Both men are referring to the right-wing conspiracy theory popularized by the French author Renaud Camus, which warns that nonwhites are having more children than whites, and that the resulting demographic change threatens European culture. This idea has been memefied by the online far right, with different groups painted as the usurpers: The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “The Jews will not replace us”; for the Christchurch shooter, the threat came from Muslims; in El Paso, it was Hispanic immigrants.

In all these strands of replacement theory, controlling white female sexuality and reproduction is vital. Women’s sexual and reproductive freedom are seen as threats to civilization itself. It is therefore not surprising that anti-feminism is an entry point to the online far right. “Misogyny is used predominantly as the first outreach mechanism,” Ashley Mattheis, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who studies the far right online, told me. “You were owed something, or your life should have been X, but because of the ridiculous things feminists are doing, you can’t access them.”

One recruiting ground is the collection of sites known as the “manosphere,” which the British anti-extremism charity Hope not Hate considered a serious enough force to include in its most recent “State of Hate” report. “It’s a very difficult movement to get to grips with,” says the Hope not Hate researcher Simon Murdoch. “It’s a very loose movement. And because it’s online, people are usually anonymous.”

The manosphere stretches from the kind of lukewarm anti-feminism that would pass virtually unremarked in a newspaper column through to glorifications of extreme misogyny. Although the manosphere’s leading figures have appeared at far-right events, and vice versa, the links between the two are more about an exchange of ideas than shared personnel.

As young men are drawn deeper into these online communities, the anti-feminist message transforms into one with racial overtones, Mattheis said. “Once you engage with the idea that a social-justice-warrior club and the feminist movement have increased the precarity of men,” she said, “that moves over time into the increased precarity and endangerment of ‘the West.’”

These ideas circulate through YouTube videos, anonymous message boards such as 8Chan, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts. The online ecosystem allows dense, rambling conspiracist tracts to be chopped up and recirculated in more palatable forms. Camus’ book-length version of The Great Replacement, for example, was condensed by the Canadian far right activist Lauren Southern in a YouTube video that now has more than 600,000 views. Southern is no fringe figure: She is verified on YouTube, and she was retweeted by Donald Trump in May.

Anti-feminism and the far right overlap because both weave narratives around real, observable phenomena surrounding race and reproduction. Birth rates are indeed falling across the developed world. Women who reach higher education levels tend to have fewer children. The “family wage”—where a man earns enough to support a wife and children—has disappeared. Working women have greater economic freedom, instead of being dependent on men. Many of them find it easier (though still not easy) to leave abusive or otherwise intolerable relationships. Women who can control their fertility and their bank accounts do not have to be subservient to men.