CONTENT WARNING: This one is just brutal. If you’re feeling even the slightest bit queasy about the headline, please don’t read any further.
By David Futrelle
Sunday morning, a young man named Brandon Clark allegedly murdered 17-year-old Instagram “e-girl” Bianca Devins, apparently a friend of his, brutally slashing her throat and then slashing his own in an attempt to kill himself. Sometime between the murder and the attempted suicide, he took a photo of her bloody body and uploaded it to 4chan.
The photo quickly spread across social media, including the Incels.co forum, where it was evidently found by a commenter calling himself canino1997, who reacted to the horrific tragedy by masturbating to the picture of Devins’ lifeless body and sending a picture of the resulting “cum tribute” to the girl’s mother (or perhaps her stepmother) as a sort of ‘”lesson” for her.
He attached a screenshot of what he said were the messages he’d sent to the mother along with his “tribute.”
Naturally, other incels applauded canino1997’s initiative. “[Y]our doing god’s work,” wrote one commenter. “Based as fuck,” added a second. “Based kikebook Stalkercel,” agreed a third, which is the Incel way of saying he thought that canino1997 is was an excellent Facebook stalker.
On Facebook, Bianca’s stepmother didn’t say anything about
canino1997’s particular act of malicious harassment, but she did post at length about the anguish of seeing the photos of her stepdaughter’s corpse — an anguish amplified by the knowledge that countless strangers were passing the pictures around in an attempt to shock others and, in some cases, to garner new Instagram followers.
It is absolutely disgusting that people are sharing, screenshoting the pictures of Bianca’s (tragic) death!! Wtf is wrong with you people!!?? … I will FORVER have those images in my mind when I think of her. When I close my eyes, those images haunt me. …
Imagine sitting there, in disbelief and praying to God that this is all some mistake and that your baby will walk through the door any minute. Now imagine seeing those pictures and having everything in you break. Imagine not even being able to yell out and scream or cry because your soul has now just been broken.
After writing this blog for eight years, and watching the political developments in the US over the last three, I can’t say I still have a lot of faith left in humanity. But discovering the incel and his “cum tribute” hit me like a punch in the gut; in some ways it feels as gratuitously cruel as the murder itself.
There’s a lot more to say — none of it good — about this case and the assorted reactions to it online. But I will save that for later posts.
NOTE: Canino1997’s original post was taken down by the Incels.co mods, though evidence of it remains in the responses to it from other commenters. I borrowed the screenshots from a post in IncelTears, a subreddit devoted to monitoring and mocking incels.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a donation our way! Thanks!
@incel157
Comments policy. Also, you’re one to talk about tarring a whole group with the same brush. Look to your own house and tidy it up before you come here.
@Lainy
I also read pyxxxie’s comment as condescending af. You were not the only one. I don’t plan to have children, but I am horrified that my niece will have to grow up in a world where this sort of crap could happen to her.
Seriously, why the fuck is this human garbage (using the term ‘human’ extremely loosely) scumming up such a nice comments section?
@Big Titty Demon
Thank you. I was trying to respectful with how I said it and stand up for myself because of how it made me feel. I didn’t really need anyone else coming in to tell me that my feelings were wrong and that I shouldn’t find it condescending.
@Lainy
For what it’s worth, I completely agree with not only your reservations about raising kids in this open sewer of a society, but your interpretation of pyxxxie’s response to you. Regardless of their intentions, it came off as extraordinarily patronizing and I’m glad you called them out on it.
As an oldster, I don’t envy those who face the idea of parenting in this toxic and batshit era, but I do wish you all the best in doing so.
@incel157 –
Obviously. We got that, from what he thought he’d get praise for. And also DID get praise for.
So? Why do I care, besides maybe wanting to send that info to the cops?
………………………….
WTF?
*YOU* chose to identify with the ‘incel’ movement. That’s on YOU. I’m sure there are things in your life that suck. You were promised a wife and kids and a house and a dog and vacations and a good career.
So were a lot of people, and they’re relying on a side hustle to afford a closet who’s rent takes up like 55% of their take home pay.
Welcome to late-stage capitalism. It sucks for everyone. We have 12 years to fix the planet, or we’re all pretty dead. My country is warming at twice the world average, half of it is on fire and half of it is flooded. LIFE SUCKS.
Sorry you’re sad, I guess, but maybe don’t hang out with people who freaking CANONISE MASS MURDERERS.
Here, I’ll give you an easy to follow guide. When you are looking for a group, check to see if a *significant portion* praise *literal mass murderers*.
Do they? FUCKING LEAVE!
They don’t? Cool, you must not be hanging around the manosphere or any incel forum. Maybe talk about cute dogs or something.
Here, I’ll get you started:
There’s a cute dog holding pizza.
Seriously.
(But, I mean, we all know that this person just left the single stinker and left, they won’t be back.)
PROVE ME WRONG
Oh right, also, MIND THE COMMENTS POLICY.
(Sorry for the double post, the edit timer isn’t showing up. I don’t think it would have run out yet?)
So, is Incel157 the latest MRAL/Seagull sock?
If he’s a drive by, I vote no. If he stinks around to talk about how unfair life is for men, I vote yes.
It may be worth pointing out that the incel-speak you mentioned includes an anti-semitic reference to facebook – “kikebook”. The word kike is a favorite term of white supremacists to describe Jews. Facebook’s CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is Jewish and many white priders (including ones on facebook) feel that fb is a manifestation of the insidious and ancient Hebrew agenda to control the world.
So recently the University of Toronto gave an honorary degree to Holocaust survivor Nathan Leipciger. And one convenient thing about LinkedIn replies is that you know what people do.
This person I’m about to quote has the headline, “Master Electrician 309A RSE Supervisor Safety 1st.Injured workers can still be productive and earn a living.”
“Tolerance is an issue the U of T can’t talk about in any way .It has become a left wing socialist entity where the truth is suppressed and fiction promoted as truth from bad science to worst of all bad ethics and reverse descrimination. It panders to left wing sponsored funding with a complete disregard for human rights .It promotes violence and flagrantly denies it violates human rights by censoring anyone who has a political opinion to the right and promotes abnormal as the norm and not the mental health issue that it is .The U of T went from one of the best universities to being worse than York University .Marxism thrives at the U of T.Just remember where Hitler came from !”
This second person has the headline, “Member Board of Directors at Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa”
“Tolerance is commendable. Giving away your culture and country is not.”
Just in case people *still* want to put forward this nonsense about how the far-right crowd consists primarily of unemployed or minimum wage employed “failsons.”
Wow. I’m being polite, calm down please.
I don’t demonize women or feel entitled to them, or any of these incel cliches, I just believe looks matter the most.
The people you are talking about (who praise murderers) are the former /r/Incels users, they hang out on .co which, as you can see, is a messed up place just like /r/Incels was. I don’t have an account there, I don’t see why I should be treated like a terrorist when I’m even not a member of the community you’re referring to.
I don’t know who MRAL/Seagull is, I found this site today through another article.
incel157, if you’re serious about it, then abandon those internet communities. They don’t do good for anyone, either for their participants or the observers. I understand you might just like the jokes and the caramaderie, maybe you aren’t even that invested in the “incel” identity yourself, but are these really worth everything else?
Move on, dude! Those people don’t really care about you in the first place, they don’t care about anything other than being as edgy as possible.
incel157, if you’re serious about it, then abandon those internet communities. They don’t do good for anyone, either for their participants or the observers. I understand you might just like the jokes and the caramaderie, maybe you aren’t even that invested in the “incel” identity yourself, but are these things really worth everything else?
Move on, dude! Those people don’t really care about you in the first place, they don’t care about anything other than being as edgy as possible. Today you laugh along with them, tomorrow you might be yet another hated normie.
There’s a reason lots of people distrust the inconsistent language of human rights. Recently we also had “human rights protector” Brooke Goldstein claim that Ilhan Omar would have been in the KKK under other circumstances. Sure, why not.
It’s not inconceivable that someone can even be a hyper-nationalist under the guise of the human right of protecting their own culture and people or somesuch.
The League of Nations promoted world peace and human rights too. Haha
@Lainy:
Sorry for being condescending though I didn’t appreciate your taunt in another post. I’ll stop. But plz don’t do that again.
@Diego Duarte:
I’m cynical to say the least that South Park is to blame for the rise of the alt right.
As I’ve said before: posting photos of homicide victims should be a crime just like posting or possessing kiddieporn is. I hope Devins family sues Instagram for failure to remove those pictures as well as the edgelords posting them.
@WTF:
Good advice.
These incels are starting to turn into a CULT. Yep. There I said it. It’s not even a political /social movement or a reactionary faction. I really do think these guys need properly trained therapists to “deprogram” them and give them real help with entering mainstream society.
@Pyxxxie
Lainy was 100% in the right calling you out. You are new here and so far you’re regularly defending the scum of the internet. You don’t get to make the rules.
Meanwhile on tumblr, people are spamming the asexual tags with images of this teenager’s dead body, because she came out as asexual a few days before the murder. At the same time, they’re claiming that she wasn’t asexual and that her murder had nothing to do with that. (The latter may very well be true, but…)
I love the fandom community on that site, but I’m so fucking sick of my orientation being the community’s fun little emotional torture project.
I would hope existing harassment law covers this case: sending the photos to the grieving parents with intent to cause emotional distress.
I’m somewhat skeptical of all laws criminalizing the mere possession of anything. It’s all too easy for such laws to be abused by law enforcement to plant something and then “find” it, and such abuse will mainly be directed at marginalized people. In the case of pure information, it gets worse: anyone who is able to gain access to your computer, via malware or physically, can plant it and then sic the cops on you via anonymous tip. Who is likely to be targeted for such treatment? a) Anyone who pisses off the alt-right and comes in for their harassment — it fits in their toolkit right alongside swatting; b) anyone who becomes a thorn in the paw of the powerful; c) anyone who the powerful seek to discredit, in particular.
Adding to that, criminalizing possession of anything creates incentives to destroy evidence. What should an upstanding, law abiding citizen do if they stumble onto anything whose possession is against the law? Immediately destroy it or otherwise divest themselves of it and hope nobody ever realizes they’d touched the thing. If it’s evidence of something that should be criminal, well, now that evidence has a questionable chain of custody at best, and is outright gone at worst.
That suggests criminalizing just distribution, and making an exception there for distributing it directly to the police for them to investigate.
(Perhaps the worst one? “Possession of stolen property.” How is one to tell, at a glance, whether something is or is not stolen property? It’s one thing if a sleazy pawn shop is offering it at too-good-to-be-true prices in new-looking condition, quite another if it’s well-used or the price is only a bit below retail or it gets to you as a gift or in some other way. Literally any physical object you buy or otherwise obtain could, in theory, be a legal land-mine. I can see why law enforcement like various “possession” laws: they can bust the thief without proving they actually stole it, they can bust the drug pusher without catching them in the act of selling it, and so on … but what’s convenient for them is short-circuiting the essential step of proving the actual, victim-harming criminal act, with the inevitable consequence that innocent people can be railroaded … though, for a white supremacist cop seeing a bunch of black people waiting for a crossing light, perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug.)
(Most ridiculous instance ever to come to my attention: that time the MPAA tried to criminalize possessing knowledge of a number. The infamous-in-some-circles 09F9 number. Because it could be used by a knowledgeable techie to unlock their favored copy-protection scheme-du-jour. They argued that the number itself counted as a “circumvention tool” under the DMCA, which — yep — criminalizes the mere possession of such.)
@Pyxxxie
Maybe stop supporting shit that makes you taunt worthy then?
Lolllllll @Incel157 lolllllllll
This is the mean kind, where i am most definitely laughing at you, sorry but it is what it is. Let me break it down.
No.
Telling somone to ‘calm down’ actually has a lot of baggage associated with it, and i wonder if you used it specifically or just unconciously. Let’s look into it, shall we?
Why would our emotions being obvious be something bad, which you would tell us to stop?
It could be because ‘logic’ is prized in arguments to a ridiculous degree. If you show emotions, you are no longer logical, that means you’ve lost the argument.
This is not true, and prioritises the people who are able to treat all arguments as intellectual excercises. Let me ask you – are you worried that an incel is going to get it into his head to ‘go ER’ and drive his rented van on the sidewalk of a busy city? Because i am. That happened.
Showing emotions also lets other people know that you care about something, and south park has shown us that means that you’ve lost. It’s not ‘cool’ to care.
This again makes it easier for people who aren’t worried that an incel will get themselves some firearms and go on a shooting spree to argue. If it’s all hypotheticals, no one dies, you see?
Also, and i leave this for last, WOMEN are the emotional ones. Men are made of PURE LOGIC, women nag and mope and are mysterious unknowable creatures from Venus.
So you’re trying to imply that we aren’t capable of having a reasoned debate on the value of the incel movement… And no, we aren’t. Because the movement is valueless. *You* aren’t, but this set of beliefs will be something talked about in psychology textbooks, if we survive long enough for it to be codified.
You still call yourself an incel. You don’t get to be part of the republican party because you like elephants, and ignore the rest of it.
You can’t wear the uniform of a hate movement (swastica, white hood, whatever) and then insist that we need to treat you differently, because you tooootally aren’t like those ooooother, murderous incels! You just like the memes! And isn’t it true how women are looks obsessed whores who are riding the cock carousel so much? Why don’t they ever give Nice Guys a chance?????????
(Note: /s)
You should be able to tell that i’m not a threat! I just have had little success in my romantic life! Rather than think about why that might be, and wonder perhaps if others are also suffering in similar fashions but somehow avoiding internet cultures that, once again, canonise mass murderers? What is their secret???
(It’s recognising ‘womz’ as humans, who get their own preferences as to who they are interested in, is the secret)
But nah. Everyone is all about the Chads it’s the only possible explanation! Using ‘incel’ as my literal name on this message board is a great idea!!! I can totally show how (hashtag) notAllIncels are bad!!! I’ll educate them!
Ehhh, sure. You came back, so i’ll pretend you aren’t a thousand year old engineer who lives right on the beach. Maybe you aren’t.
But what does it say of your contribution to the conversation, when we have all heard it before?
It is literally #notallincels, my dude.
Re: Pyxxxie – yeah, not cool. You don’t know Lainy’s life.
…I don’t know what to say.
Incels are terrorists?
Sounds close enough.
Even the incels that don’t encourage mass murder refer to women as “roasties” and such. So don’t give me that shit.
And looks matter most? To who? A subset of people? Sure. To a large portion of the world? Not so much. Have you really not noticed all the multitudes of people out there who don’t look like underwear models but still have partners? If you haven’t, it’s an indication that women who aren’t super conventionally attractive don’t even register as women to you. So yeah, misogynistic and entitled.
[Emphasis mine]
And you would be wrong.
Ignoring for the moment the likelihood that you’re specifically claiming that looks “matter the most” to women and all the inherent contempt that implies, let’s pretend you were talking about everyone, men and women and non-binary alike. Either way, the claim that looks matter “the most” implies not only that there is some universal measure of beauty — at the very least within a culture or society if not truly universal — but that the vast majority of people agree with that measure (and thus find the same people attractive) and also prioritize it over every other trait.
And if you can’t see what a steaming pile of bullshit that is, then you’re pretty fucking stupid, because counterexamples are literally everywhere, in real life, pop culture, fiction of every type, and pretty much the entirety of history.
So tell me, where do mustaches fall on this universal scale of beauty? What about short hair? If standards of beauty change over time, how can they qualify as universal? And how far up your own ass is your head lodged?
Very low on the scale for me. Reminds me to much of my father.
@Lainy
Then how do you explain Tom Selleck?
Huh?
HUH!!?!?!?
…checkmate!
(/s, of course)