It’s fair to say that the manosphere — the constellation of weight-lifters, men’s-rights gurus, and anti-feminist YouTubers — occupies a central space in the culture. Masculinity influencers command audiences in the tens of millions, shaping how boys grow up and how women are blamed for it. But in the digital ecosystem where feminism is treated as a contagion, a resistance is taking shape. It moves like its manosphere enemies, also online and incendiary. The counter-movement’s avatar is “Rad Fem Hitler,” a Chicago-based woman who has won online fame — infamy, depending on whom you ask — for her hard-line feminist provocations.
She exists in a strange subcultural ecosystem: the reactionary feminine id, emerging like mold in the shadow cast by figures like the Tate brothers, Jordan Peterson, and President Trump. But she’s far from the palatable rebellion of Netflix’s Adolescence.
RFH emerged from the same digital petri dish of the manosphere, fluent in its grammar of outrage and irony. But she inverts its vernacular, posting incendiary feminist content in a voice that calls out the trolls she once aligned with. Her account has become a minor spectacle on X, where she draws both threats and disciples. She is documenting, in real time, what it looks like when a former anti-feminist tries to escape the ideology she once helped amplify; and how the internet doesn’t make it easy to leave.
By the time I called her a few weeks ago — early afternoon — she had already tweeted 14 times. There was one that said, “I am the female Donald Trump,” and another, a reposted meme from a fake WikiHow article: “How to get men to leave you alone.” The answer: “Show them your Twitter.”
She laughed when I brought that up. When men do indeed go running, it shows her who they really are. Or they do the opposite: rage-quote her into a thread with 10,000 likes, tagging friends and followers to come and see what a deranged woman looks like. Sometimes, they go darker: burner accounts, threats. But she insists she doesn’t really care, because she’s there mostly “to have fun.”
She called herself Rad Fem Hitler, twisting the insult “Feminazi” into a parody so grotesque it loops back into being seductive. It stuck, succeeding in pissing people off. She doesn’t want me use her real name, which makes sense: the whole project is part performance, part exorcism.
Her tweets are lacerating, occasionally brilliant, and often disturbing. When Russell Brand — the former actor, revival-tent star, and accused serial predator — was filmed being baptized in the ocean, RFH captioned the clip, “Put some clothes on, wh*re.” A few weeks earlier, she tweeted, “If I were a gay guy, I would be r*ping so many straight men.” She claims it’s just jokes, and in one sense, it is. But even jokes have a location; and hers live somewhere between trauma and spectacle, sharpened by the language of the Right-wing enemies she had counted as allies.
On the phone, she’s disarmingly gentle. “I’m kind of in the middle of a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t have this entire hate-boner for trans women…. I don’t really care about adults doing these things”. The internet rewards extremism — including the kind she traffics in — but reality rarely does.
There’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in her cruelty. Or maybe it’s righteous anger. She uses the language of the online Right because it’s the dialect in which she first learned to be political, and because it’s the only tongue that seems to stir a reaction. Her fluency with it is part echo, part strategy, part theater.
She grew up in a “normal Republican family” in a Chicago suburb, with a brief interlude in Bahrain for her mother’s work. She remembers her childhood happily, and her parents modeled an equal partnership she’d hoped to find for herself. But her politics came online at the University of Michigan, where she discovered the term “libertarian,” and suddenly, everything clicked. “I think I was kind of a libertarian as a child, I just didn’t know there was a word for it. I remember thinking, why are people not allowed to do drugs? That’s their own business.”
She found, among her fellow libertarians, a bunch of “nerdy spergy guys who probably have mommy issues and don’t like women that much.” (The word “spergy,” in her usage, oscillates between self-identification and diagnosis; it feels defensive, maybe self-hating, maybe affectionate. In a way that’s hard to parse, she includes herself in the insult.) “That was me,” she said. “I was them.” At the time, she called herself an “anti-feminist.”
She ran in the same circles as the Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, who was then running Breitbart. When Trump announced his run, she became a die-hard MAGA fan, because all his talk about “The Wall” was exactly what she felt Republicans had been missing.
She and a friend who worked for Yiannopoulos thought it would be “funny” to go to a Bernie rally and ask for donations for Trump’s campaign. To top it off, the rally was in Columbus, Ohio, and they wore their Michigan clothes, poking at the fiercest rivalry in college football. The plan was to troll everyone: Bernie fans, Buckeyes, liberals, the internet. “A lot of people were swearing at us” but some engaged, and some “thought it was almost kind of funny.”
That friend has since left politics and got the video scrubbed, but when RFH was recently doxxed, people from “back then” remembered it and put it on the internet—a gotcha. Many relics of her Trumpian days have since re-emerged, used as fodder against her. “I’m not in contact with any of those people now,” she tells me, sternly.
“Her whole schtick is a kind of black comedy about realizing, too late, that the joke was always on you.”
Things began to fall apart in 2018. The edge-lord e-Right — which once felt like a self-aware, post-political LARP — began bleeding into real life. Meet-ups turned into romantic entanglements, and RFH witnessed “unconscionable misogyny. There was so much domestic violence and horrific emotional abuse.” One man was trying to starve his girlfriend down to nothing. Some were addicts, and some died. There was slut-shaming, deadbeat fathers, self-destruction. “And somehow,” she added, “it was always the woman’s fault.”
She felt this in her personal life, too. She had absorbed the belief that “marriage was my salvation as a woman … that I had no other real purpose.” So she married a man from her libertarian college circle. She was 25. She got pregnant “immediately.” He wanted nothing to do with the baby. “I felt like I was living a meme,” she said.
Trad-wife life had promised adoration; instead, she was treated like a leech. Her husband’s misogyny, once theoretical, turned violent. When she asked for help, he would scream, “I’m not here to serve you.” The spell broke.
Her slow burn toward feminism began to accelerate. “I would say motherhood is quite radicalizing.” Her former views curdled into suspicion. “They want women to be mothers to just sort of keep them almost lobotomized, away from society.”
She saw it in the way conservatives talked about divorce. “The minute there’s a divorce, it’s like, ‘You just took his money,’ and, ‘You didn’t do anything.’ I’m like, didn’t you just say motherhood is so important?”
She won’t talk about her divorce to protect her child’s privacy. But she’s made the stakes clear elsewhere: “I had to live out the consequences of these ideas,” she said recently in an interview with the UnHerd contributor (and repentant online Rightist) Richard Hanania. “It’s not just an abstract, funny thing. It has real-world implications, and they’re not good. Not for me, or for other women.”
That’s the thing about RFH; her whole schtick is a kind of black comedy about realizing, too late, that the joke was always on you. The thing she’s doing on Twitter isn’t quite politics, but a kind of shadowboxing against her former self: an attempt to climb out of the hole using only the dirt that buried her.
Still, she remains caught between poles. She’s not trying to win approval; she’s trying to balance fury with fluency. She still hates liberal sanctimony, rants about immigration, and tweets like someone who spent too much time on 4chan.
Online fame has presented a double bind for her privacy: since her doxxing, she must defend herself as a “beautiful woman” while also impressing how much a woman’s “beauty” is overvalued. And she is cruel about people’s (usually men’s) lives and appearances, only to reap the same treatment when it’s flung back at her. It didn’t take me long to find men on Twitter talking about killing her, raping her, the size of her bust.
But for RFH, the point isn’t clarity or persuasion — it’s chaos with a feminist flavor. And it works. She’s built a significant following, with many of her posts going viral, not because people agree with her, but because they can’t look away.
She reminds me of Valerie Solanas — the radical feminist most famous for shooting Andy Warhol. Before she pulled the trigger in 1968, Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a text that called for “thrill-seeking females” to overthrow society and eliminate the male sex. It was dismissed as lunacy, and eventually, she was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. “I love Valerie,” RFH told me. “She was onto something.” Like much Twitter-speak, they both fall somewhere between dark comedy and a call to arms.
RFH reaped the full Solanos treatment in December. When a teenage girl carried out a school-shooting in Wisconsin, killing a teacher, a student and wounding six others, Twitter users alleged that RFH was cited in her “manifesto.” Months on, nothing from federal investigators suggests that RFH, or feminism, had anything to do with the shooting; but that hasn’t stopped her opponents going wild over it.
It made her “sour” on the internet. She says anyone who suggests her calls to violence are earnest is just being disingenuous: “They don’t even believe it. You can’t read my stuff and believe that. There’s nothing in there that hints at some sort of violent takeover of men.”
Still, it lingers, like all internet scandals do. And she keeps going, because, in her view, things are changing. “We’re entering a weird postwar America,” she said. “Young men aren’t dying off anymore. We’re going to see this slow, social collapse.”
“We’re just going to have this big kind of culling,” she clarified. “I don’t mean killing people, but there’s just gonna be a lot of people that don’t reproduce.” Her vision of the future is certainly not what Andrew Tate’s devotees want to hear. It’s not clear yet whether RFH is helping that process or just making it harder to ignore. But she doesn’t seem interested in guiding anyone to safety. She’s more like a lighthouse that flashes on and off, just enough to show you how rough the water is.
