Jesse Singal is famously bad on trans issues. Is he an incel apologist, too?

A 25-year-old California incel was recently arrested and charged with hate crimes, after he allegedly sprayed women with pepper spray in a series of attacks that he filmed and put on YouTube. With the hate crime “enhancements” on top of his various felony charges, he could face up to 13 years in prison.

This gentleman, who I will not name, is not your typical incel, in that he actually went out in the world and acted out his hatred of women. While a number of incels have of course attacked and killed innocent victims, most incels simply fantasize about this sort of thing.

Indeed, over on Incels.is, the most popular incel forum, the regulars bemoaned the “Pepper Spraycel’s” arrest. It’s “ovER for saint pepperspray,” lamented one. “So fucking sad,” wrote another, “he was so based for doing what he did. It’s over for us. Time to rope.” Their only criticism? Saint Pepperspray turns out to be good looking, certainly handsome enough to score a “Becky,” so, while still a hero, he’s actually a “fakecel.”

Jesse Singal, the former New York Magazine writer turned Substacker, thinks these guys are getting a bad rap. Singal, perhaps best known for his appalling takes on trans issues, seems to be turning into some sort of incel apologist.

In a recent Substack posting, Singal roundly criticized that Center for Countering Digital Hate report on incels I also wrote about critically on Tuesday. Some of his criticisms of the report’s methodology were spot on. (I’m not going to summarize; you can go read it.) But unfortunately the whole piece was in service of a position on incels that I think is not only naïve but dangerously naïve.

To hear Singal tell it, the sorts of appalling comments I quote above — exceedingly common on Incels.is and wherever incels congregate — aren’t appalling comments for real. They are, rather “desperate, attention-grasping LARPing.” Incels are just playing at being psychopathic, violence-obsessed, woman-hating assholes to score internet points with other LARPers like them.

People say such terrible things about incels, Singal laments, but only a “very small percentage” of them are serial killers or harassers.

[M]ostly they are this sprawling sad-sack community of disaffected young men with a diversity of views on various subjects, including women. There are creepy men’s rights activist incels, but there are also more straightforwardly tragic ones, hobbled by physical or mental disabilities, who blame themselves rather than women for their shortcomings.

What on earth is he even talking about? Go on Incels.is right now. Try to find one of these “sad-sack” incels who doesn’t hate women with the very fiber of their being. Show me this alleged “diversity” of opinions. Even the much vaunted “Incels Without Hate” forum on Reddit was taken down … for containing too much hate.

Also, there are essentially zero “men’s rights activist incels,” creepy or otherwise, because MRAs at least pretend to be activists who think the world can be made better for men (in their view). Incels reject any this sort of activism out of hand as an empty “cope.” Most of them are deeply committed to the idea that nothing can get better. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous. That’s one of the reasons they, or at least that “very small percentage” of them, go out and kill people.

Singal would know this, if he knew shit about incels.

Would Singal say the same sorts of things about the vicious racists on, say, Stormfront? Would he excuse them as mostly “sad sacks” who are just “LARPing?” I rather doubt it. Why is it that only those who hate women are given these sorts of apologias?

Singal also wants us to know that incels haven’t killed all that many people, if you think about it. Sure, he breezily acknowledges, some

incels do, very rarely, commit horrific acts of violence. It’s not a nonexistent threat.

I’m sure the loved ones of those killed by incels will be glad to know that the incel killers weren’t imaginary.

But there’s a lot of danger in the world, and people aren’t always good at appropriately evaluating and triaging risks, so I think there’s always a danger that some shiny new threat will attract more attention than it should … [E]ven a liberal estimate of [the number of people killed by incels] would be dwarfed, by almost an order of magnitude, by the number of murders in Chicago in 2021 alone, and is far lower than the number of Americans who succumb to Covid every day.

Using similar logic, you could point out that even in the worst years in the 19th century, the number of lynching victims was really pretty low compared with the total black population. Why, you could ask, have people made such a big deal of this “shiny” danger?

I think people did because hate crimes are not only uniquely abhorrent but they are also acts of terrorism designed to keep the hated population “in line.” And these crimes don’t happen in a vacuum — in most cases there are countless others that commit no hate crimes but who root for those who do. That’s made explicit in those horrifying photos of public lynchings in which giant crowds of white people surround the body of the victim with huge grins on their faces.

You get a similar response on the Incels.is forum every time an incel kills. And for every incel who posts about murder there are innumerable “lurkers” in the forums who agree but don’t speak up. One of the scariest things about he flawed but still useful Center for Countering Digital Hate report was that it showed just how disturbingly popular Incels.is has become, with some 17,000 members (including 4000 who actually post on the site) and 2.6 million visits a month.

All that is enough to keep me worrying about them. It would be nice if I could, like Singal, blithely dismiss everything posted to that site as inconsequential LARPing. But it’s not LARPing, and it’s not inconsequential.

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