Jake Davison, who shot five people dead in a Thursday night shotgun spree before turning the gun on himself, didn’t leave behind a manifesto.
The 22-year-old Plymouth (UK) virgin was more of a YouTube guy, posting assorted rants on the site bemoaning his life and offering his opinions on women (cruel and picky but not, he thought, very smart) and his future prospects (not good, he was sure; he felt old and ugly and washed up at the ripe old age of 22).
He scattered his opinions across Facebook and Reddit as well, launching into tirades against his mother, whom he called “vile” and “abusive.” (All of these accounts have been shut down as of this writing, but you can find traces of what he said in the press coverage of his murder spree; meanwhile some of his videos have been saved and reposted on the Incels.is forum.)
His mother was the first person he shot in his murder spree; in the end he killed two women, two men and, most horrifically, one three-year-old girl.
Most of Davison’s rants — whether about women or his own seemingly worsening life — could almost have been pasted word for word from incel discussion forums. He may have been fervent in his beliefs, but he wasn’t original.
He lamented that he had missed the joys of teenage romance, something that he would never be able to recapture.
“Let’s say I get with a woman my age,” he declared.
She’s had a million relationships. Likely been destroyed and broken and torn apart by a fucking Chad. She’s probably completely incapable of loving anyone like she did when she was 16, 17, 15, when she first got with that fucking Chad.
This weird glorification of teenage love (and teenage girls) is common among incels. (I’ve written about this in a number of posts, and will elaborate on Davison’s obsession in a future post.) It’s not clear how Davison was able to reconcile his fantasies of underage sex with his Qanon-style belief that the government is full of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who need to be put down. Davison was not only an incel but was also something of a Trump-worshipper and gun fanatic who dreamed of moving to the US some day, so it’s not all the shocking to see QAnon-ish conspiracy theories mixed up in his brain with thoughts of Chad and Stacey.
But if we set aside his Trumpian enthusiasm — fairly atypical for incels who are generally not very political –most of what he set forth in his posts and videos was standard issue incel. The biggest difference I can see between Davison and your typical incel is that he actually carried out his fantasy of a Elliot Rodger style “day of retribution.”
Despite his weight worries (he was a bit plump) and his belief that he was ugly and getting uglier, Davison was a fairly typical-looking young man, a sort of Seth Rogan-esque stoner dude who might have had a chance with women had he only trimmed his beard a little more often. It would have helped a lot more if he hadn’t been quite so angry and misogynistic and self-loathing; like most incels, Davison blamed his looks for his lack of success with women, though the real problem was all the poisonous bullshit stuffed in his head.
The most energetic coverage of the shooting spree comes in the British tabloids — among them The Sun, which described incels as “a sinister death cult of miserable, sex-starved loners linked to a string of terror-style attacks.”
A little over-the-top, but … true.
Davison is picking up fans on Incels.is, with some comparing him positively with Elliot Rodger, the original mass-killing Incel “saint.”
“What a hero,” wrote MisterMeme. “I hope he is in heaven rn.”
“We were past overdue for a new ER, [Elliot Rodger]” added Metabuxx.
“Yes I can say it this time,” Lookscel cried out.
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
A new ER
“It was a long drought but finally it’s ER season again,” added CrackingYs happily.
Over on The Black Pill Club, another incel hangout, one especially edgy commenter wrote that he had “read that a 5 year old whore is among the dead which is very pleasing to hear.” (Actually, she was three years old, which is even worse.)
That’s about all I can take on this right now. I will be back, probably tomorrow, with more thoughts on incel obsessions with “teenage love.”
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Only way to distinguish a TERF from a MTGOW is to check gender. And they wonder why we don’t think they are feminists …
@Ohlmann: “Only way to distinguish a TERF from a MTGOW is to check gender.”
Wow. Wow. I’m going to have to sit with that for a while. You might be right, I dunno.
The cops who gave this asshole’s shotgun back need to be up on charges too. What’s the point of gun control if you don’t use it?
My husband was a complete dork till he was 25. I didn’t hit my stride till about 29-30.
Oh, man, I had the world on a string at 30 — old enough to know myself and what I was doing, young enough to still do it.
Siiigh. Off topic, but Laura Ingraham had a guest (Jon Taffer) on recently who had a “solution” to all those unfilled jobs in the US – you know, mainly the ones which are part time, at or near minimum wage, often with irregular hours so you can’t go to school or get a second job, occasionally requiring you to be “on call” without the extra pay that normally comes with that – and his solution is to eliminate unemployment, so people will be forced to take them.
He even went with “A starving dog is an obedient dog”. (Not those exact words, it was an extended metaphor about military dogs which I really hope isn’t actually true.) He flat out stated that keeping people poor, desperate, and miserable is, economically, a good thing. Also bashed the concept of self-care, including by saying that his mother neglected herself for the sake of the family during the Great Depression, and that Millennials are whiny and entitled for wanting better.
Ingraham notably did not push back on any of this, at all. And worse, added something which could be construed as supporting child labor.
Further to our conversations above…
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/13/should-the-plymouth-shootings-be-declared-an-act-of-terror
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/13/should-the-plymouth-shootings-be-declared-an-act-of-terror?fbclid=IwAR12ZaJbiWSKKMz3ZcAPxLrVJ7plMOJzQIJ1szw2zm2l2ykFrbiz7kcJSxg
@Snowberry
Conservatives are fascists. All of them.
Shit, that’s horrible. My condolences to everyone affected.
On the discussion of age, I had my first kiss at 31. Then again, a lot of people have sex when they’re teenagers too. I remember a group of classmates talking in 11th grade about “who was a virgin or not” and I’d wager most of us were honest because it wasn’t a crowd where you’d be shamed for one or the other. 5-6 girls there, ages 16/17, and two had sex already, and three/four hadn’t, if I remember right.
Anyway, it’s a topic where there’s such a variety of experience that it’s hard to pin down anything as “normal”. And finding averages is descriptivist, not prescriptivist. Saying you’ll only have the best sex and/or romance at X age is SO fucking narrow-minded. But it’s not a surprise with incels, who seem stuck in this very constrained belief system (mainly “woman bad”).
The Sun has an accurate description attacking incels because it is desperate to deflect attention from his right-wing trumpist views.
@Snowberry:
I want to see them starving,
The so-called working class.
Their wages weekly halving,
Their women stewing grass.
When I drive out each morning
In one of my new suits
I want to find them fawning
To clean my car and boots.
—Philip Larkin.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/15/extreme-misogyny-ideaology-plymouth-killer-terrorist
This, so much. I think it’s a very good idea to keep in mind how political they are in their aspirations. They want their shitty takes legislated. They want Gilead. Just like @kupo and @Dalillama said, they’re fascist in their intent and ideology, it’s just a question of what they’re willing to say out loud. The TERFs, the MGTOWs, the MAGAs, they’re all expressions of the same belief system, and the right wing political apparatus is their legislative arm.
Alan. Reinforcing your point, The writer of that Guardian article is Joan Smith, who also wrote the book referred to … Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists. It’s excellent.
I strongly recommend it, and not just for people like us. Her recommendations for police and other agency policies and practices are spot on.
Of course TERFs are on the incel side
@Bakunin
Bigots are always more sympathetic to other bigots than to the targets of bigotry, even when they are targets of bigotry.
The profound trauma and emotional torment of the ‘Incel’ did not really start with the pain of adolescent rejection that commenced in early adolescence. It was seeded much earlier in life than that. It was embedded in the earliest years of life through a process of neglect, abuse, invalidation and victimisation from the toxic Bio-Fam.
Very young children (practically babies/toddlers, really), were distorted and irretrievably scarred, usually by neglectful and disinterested mothers, overtly abusive and cruel (often step)-fathers and also, collaborative colluding ‘siblings’. The psycho-social wounding and psycho-sexual mutilation of a hostile step-‘father’ will inflict untold, untreatable damage on a child growing up who is expected to fit a so-called ‘masculine’ model of performativity.
I think that these incels who waste their days spleening in online forums and venomously spitting out the worst kinds of misogyny need help, but the problem is, there is no help. The damage was done too soon and it is impossible to ‘unmake’ them and build them into better versions of themselves.
As for those who mis-direct their violence and aggression against women; well, there really is no helping them and I genuinely think that they need quarantining from society – not for their good, but more so for the good of any of their potential victims.
People who are designated unattractive and undesireable can go on to lead semi-productive lives, or at least sustain themselves independently.
Our lack of good looks preclude genuine social and professional advancement, but we can eke out a modest or humble existence that utilises a fraction of our talent, ability and potential.
This is particularly the case if you’re TGNC or otherwise ‘other’.
Also, it helps if you can develop extra-curricular activities that do not involve being around the attractive and desireable; no point in having your nose rubbed in it every single hour of every single day of the week for the rest of your life.
There is no reason much less any justification for recourse to psychopathic murder at all.
Anyone claiming otherwise forfeits their right to freedom or liberty.
So, TL;DR – it is possible to suffer the psychological scarring of being considered too unattractive for intimacy, companionship and love, but this does not provide a basis for the pseudo-rationale of legitimating murder of innocent bystanders who are not the architects of your misery and oppression. People who do think so are making the same mistake as the utterly immiserated and most oppressed of the working class targeting migrants, refugees, ethnic minorities &Co. as the cause of their social marginalisation and economic exclusion, rather than recognising that there are larger forces at play.
@AnhedoniAmelia
Are you basing this claim on research or just gut feeling? Because it reads like gut feeling and I’d rather go with the null hypothesis that the proportion of abused/neglected incels is the same as the rest of the population unless this hypothesis has actually been tested in a meaningful way.
Also, nice sexism in the assumed type of abuse based on gender for each of the hypothetical parents.
@Kupo
It isn’t assumed – it is lived experience. It just so happened to pan out that way in this particular instance, though I’d be the first to concede that it could vary in all the possible permutations that can be derived from such a setting.
The major point I was trying to make is that these apparent problems around the seething resentment of rejection and non-acceptance has historical antecedents in earlier developmental experience.
Also, I think that in some instances at least, the failings in terms of intimate interpersonal relationships are reflected in other areas of life, too.
I mentioned that I think someone chooses to embrace a vengeful, resentment-fuelled ideoology which I think incel culture actually is, tends to find themselves backed into a corner from which change is impossible.
For someone such as myself, who has not paraded claims to formal training i developmental psychology or paediatric psychiatry (so far as I can tell, nobody else on this thread has done so either), I think that speaking from lived experience is actually a valid position to be coming from?
What do you think?
I think that attempting to attach the blame for the actions of violent misogynists on anyone but those violent misogynists is not cute.
The murderer in this instance chose, at every step of the way, to escalate. To surround himself with an echo chamber that by degrees allowed him to lie to himself and consider violence against random women to be acceptable. To move from despair to hatred to planning and then finally to murder. At any point, he could have stepped back.
He did not. That is his fault. Five people are dead, and they are not dead because some parents are abusive. They are dead because a human being old enough to know right from wrong and decide to do right or to do wrong chose to murder them.
We do not know the childhood situation of the murderer, nor is it relevant. My own childhood situation was hellish, but the nature of human existence is transition & transcendence. My past informs who I am but does not dictate it, and this is so for every human being because we are smart enough to choose.
You are choosing to defend a murderer, to argue that this murderer was, against all evidence we have access to, not responsible for his own actions. This is not inevitable, it is a choice you are making.
And I see it. I see you, and I am not impressed.
@Kupo
If we offer it the dignity of taking it seriously, which it has not earned, then it’s definitely a university of assfacts kind of situation. That which may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
I could argue, based on my lived experience, that nearly all trans people had or have abusive parents. This is true for myself and a lot of my trans friends. However, ten or eleven trans people is not a compelling reason to say that most trans folks have abusive parents. There are many more trans people, and the research just hasn’t been done to demonstrate any difference in the rates of abusive family situations from the standard in the general population group.
There has, however, been research done that demonstrates women (both cis and trans) as a class are in danger from cis men as a class.
@IgnoreSandra, I am giving you a standing ovation. You have spoken truth with clarity and grace.
My best trans friend (as opposed to the several others) had a pretty good childhood and relationship with both parents and stepparents. People of all sorts with idyllic childhoods still “go bad”, and people with horrific ones rise above them.
Yes, as Mr. Larkin also said “they fuck you up, your mum and dad”, but that’s no excuse for multiple murders. He could have stopped at any time.
ACAB: All Conservatives Are Bastards.
There are no non-fascist conservatives left, they’re all complicit.
@IgnoreSandra
@Kupo
Before I try to answer what you say in response to my earlier posting:
No, you really do not see me at all. You have know idea of who or what I am, what I have lived and what I have had to overcome.
Furthermore, most vitally, there is nothing in what I have written that could be mischievously construed as condoning the behaviour of deranged murders who always possessed agency and free will and were always at liberty to step back from their toxic ideology.
I do believe that the only way we are ever likely to be able to understand this modern-day deformity of masculine expression is to try to understand its aetiology, or roots of its origins.
I think that, as stated previously, it starts very early in life with a dysfunctional family set up, but I also think it is hugely reinforced by a toxic values promulgated within the wider society and then perpetuated and reinforced in peer groups.
This is not to excuse it in a way, shape or form. Of course, it is tempting to write these individuals off as waster-losers who are better off dead. But who does this help prevent it happening again, again and again? Seemingly random attacks against often, wholly unknown members of the public seem to be increasing both in terms of frequency and severity.
The latest outrage which this thread concentrates on, seems to be centred around individuals known personally to the murderer/terrorist (let’s call it what it actually is), whereas within the last few weeks, there have been other incidents seemingly motivated by similar considerations.
This cannot and should not be allowed to continue. How, in the context of this latest outrage, the perpetrator was allowed anywhere near a firearms licence is one hell of a mystery. How these forums alluded to by the OP are permitted to exist reins beyond my comprehension.
I read – from this very blog – that Reddit have now finally closed down two of the most notorious Incel/Incel-adjacent subreddits on their platform. What took them so long? If, as suggested, it was to aid FBI or other law enforcement to investigate the posts, the possible contact details of the subscribers (email address, IP address, ISP and so on), then this could have been accomplished by providing a suitable data digest extracted from what is already in the system.
Please, do not presume to say that you “see me”, when clearly you do not. Also, as mentioned please do not think that I am in any way offering an apologia for the utterly indefensible.
Although I’d vaguely heard of it before, I only really began to notice this incel stuff after reading a book by Laura Bates, reviewed in The Guardian and on Radio 4 last September called Men Who Hate Women, with the final word struck out so that it simply read as Men Who Hate.
I won’t precis the book, as there are Reviews all over the internet.
Suffice to say, that it unified the 3 main points of the so-called ‘Manosphere’, covering the seemingly-innocuous MRA to the more extreme MGTOW right up to the actual hard-core incel movement itself. The author then drew out the pipeline traversal from specifically misogynistic hatred to hatred upon other minorities and the increasing embrace of far-right / alt-right ideology; much as this blog itself actually does.
Oh, a long-winded troll with no wits, style, or originality.
No, they weren’t twisted into hateful husk by their mother. They decided from their own free will to become assholes. You can at best argue the far right tempted them into that, but fundamentally it’s still their choice.
He killed because his aggrieved entitlement made him so aggrieved he couldn’t stand that women get to choose their sexual partners by however we want. He killed for *that*. Hellish and disgusting.
I don’t care how a guy’s parents brought him up. I care what his body looks like, whether he is handsome, whether or not he’s at least 6 feet tall, whether he’s kind, has a creative spirit, shares my tastes and follows my directions.
If a guy who doesn’t like that, all he has to do is go away. To think that I deserve to *die* for wanting what I want. That’s what is truly ugly.
@AnhedoniAmelia
Others said it better than I could but his background doesn’t matter. His ugly choice was his.
@Ohlmann
Not everyone who’s points you may have issue with is a troll.
Your characteristically hostile and aggressive response is fairly indicative, but I am not going to waste time worrying too much.
I have tried to explain that there is no excuse for the inexcusable, but you seem to have missed that point made more than once.
I am new he,re so I guess that makes me an easy target for simmering resentment and hostility; however misdirected.
I hope that the points I made make sense to those who take the time to pay attention to what was said rather than to how some may choose to maliciously misrepresent what I say.
I have never offered the early-years damage as an excuse for the indefensible, merely indicated that the problem runs deep and that maladaptive individuals can respond to things in ways that no normal person would ever contemplate.
Apologies for long comments discussing complex, difficult topics that have to be resolved as a matter of urgency.
I disagree with his actions. I don’t think that’s debatable at all. As a young man, I went through the same low self-esteem and self loathing. I was angry at the world and a virgin well into my 20s. I obsessed over how for some guys, it was all too easy to talk to women and date women. I should have been concentrating on my education and career. Anyway, when I finally had sex, I found it overated. It was not some earth-shattering event as most people think it will be. For any young men reading this – incel life is a deadend. If you go through life with a scowl, unkempt and bitter, women won’t find you attractive. Change your wardrobe and attitude, SMILE damn it. Don’t expect women to fall at your feet, but as an old friend used to say: “There is someone for everyone.” Lastly, the first woman who shows an interest in you, she will probably not be “the one”. It’s rarely ever love at first sight. You may think it is; but it likely won’t last.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved
Agreed entirely, I say as much when I point out that they always have agency and free will and can always step back from the toxic ideology that have freely chosen to embrace.