Via CBC:
It all began with a Facebook post on Jan. 19, 2019.
A Colorado man named Christopher Cleary took to social media and laid out the plan for an attack that was coming together in his mind.
"I'm 27 years old and I've never had a girlfriend before and I'm still a virgin," Cleary wrote. "This is why I'm planning on shooting up a public place soon and being the next mass shooter."
In this case, police tracked him down — en route to a women's march in Utah — before he was able to carry out his plan.
But it doesn't always work out that way when men who identify themselves as incels — or involuntary celibates — post such thoughts online.
In April 2018, Alek Minassian allegedly drove a van into pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring 16 others. Before the attack, a post appeared on Minassian's Facebook account that said "the Incel Rebellion has already begun."
Experts interviewed by The Fifth Estate have identified 120 instances of extreme violence in Canada by right-wing groups, including incels, in the past 30 years. This is compared to only seven by Islamist-inspired extremists.
Authorities in Canada and the U.S. are often quick to call these incidents "lone wolf" attacks, but criminologists and sociologists are sounding the alarm on incels and other growing internet subcultures that promote extreme violence. They say the threat posed by these groups isn't being taken seriously enough.
"These people are extraordinarily dangerous," Mike Arntfield, a criminologist at Western University in London, Ont., told The Fifth Estate. "As soon as you have a suicidal, disoriented male, all bets are off in terms of what they're capable of doing.... Many are suicidal and some are homicidal.
"This [group] has an organization to it."
Still, these attacks are often quickly deemed "lone wolf" attacks by authorities, and the public is told there's no threat to public safety.
Experts in Canada and the U.S. are sounding the alarm bells on groups like incels, and encouraging authorities to take them more seriously.
"We're missing something," said Perry. "How is this not an attack on national security?… There's a real and present threat associated with the far right.… I think we make a dangerous mistake thinking about it as only ... a fringe movement."
There is much more at the link above. It's not a single loner nerd on a computer by himself. They're organized. They talk to each other. They spread their message to others. Lone wolves my ass. Lock if old."The Elliot Rodgers and other mass killers do sometimes take on a mythical quality because, for some incels, they embody the ultimate form of resistance against a feminist culture that doesn't value them for who they are," Haenfler said.
Incels may be a recent term, Haenfler said, but in many ways the social climate that produced them has been 50 years in the making.
"What we've seen is a long-term cycle of social change in which women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, immigrants and others have demanded recognition and rights," he said. "There's the sense on the part of the incels that those rights are coming at the expense of white, heterosexual men."
Haenfler has been studying trends in alt-right and incel violence, and said he worries that things will only get worse.
"I wish, with all my heart, I could say that we've seen the last of these mass killings, but in all honesty, the cultural ingredients are there. The foundation is there. That hasn't gone away. So, in the foreseeable future, I'm very sad to say, I anticipate more of these kinds of killings."
