NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

An Iranian-American microbiologist and self-described "late bloomer", Roosh discovered the PUA community during his senior year of college and "took to [it] like a fish to water", later using his writing to share this information with like-minded readers eager to get more women to sleep with them. He also self-published a host of pickup and travel guides about the rough and at times nonconsensual sex he had around the world. In 2012, he founded Return of Kings, a site that published articles with headlines such as "The Intellectual Inferiority of Women" and "When Her No Means Yes", as well as a 2015 piece (which he characterised as satirical) in which he proposed that rape be legalised in non-public settings. His doctrine of "neomasculinity" holds that "a woman's value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty", while "a man's value significantly depends on his resources, intellect, and character". 

While Roosh had clearly begun to move pickup artistry into a more politicised dimension -- probably because he sought common cause against his critics rather than any deeply held political principles -- it was his successors who drove it into full embrace with the Online Right. Roosh, in fact, has had a fairly complicated relationship with the supposed "white nationalist" elements of what journalists were all rushing to lump together as the "alt-Right", at times defending neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and at others characterising white nationalism as "a frustrated mob that wants to control the sexual choices of all men". He also feuded with Right-wing activists, such as Lauren Southern, for adding little to the Right besides physical attractiveness. And this stance, combined with his own lack of charisma and decidedly non-"alpha" pedigree, has limited him to fringe status. In recent years, Roosh distanced himself from both the alt-Right and PUAs, removing many of his books from print, and banning PUA and casual-sex talk from his website's forums in 2019 after converting to the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

Mike Cernovich, by contrast, made a far smoother transition from being a PUA to a member of the Online Right, even as he also gradually drifted toward "trad" stances on various issues. His career began as a stock libertarian concerned with "false rape" accusations (he was on the receiving end of such an allegation, and advised secretly filming sexual encounters and building up a texting paper trail to ward them off). But from there, he progressed to investigations of "alpha male" masculinity -- he once even praised former president Barack Obama's "Alpha Male status" -- via his Danger and Play advice blog. The site had a broad brief, ranging from nutritional supplements to male body image, but it also offered tips for becoming more dominant in the bedroom, including choking a woman during sex. Owing to a "seven-figure" divorce settlement from his first wife, Cernovich was able to devote considerable time to these online ventures. 

By this point, the worlds of PUAs and the Online Right had begun to blur; there was simply no way for self-proclaimed PUAs to find fair harbour on the Left or in non-aligned spaces. Cernovich, unlike Roosh, made a fairly rapid and shrewd transition from the alt-Right fringe to something of a "happy warrior" for the far-Right mainstream. Piggybacking on the success of his 2015 book Gorilla Mindset ("a book about embracing your gorilla nature to find dominance and power"), he rushed out MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again to capitalise on the 2016 primary success of Donald Trump. From there, he achieved great acclaim fanning the fires of various paedophilic conspiracies and other more conventional Right-wing issues, playing a key role in the early days of Pizzagate and generally using "trolling tactics to build my brand", as he told The New Yorker.

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