The red pill, it turns out, is filled with rat poison.
Robyn Pennacchia Mar 13, 2026
I realized recently that it’s been a while since we’ve seen an incel mass murderer. Because, really, for a time there, it seemed like something of an endless parade of angry young men going on murder sprees over not being able to get laid. It occurred to me the reason for this may be that, while they’re probably still not getting laid, they’re certainly less alone now. “Incel culture” has become mainstream on the Right. They hate women like incels. They talk like incels. Terms like “foid” (short for “femoid” or “female android”), “looksmaxxing,” “______ mogged,” “the wall” have entered their lexicon. Many of them are straight up turning themselves into incels just by hating women and various other groups of people so much that they are repulsive to women.
These days, they don’t have to go to dark corners of the internet in order to share their insane theories about women, to be told by other men that they are inherently superior to women, that women are crazy and evil and that giving them rights has ruined everything. They just have to go over to X The Everything App or to YouTube or, you know, listen to a sizeable majority of the mainstream male Republican pundits.
There are even more than a few women they can listen to. Women who will gladly tweet and stream and podcast all about how they think feminism and the sexual revolution ruined everything for women as well, who will even claim they want to #RepealThe19th because of how stupid and crazy we all are.
But that sort of pretense isn’t easy to maintain, especially once it’s no longer serving you. Thus, we’ve increasingly seen stories about alt-right women defecting from the movement after they have “seen the light” and suddenly come to realize that these men don’t actually like them, either. This week, we’ve got one in New York mag.
They all have pretty much the same story at this point. They fell into all of it because they were mad about “woke scolds” and thought it was cool and rebellious to embrace far-right ideology, because they enjoyed the attention they got for repeating anti-feminist talking points and maybe even believed that they’d rather be stay-at-home moms — literally nothing wrong with that! No one cares! Go and be well! — or that working instead of raising children was making women “crazy.” Then they realized, at some point — whether because they ended up in a pretty bad domestic violence situation like Lauren Southern, or because their baby daddy let his acolytes post AI child sexual abuse images of them on his social media site as happened to Ashley St. Clair, or because they realized that the Right did not actually allow for differing opinions or criticism, or because they realized that the men they were sucking up to hated their guts as much as they hate ours.
“Anna,” a former “celebrated pundit of the New Right,” anonymously told New York her own version of this well-worn origin story. She was liberal when she was younger and living in a conservative town, but then she left and …
[D]uring college in the mid-2010s, she was exposed to the overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke.
“I’m somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time,” she tells me. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.
She wasn’t attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of “traditional America” — big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children. Rather, she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”
Ah yes, the “frisson of transgression.” “Gnosticism.” What a fabulously intellectual way to say “I got tingly from being a bigot and didn’t actually care about who I harmed as long as I felt special.” Another woman who spoke to New York said about the same thing.
[Alex] Kaschuta [who hosted the alt-right podcast Subversive], like Anna, says she was initially attracted to the New Right out of curiosity, contempt for woke pieties, and a taste for transgression. “I’ve always liked edgy stuff, unfortunately — that’s one of my problems,” she says, laughing.
We’ve seen a lot of this. People attempting to write off racist, misogynistic or otherwise shitty views as some attempt to “freak out the squares” — as though it’s somehow similar to middle schoolers trying to convince their teachers that they are Satanists just to mess with them. The thing is, you don’t do the latter unless you think it’s dumb that people are freaked out by Satanists (which it is), and you don’t do the former unless you think it’s dumb for people to not want to be harmed by bigotry. This kind of thing doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Anyway, “Anne” seems to have realized the error of her ways when they started to harm her.
“Over time, the language of New Right misogyny got way more tuned in to red-pill-type stuff,” she says. Among young MAGA men, there ceased to be a huge difference between self-understood trads — Christians who tend to (patronizingly) venerate women’s special contributions to family and religious life — and rageful incels, who see women as conspirators in a plot to deprive them of sex and status. Both groups, Anna says, came to see women as “these objects you can use at will. So if you want a marriage, if you want a lifelong ‘bang maid,’ then you can pursue that. And if you want to just have endless hookups, you can pursue that by using these dating tactics within the red-pill sphere.”
While the language has certainly become more coarse over time, while it’s much more “acceptable” on the Right to now say, as Nick Fuentes does, that you’d like to see women put in concentration camps, this really isn’t anything new. In fact, what many of these women imagined themselves “rebelling” against was the silly feminist notion that these men thought these things and behaved this way in the first place. That the “woke scolds” were imagining all of this sexism and racism that didn’t actually exist anymore. Indeed, the swiftness with which they waver between blatant misogyny and racism and claiming that these things are not a problem in today’s society will give you whiplash.
Now, I am always glad for people to defect from any bad way of thinking, whatever it is that wakes them up. The fewer of these fuckers, the better. That being said, I do think this is all bullshit. I do think that the reason they’re leaving is because they’re being pushed out, not because they are suddenly realizing that right-wing ideology is bad.
The Right has fallen in love with the narrative of “the woke scolds were too much and we were all rebels who would never be any good, so we had to become Nazis!” but that is, and always has been, absolute bullshit. If someone’s instinct is to “rebel” or even simply to be contrarian, they’re not going to be out here demanding that everyone go along with them — because once that happens, you’re not a rebel anymore, you’re not “transgressive,” you’re just like everyone else. Their anger wasn’t ever that they couldn’t use slurs. The power to do so was within them all along. What they were mad about was that it wasn’t socially acceptable for them to do so. That other people weren’t doing it.
Similarly, no one (other than companies that don’t want to pay people enough money to subsist on a single income) has done anything to prevent any of these women from becoming housewives or stay-at-home moms. I’ve been a feminist my entire life. I’ve been a feminist in a professional capacity for over a decade at this point. At no point have I ever heard any feminist disparage “stay-at-home moms.” Literally not once. Ever. This is a narrative that lives exclusively in the minds of paranoid conservatives who live in terror of someone policing their life choices the way they police the life choices of others.
But you know what? Even if they did! Even if absolute legions of feminist writers devoted themselves fully to proclaiming that stay-at-home moms should not exist … other people’s opinions are not the law.
The fact is, both the men and the women who participate in this bullshit are looking for the same thing — validation and self-esteem. They want to be told “you’re better than other people just by being you.” For all the talk of “merit” on the Right, this is what they’re most thirsty for. The men want to be told they’re inherently superior to women — as well as people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, etc. depending on their personal identity — and the women wanted to be told they’re “not like the other girls!” or “so based!”
I suppose it is entirely possible that these women spent years in the dark and are just now realizing that the men in their movement really do hate women and really do want to deprive them of rights and that this would be unpleasant for them were it to actually occur — this seems to be what “Anna” feels happened to her.
“You almost don’t realize what’s happening until five years later,” Anna says, “when you look back and you’re like, Oh gosh, I was being used.” She also blames herself: “I was too frivolous with ideas.”
But I don’t think these defections are happening by coincidence at a time when shitty men now feel so “empowered” that they no longer require the permission of pick-me girls willing to say “I agree! Women are terrible and crazy and too emotional and shouldn’t have rights!”
Arguably, these women are no longer necessary to their movement and are being cast aside as such. Conservative men no longer feel like they need to be able to point to a woman and say “Look! She’s okay with it!” because they have gotten to the point where they do not care about that anymore.
This, indeed, is more or less what Kaschuta’s former compatriots had to say about her.
Many attacked her looks (Kaschuta is blond and conventionally attractive) and then attributed her defection to those same insults. Charles Cornish-Dale, a New Right figurehead who goes by the name Raw Egg Nationalist and appeared several times on Subversive, posted on X, “The truth about the whole saga … is that people (i.e., men) started calling Alex fat and telling her they didn’t want to be browbeaten and tone-policed by a woman.” This, he said, was the real reason she had turned against the right, “not principles or ideas.”
At this point in their evolution, they now feel free to denigrate those women just as furiously as they denigrate feminists, if not moreso.
They now take pledges to, as the article notes, “rape, kill and die” for Nick Fuentes (frequently abbreviated “RKD4NJF”). As “Anna” put it, they are “insisting that women subject themselves entirely to male authority, while advertising that male authority will be cruel and vicious and fickle.” They no longer feel the need to pretend that this is meant to be a good time for women as well. They’re just viscerally furious at women for existing and “ruining” everything for them by insisting upon being treated like human beings. They want to see us all punished for this and they no longer want to have to pretend to not hate a few women here and there.
In return, they are gaining power in the Republican Party. A follower of Fuentes’s was just elected as president of the College Republicans of America.
Granted, these defections and even these men outright saying that they want a world in which they get to be horrible to women will probably not deter other women from attempting to join in on all the #RepealThe19th good times. Because sure, they’ll still get a few “so based” and “If only all women were like you!” comments here and there and that will make it all worth it for them — for a while, at least, until they, too, experience the spontaneous revelation that they will have to also accept a much larger dose of disrespect in exchange.
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