In We Hunted the Mammoth’s early years, Futrelle assumed the communities he was scrutinizing were essentially fringe movements with a fixed and fairly low limit to their growth. This changed in 2014 with GamerGate, a snowballing manosphere-born campaign of that directed a large volume of misogynistic harassment who called out sexism in the world of video games. “The old-school M.R.A.s mostly sat GamerGate out,” Futrelle said. “They thought video games were for wusses.” But the movement rallied a new coalition of online misogynists, not just gamers but pranksters from message boards like 4chan and 8chan and “edgy” conservatives like those reading Breitbart News, which, sensing an opportunity to expand its audience, hitched its wagon to GamerGate early on. (The notorious former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was a particularly vocal evangelist for the movement.)

In the eyes of the post-Gamergate manosphere, Futrelle is the prime example of a S.J.W. (social-justice warrior) trying to “white knight” his way to approval by the feminists and liberals who dominate American cultural discourse. On the site Encyclopedia Dramatica, a Wikipedia-style compendium of articles written from a broadly pro-manosphere perspective, the entry for “David Futrelle” (“occasionally referred to as FATrelle or “Fatrolle”) cherry-picks quotes from Futrelle’s writing in hopes of characterizing him as an apologist for pedophilia, torture porn and child prostitution. Another site, Demagogue, apes the visual style of We Hunted the Mammoth almost to a tee, attempting to target Futrelle with the same zeal he targets them.

“In the long run, David Futrelle’s been a big boost to my career,” says Elam, one of Futrelle’s most frequent individual targets. “Eventually he sent all kinds of people to my website that figured out they weren’t exactly getting the straight picture from him. Some of these people have not only stayed and started reading the site, they’ve become financial supporters.” Futrelle, Elam says, “claims to mock misogyny, but what he really does, in essence, is he mocks the pain of men that are really going through hard times. He might as well be on a cancer unit making fun of people for being sick.”

Mike Cernovich, a prominent online conspiracy theorist, is another frequent subject of We Hunted the Mammoth posts. By email, Cernovich suggested that Futrelle intentionally exaggerated the size of his readership by creating “sock puppets” (fake users) to write comments under his own posts. “When I Google myself, his stuff shows up,” Cernovich added. “I don’t read the blogs, as they are predictable and boring.”

Futrelle’s approach to the manosphere — best summed up as “document and mock” — is often most palpable in his post titles, which are sometimes just a few degrees away from Onion headlines. (“Harry Potter pushes ‘willing cuckoldry as a moral imperative,’ weirdo Nazoid pickup artist explains”; “internet laughs after men’s right’s activists discover Amazon’s Alexa is a feminist.”)

The posts themselves often follow a template not dissimilar from the one used by the John Olivers and Seth Meyerses of the world. Some recent manosphere rant or manifesto is held up for inspection and then broken down into snippets and interspersed with Futrelle’s commentary, designed to bring the absurdities of the target into view. It would be fair to criticize the site as an echo chamber: a place where almost everyone agrees that online misogyny is rampant and congratulates themselves for knowing so, taking what pleasure they can in laughing at their enemies’ latest mutterings. Over the years, while poring through Futrelle’s posts for help with magazine articles about the manosphere, I have wondered what the site would look like, and what it might accomplish, if it made more of an effort, alongside its fact-finding and analysis, to speak directly to manosphere denizens. But Futrelle believes that direct engagement simply isn’t part of his mission. “Put bluntly, this blog isn’t for you,” he wrote in a 2010 post directed to the M.R.A. readers still hanging on after following his migration from Reddit. “It’s for all the people in the world who aren’t you.”

As Donald Trump blustered his way to the presidency, Futrelle watched the manosphere thrill to the rule-breaking candidate as an avatar of their collective worldview: an old-school misogynist unshackled by politically correct strictures; a self-proclaimed anti-elite outsider but also a boastful “alpha” male who unapologetically did what he wanted with the political establishment, much like, it was gleefully pointed out, a powerful pickup artist or “seduction artist” did what he wanted with unsuspecting women.