Front Burner - One year after the van attack "incels" are unrepentant

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

One year after the deadly van attack in Toronto, the misogynistic online community that inspired the attack remains unchanged, says reporter Zack Beauchamp who spent a year investigating incels.

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I'm Stephen Quinn. Sanctioned is the complicated story of how and why Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested. How will this impact our lives and technology? Sanctioned. Subscribe at cbc.ca slash sanctioned or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. It was one year ago this week that a van was driven deliberately through crowds of people on Yonge Street in Toronto. I see a white van mount the sidewalk. that a van was driven deliberately through crowds of people on Yonge Street in Toronto. Come on, get down!

Come on, get down! I see a white van mount the sidewalk and plow into a group of pedestrians. Hitting the people one after one. It hits the people and even like fly. As soon as he passed my car, he turned around, he looked at me face to face. That's when I saw he was a very angry and scared young guy. Ten people were killed. That's when I saw he was a very angry and scared young guy.

Ten people were killed. The driver, Alec Manassian, posted an ominous message on Facebook shortly before the attack. He wrote, The Incel Rebellion has begun. That message, including these words, all hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger. He says we will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys. Incel is short for involuntary celibate. And the Toronto attack was the first time many people had even heard this term. There are tens of thousands of young men on Incel message boards,

men who feel like the world isn't fair because women won't date them. Incel share misogynistic, angry, and sometimes violent messages about women online. Today, I'm speaking with Zach Beecham. He's a writer for Vox, and he spent the last year investigating the incel community, trying to understand how it works, and how it leads to mass violence. This is Frontburner. A warning here first. We're talking about a community with a very hateful ideology. There are disturbing details in this conversation.

Zach, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Hey, happy to be here. So you've spent the last year investigating incels. I can imagine that this was quite difficult for you at times. Yeah, it's not fun. So over the course of the investigation, I read old logs of chat forums going back years, many years. I interviewed heads of their forums, experts, and read every day pretty much with a few exceptions on vacation and stuff in cell forums. Every day, log on to a few sites and get my daily dose of

poison. I want to get to what's happening on those forums today, but I'm actually hoping that we can start further back. And can you explain to me how this incel community started online in the first place? Because I know that it started in Toronto. Yeah, it's a fascinating story. So it was founded not by, you know, angry man, but a queer woman based in Toronto. Her name's Alana. She likes to keep her last name out of the news. But basically, she was somebody who had real experiences with, you know, being shy in her dating life and having difficulty finding a partner. And so after her first serious relationship, she decided to start a support forum for people who had gone through what she had gone through and to reflect on her own experiences, just entering the dating pool, basically after college.

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Pout. I came up with the idea to create the support group online because I recognized that there are other people who have this kind of situation. And if I can get out of it, if I can start dating after a long period of being single, then maybe other people can too. Alana's initial project, called Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, was a success. It was this very small community of people, men and women alike, who were sharing stories and experiences about difficulties in dating.

I think there was a lot of empathy, but nobody really had any answers. One of the challenges of having a peer support group is that you got a bunch of people who don't really, like they all have the same problem and they don't have a solution. But that was around the late 90s when this really coalesced. But things started to change in the 2000s.

And when did they start to change? When does this start to become something darker? In the 2000s, the internet was starting to grow and a lot of the darker features of our real world, that is to say deep misogynistic prejudices and other types of prejudice, were making their way onto the internet, were developing dedicated presences in different corners of the web. And one of the various different incel forums that had come about after Alana's initial project was really open to these kinds of ideas. And you got people cross-pollinating, going from places like 4chan or the quote-unquote

manosphere and pickup artist websites where people had nasty views of women. And then they would go to incel forums. Young men who tried the pickup artist stuff tried to manipulate women into sleeping with them and failed. They were so angry about this and created a very different kind of incel, a new all-male, misogynistic, angry version of the movement, even though there were a few who still adhered to the original vision. Now, 2014 is the key turning point because that was the first mass casualty attack associated with an incel, someone who understood themselves as such and used the terms in their writing.

Right, and we're talking about Elliot Rodger here. That's right. An angry and psychologically twisted young man whose public rantings exploded into sheer terror in a quiet California community. In 2014, he stabbed two of his roommates and a visiting guest in his house and then went on a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, California. And Rodger left behind this really long manifesto where he describes what he did and why he did it. It's excruciating to read. It's painful. It's hard to put down because you see the raw anger and viciousness embedded in somebody who had, by most standards, a pretty good life. He was pretty wealthy.

His parents gave him whatever he wanted. They treated him well. But he could not figure out romantic relationships. And that turned him into a killer. It also turned him into an icon for this new kind of incel community who came to see him and literally describe him in their writing as a saint. see him and literally describe him in their writing as a saint. Can you take me through some of what he says in his manifesto?

So Roger's manifesto is essentially an autobiography. And what he describes is a narrative of kind of like a fall from grace, an almost Adam and Eve kind of thing. He describes his life as collapsing because he started to become attracted to women, and women didn't like him back. For the last eight years of my life, ever since I've hit puberty, I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. And so he sees the great failure of his life as being an inability to get women to have sex with him or to have any kind of meaningful emotional relationship. Now, the failure is not his, right? It's theirs.

I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy. And yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. He blames women for not being attracted to him. He has this whole worked out social vision, even at the end, where he talks about how women should be put in concentration camps and humanity should be scientifically, genetically engineered. So sexual reproduction is no longer necessary. The logical outgrowth of the misogyny that informed the violence. And essentially these views are what become venerated in these online incel communities. That's right. Not every part of Roger's manifesto is taken up and turned into literal incel canon.

But his general worldview, his idea that women won't sleep with him because they're shallow and evil and dumb. That idea, that is the central doctrine, if there is one, of incel philosophy, which they call the black pill, a term that has, through a twist and turn kind of way, its origins in The Matrix, the 1999 movie. It's weird. Can you unpack this concept of the black pill to me? I find it quite confusing. Can you unpack this concept of the black pill to me? I find it quite confusing. So in The Matrix, there's a scene where Morpheus gives Keanu Reeves' Neo a choice between two pills. One's red and one's blue.

You take the blue pill. The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill. You stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. The blue pill lets you just go back to sleep and forget about the fact that you're living in a computer simulation. The red pill wakes you up to the reality of humanity's domination by machines.

Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more. That concept, the concept of there being a pill you can take that wakes you up to the true nature of reality, was picked up by pickup artists and the online misogynist who said, if you take the red pill, you understand that what you've been told about sex and gender is a lie, that male privilege isn't a real thing, that it's women who hold the power and that women are, and this is a crucial term for incels, hypergamous, which means attracted to the highest status man they can find. Highest status, in their view, just means best looking. That is the core of the black pill, the idea that women are incredibly shallow and attracted to men solely on the basis of their physical appearance.

And a black-pilled person believes that this is because women are bad and they need to be controlled. Again, this language all reeks of entitlement. When you listen to it spoken out loud, there's a sense that they are owed sex by women. There should be some woman who is in some way compelled, not through their own free choice, but because men deserve sex, therefore they should have it. Not that women are autonomous choosing individuals, right? It's just the entire worldview is premised on this idea that they're entitled. Right. And I know Alec Manassian, you know, before he drove this van up Yonge Street in Toronto and killed 10 people last year, he posted on his Facebook page that the incel rebellion has already begun.

All hail the supreme gentleman rebellion has already begun. All hail the Supreme Gentleman, Elliot Rodger. And this is all kind of wrapped up together, everything you've just been talking about. That's right. So those are all incel terms. Supreme Gentleman is Elliot Rodger's term for himself. And it's one that some incels have taken up to show how they are real, you know, good men who deserve a woman. We'll be back in a second. Discover what millions around the world already have.

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Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. What do we know about how active Alec Manassian was now on these forums? The interesting question is we don't really know very much. One thing that I found striking is that no one in the incel community or any observers I've seen have been able to find posts that are attributable to Manassian. We don't know where he was getting his ideas. It's very clear from the language that he uses that it's from some incel community. You don't talk like that unless you're deep in that world. But no one has been able to find a handle on either of the main incel forums or any broad incel posting history associated with him. It's possible that that'll come out of trial,

that publicly, we actually don't, we can't be specific other than incels writ large. Right. And it's also possible, I suppose, that he was just lurking around on these sites as opposed to being an active member on them. Can we talk about what these incel communities look like online today? Where are they and how many people are on them? Right now there are two main incel forums. One of them is on Reddit and the other one is called incels.co. It's moved its domain name a lot because it gets dropped due to people not wanting to host a pretty toxic website. Both of them are deeply misogynistic.

pretty toxic website. Both of them are deeply misogynistic. Incells.co is where you go if you're a more radical, angry, inclined to call for mass killings or call for veneration of Elliot Roger. And then you have another set of really extreme sites led by a Virginia-based self-described advocate for rape, which encourages incels to literally commit acts of sexual violence. The thing that when I read it made me recoil the most while reading it. And to answer your question about numbers, I'd say there are about tens of thousands in some number. No one can really be sure. There are a lot of technical difficulties in assessing how many incels there are, but tens of thousands on the two main forums with several thousand scattered around the other ones. And the vast bulk of the users are in Europe or North America. So I just want to sit with one thing you said there for a second.

There are a variety of communities online that essentially run the gamut from hateful to extremely hateful and violent. One of these communities advocates raping women as a way for men to get over the hurdles that they see in their lives caused by women who will not sleep with them. That is correct. I read one thread on one of those sites, I'll never forget this, where these men talk about the best way to get away with rape. It is stunning to me that these websites are up. One of them is, I won't give the actual domain name, but the title of the website is, quote unquote, Raping Girls is Fun. That's the name. I have no idea how much worse it can get. I'm sorry. That's one of the most disturbing things I've heard on this show.

How serious do we think these threats are? It's really hard to say. And that's what makes this so scary in part, right? Is like these people say awful things online and maybe they're doing it to get a terrible kind of attention and validation from their peers. Maybe they're serious. And we don't know because there's not like a hate crime statistic for incels, right? I haven't seen anyone be arrested for sexual assault, say, and say, I did it because I'm an incel. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened because the vast majority of sex crimes don't get prosecuted or caught. It would probably be hard to prove in some of these cases. This is also new, and it's also difficult to attribute how many people have been radicalized by the site versus were already terrible to begin with and logged onto the site because they found a community of people who validated their worldview. It's just there's no reliable aggregate statistics.

What's your sense of how these communities have changed in the last few years, particularly since Elliot Rodger, and then also since the Toronto van attack last year? I think Rodger was a radicalizing point. He pushed out the moderate incel community, which was already on its last legs. I spoke to somebody who had been involved in incel from the beginning, and he said that we all recognized the people who were not misogynistic and who wanted to maintain the open spirit of the initial project. That at that moment, when there was a mass killer who targeted women and he described himself as an incel, the term was ruined. Roger polarized it in such a way that only the most extreme and misogynistic people would want to be incels, would want to use that term to describe themselves. And so the community drifted further and further on the trajectory it had already been on beforehand and became the community that would produce Alec Manassian in 2018. After Manassian, the incel community didn't change at all. There was no meaningful self-reflection about their role and their complicity in what Manassian did. I saw chat logs from the day after the Toronto attack. And the administrator basically dismisses concerns

about the forum playing a radicalizing role or some members of it who literally named themselves after previous mass killers. He's like, I don't know. These people aren't serious. They're trolling. This is just a PR problem was basically his view. One day after a self-described incel killed 10 people in Toronto. They just see it as a PR problem. Yeah. And when I spoke to him directly about this stuff and he's just like, look, our posters aren't serious, but they demonstrably are serious. And it doesn't matter if you mean we should go kill them.

Ironically, if there's one person on the forum who takes that seriously and not ironically, well, then you've inspired violence. Right. And there doesn't seem to be any sort of self-reflection around that, is what you're saying? None whatsoever. The rest of the world woke up after Toronto to see just how scary the incel community had become.

But the incels themselves didn't change. The other thing I want to ask you about, because you've spent so much time thinking about this issue, but I imagine also the journalism around it. You know, after the Toronto van attack, a lot of people were asking if we should be using the names of the attacker or if we should mention this belief system. Would that just promote this hateful idea? And what do you think about that? You know, that's a really hard question. And one that we thought a lot about in the coverage of the Toronto attack and in writing this piece. Because, you know, in my first draft, I had Alec Manassian's name at the very front of the piece, but we decided not to reference it until way later down, until somebody who had read all of the previous wind-up. make it so that for someone who is just casually encountering the article and maybe didn't go through and process all the arguments in it, that they wouldn't see a mass killer being held up as somebody kind of famous rather than an objective analysis. So you have to strike this balance between informing your audience accurately, between telling them that the black pill is out

there and it exists. It would be absurd. You can't talk about jihadism without talking about al-Qaeda and its ideas. You can't talk about the Toronto attack without talking about the black pill and the incel community. It just would be a disservice to your readership or your listenership and would serve to give a false impression of what's happening. to give a false impression of what's happening. This is very dark and disturbing, but I'm also very grateful to have had this conversation with you. Thank you. Thank you. You'll remember at the beginning of my conversation with Zach, he mentioned a woman named Alana, You'll remember at the beginning of my conversation with Zach, he mentioned a woman named Alana who started this community of involuntary celibates back in the 1990s. Alana is very clear.

Men have hijacked and weaponized this term that she coined. She's currently trying to help people of all genders who feel unfulfilled in their sex lives through a project called Love Not Anger. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. Go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.