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Republican Rep. in New Hampshire Tied to Creation of Misogynist Reddit Thread

Republican Rep. in New Hampshire Tied to Creation of Misogynist Reddit Thread

Men's rights activist Rep. Robert Fisher has been asked to resign after being tied to rape denial posts.

The horrifying misogynist Reddit thread, The Red Pill, has long been a hub of activity for men's rights activists who are threatened by any perceived progress made by women in the long slog for equality. Now The Daily Beast has revealed that Republican Rep. Robert Fisher of New Hampshire's email address has been linked via various usernames and URLs to the creation of the hateful forum where conversations about women's lack of intellect and usefulness abound alongside rape denial posts. Since the The Daily Beast's detailed report two days ago that tied Fisher to The Red Pill and dozens of specific, problematic posts, including one that defends being attracted to underage girls, Fisher's colleagues in the state House of Representatives, on both sides of the aisle, have called for his resignation, the New Hampshire Union Leader reports.

Fisher, 31, who had been using online aliases that led to his username Pk_atheist, was revealed to have launched The Red Pill (the name refers to the movie The Matrix and implies a choice between reality and illusion) in 2012 as a place for "discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men," The Daily Beast reports

Following the bread crumbs of aliases and URLs that linked Fisher to the creation of one of the internet's most disgusting threads, the Beast was taken to Fisher's personal email address and Facebook page. When Fisher was asked for comment about The Red Pill, he claimed that he'd never heard of it, right before all connections between him and the forum were wiped clean.

Among Pk_atheist's greatest hits on the forum, to which 200,000 men frightened of women subscribe, is a thread in which he argued that women are intellectually inferior to men and that they are incapable of carrying on conversations beyond beauty, diet, and pop culture because men have made their lives so cushy that women don't need to learn how to do anything.

"I found myself making excuses for women. I distinctly remember thinking to myself on more than one occasion about more than one woman 'wow, she's really cool, and really smart, too!'" Pk_atheist wrote. "And I was lying to myself. Because when I told myself I thought they were smart, I really had the footnote in the back of my head... smart.. for a woman."

And if that nugget isn't awful enough, he took it a step further, revealing his Freudian issues and reducing women to no more than the sum of their body parts.

"If you took the conversation skills, the sub-par intelligence, the lack of curiosity and put it in a man's body- would you hang out with that guy? No! Would he be successful? Hell no!" Pk_atheist wrote. "Those things are useless without a woman's body attached."

Fisher, who described himself in a Reddit thread under the alias Panderific as "an attractive businessman," ran for the New Hampshire House of Representatives unsuccessfully as a Democrat in 2012, but returned two years later to land a seat in the chamber as a Republican. He's also the chief operating officer of Same Day Computer, and he was the lone member of the electronic band the Five Nines, according to the Beast.

Responding to calls for his resignation, Fisher dug his heels in on posts he was linked to in which he claimed to record his sexual experiences as proof of innocence in case he was accused of rape. Fisher sent a statement to the Union Leader defending that choice by explaining that countering false rape accusations is a core issue for him:

"In my early twenties, I went through some very uncomfortable experiences that I do not wish to detail publicly, except to say that false rape accusations became a very real concern of mine. I know it's not something most people think about but I lived through a nightmare situation. That sort of experience wasn't easy for me, it brought me to a very low place in my life. It was only natural for me to try to seek out support. I have since come out the other side much stronger and smarter, and am glad that I'm in a position in Concord that can help others who have suffered."

In his statement, Fisher called Daily Beast writer Bonnie Bacarisse's linking him to various troubling threads "slanderous."

The Democratic leader of the House, Steve Shurtleff, called for Fisher to step down in a statement that read, "The posts linked to Representative Fisher, which include chilling comments in defense of rape, are beyond reprehensible and have absolutely no place in civilized discourse."

Shurtleff was one of the several representatives who urged Fisher to resign, but Fisher, in his statement, maintained his innocence even as he touted himself as a men's rights activist.

"Here's my message to the public: I am not disappearing," Fisher wrote. "I will continue to stand strong for men's rights and the rights of all."

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Tracy E. Gilchrist