Into The Valley of Virgin Violence: The Incel Effect

Into The Valley of Virgin Violence: The Incel Effect

©Loren Coleman, MSW  2018

Author of The Copycat Effect

A specific brand of brutal bloodshed against women, blacks, gays, and Jews is being visited upon the land, with an alt-right flavor that seems hard to ignore. Well-known within a vast online community of isolated, mostly male individuals, a common denominator of hate ties the killers together. But for most people in our culture, this activity is flying under the radar.

The desensitizating "breaking news" coming from the wall-to-wall media may mildly alert you to the episodes of mass violence.  Few citizens, nevertheless, have been aware of the celebratory nature of how the events are spreading. The incidents are being linked and copied by the perpetrators and their followers in the involuntary celibacy community. From this cultural diffusion these violent behaviors are becoming a widespread social problem.

The time has come for the overt recognition of this mayhem with a phrase, The Incel Effect.

[For a new update, see "Incels Bring on the Apocalypse," January 24, 2019.]

Attack at Hot Yoga

Scott Paul Beierle (October 6, 1978 - November 2, 2018) entered Hot Yoga Tallahassee studio carrying a black bag and acting like a customer at 5:37 PM EDT on November 2, 2018. He then began shooting six people, killing two women. When located, Beirle was found deceased, as he had died by suicide.

People in the yoga class reportedly fought the shooter, and a man in a bloody white T-shirt ran into a downstairs bar and claimed to have charged the shooter only to be pistol whipped.

Maura Binkley, 21, and Nancy Van Vessem, 61.

Scott Paul Beierle, according to his social media profiles, was a military veteran and a former English teacher for the Anne Arundel County Public School System in Maryland. He twice had been previously charged with battery in 2012 and 2016, when he was accused of grabbing a woman's buttocks in both situations. 

Beirerle used trigger words known within his "community" to signal what he was communicating.

In YouTube videos posted in 2014, Beierle identified with the involuntary celibate community ("incel"), complained about sexual rejection from women, and ranted against interracial dating.

“I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males… that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing,” Beierle said in the video. “This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent.”

Beirerle used the name Scott Carnifex—the latter word meaning "executioner" in Latin.

Beierle made videos attacking African-Americans, immigrants and women. Beierle was a member of two groups on his Facebook page, Florida State University  College Republicans and We Are Conservatives, but avoided the mainstream membership of a political party.

Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, currently the state’s Democratic candidate for governor, returned to the city from the campaign trail on Saturday night, November 3, 2018, after getting news of the shooting.

Few outside the incel world knew that yoga females had been a long-term target for the hatred of incel males. They even had a special term for these women: "Beckys."

Within misogyny discussions of the incel community, "The Becky" is zeroed in on as a yoga female not to be trusted.

Who are the "incels"?

Incels

Incels (a portmanteau of involuntary celibates) are members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom. Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment, misanthropy, self-pity, self-loathing, misogyny, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against sexually active people.

"Incels believe they have no sense of control hence the term 'involuntary'. While we may go through phases of rejection when it comes to dating or romance, Incels may feel such a sense of defeat, rejection, and unworthiness that they start to believe it themselves as being 'forever alone' (FA)," writes therapist Sam Louie in Psychology Today on April 24, 2018.

Today, self-identified incels are mostly white, male, and heterosexual.

It began differently.

Alana

Despite the current identification between incels and straight, angry, white males, it was intriguingly a woman who began the movement. Toronto's Alana Boltwood (pictured) was the first person to systematically think about involuntary celibacy and caused the word "incel" to be coined.

As Wikipedia summarized this ironic history:

The first online community to use the term "incel" was started in 1993 when a Canadian college student known only by her first name, Alana, created a website in order to discuss her sexual inactivity with others. The website, titled "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project," was used by people of all genders to share their thoughts and experiences. In 1997, she started a mailing list on the topic that used the abbreviation INVCEL, which was later shortened to "incel," where it was defined as "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time." 

During her college career and after, she realized she was queer, and became more comfortable with her identity. She later gave the site to a stranger. When speaking about the website in 2018, Alana said, "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years."

Alana, the coiner of the term incel, initially considered using other terms such as "perpetually single" or "dating shy."

Elliot Rodger Incident

The breakthrough event that marked a turning point for future copycats tied to the incel community was the mass shooting committed by Elliot Rodger.

On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, 22, began his attack by stabbing three men to death in his apartment. Afterwards, he drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house and shot three Delta Delta Delta sorority students outside, killing two. He drove past the nearby Isla Vista Deli Mart and shot to death a male student who was inside. He began to speed through Isla Vista, shooting and wounding several pedestrians and striking several others with his car. Rodger exchanged gunfire with police twice during the attack, receiving a non-fatal gunshot to the hip. The rampage ended when his car crashed into a parked vehicle and came to a stop. Police found him dead in the car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Rodger ended up killing himself in Isla Vista, California, near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara. These killings drew media attention to the concept of involuntary celibacy, and particularly the misogyny and glorification of violence that are a mainstay of many incel communities. Rodger self-identified as an incel and left behind a 137-page manifesto and YouTube videos detailing his involuntary celibacy and discussing how he wanted revenge for being rejected by women. He had been an active member of an involuntary celibacy community called PUAHate (short for "pickup artist hate"), and referenced it several times in his manifesto. Although PUAHate shut down soon after the attack, Rodger became something of a martyr to some communities that remained, and to some of those that began later. He has been referenced by the perpetrators or suspected perpetrators of several other mass killings. 

Rodger was born in London, England, and moved to the United States with his parents when he was five years old. He was raised in Los Angeles. His father is British filmmaker Peter Rodger, whose credits include working as a second unit assistant director for The Hunger Games, and his own feature length film Oh My God, and his mother is Li Chin Rodger, a Malaysian research assistant for a film company. Elliot Rodger's paternal grandfather was photojournalist George Rodger. (Source.)

While other incel-linked incidents have been retro-dated as having occurred before the Elliot Rodger/Isla Vista event of 2014, this is the one that is seen, within the incel community, as the "first."

Mass Violence and Incels

Notable mass killings and other violent attacks in North America have been committed by men who have self-identified as involuntarily celibates, or whose statements align with incel ideologies. The general incel background of being misogynistic, rightwing, racist, and anti-semitic has aligned some white heterosexual males with outbursts of violence and mass murder.

The following is my compilation list of the mass violent offenders who are probable incels, in chronological order:

December 6, 1989: Marc Lépine

After several months of planning, Marc Lépine (born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi) entered the École Polytechnique de Montréal, on the afternoon of December 6, 1989. He had long complained about women working in non-traditional jobs, and after separating men and women in a classroom, he shot the women, claiming that he was fighting feminism. He then moved into other parts of the building, only targeting the women in classrooms he went to, before killing himself. His suicide note blamed feminists for ruining his life.

"Incel postings sometimes include disturbing reverence for Marc Lepine, a Canadian who opened fire at the Ecole Polytechnique, a Montreal engineering school, in 1989, killing 14 women and wounding 10 other women and four men before killing himself," wrote the Chicago Tribune.

April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho

On April 16, 2007, a school shooting occurred at West Ambler Johnston Hall and Norris Hall at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg, Virginia. Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate student at the university and a U.S. resident of South Korean origin, shot 49 people on campus with two semi-automatic pistols (a Glock 19 and a Walther P22), killing 32 and wounding 17. Several other victims were injured jumping from windows to escape Cho. As police stormed Norris Hall to find and arrest Cho, he shot himself in the head with a pistol, and died instantly.

There is a wiki site named "incel inside" that notes some killers who are seen as incel mass murderers before Elliot Rodger. Seung-Hui Cho is so identified due to his relationships with women, being rejected by a prostitute, having a restraining order placed against him after meeting a potential date, and stalking situations. The woman who was creeped out by Cho and considered charges against him was named Emily Hilscher. She was one of the first people Cho shot before the massacre.

August 4, 2009: George Sodini

The 2009 Collier Township shooting, also referred to as the LA Fitness shooting, was a mass shooting and murder-suicide that took place on August 4, 2009 in an LA Fitness health club in Collier Township, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The attack resulted in four deaths, including that of the perpetrator, who took his own life. Nine other people were injured. The fitness center is approximately 10 miles (16 km) south of Pittsburgh, in the Great Southern Shopping Center, a strip mall located in the Kirwan Heights section of Collier Township.

On a website registered in his name, Sodini chronicled over a nine-month period his rejections by women and his severe sexual frustration. "Who knows why? I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29)," he writes. "Last time I slept all night with a girlfriend it was 1982. Girls and women don't even give me a second look ANYWHERE."

Wikipedia notes: "George Sodini has since widely been discussed online by the incel movement."

"Mass murderers are treated like heroes in the looniest incel chatter," noted the Chicago Tribune on May 4, 2018, calling it "Going Sodini."
The Hot Yoga Tallahassee shooting followed the model of the LA Fitness health club attack.

May 23, 2014: Elliot Rodger

See above.

Rodger is among one of the most frequently and regularly praised attackers by members of the incel communities. Other killers have used his name as their own, mentioned him in their statements, and copied catch phrases of his. Media treatments, especially in England (Rodger was born in the UK), tend to call him "The Virgin Killer" and the "kissless virgin." The Virgin Killer (director Talya Tibbon) was a 2014 documentary about Elliot Rodger, produced by the UK's ITN-Channel 4.

His followers call him "Saint Elliot" and some even celebrate "Saint Elliot Day," May 23rd, the anniversary of his killing rampage in Isla Vista, California, according to David Furtrelle's "When a Mass Murderer Has a Cult Following," The Cut, April 27, 2018.

November 4, 2014: David Michael Kalac

After drinking extensively on November 4, 2014, David Michael Kalac posted fantasies on 4chan about wanting to kill his girlfriend and then did. He later posted pictures of her body after he murdered her. His act was celebrated by the incel community.

Amber Coplin, Kalac's victim.

June 17, 2015: Dylann Storm Roof

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American white supremacist and mass murderer convicted for perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015.
During a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured one other person. After several people identified Roof as the main suspect, he became the center of a manhunt that ended the morning after the shooting with his arrest in Shelby, North Carolina. He later confessed that he committed the shooting in hopes of igniting a race war.

On June 20, 2015, a website that had been registered to a "Dylann Roof" on February 9, 2015, lastrhodesian.com, was discovered. Though the identity of the domain's owner was intentionally masked the day after it was registered, law enforcement officials confirmed Roof as the owner. The site included a cache of photos of Roof posing with a handgun and a Confederate Battle Flag, as well as with the widely recognized neo-Nazi code numbers 88 (an abbreviation for the salute "Heil Hitler!") and 1488, written in sand. Roof was also seen spitting on and burning an American flag. While some photographs seemed to show Roof at home in his room, others were taken on an apparent tour of slavery-related historical sites in North and South Carolina, including Sullivan's Island, the largest slave disembarkation port in North America, four former plantations, two cemeteries (one for white Confederate soldiers, the other for slaves), and the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville. Roof is believed to have taken self-portraits using a timer, and his visits were not remembered by staff members working at the sites.

The website also contained an unsigned, 2,444-word manifesto apparently authored by Roof, in which he outlined his opinions, all methodically broken into the following sections: "Blacks," "Jews," "Hispanics," "East Asians," "Patriotism," and "An Explanation."

October 1, 2015: Christopher Sean "Chris" Harper-Mercer

Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people and injured eight others before killing himself in a shooting at the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Oregon on October 1, 2015. He left a manifesto at the scene, outlining his interest in other mass mass shooters, describing them as "people who stand with the gods."
Before the attack, when someone on an online message board had speculated he was "saving himself for someone special," Harper-Mercer had replied: "Involuntarily so." Several hours before the shooting, someone suspected to be Harper-Mercer posted a threat to a Pacific Northwest college to /r9k/, a 4chan board with many involuntarily celibate posters.

On the day of the shooting, Harper-Mercer gave a survivor numerous writings showing he had studied mass killings, including the 2014 killing spree at Isla Vista, California, the Elliot Rodger event. These expressed his sexual frustration as a virgin, animosity toward black men, and a lack of fulfillment in his isolated life. In them, he said "Other people think I'm crazy, but I'm not. I'm the sane one," and that he would be "welcomed in Hell and embraced by the devil." He also reportedly admired the perpetrator of the WDBJ shooting for the fame received, and wrote that: "A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day."
Chris Harper-Mercer was a self-described incel saying, “Here I am, 26, with no friends, no job, no girlfriend” in his own manifesto.

July 31, 2016: Sheldon Russell Bentley 

A private security guard at the Lucky 97 grocery store, Sheldon Bentley robbed and killed an unconscious man in an alleyway in Edmonton, Alberta. During his trial, Bentley said he killed the man by stomping on his abdomen because he was frustrated with stress from his job and with being involuntarily celibate for four years.

Bentley stomped on Donald Doucette, 51, who died within minutes from massive internal bleeding.

At the sentencing hearing, a forensic psychiatrist and a probation officer submitted reports outlining Bentley's anger and frustration about not being able to find a sexual partner.

Donald Doucette

"He [Sheldon Bentley] seems to put himself into the category of an involuntary celibate person," Crown prosecutor Kristen Logan said.

January 19, 2017: Alexandre Bissonnette

The Quebec City mosque shooting was a terrorist attack/mass shooting that occurred on the evening of January 29, 2017, at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, a mosque in the Sainte-Foy neighbourhood of Quebec City, Canada. Six worshippers were killed and nineteen others injured when a lone gunman opened fire just before 8:00 pm, shortly after the end of evening prayers. Fifty-three people were reported present at the time of the shooting.


The perpetrator, Alexandre Bissonnette, was charged with six counts of first-degree murder. Bissonnette searched the web for information about Elliot Rodger less than 24 hours before opening fire, The Globe and Mail reported.

March 20, 2017: James Harris Jackson

Timothy Caughman, a black 66-year-old man, was collecting cans for recycling in Manhattan, New York City when James Harris Jackson, a white 28-year-old man, allegedly approached him and stabbed him multiple times with a sword, on March 20, 2017. Caughman later died of his injuries. Jackson subsequently turned himself in to police custody and confirmed that he traveled from Maryland to New York with the intention of killing black men in order to prevent white women from having interracial relationships with them. He wanted to kill several young black men, and this was "practice."

"Incels overlap with white supremacists," noted online comment about this attack.

Timothy Caughman

Caughman was born in 1950 or 1951 in Jamaica, Queens. His parents were a home health care aide and a pastor. He was raised in the South Jamaica Houses in Queens. He graduated from Brooklyn College with an associate's degree and earned a living as a social service worker. He took up can and bottle recycling to earn money and keep busy. For the last 20 years of his life, he lived on West 36th Street in Manhattan, in a building known as The Barbour Hotel. It is now housing for people transitioning out of homelessness, but Caughman was not homeless.

May 20, 2017: Sean Urbanski

On May 20, 2017, Sean Urbanski, a student at the University of Maryland, allegedly murdered Richard Collins III in an unprovoked possible hate crime while Collins was waiting for an Uber. Urbanski was a member of the racist Facebook group Alt-Reich Nation. Police found a 3 to 4 inch silver blade in Urbanski’s front right pocket.
Collins, a 23-year-old student at Bowie State University, was visiting friends at the College Park campus, and he and his two companions watched as Urbanski, who was unknown to them, approached. Urbanski was "yelling, perhaps screaming" as he approached them, according to eyewitnesses. He appeared to be intoxicated.

Urbanski told Collins: "Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” When a puzzled Collins said no, Mitchell said, Urbanski stabbed him in the chest and fled, police said. Collins died at the hospital.
The victim was due to graduate from Bowie State with a business administration degree on Tuesday and was recently commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army's intelligence division.

May 26, 2017: Jeremy Joseph Christian

The 2017 Portland train attack occurred on May 26, 2017, when a man fatally stabbed two people and injured a third, after he was confronted for shouting what were described as racist and anti-Muslim slurs at two teenage girls on a MAX Light Rail train in Portland, Oregon. Two of the victims, Ricky John Best of Happy Valley, a technician for the City of Portland's Bureau of Development Services, a U.S. Army veteran and a father of four children, and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche of Portland, a recent university graduate, died following the attack. The third victim, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, survived serious neck wounds.

Victims: Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche

Following the attack, Jeremy Joseph Christian, who described himself as a white nationalist, was arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder, and other crimes. He held extremist views, posting neo-Nazi, antisemitic, and far-right material on social media, as well as material indicating an affinity for political violence. Christian described himself as a white nationalist. The Oregonian noted that Christian made many contradictory Facebook posts, but that such contradictions are typical of extremists. It said his posts "reveal a comic book collector with nebulous political affiliations who above all else seemed to hate circumcision and Hillary Clinton." He envisioned himself an anti-circumcision extremist. 

At times he expressed support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, although he wrote he did not vote. According to friends and acquaintances Christian's actions were becoming increasingly unstable, and he was in need of mental help, but he had not been given a formal diagnosis.
In April 2017, Christian wrote, "I just Challenged Ben Ferencz(Last Living Nuremberg Persecutor) to a Debate in the Hague with Putin as our judge. I will defend the Nazis and he will defend the AshkeNAZIs [a reference to European Jews]." He praised Timothy McVeigh in an online posting on April 19, the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He also "posted conspiracy theory memes from the right-wing Alex Jones Channel".
According to The Portland Mercury, Christian was a "known right-wing extremist and white supremacist". He had participated in various alt-right rallies in Portland. One month before the stabbing, Christian appeared at the right-wing March for Free Speech in Portland's Montavilla Park. He wore a Revolutionary War-era flag of the United States, and carried a baseball bat, which police confiscated. He gave Nazi salutes, and used a racial slur at least once. At the event, Christian was videotaped shouting "Die, Muslims!"
The day before the killings Christian had made racial threats on another train, threatened a conductor, and hurled a bottle at a black woman who then maced him, as seen on cell phone videos.

July 14, 2017: Lane Maurice Davis

According to the SPLC, "Lane Maurice Davis is a well-known and at times popular alt-right social-media figure who uses the nom de plume 'Seattle4Truth,' even though in reality he lived in rural Skagit County near the town of Bow, on Samish Island in Puget Sound, about 75 miles distant. His YouTube videos frequently have garnered thousands of views, and he wrote for the popular alt-right site The Ralph Retort. At one time, he was reportedly employed as a researcher for Milo Yiannopoulos.

Chuck Davis

Earlier this summer, under his own name, the 33-year-old stabbed his 73-year-old father — Charles “Chuck” Davis, a highly regarded civic leader in the Skagit County area and longtime attorney — to death during a heated argument over the younger Davis’ obsessive beliefs in conspiracy theories." The younger Davis picked a fight with his parents on July 14, calling them “leftists” and “pedophiles,” and mentioning Pizzagate.

One site called Lane Davis a "33-year-old permavirgin."

August 12, 2017: James Alex Fields

On August 12, 2017, a car crashed into a crowd of people who had been peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The 20-year-old driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., had previously espoused neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs. Fields was charged with hit and run, first-degree murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, multiple counts of federal hate crimes for injuring 28 others, and other crimes.

Heather Heyer was a victim of Charlottesville.

October 1, 2017: Stephen Paddock

The 2017 Las Vegas shooting was a mass shooting on the night of October 1, when a gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. Perpetrator Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, fired more than 1,100 rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 58 people and leaving 851 injured from gunfire and the resulting panic. The shooting occurred between 10:05 and 10:15 p.m. PDT; about an hour later Paddock was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 

The 58 fatalities included 36 women and 22 men.

Wikipedia noted: "After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting by Stephen Paddock, some of the involuntarily celibate community celebrated the shooter, who they felt was a hero who was targeting 'normies'."

December 7, 2017: William Edward Atchison

William Atchison killed two people on Pearl Harbor Day, 2017, before killing himself in Aztec, New Mexico, in a shooting at Aztec High School, where he had previously been a student. He had used the pseudonym "Elliot Rodger" on several online forums, and praised "the supreme gentleman" (a term Rodger had used to describe himself, which has since been adopted as a moniker by incel communities).

Atchison's online activity included posting pro-Hitler and pro-Trump thoughts on alt-right forums and white nationalist websites like The Daily Stormer under such usernames as "Future Mass Shooter" and "Adam Lanza," and joking about school shootings, in particular the Columbine High School massacre. Via a Steam chat group he was in contact with the perpetrator of the 2016 Munich shooting. He also posted about his frustration with life in rural New Mexico and bleak career prospects. Atchison was also a sysop in Encyclopedia Dramatica, a website he joined when he was 11.

Casey Jordan Marquez, a senior, and Francisco Fernandez, a junior, were the victims.

February 14, 2018: Nikolas Cruz

On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen students and staff members and injuring seventeen others. Witnesses identified nineteen-year-old former student Nikolas Cruz as the assailant, and he was arrested in Coral Springs by the Broward County Sheriff's Office shortly after he escaped the scene; Cruz had purchased food at Walmart and McDonald's restaurants after leaving the scene of the shooting. Cruz confessed to being the perpetrator, and he was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Police and prosecutors have not yet offered a motive and are investigating "a pattern of disciplinary issues and unnerving behavior".

It is the deadliest shooting at a high school in United States history surpassing the Columbine High School massacre which took place on April 20, 1999.
Cruz killed seventeen people and injured seventeen others in a shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida before being arrested. Cruz had previously posted online that "Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten."

Sixteen Florida victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. L-R: Alyssa Alhadeff, Peter Wang, Gina Montalto, Alaina Petty, Joaquin Oliver, Luke Hoyer, Martin Duque, Jaime Guttenburg. Bottom row, left to right: Chris Hixon, Alex Schachter, Cara Loughran, Meadow Pollack, Scott Beigel, Nicholas Dworet, Aaron Feis, Carmen Schentrup.

Items recovered by police at the scene included gun magazines with swastikas carved in them. One student reported that Cruz had drawn a swastika and the words "I hate niggers" on his backpack. CNN reported that Cruz was in a private Instagram group chat where he expressed racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and anti-immigrant (xenophobic) views. He said he wanted to kill gay people and Mexicans, and talked about keeping black people in chains. He said he hated black people "simply because they were black," and Jewish people because he believed "they wanted to destroy the world". He also referred to white women who engaged in interracial relationships as traitors.

A student's mother said that he also bragged about killing animals.

April 23, 2018: Alek Minassian

The Toronto van attack was a vehicle-ramming attack that occurred on April 23, 2018, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A man, alleged to be Alek Minassian, drove a rented van and sped through the North York City Centre business district, deliberately targeting pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16, some critically. The attack started at the intersection of Yonge Street and Finch Avenue, and proceeded south along the sidewalks of Yonge Street to near Sheppard Avenue. The 25-year-old Minassian was arrested uninjured just south of the crime scene, after attempting to provoke a police officer to kill him. The arrest was made at 1:32 p.m. EDT, seven minutes after the first 9-1-1 call reporting the incident was made. The incident is the deadliest vehicle-ramming attack in Canadian history.
Following the attack, a Facebook post attributed to Minassian circulated online, which indicated he may have identified himself as an incel ("involuntary celibate").

The post, dated to shortly before the beginning of the attack on April 23, read:

Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

4chan is a popular but controversial Internet imageboard. "Chad" and "Stacy" are nicknames used on incel-related forums and on the /r/incels subreddit (banned since November 7, 2017) on Reddit to refer to popular, attractive sexually-active men and women; a subreddit is an individual community on Reddit based on a topic of interest. The term "Incel Rebellion" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "Beta Uprising" or "Beta Male Uprising," which refers to a violent response to sexlessness, which incels view as sexual deprivation. Elliot Rodger was the mass murderer behind the 2014 Isla Vista killings in California. Rodger intended to target attractive women and sexually successful men, which led to him being posthumously idolized by some people on misogynistic online fringe communities, including several incel websites. Facebook verified the account as Minassian's. A source in the Department of National Defence told media that C23249161 was Minassian's military identification number during his army training.
After the 2018 Toronto van attack, a poster on a website created to supersede /r/incels wrote about suspected perpetrator Alek Minassian, "I hope this guy wrote a manifesto because he could be our next new saint."

The 10 victims of the van attack in Toronto on April 23, 2018. Back, from left: Anne Marie D'Amico, Dorothy Sewell and Mary Elizabeth (Betty) Forsyth. Middle row, from left: Geraldine Brady, Chul Min (Eddie) Kang, So He Chung and Ji Hun Kim. Front, from left: Beutis Renuka Amarasingha, Munir Najjar and Andrea Bradden. Credit: Heather Buchanan

May 18, 2018: Dimitrios Pagourtzis

A school shooting occurred at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, United States, in the Houston metropolitan area, on May 18, 2018. Ten people – eight students and two teachers – were fatally shot and thirteen others were wounded. The suspected shooter was taken into custody and later identified by police as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old student at the school.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis reportedly studied mass shootings of the past before killing 10 students and teachers and wounding 13 others. A source told ABC News he “used aspects of those (attacks) in his own shooting.”

Mirroring the attacks in Parkland, Florida, the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, and Columbine High school in 1999, Pagourtzis snuck a .38 caliber pistol and Remington shotgun in his black coat and brought it to school Friday morning (May 18) and opened fire before the first bell rang.

Pagourtzis almost immediately was tagged as an incel killer. This sad story focuses on Pagourtzis’ apparent first victim, Shana Fisher. According to Fisher’s mother, Sadie Rodriguez, the girl “had 4 months of problems from this boy …. He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.” Rodriguez says that Pagourtzis continued to get more aggressive and her daughter finally stood up to him, embarrassing him in class. “A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like.” She claims, “Shana being the first one.”

One the shadows hovering over the Santa Fe shootings is whether Pagourtzis should be considered part of the so-called online world of “incels,” involuntary celibates. Male incels are part of a peripheral online community known as pick-up artists (PUA), sexually frustrated men who blame women for their misery – and virginity – and often advocate for violence against them. According to Vice, PUA is “a manipulative craft largely developed by Neil Strauss’s The Game, a book that provides its readers with techniques like ‘negging,’ which teach men to insult women in order to charm them into bed.”... 

Pagourtzis may well have had incel “tendencies,” an apprehension (if not fear) of females, that contributed to the people he killed. Of the 10 people he killed, 7 were female (5 students, 2 teachers) and three were male students. Most disturbing was that white nationalist paraphernalia he displayed on line – a “Born to kill” T-shirt, a Nazi Iron Cross, a Communist hammer-and-sickle, a kamikaze rising sun and Knights Templaridol. What this confusing assortment of symbols meant to the Sante Fe shooter is anyone’s guess. Sadly 10 people paid with their lives as Pagourtzis lived out its incoherent meaning. Source.

June 28, 2018: Jarrod W. Ramos

On June 28, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at the offices of The Capital, a newspaper serving Annapolis, Maryland. The gunman, Jarrod Ramos, shot and killed five employees with a shotgun. Two others were injured while trying to escape. Ramos was arrested shortly after and is currently imprisoned while awaiting trial for the shooting. The newspaper published an article in 2011 about Ramos being put on probation for harassing an acquaintance from high school through social media and email. Ramos, angered by the article, brought a defamation lawsuit against The Capital; a judge later dismissed the suit. Ramos is alleged to have sent enraged letters and messages to the newspaper's offices about his threats to attack the office and its staff; no legal action was taken after the threats were received.

"The details of the Gazette article contained within the court’s opinion paint Ramos as an isolated and unstable individual who reached out to a woman on Facebook because she had said ‘hello’ to him years earlier in high school. Ramos began obsessively harassing her when she presumably rebuffed his entreaties or refused to provide him with emotional support. This is a recognizable pattern of behavior frequently discussed within the increasingly notorious Involuntary-celibate (Incel) movement. There’s no evidence that Ramos shared anything beyond this common worldview with the Incel community, but it is worth noting that in the aftermath of the Toronto attack, ostensibly on behalf of a larger ‘Incel rebellion’, newsrooms in Canada received online threats and increased security as a temporary precaution. His history of harassing women does place him on an ideological continuum alongside similar, more organized people who harbour a deep hatred of the free press....The Incel community whose views and behaviours Ramos echoed through his harassment of women and the National Rifle Association, who championed Ramos’ right to own the weapon that he used." ~ Kevin Metcalf, "The Civility War - How Trump, Milo, Incels and the NRA are linked in the Capital Gazette attack," Medium, June 28, 2018.

July 22, 2018: Faisal Hussain

The Danforth shooting was a mass shooting that occurred on Danforth Avenue in the Greektown neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on the night of July 22, 2018. Faisal Hussain killed two people and wounded thirteen (eight directly) using a semiautomatic pistol. He died by suicide after a shootout with Toronto Police Service (TPS) officers.

"After the 2018 Danforth shooting, posters on an incel message board expressed excitement with the possibility that the perpetrator might be an incel, although no motive has been identified," mentioned Wikipedia.

Ten-year-old Julianna Kozis and 18-year-old Reese Fallon were killed in the attack.

November 2, 2018: Scott Paul Beierle

See the first segment of this essay. This is the shooting at the Hot Yoga Tallahassee studio. Two women were killed, and Beierle took his own life.

One of the Hot Yoga victims killed, Maura Binkley, 21, was a sister of the Delta Delta Delta sorority.

Two of the victims Elliot Rodger killed, Veronika Weiss and Katie Cooper, were Delta Delta Delta sorority sisters, as well.

According to the London Free Press:

[Scott] Beierle slammed the “treachery” of young girls he went to school with, including 13-year-olds. And he names the women he believed...who had done him wrong.
— Claimed: “There are whores in — not only every city, not only every town, but every village.”
— Opposed interracial marriage, claiming the women “betrayed their blood.”
— He said of one woman who scratched a date with him: “I could have ripped her head off,” while he wanted to “blow off” another’s head.
— Expressed his admiration for...the incel movement.

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." ~ Margaret Atwood

With a new broader awareness of The Incel Effect, more mass killers may fall under this umbrella term and a clearer understanding will begin to occur regarding this phenomenon. Preventative measures can be explored too.

What is unfortunately also true is that members of the incel community appear to keep adding past mass killers to the rolls of "incel killers." This occurred recently with the involuntary celibacy blogger at Rants of an Incel, who said The Dark Knight/Aurora mass murderer James Holmes was an incel, with little or no evidence. It perhaps says a great deal that Rants of an Incel no longer exists.



November 7, 2018: Ian David Long

At about 11:20 pm Pacific, Wednesday, November 7, 2018, a trench coat-wearing individual began shooting at dancers in the Borderline Bar and Grill. The establishment is located at 99 Rolling Oaks Drive, Thousand Oaks, California (well-known as the setting for many Hollywood movies). Borderline is a country and western music bar, and it was "college night." And "singles night." (Was this an "incel" target?)

The white male suspect was said to be dressed in a dark sunglasses, a black coat, and a beard. He had a hoodie or a hood over his head too. He fired approximately 30 rounds and throwing smoke bombs.

Long, before he graduated from high school, it was revealed after the shooting, allegedly assaulted his high school track coach.

Dominique Colell kept it quiet because the other coaches did not want her to ruin Long's chances in the Marines.

“He attacked me. He attacked his high school track coach,” said Colell. “Who does that?”
For the former Newbury Park High School track coach this day has been full of emotions — from sadness to guilt. Because she never filed charges against Long after she says he assaulted her his senior year.
Colell says it happened during practice when someone found a phone and she was trying to figure out who it belonged to.
“Ian came up and started screaming at me that was his phone,” said Colell. “He just started grabbing me. He groped my stomach. He groped my butt. I pushed him off me and said after that — ‘you’re off the team.’ ”
But Colell says she was encouraged by other coaches and the school to accept an apology to not ruin his future in the Marine Corps.
“I should have reported it then,” said Colell.
And although she never would have predicted this, Colell says she doesn’t believe this is just a case of PTSD. She says Long had issues long before he was ever a Marine. ~ CBS Los Angeles.

Long had been living with his mother at the time. He reportedly had anti-social behavior.

Did Ian David Long think of himself as an incel?

+++

Postscript

My essay was researched and written after the Hot Yoga attack of November 2, 2018. It was posted on Monday, November 5, 2018. As a sign of the heightened interest in this avenue of thought, concurrently Inside Edition broadcast an segment on the Hot Yoga attack and incels also on November 5, 2018. They furthermore published an online article, "Did Florida Yoga Studio Gunman Want to Get Revenge on Women for Rejecting Him?".

During their Monday segment, Inside Edition noted that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired an episode on October 11, 2018, entitled "Revenge." It has the unit investigating a series of assaults where the victims are called "Chad" and "Stacy." They discover an online incel group is the source of the violence. Kathryn VanArendonk wrote a review of the episode for Vulture on October 17, 2018: "Law & Order: SUV Did a Whole Episode About Incels."

Appendix: Incel Terms

Incel community members make use of self-pity, misogyny, misanthropy, narcissism, and racism and exhibit behaviors like "catfishing women" (meaning "to lure females into relationships by means of fictional online personas"). 

A host of specific terms are used by "involuntary celibates" (shortened to "incels"). These include:

inceldom or incelibacy = inability to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one

love-shy = those with social anxiety or excessive shyness preventing romantic success

Along with a long list of other terms with similar meanings, including "omegas," "zeta males," "betas," "the undersexed," or "the sexless."

Members of incel communities may describe individuals or actions as:

femoids = women

Stacys = attractive sexually active women

Beckys = less attractive sexually active women

{Footnote: The Incel community actually appropriated the above art from a woman who was making an entirely different point. See below.}

Various social media "illustrations" of these definitions.

Chads = sexually active men

Other terms...

Mogging = eclipsing another person in terms of physical appearance and thereby undermining them. 

Looksmaxing = enhancing one's appearance by methods including dressing nicely, going to the gym, or undergoing plastic surgery.

NEET = not in education, employment, or training"

Variations of the term "incel" include:

volcels = voluntary celibate; someone who chooses to forego sexual intercourse

marcels = marrieds

nearcels = those who are considered nearly incel

hicels = those who have high standards; are very picky when dating)

heightcels = short)

fakecels = those who claim to be incel, but in reality have recently had sex or been in a relationship

currycels = people of South Asian ancestry

ricecels = people of Chinese or Southeast Asian backgrounds

ethnicels = people of various ethnicities

Investigators of incel-aligned crime use two overlapping labels ("wound collectors" and "injustice collectors") related to behaviors exhibited by incels.

Many are "wound collectors," a term coined by former FBI agent Joe Navarro [in Dangerous Personalities, 2014] to describe, "individuals who go out of their way to collect social slights, historical grievances, injustices, unfair or disparate treatment or wrongs— whether real or imagined."
"They wallow in the actual or often perceived transgressions of others and they allow sentiments of animosity and vengeance to percolate and froth at the surface by their constant and attentive nurturing of those perceived wounds," Navarro explains. "As you can imagine, in an imperfect world where there are real injustices, where people make mistakes, and stupid things are said and done, the wound collector never has to go far to feel victimized."
J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who has worked with the FBI, uses a similar term: “injustice collectors” — noting that these cumulative grievances are often blamed on one person or a group. “If you have this paranoid streak, this vigilance, this sense that other have been persecuting you for years, there’s an accumulation of maltreatment and an intense urge to stop that persecution,” Meloy told the New York Times. Source.

Sources and background information are easily found throughout the Internet. For this essay, the following were especially helpful resources:

"The Alt-Right is Killing People," by Keegan Hankes and Alex Amend, Southern Poverty Law Center, February 5, 2018.

"How Elliot Rodger went from misfit mass murderer to 'saint' for group of misogynists — and suspected Toronto killer," by Hailey Branson and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2018.

"When a Mass Murderer Has a Cult Following," by David Futrelle, The Cut, April 27, 2018.

"Why All Moms Need To Know About The 'Incel' Community," by Otherwise, May 1, 2018.

"Florida man who killed two women at yoga studio spoke of 'incel' hero Elliot Rodger in online video," by Brett Barrouquere, Southern Poverty Law Center, November 3, 2018.

"Incel," Wikipedia, retrieved November 4, 2018.

General media accounts on various mass shootings.

The Copycat Effect