping women of the right to vote. Though redpillschool expressly disavowed suggestions to repeal the right to vote for women—calling it a “dumb idea”—in 2017 he wrote that the “argument that women shouldn't be able to vote is one that might have some merit to discuss.” For redpillschool, that merit seems to lie in what he calls a “responsibility gap.” He is in favor of giving women more responsibility, for instance, through compulsory enlistment in the armed services—despite his view that women are “biologically unable to make decisions that help men.”
Instead of advocating for the repeal of the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote, redpillschool said men should “be kicking [themselves] for letting them gain as much ground as they did,” saying that the right to vote “ accelerated the socialist and marxist philosophies” present in today’s culture.
In a statement following The Daily Beast’s initial investigation, Fisher denied that he still held the belief stated under the username Pk_atheist that women had “sub-par intelligence.” He pointed to its context wherein he stated his five female family members were intelligent (though was disappointed to learn this reality was a “delusion” outside of his family).
Yet, in June 2016, redpillschool stated, “As far as warmth goes, I'm not sure if you've been to any of our major cities in the USA, but the woman-power culture we live in today really lacks those subtle qualities. Intelligence is a joke, unless you mean something like ‘oh, you read books? Wow! You're such a special snowflake!’ I've yet to meet a woman who even prioritizes true intelligence beyond a cursory understanding of what's required to function at their job or specialty.”
As evidence that he’d retired his apocalyptic Red Pill beliefs about dating, and broad condemnation of women’s intelligence, Fisher offered that he now has a girlfriend. “Sure, my experience would eventually lead me to discover that all is not lost in the bleak world of dating, as I'm in a very happy relationship today,” he said.
Indeed, redpillschool often discusses his long term relationship (“LTR”). In 2016, in an interview with the Guardian, he made the case that red pill tools helped him “to keep her attracted, and the knowledge to know she was worth a long term relationship with.”
Redpillschool said he wanted to have children, and sees a long-term relationship as a necessary component of achieving that goal. In May 2016, he stated he was currently “vetting” his girlfriend for such a role by choosing to cohabitate. But he complained, though, that since moving in together, he noticed increasing “shit tests”—a pickup artist term for a social device meant to gauge a suitor’s fitness—and had responded through discipline.
“Last week she gave me some attitude while we were spending a day out together, and I immediately changed our plans, drove her home, and went out to the bar alone. She knows my boundaries,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, he concluded, “The girl I'm dating right now is actually quite good, except for this past week of outbursts. And I am looking to see if she's trainable and understands why this behavior is unacceptable. If I need to next her, I have no problem doing so.”
If Fisher is posting under redpillschool, he has shown no signs of slowing down. On Saturday, redpillschool delivered a mobilizing “State-of-the-Sub” address in celebration of the forum’s 200,000 subscribers. Of Fisher, “the man currently accused of creating the red pill,” he wrote that “knowing the truth and living by it was not enough to save that man from the wrath of vitriolic women. He stands as a testament to what happens to men who stand alone: They get torn down.
“Had he not built his own support structure, it could have been the end of his career.”
