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Front Burner
Incel violence and the Montreal shooting
00:29:58
<p>On Monday morning, a 25-year-old man opened fire in Montreal, leading to a shootout that left three people dead.</p><p><br></p><p>A few hours later, police found a manifesto written by the shooter. It contained a laundry list of grievances but, more than anything, it bore the telltale signs of someone who had spent a lot of time immersed in the world of incels.</p><p><br></p><p>The incel, or involuntary celibate, movement was born online but has occasionally inspired real world violence. Elle Reeve is a correspondent for CNN and the author of Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. </p><p><br></p><p>She joins the show to explain why young men are drawn to this movement – and why it keeps leading to violence. </p><p><br></p><p>For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts</p>
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B
This is a CBC podcast.
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A
Hey everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. On Monday morning, a 25 year old man opened fire in Montreal, prompting a shootout that left three people dead. A police officer, a civilian bystander and the gunman. A few hours later, police found a manifesto written by the shooter. It's 104 pages and it contains a laundry list of capitalism, Zionists, rap music, pornography. But above all else, it looks like the work of someone who spent a lot of time in the world of incels. The incel, or Involuntary Celibate movement, was born online, but can spill into real world violence. In 2018, a self described INCEL named Alec Minassian drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 11 people. Two years later, a 17 year old stabbed a woman with a sword at a Toronto spa, which a judge deemed an INCEL inspired act of terrorism. Ellie Reeve has spent the better part of a decade trying to understand the world of incels. She's a correspondent for CNN and author of Black How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison society and Capture American Politics. She joins me now to try and understand why some men are drawn to this movement and why it keeps leading to violence. Ellie, thanks so much for coming onto the show. It's really great to have you.
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C
Well, thanks for having me.
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A
So you have been covering the world of incels for years now, really. You've spoken to them, you've spent time in their chat rooms and just like, what was your reaction when you heard about this attack and read the shooter's manifesto?
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C
My first reaction was one that I share with a lot of people who've covered Internet extremism over the last 10 years, which is, I can't believe this is still relevant because at the time when you first started uncovering it, it seemed so crazy and so strange and it was actually very difficult to get people to pay attention to it. And now our reward or punishment for having the foresight to look into this stuff is that it. It just keeps being relevant and it's just like, I can't believe this is happening again.
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A
You know, I want to come back to that idea with you. Towards the end of the Conversation. But let's spend a little bit more time now kind of interrogating what this guy seemed to want believe, as sort of detestable as it is. You know, like I mentioned off the top, there are a lot of different grievances in this manifesto, and I'm wary of reading too much into it. But the one thing I kept seeing kind of over and over again was this word hypergamy. And what does that word mean?
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C
Hypergamy became popularized in sort of extremist online spaces more than 10 years ago as an idea that women want to sleep with the highest status male available. So there's this idea that, like, men will sleep with anyone, but women want the most high status male, the richest, the best looking, et cetera. And so what that has meant is that the top 20% of attractive men are having sex with all the women. And so that means the bottom 80% and definitely the bottom 20% of men have no available romantic partners. And what's interesting about this manifesto is all that stuff came in the form of very crude memes. These ideas all developed on sites like 4chan, Wizard Chan more than 10 years ago. And what this manifesto does is try to intellectualize them. You know, like, often the process we see is like some very, like, sophisticated piece of political philosophy boiled down into like a meme, a slogan on an image. This is the opposite is taking the slogan in the image and these, like, crude drawings of, like, hot girls and guys get, you know, having sex with each other and tries to intellectualize it.
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A
And this term hypergamy, what's the significance of it to, like, the broader incel community?
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C
It speaks to their idea of the inherent nature of women as, like, untrustworthy and governed by emotional and instinctual impulses that they can't control.
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A
The manifesto blames a whole bunch of different things for society's downfall. Women, Zionists, trans people, capitalism, pornography. Like, is there a through line that ties all of this stuff together, or do you read it as completely incoherent?
- [05:32]
C
No, this is again, this is just like the opposite of a distillation of 10 years of like, far right Internet culture. He has not done anything new. This kind of melding of all this different stuff, this has been done before. This you can find in sort of the collective hive mind of 4chan that I spent many, many hours, like, reading. Ultimately, yes, the blame. They put the blame at the foot of women. That they believe that women, like, evolved to not be able to think that well and to be conformists. And
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A
can I.
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C
Okay, can I Just like explain like some of these memes. Okay, so like, like there was a, a long standing meme about women called alpha fucks for beta bucks. The idea is that women in this hypergamous drive will sleep with all these like hot, like frat dud, the jocks, you know, whatever, the guy who made fun of you in high school. And then as they approach 30 and are starting to become ugly, in this view, they seek out a beta male. That's the beta books, right? So they marry a poor, downtrodden, hardworking beta male who is like made his career and now has a nice income they get with this beta male. They don't want to have sex with them. And then after a couple years they divorce him and take half his money. And you can actually find an intellectualized version of this inside this manifesto. Like he uses like longer words, you know, he has footnotes, but it's the same idea.
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A
And I guess the shooter appears to have targeted ilo, the parent company of pornhub, which is the largest porn site in the world. So given what you just said, does that surprise you?
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C
No. There's long been this idea that porn, not everyone just ascribes to like conspiracy theory that like it is intentional or that it's being done by Jews, which is another common conspiracy theory. But yes, there's this idea that porn is degrading men, making them like easy to manipulate automatons who like do their wage slave jobs and live in misery but not be able to better themselves.
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A
You know, most men rejected by women don't kill people, right? Most people who even kind of identify as incels. I mean this shooter didn't even self identify as such, but they don't commit acts of violence. But in this incel world, like I know that violence is manifested a lot and just tell me more about that.
- [08:25]
C
Well, so for one thing they might complain bitterly about women, but if you look at this manifesto as well as Elliot Rogers manifesto, who in 2014 his mass killings in Isla Vista, California sort of drew all this attention to incels. Like there's so much written about men.
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A
As we come on the air this morning, new details emerging about the deadly rampage near a California college. 10 minutes of terror when 22 year old suspect Elliot Roger opened fire, triggering a deadly chase with police. In this disturbing video, Roger called it a day of retribution.
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C
They feel very bad that men, and particularly high status men don't regard them well. They like are looking for women as a way to give them a way into society to be a person of Good standing to be squared away within these communities. You know, I spent a long time, actually I've now known them about 10 years, talking to a group of incels I met who spent all their time in a discord chat room just talking about this. And they talk about it over and over and over again and how miserable it is. Before we came here, I told you to just be yourself. You said that was a joke. The joke was like, you know, he's some skinny loser and Chad does something awesome and he goes, hey man, how
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A
do you do it?
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C
And the guy Chad just goes, just be yourself, man. Chad doesn't realize that, you know, his good looks or his muscles or his financial status or social status are what make him successful and what get him friends. He doesn't realize that. When I first interviewed this guy in 2018, he said six of his friends had died by suicide. And the crazy part of it is like they're so used to talking about it when they say that to you, they don't even say it. It's this horrible, shocking thing. They're like, oh yeah, so and so killed themselves.
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A
How do you think? Sort of these dark conversations that they're having online. And then also I know they talk about violence in like a pretty memey and jokey way a lot. Ellie, I'm going to fireball multiple government buildings. Ellie, my name is Spot S P A F T. I live in the United Kingdom. Within the next few months, I'm going to Fireball.
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B
Remember that?
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A
And if you don't report me to the police, it's on your conscious, honey.
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C
This is a kind of sarcastic bit,
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A
like how does that turn into real violence outwardly against all also like other, other people.
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C
So what people who have lived in these forums and chat rooms tell me is that you have to build up this thick wall of irony as self defense. And so you never quite know if someone is serious or not or someone's joking or not. So like these insults told me they would joke about going, er, as in going Elliot, Roger or committing a mass murder event, but they never knew for sure if someone was going to do that. There's just this like, unreality and like video game aspect that their life takes on. Like, one insult told me that, you know, he lived in Florida, really close to the beach and he never left his apartment. He was like always online. And one time he had gone to the beach and he was staring out at the waves at sunset and he had the thought, you know, this is beautiful, but I would like it better if it were on my computer screen.
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A
You know, I'm struck by the empathy that you seem to have for some of these men in this community, considering the fact that you are a young woman and just all the kind of vile stuff that is directed towards, well, people like us. And I'm just curious, like, where that comes from.
- [12:23]
C
I mean, I have been sent a drawing of myself naked with a gun to my head, but that's not the guy I, like, chose to interview and get to know. I mean, it's. Everyone wants to tell their story, and once you start listening to them, it's like, a lot of them are smart and funny, and it's just like, dude, just go outside. Like, go in the real world and you'll see, like, this isn't real. All this stuff is an illusion. But I mean, once you get to know, like, people, like, you have to grapple with their humanity, even people who've done horrible things, and obviously I condemn those things, it's terrible. And another part of it is, like, how can we prevent people from slipping into this? Like, how can we prevent them from doing violence? And I don't totally have the answer.
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A
Is there, like, a typical way in which a young man would fall into this kind of subculture?
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C
The pattern I see over and over again, one, they either have a bad relationship with their father in that their father is very remote and ignores them, or is it, like, mean? Then the second one I always see is being bullied in school. And so I would go on these incel forums and read these stories about things that had happened to these kids when they're, you know, 13, 14, and it's horrible. And then you read the next post, and it's like some horrific, barbaric, misogynist rant. And then another element is whether there is actually any medical diagnosis or not, Many identify as autistic. Like, even some have been diagnosed that I've interviewed, but some have not been. And they just kind of identify with it online. It's like an idea that they are very, very smart and they can understand the world, but they don't have the social skills to function in it. And that if society were organized in a way that truly rewarded human greatness to, like, the extent that it deserved, then they would be higher in the rankings. They would be able to attract more beautiful.
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n e not so friendly reminder that no one who's actually good at their job is the office bully like at all. But we can handle that. For all of the no fluff advice for getting ahead in your career without losing your mind, listen to Clock in with Emily Durham. Wherever you get your podcasts,
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A
you've embedded yourself with the alt right as well. But you've said that while that movement has sort of lost steam, the incel community has only grown. And just why do you think that is? And I think it might be surprising for some people to hear that you think the alt right movement has lost steam because they do feel so omnipresent right now. Right. I'm thinking of like Nick Fuentes.
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C
Sure. Nick Fuentes. But like the alt right as it was like, doesn't exist. And all of the main leaders in it are either out, they have converted their politics like they've retired, or they've been indicted. Nick Fuentes was like maybe a teenager when he was at Charlottesville. Violent clashes broke out in Charlottesville as thousands of white nationalists took to the streets. A car plowed into a crowd of counter protesters. The city's mayor says at least one person is dead, so he was certainly not a big leader in the movement at the time. They all describe it as dead. They were after Charlottesville, they were like doxed. Kicked off social media, like it became difficult to make any money online to, you know, These companies like PayPal and Stripe prevented them from being able to process credit card payments. So. And they also kind of felt foolish. You know, they went too far. The goofy like swastika Hitler, Hiling stuff is too foreign and remote to go very far in America. But many of their ideas have succeeded. You know, like bans on immigration, a moratorium on immigration. I see the American Department of Homeland Security's Twitter account sometimes makes references that are to. Alright, memes. Right.
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A
I mean, you certainly see a lot of this stuff permeate through X. Yeah, but, but, but please go on. I'm so interested.
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C
Well, most of those guys are like. I mean, they're like literally our own podcast bitterly saying, like, I invented these ideas, like, why am I not successful? We invented liking Russia, we invented this stuff. But the incels, these are guys who spend 18 hours online at a time, two days on time at a time online, and they are analyzing mainstream culture and looking for soft spots, places to attack contradictions. And it's like this big hive mind. And they've come up with all these different, very catchy, very clever ways of referring to things that the people have. Like normal people have now adopted just the term maxing, like looks maxing and all that. Regular people use that all the time. Yeah, I see Elon Musk talking about, you know, clown world this. And, you know, it's. All of these memes have come from these guys who, like, it's like an alternative culture that you don't get in trouble for appropriating because one, they're anonymous and two, they're just largely white guys.
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A
You know, I mentioned the Toronto van attack in 2018, when Alec Bonassian drove his van into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto and killed 11 people. I thought I was like, accepting it pretty well in the beginning, but these days it's. I think it's harder for me to actually think and accept the fact that she's actually gone forever. The judge in that case, Justice Ann Malloy, ultimately determined that the Incel movement was not, in fact, a primary driving force behind the attack, and that ultimately he was motivated by notoriety. And I do wonder, are we putting too much stock into this? Like, if the same could be true of this Montreal shooting. Is there a risk of, like, ascribing too much of this real world violence to the Incel movement, or do you think. No?
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C
Yeah, I read the judge's ruling and I disagree with her analysis, although not her decision to punish Minassian. We want to believe. They don't really believe this. They can't possibly actually believe this. But if you go and watch Alec Manassian's police interrogation, which is on YouTube, he believes it. It's like, it's like stunning. You can even tell from the police officer talking to him is like repeatedly stunned by the things that he's saying, which again, are more crude and vulgar versions of what was in this manifesto. Like, there is an element of people living in this world. In between sincerity and irony of it being a joke, but also real. But at the end of the day, if you believe it enough to drive a van into people for it, you believe it enough. I just don't know how much more proof you have to offer besides like actually killing people for this cause.
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A
You know, I feel like we're talking about this. Like it's a relatively new thing. It's very online. You know, they traffic in memes and Internet slang. But in like other ways this all feels incredibly familiar, right? Like a lot of listeners will remember the shooting at a col Polytechnique in 1989 in Montreal when. When a shooter targeted and killed 14 women and the shooter was motivated by anti feminism. And so, you know, do you think that this incel movement is a new ideology or just like different packaging of the same kind of violent misogyny that we have been dealing with forever?
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C
Maybe the way to think about it is like, it's like a long standing instinct within society that that has adapted to modern technology and modern social problems, you know, that that shooter didn't have social media. Now it is so much easier to spread these ideas. It's essentially free. I talked to old school white nationalists or like, you know, you used to have to like find the guy who had the address and write a letter to this address in like Arkansas or something and get old photocopies of some years old, you know, extremist screed, but now it's like instant and it washes over you. And that's the other element that I find really troubling is like, and can affect all of us, not just, you know, maybe mentally ill or troubled young men. It's like these social media feeds, like, you don't think you're really, you're not like approaching it the way you would like a political theory text, like some great work of intellectual literature. But. But this stuff buries into your brain just the same. And just being in this world where these, this one idea washes over you again and again and again, which is like, the world is doomed, it is hopeless. You will never find love, you will never find happiness because everything is bad. And the only thing you can do is try to burn it all down. Like it sticks in your brain, you know, it's like it radicalizes you without you even realizing it.
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A
And then, you know, what do you think the effect is of also seeing it in way more mainstream places too, right? As extreme as the shooter's manifesto is, there are several Pages arguing that feminism was a mistake, that allowing women into the workplace has set society back. And those are just the same arguments now being made by influential conservatives, too. For example, like last year, Pete Hegseth reposted a video of a pastor saying women shouldn't be allowed to vote. There are some who have gone so far as to say that they want the 19th amendment repealed. I would support that. And I'd support it on the basis that the. The atomization that comes with our current system is not good for humans. The Heritage foundation, the group behind Project 2025, recently hired a guy named Scott Yener who believes that it should be legal to discriminate against women in the workplace. And like, you know, how do you think about the relationship between this in cell culture and I guess in these examples that I've just given you, like the modern conservative movement.
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C
Yeah. Tucker Carlson said he wanted to go back to a world before Betty Friedan wrote the Feminine Mystique, if you'll allow it. I have to say I'm not sure, because on the one hand, these guys talk about moving the overton window, meaning changing the parameters of acceptable debate. On the other hand, they consider people like Tucker Carlson Pete Hexseth to be, like, a little stupid. And maybe still, you know, in the matrix, they call conservatives con tards. You know, you can guess what that means. Like, I had this incel once, sort of pointing out, actually, an alt right guy using some of his language, being like, these people are culture vultures. They're, like, trying to steal from us. Like, they look down on all of us as rubes. So when the rubes start adopting their ideas, like, maybe they feel better about it. But I don't know if that encourages. I guess I just can't say whether that encourages them because it's also wrapped up in so much contempt.
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Yeah, I mean, I'll note, like in that manifesto, this guy actually called masculinity, Influencer, swindler. It's like he mentions and Andrew Tate by name. Right?
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C
Yeah.
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He went, even went as far as suggested they were valid targets for acts. Acts of violence.
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C
Yes. And conservatives as well. The right wingers, the pickup artists, the weightlifters, all of that stuff.
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A
You profiled a number of incels in your reporting who eventually left the movement. What was their path out?
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C
It took so long. You know, the first time I checked in on them, it had been three years later, and they're still in the same world, you know, up all night drinking and chatting online. Eventually, one of them left because his dad got him to move to a different apartment and he started boxing. And he says to me, listen, I don't want to be portrayed as like a success story because I'm still a little messed up. Like, I like to punch people in the face as a hobby. But he's like a skinny white guy who would go to a gym of, like, working class guys, very diverse, and it kind of taught him about masculinity and having a. Having a hobby and just leaving the house. Another got involved in crypto, which, you know, has its own problems. It can be a world with a lot of scams, as even the enthusiast will tell you. But again, he was leaving his house and then another, I think, got some mental health care and went back to college.
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A
What does that tell you? Like, I just. In trying to address this crisis. Right. Because that's really why you and I would even spend this amount of time trying to understand it. Right. And why you kind of do the work that. That you do. Right. It's not to, like, wallow in all of this.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Kind of detestable stuff. Right, Right.
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C
Well, I guess. And there's one other person who got out of it. Again, like something that this very manifesto makes fun of. The idea of going outside, like, literally leaving the computer and seeing the outside world and then having. Being involved in some kind of process in which they can have small successes that build on themselves. Like this guy being involved in crypto business or the boxer, you know, slowly getting better at boxing, like having some kind of measurable success, no matter how small, seemed to help change them a lot. And then having someone who would talk to them outside this world, just like. I mean, they do kind of just need girlfriends. Right. That's not like I can prescribe that to them, but like, having someone you can confide in and talk to and will be nice to you back, that's a really big deal. And most of them don't have it.
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A
I mean, it's kind of getting at something as sort of horrific and inexcusable as this act of violence was, and as sort of misogynistic and racist and conspiratorial as this manifesto is. It's getting at something that I think a lot of men are struggling with. Not. Not just, you know, in this incel space, but this crisis of loneliness that is. That is happening to young men the world over. And do you think that we can address the incel problem without addressing this kind of more fundamental crisis that seems to be going on right now around masculinity?
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C
No. And one of the things I find so strange about it all is, like, the meek have inherited the earth. Like, if you look at the very top levels of our economy, it's like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, like, nerds. Nerds who made a lot of money in tech. And yet what do they do? They go work out. They want to be the jocks still. It's like, you won, but you're still mad about it. And I, like, oh, my God, they would be so mad at me for saying this. Or, like, they need to. Men need to be able to talk about their feelings when they're young, and they need to have better relationships with their dads. And. Yeah, I mean, God, I. I know people would get so mad at me about this. Like, I'm telling people how to live. But, like, if dads could just be nicer to their sons and not call them losers if they're bad at sports, like, the world would be 10% better. And that's a lot.
- [30:57]
A
Ellie, this was really interesting. I feel like I could keep. I could keep going, but that's all the time that we have today. But I hope that you'll come back on. It was really. It was really good to chat with you.
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C
Oh, yeah. Great talking to you, too. Thank you. You.
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A
That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.
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B
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