Canada’s deadliest vehicle-ramming attack was preceded by a nontransparent Facebook post calling for an “incel rebellion,” just minutes after a young man drove a rented van onto a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 people and injuring 15. The tactic is advocated by al-Qaida, supported by ISIS and popular among other jihadi terrorists, but this attack was carried out by someone with an entirely different ideology: the violent misogyny associated with involuntary celibates, or incels.
Incels are a group of heterosexual men who blame women and society for their failure in love. Originally an online club of lonely hearts for both men and women, incels have evolved into a pessimistic, misogynistic, male-only microculture. Early incel attacks were not considered terrorism because they had no clear political motivation. However, as the movement has grown and matured, their political motivations and influence have begun to coalesce into an emerging political platform centered on legitimizing male dominance and rolling back women’s rights. The group thrives in the manosphere, a series of hard-to-manage websites, online chat rooms, and blogs that create a digital ecosystem where misogyny and anti-feminism are the norm. Graham Wood writes, “These communities become instruments of conscience extermination, like ISIS, and the lonely losers within them become numb to their senses and ultimately morally inverted.”
To make sense of the world they inhabit, incels have created a worldview that organizes society into a gender hierarchy based on physical characteristics: attractive men and women, or “Chads” and “Stacys,” at the top, average men and women, or “Normals” and “Beckies,” in the middle, and unlucky genetic losers, or “Incels,” at the bottom. This unequal gender hierarchy is the result of feminism and the sexual revolution, which gave women more agency over who they chose as sexual partners. Incels view women as exploitative, shallow, manipulative, and essentially subhuman, and they use access to sex as a means of control, giving it to attractive Chads, exchanging it with Normals in exchange for material benefits, and denying sex entirely to Incels.
Shut out of the sexual marketplace, incels believe that feminism and its supporters deny them the right to access women’s bodies when they want, preventing them from living the life that patriarchal ideals envision. This worldview became known as the Red Pill. It woke incels up to the existing female-dominated society we live in, where feminism exploits and oppresses men. Everyone else is considered Blue Pill (i.e. indifferent to an unequal system and the plight of incels).
To break free from the feminist female domination in which they feel trapped, incels employ a set of strategies known as “hope, deal, rope”. “Hope” refers to incels’ belief that they have the opportunity to improve their attractiveness. This includes grooming their appearance (looks max), going to the gym (gym max), earning more money (money max), and even getting a pet (pet max). This option gives the individual incel some agency but does nothing to address the broader systemic discontent. Incels can also “deal” with the situation by distracting themselves by playing video games, spending time on incel forums, or consuming pornography, thus reducing the negative impact on their lives. However, the outcome of this strategy is continued isolation and loneliness. The third “rope” strategy highlights the pessimism and hopelessness that underlies much incel ideology. This option refers to the individual abandoning all efforts to improve their situation, i.e., LDAR (lie down and rot) or committing suicide.
For most incels, these three strategies are the foundation for survival in a world that is at best unfair to them and at worst intolerable. But for a minority of incels, a fourth option has emerged: rebellion, in which incels act out their violent online fantasies in real life and make their plight known to the world.
The incel/beta rebellion mentality is loosely based on the following ideas:
If we [Incels] We cannot solve our problems, we must destroy the problems… One day, incels will realize their true strength and numbers and overthrow this oppressive feminist system.
This idea, initially a fantasy, has become more prominent as the incel community evolves, grows, and becomes increasingly radical with the emergence of the black pill, who maintain the incel red pill worldview but reject all aspects of self-improvement and believe that no matter how hard you try, you cannot make up for bad genes. For black pill people, the only solution is societal-level change.
Blackpill-fed incels’ desire for collective action has triggered the formation of a nascent socio-political ideology that drives unified and possibly violent political action. Until now, most discussions of incel violence have not gone so far as to identify it as terrorism. This is because, at first glance, incels have no political agenda. Rhetoric on incel forums revolves around the expression of personal grievances and rants against women, feminism, and its supporters. But even here the seeds of a violent political ideology are prevalent. Incels want normies (i.e., anyone other than themselves) to suffer and live in constant fear. Some incels openly advocate acts of violence against civilians and encourage each other to “go to the emergency room” or be “heroes” (emphasis on the initials of Elliot Rodger, the famous incel who murdered six people in Isla Vista, California). One incel succinctly put it: “[T]”This is a political movement, my friends. We talk about how people should behave and how they should be governed. That’s politics.” What makes this political movement especially dangerous is that incels who take the black pill feel that they no longer have anything to live for. As such, they are often willing to sacrifice their lives in order to terrorize society into addressing their plight. By imposing their ideology on others through the threat or execution of violence, incels’ violent misogyny becomes highly political.
Even terrorism experts who were initially skeptical of the incel threat now acknowledge that law enforcement and the counterterrorism community need to take them seriously. Since 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Counterterrorism (START), and the Anti-Defamation League have all begun tracking male supremacy as an extremist ideology. In January 2019, a young man was arrested for planning a mass murder at the Women’s March. The day before, he had posted on Facebook, “I’m going to shoot up a gun in a public place and kill as many girls I see as I can.” He eventually pleaded guilty to attempted terrorist threats, which may be the first terrorism-related sentence in the United States for a crime stemming from incel beliefs. In 2020, a teenager who identifies as an incel was charged with terrorism after stabbing a woman to death in Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police stressed that “it is important to note that terrorism comes in many forms and is not limited to any one group, religion or ideology.” In February 2021, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation acknowledged that the left-right spectrum of terrorist ideology is no longer fit for purpose and that there is a need to recognise niche issues as drivers of terrorist acts. Here, he specifically mentioned violent misogynists such as incels. This new recognition that incel violence counts as political violence indicates that this is a group of actors with new political footprints that must be reckoned with.
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