UPDATE: The CBC has confirmed with Facebook that Minassian’s post declaring himself an incel and hailing Elliot Rodger is real.
By David Futrelle
As I write this, it’s still not completely clear if Alek Minassian, the alleged driver of the van that killed ten pedestrians in Toronto yesterday in what appeared to be a very deliberate attack, is in fact a self-identified “involuntary celibate” trying to take revenge against the “Chads” and “Stacies” and other “normies” he blames for ruining his life — or if these reports are simply some sort of 4chan-style hoax.
But on the Incels.me forum, one of the more egregious hangouts for incels online, many are already hailing the alleged mass murderer as one of their own.
In an assortment of threads that popped up after the news media began to report on a supposed Facebook post from Minassian announcing that “the Incel Rebellion has … begun,” some of the Incels.me regulars are celebrating the killings and the alleged killer as “life fuel” for them and their nihilistic, misogynistic, misanthropic “movement.” (Click on the pics below to see the comments in context on Incels.me.)
Naturally, it didn’t take long for one of the regular commenters to adopt a picture of Minassian as his avatar.
But no one was quite so enthusiastic about the killings as the commenter calling himself BlkPillPres, who wondered if the killer had taken the advice he had given in a previous thread to use something other than guns in his “ER” — that is, Elliot Rodger-style — attack.
Many in the media and in politics are unwilling to label attacks driven by misogynistic ideology as terrorism — often declaring them to be simply the result of “mental illness,” as many did in the case of Elliot Rodger’s murders (ignoring his hundred page manifesto), and as the authorities are already doing in the Toronto attacks.
But misogyny is not mental illness; it’s hate. And what BlkPillPres is talking about here is essentially the dictionary definition of terrorism — “[t]he unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” The tactics he suggests are an explicit attempt to subject “normies” to “constant fear” — that is, terror — in all areas of their lives, in order to advance BlkPillPres’ goal of “black pilling” the world and intimidating those who criticize incels into silence.
Following his link back to the older thread, one quickly discovers that it is even more disturbing. In it, BlkPillPres sets out what he sees as the virtues of various terroristic strategies, from acid attacks to mass rape to vehicle attacks like the one we saw yesterday. (If you are feeling at all fragile you may wish to stop reading this post right here.)
Others in the thread suggests that this all sounds great to them, with one aiming some of his ire at the IncelTears subreddit, which is devoted to criticizing Incels on Reddit and elsewhere.
Other commenters offer their own even more horrifying ideas.
Like Ub2w, BlkPillPres is especially taken with the acid-in-the-face tactic.
“Kek.”
Sadly, as someone who has been writing about incels for several years now, none of this is surprising. Disturbing, yes, but not surprising. Incel is a hate movement, and it is long past time for it to be treated as such.
NOTE: The reaction amongst Reddit incels has been more measured; I may delve into that in a future post.
@Violet
Yeah, I’m still trying to… just process this mess. I just hope we won’t get any copycats.
The narcissism and self-entitlement of these people is incredible…I’ve rarely seen such egotism. I am glad the mainstream media is focusing on them, so that the danger can be seen and exposed — how they unite and fuel each other’s fury on the internet and inspire each other to cause chaos.
More importantly, we have to find ways to prevent these people from acting out or falling into these destructive and self-destructive behaviors. As police chiefs point out, “We cannot arrest our way out of crime.” That’s addressing the issue AFTER the horror, instead of preventing it.
We need awareness and intervention. That obviously has to start with the family — when parents realize their son is behaving badly, for example — and continue in schools and workplaces. There is also the medical research needed — identifying medical causes and medication that can address issues.
We don’t seem to be learning from the trail of blood that has been created by these people and the horrors they cause. The Canadian guy is not unique — he was inspired by Elliot Rodger. Before him, there was Richard Wade Farley, who is still on California’s death row. Before that, there was Jack the Ripper.
We need to do the work now to prevent tragedy later.
@Katamount, @left_wing_fox
I had a similar trajectory too! I definitely flirted with MRA/PUA ideology for a bit as a teenager thanks to gaming forums (ugh), before eventually getting out. I think it might’ve been a bit earlier than you two – Captain Awkward certainly wasn’t around then, at least (that said, she gets my highest recommendation!) though it was advice communities and blogs that helped me too. I remember thinking something like ‘even if these men are right, I should know what women have to say about relationships’ and then realising they made a lot more sense and the PUAs were full of shit. All it took was a bit of empathy and thinking about the fact that multiple people were involved (that said, “women are people” may be a surprisingly difficult intellectual jump for a lot of manospherians).
The irony is that I’m on the asexual spectrum (demisexual), which might’ve also played a role, for better or worse. I remember thinking the lifestyle PUAs were offering sounded miserable, and because they framed everything as a straightforward level-up progression from ‘AFC’ (‘average frustrated chump’, yes) to PUA, it just threw everything into question. I wanted insight into how to find companionship and build connections with people; I’m heteroromantic, and those were the kind of connections I was really looking for even if I didn’t have the ability to express that at the time. And mainstream culture conflates companionship/romance and sex, or even erases the former in favour of the latter, so “how do relationships work” often gets replaced by “how to get laid”; PUA culture just takes that to a ludicrous extreme. I think there might be something to that pathway, though – lonely people who don’t really know how to socialise, internalising toxic value systems from the culture that surrounds them, being given bad advice, and then diving further into the ideology when it backfires on them. I don’t say this to excuse them, far from it, I’m just looking for explanations.
(The other thing I’ve always thought is that a lot of these people think life should be like a movie. The “hero” is rewarded by “getting the girl” and then they ride off into the sunset the end. In a way it’s no wonder they don’t care about the actual relationship part; they can’t see past the credits!)
“Elevatorgate” was definitely the thing that dropped the scales from my eyes though, and definitely marks the point at which I started getting seriously into feminism and realising just how much work needed to be done. I definitely read feminist content before that, from time to time, but it was mostly because bloggers I liked for their atheist or political content happened to be talking about it.
I don’t really know how you get people out of these ideologies, despite having thought about it a fair amount and made some attempts; the only “success stories” I know of are of people who either got themselves out (which as you say, takes work), or “dodged the bullet” so to speak before getting in too deep (apologies for the mixed metaphors). And especially the incels nowadays are so deeply committed to viciousness that I suspect they may be irredeemable, so in pragmatic terms we’re better off trying to figure out how the pipeline works and cut people off before they get there, rather than trying to redeem the ones who are already there. I fully understand anyone who doesn’t want to forgive ex-manospherians the harm they’ve already done, because that’s real and shouldn’t be ignored, but there is also a definite benefit in organisations like Life After Hate that provide them a landing place to help keep them from reverting. I think that’s important work, even if only viewed in terms of preventing more victims from being hurt by the people they’re trying to rehabilitate.
@Anne
Sorry, just now saw your post. Is it this domain? If so, we can contact go daddy (email address is in the registry info). https://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=Register-her.com
@Pissed off by incels
That you, f-guy?
I just want to add my 5 cents to the good ole mental illness excuse…
Mentally ill people are far more often victims of violent crimes than perpetrators of violent crimes.
It’s just a sh*tty derailing technique.
Wow, wonder why these guys can’t get laid? I also wonder how many of them have whinged about how women never go for “nice guys,” as if that somehow describes them.
Oddly enough, most women prefer to have sex with men who treat them as people, rather than as a support system for a vagina. I know men who are average-looking and middle- or working-class who have managed to find happy relationships. The things these guys have in common is that they’re not whiny, angry, entitled dicks.
thanks @kupo. @pissedoffatincels seems very strange…and familiar.
no, they lash out at women because society told them they deserve women. it isn’t about sex. it’s about control. they want women as possession, or like a slave who will only do what they exactly order them. women is for status – society tells them that plenty women = high status. they want to collect women, control women and use sex like a high score.
these incels believe something “owed”to them, because that is what society tells to young men – they will “get a girl”. and when they don’t get what they owed? they get revenge, or they want revenge. they are like severe symptom of a disease which many men little bit infected with. disease called toxic masculinity.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who though that sounded like FGuy. I don’t want to assume though. We’ll just see if they come back and post more I guess.
CBC, Toronto Star, Le Devoir, Guardian, Vox now reporting on incels.
Le Devoir does a particularly thorough job of explaining the dog whistles:
https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/526125/le-portrait-de-alek-minassian-se-dessine
LaPresse is arguing it’s hard to know why this guy decided to kill; it’s probably not autism, but it could be, and how can we be sure? LeSigh.
NYT focuses on the amazing fact that sometimes cops don’t kill people. Which I guess *is* probably the more important part of the story for the US — lots more Americans die from police bullets than from terrorism.
@weirwood,
I wasn’t referring to the physical condition of being fat, but rather as a metaphor for the kind of entitlement certain Western people possess. Granted, it was not a well-thought-out metaphor, but muscle relaxers can only relieve pain, not clear the mind, and I was on a bit of a rampage last night. :p
Hope that clears things up a bit.
Yeah, but the reason “fat” could be a metaphor for lazy and entitled is because fat people actually do get called things like that. So please don’t use fat as a synonym for negative things anymore.
Freedom of speech is one thing, but since when is networking and building an idealogical terrorist movement legal? This is well beyond the point someone should be stepping in. These are opaque threats.
To return to Cohen, I would also point out that the idea that X is more common in radicalized people (or make it easier to get radicalized), regardless of X, need to be well substantied, and by that more than “it make sense !”. ’cause extreme right people in my experience come from poor and rich alike, from wrathful and peaceful people, from educated and uneducated people, from intelligent and stupid people.
For my part, I know a lot of people who are moderate MRA. Myself I really dodged that bullet hard, and entirely by chance. I am persuaded I alway was a very small step away from being one of thoses rage-filled husks.
what does “kek” mean?
@Jen
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/05/08/what-kek-explaining-alt-right-deity-behind-their-meme-magic
@Ohlmann
What is a “moderate MRA”? And how does one not become an MRA “entirely by chance”?
I gotta say, it took me a long time to realize misogyny existed in the world. I mean, I knew I was a person. It didn’t occur to me that there were people out there who didn’t consider people perceived as women as actual human people. I didn’t realize that until way too late in life. Mind was blown. It just didn’t occur to me that personhood would be a point of contention for already existing human beings.
It’s kinda similar to my reaction to the whole birther bullshit. I mean, Obama’s mother is a US citizen, ergo, he’s a citizen too regardless of where he was born. End of story. And yet not. I still don’t really get it. Why is this even a question? I get that it’s politics, but c’mon.
@GenJones
slave patrols
Ku Klux Klan
antiabortion movement
pretty much any campaign of violence orchestrated by white men through US American history to maintain some flavor of the status quo
These posters need to be outed and also indicted.
@Alan
I’m going to think about your post and come back to it. 🙂
@Valentin
Having a good, easy life does not mean that one will be free of suffering and mental illness, though. 🙂
Personally I’ve never noticed that poor men act any less entitled to my affection than middle class men do. Yeah, poor men may think it’s because they don’t have their own place, or car, and not because they have a feminine hair cowlick like ER may have thought, but imo the underlying entitlement to women (and their affection) is the same.
I don’t know why my phone won’t copy the rest of your post, but this entire post is very well said. And very true. So have some internets. 🙂
Re:mental illness
I’m not quoting any one person because a bunch of people have been talking about it. But Imo it is offensive to make any blanket statement about mental illness. It’s offensive to blanket blame mental illness for violence. It’s also offensive to act like some people don’t struggle with anger and violence as part of their mental illness.
@Jo
Still don’t get them. :p
I talk to my kids about media and relationships. Presumably these guys have had parents, or older relatives, or teachers, or other adults in their lives. If all else fails, there’s google. Reality is everywhere, if they wanted to see it.
Hmmm, touche. And segregation, internment camps, the shit ICE is doing. And maybe that’s sort of the point.
Let me rephrase: Threats are not protected speech.
I understand the First Amendment, you can’t ban racial slurs or throw someone in prison for being a Hitler fan. But when someone says they’ve “found their MO” and is saying things like “we actually need to be going out literally committing more mass killings, raping and maiming”, it has crossed the line where authorities should be taking it seriously before they actually carry it out with the encouragement of their ingroup. When people say they want to assassinate a public official or shoot up a school, they are investigated. As David himself put it in the original post, these are laying out terrorist strategies. This is planning.
Kupo : a moderate one is one who is outwardly against all the horrors said by the MRAs and incels, but it’s actually very visible that they rail quite a bit to not be the all powerful male that they feel entitled to be. Just, they aren’t (yet ? I hope not.) at the level of rage and delusion of the actual MRAs.
As for not becoming by sheer chance : at the moment where I was the most hate-filled, something made me try to see the world through the eye of another people. Which is the point where a lot of anger and demonization start to be blatantly silly. That wasn’t due to me being exceptional, or nice, or well-educated, or anything. It, really, was because of random happenstance.
(I *do* often kind of envy the MRA/neo-nazi/incel world vision. It would be *terribly* convenient and easier to have a scapegoat who is the lone responsible of everything. It make trying to make the world a better place infinitely easier by reducing “being a good person” to “attack the scapegoat”. And it make news a lot easier to parse)
@Ohlmann:
That’s part of the problem, of course. To quote:
Often paraphrased the way I first heard it, as ‘For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.’
The real world does nuance whether anybody is willing to admit it or not.
I was telling my husband about what incels are. He stopped me, asked to hear no more, lest he completely lose his temper. Like most of the people I know face to face, he’s such a normie he is unfamiliar with the term normie. As a Black queer pagan in the United States, he knows how appalling some straight white men can be, but this was new and unwelcome.
I’ve been seeing some discussion on Facebook from other people I know who are seeing what’s under this particular big flat rock. Most of them are surprised, all are revolted. My eldest brother made the interesting comment that he realized in his early teens that the only ways to get what he wanted in life were theft, charm or work. He refused the first, was incapable of the second, and resigned himself to the third. He had a full, successful career and a long, stable marriage which is still going well.
Hi, long-time lurker here,
I wanted to firstly thank David for this forum and the loyal community for their thoughts and educational commentary.
I don’t think I would have dared to post a comment here were it not for the news from Toronto today. To me it shows the value of this blog and the unpleasant work that you do in researching it.
I honestly thought (despite other evidence) that the rather ridiculous beliefs of a tiny minority of mostly North American males did not matter. Today I was proven wrong and that sometimes the things people write are dangerous and remain toxic to the credulous online.
My sympathies are with those directly concerned and to all Canadians,
ADMO.
Sorry, I’m late to the ‘party’. Man, these Incels are absolutely terrifying! Even if this is all talk, there is a real risk of one of them carrying out an attack, because many men have committed such attacks. It only takes one of them to think that this is a good enough idea to commit an atrocity. I mean, Eliot Rodger, Alek Minassian and many others thought this was a good idea, what’s stopping one of these guys from doing the same?