White nationalist attend a rally on October 28, 2017 in Shelbyville, Tennessee. The event billed as a White Lives Matter rally is hosted by Nationalist Front, which is a coalition of several white supremacist organizations.
Credit; Scott Olson/Getty /Salon

For Jessica Reaves, the journey into the most hateful reaches of the internet began after the 2018 van attack in Toronto. A white male in his 20s plowed his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16. After he was arrested, the driver told police that an online community of involuntary celibates, or “incels,” had radicalized him.

“That was definitely not the first time that we’d seen someone who identifies as an incel . . . act out against women violently, strike out against them, murder them,” says Reaves, who, as editorial director at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), monitors extremists across the ideological spectrum. “But it was a sort of turning point in the sense that people were starting to really pay attention to this issue.”

Jessica recently […]